On September 12 Boston’s public schools opened under a court-ordered scheme in which eighteen thousand of the city’s ninety-four thousand students would be bused (and twenty-seven thousand otherwise transferred) outside their neighborhoods to achieve racial balance. In a city whose schools, like the neighborhoods they served, had always been severely segregated, there was bound to be resistance. Yet on the first day the only major trouble came in the strongly Irish Catholic neighborhood of South Boston.

In Southie, as it was known, virtually no white students went to school. Most of them congregated instead on the streets, often with their parents, to jeer and stone the buses bringing students from Roxbury, a black neighborhood. In the following days and weeks, matters only got worse. White students stayed home in protest and blacks in fear for their safety. With attendance hovering around 20 percent through the fall, beatings and stabbings multiplied, causing interracial strife that spread to other schools.

To South Boston’s rebels the resistance was a fight for their neighborhood’s very life. Southie was not rich, but it was proud and it was close-knit. Its streets, churches, bars, and schools formed a seamless web of acquaintance and kinship, and South Boston High School—especially its sports teams—was perhaps the single most important institution in binding the neighborhood together. Now a judge who lived in a wealthy suburb wanted to tear it all apart. Bitter critics called busing “the WASPs’ revenge” on Boston’s dominant Irish population.

Proponents of busing said that everything would work out in the end, but as Southie’s rebels repeatedly pointed out, they did not have to live with the results of their experiment. Sure, Roxbury had problems, but why should safe, industrious South Boston bear the brunt of resolving them? What had its residents done to deserve such a burden except work hard, save, and build? Why send its kids into a dangerous area and make them wear another school’s colors on the gridiron? Why bring in hundreds of outsiders who knew nothing of the neighborhood?

That was how South Boston saw it. To the residents of Roxbury, who were trying to escape decades of neglect from Boston’s all-white school committee, the protesters’ incessant use of the word nigger, sometimes accompanied by imitations of monkeys and waving of bananas and watermelons, along with the indiscriminate beatings of any black person unwise enough to stray into the neighborhood without a police escort, told a different story. South Boston High School was hardly a bastion of academic excellence, and only a Harvard sociologist could expect that attending the same math class would cause the two races to make friends with each other. Yet despite its heavyhanded nature, busing seemed the only way to get anything done about the dreadful schools that Boston’s black children had to endure.

Marches, boycotts, assaults by and upon both races, and other forms of harassment large and small went on for months, stretching into years. In December 1975 a frustrated Judge W. Arthur Garrity, author of the original decree ordering busing, put South Boston High School under direct federal control. Over the ensuing years the Southie standoff never really came to an end; instead it petered out. As busing continued, private schools and the suburbs siphoned off the fiercest resisters of integration. At the same time, economic trends and changing immigration patterns were transforming Southie and the city as a whole. Boston had once been so predominantly white that a 1965 state law made it illegal for any school to have more than half its students be black. South Boston High School was among the whitest, enrolling a total of three blacks in the decade before busing began. By 1986, a year after Judge Garrity relinquished control, it still had the highest fraction of whites of all of Boston’s neighborhood high schools: 30 percent.

In France, September brought the denouement of the infamous Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer had been framed in a spy scandal to shield one of his colleagues. Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, convicted of treason by a court-martial in 1894, had languished on Devil’s Island for five years before the emergence of exculpatory evidence led to a retrial. When a kangaroo court announced a renewed verdict of guilty in September, Americans rushed to join the global chorus of condemnation. “It was incredible to the Anglo-Saxon mind,” wrote the determinedly Anglo-Saxon Harper’s Weekly, “that the judges should find for guilt when there was not the slightest proof of guilt, and, moreover, deny to the prisoner the right to present the only direct proof of innocence possible, beyond his own word.”

Yet the sordid affair had a silver lining. “It is immensely to the credit of our present civilization,” continued Harper’s, “that such an atrocity cannot be committed by any people with impunity. The world did not care, a few centuries ago, what any particular country did with its Jews. Now no nation can deny to one Jew even, the means of justice, and escape the condemnation of her sisters, so sensitive is the world-mind, and so closely knit have humankind become.”

Israel Zangwill, a popular Englishborn novelist and ardent Zionist, agreed. France’s ugly act, he wrote, was “nobly wiped out by the truly Christian attitude of the whole of the rest of the world. Since Jesus, no Jew has so drawn the world’s sympathy as Alfred Dreyfus.”

Mark Twain also addressed the Jewish question in September, in an article written before the final verdict in the Dreyfus case but prompted by it and other recent events. A reader had asked Twain for his thoughts on Jews and their place in the world. The author responded by balancing the race’s virtues ( “The Jew is not a disturber of the peace … he is not quarrelsome… . His race is entitled to be called the most benevolent of all the races of men") against its faults (“He has a reputation for various small forms of cheating, and for practising oppressive usury, and for burning himself out to get the insurance”). On the whole, Twain concluded, “the Christian can claim no superiority over the Jew in the matter of good citizenship.”

Twain advised Jews to take a more active role in politics, pointing out that “in America, as early as 1854, the ignorant Irish hod-carrier … made it apparent to all that he must be politically reckoned with.” He ironically opposed the establishment of a Jewish state: “If that concentration of the cunningest brains in the world was going to be made in a free country (bar Scotland), I think it would be politic to stop it. It will not be well to let that race find out its strength. If the horses knew theirs, we should not ride any more.” As for the fate of antiSemitism, Twain was almost as sanguine as Zangwill and the Harper’s writer had been. The persecution of Jews, he wrote, would continue “here and there in spots about the world, where a barbarous ignorance and a sort of mere animal civilization prevail; but I do not think that elsewhere the Jew need now stand in any fear of being robbed and raided.”

On September 4, in the Blackwell’s Island prison in New York City, a woman named Maria Monk died at the age of thirty-three. The cause of her death was not recorded, but it presumably was the wages of more than a decade spent as a drunkard and a streetwalker. Mentally unbalanced since she jammed a slate pencil into her head at age seven, Monk had taken to prostitution as a teenager and borne two illegitimate children. Her last known address was a brothel in the city’s notorious Five Points section, where she had recently been arrested for picking the pocket of one of her customers.

While such stories were all too common at the time, Monk’s biography held an especially tawdry twist. In between her wretched youth and sordid death, the ill-fated girl from rural Quebec had written a fabricated memoir, as popular as it was scurrilous, that inspired riots, looting, church burnings, and countless other acts of hatred, doing for anti-Catholicism what Protocols of the Elders of Zion would later do for anti-Semitism.

The book, ponderously titled Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings During a Residence of Five Years as a Novice, and Two Years as a Black Nun in the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal, purported to be a true story of licentious convent life. On taking the veil, Monk wrote, she had been told that she must defer to the priests “in all things.” The meaning of this rule became all too apparent when one sister who rebuffed a priest’s sexual advances was smothered beneath a mattress. Monk described a secret passage connecting the nuns’ quarters with a nearby priests’ residence as well as dungeons where babies born of the illicit liaisons were strangled and buried (after being baptized, of course). To save her own child, Monk fled the convent when she became pregnant.

Convent exposés had been selling briskly for several years, capitalizing on a nationwide outburst of nativism and anti-Catholicism (the two overlapped considerably). The genre had seen a few moderate successes, the biggest being Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent (1835). But Awful Disclosures was easily the most salacious.

As soon as it appeared, Monk’s book was conclusively refuted by Catholics and Protestants alike. Journalists uncovered the author’s wayward past while prominent citizens visited the convent and found no resemblance to the floor plan she had described. Still, Monk retained her supporters, particularly a cluster of New York ministers who took a deep interest in the pretty, impressionable young woman with loose morals and a weakness for clergymen. One of these was the Reverend William K. Hoyt, a rabid crusader against “popery” who had taken the delusional Monk under his wing. Hoyt had helped his protégée leave Montreal (where she had in fact never been a nun at all), trumpeted her cause in New York, and apparently made her his mistress. Theodore Dwight, also a devotee, admitted to writing the manuscript of Awful Disclosures himself but insisted that Monk had dictated it.

In 1838 the feckless Monk bore a second illegitimate child, probably fathered by yet another clerical admirer, the Reverend John Slocum, who promptly abandoned her. Having received little or no royalties, and bereft of powerful friends, she began her long and sorry decline. Yet Awful Disclosures lost none of its appeal to the general public, and Monk’s sad end did little to dent the book’s popularity. It went on to become America’s bestselling book until Uncle Tom’s Cabin—which was itself a piece of propaganda, though much more benign, and acknowledged to be fiction. Imitations from other purported exnuns proliferated, and well into the twentieth century reprints of Monk’s poisonous fantasies continued to stoke the fires of bigotry.