Historian and author Douglass Shand-Tucci, the Harvard-educated independent scholar, is founder of the extraordinary new history site (www.backbayhistorical.org) dedicated to Boston-Centric Global Studies | Art and Architecture; Literary, Cultural and Intellectual History. His latest work -- "Gods of Copley Square", "Barack Obama's Emerson", "Heroic: 1960s Concrete Architecture", "Idealist Bigots", is now regularly published on this site in his eScholarship column.Shand-Tucci's most recent book ("magisterial"-- London's William Morris Gallery director Peter Cormack) is the second volume of his study of the American architect Ralph Adams Cram (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005) the first volume of which, "Boston Bohemia", ("brilliant, historic, profoundly relevent scholarship -- Harvard professor Peter Gomes) was published by the same press in 1994. His classic "Built in Boston" is also published in its latest edition by Massachusetts (2001)."The Art of Scandal", Shand-Tucci's "intimate and engrossing biography" (The New Yorker) of art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (HarperCollins, 1997) was featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review and as a Critic's Choice on the Times's Best Seller's page. In a different vein is Shand-Tucci's "Harvard University" (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) with an introduction by Harvard president Neil Rudenstine."The Crimson Letter", meanwhile, (St. Martin's, 2003), following on the Boston gay history theme of "Boston Bohemia", has also helped in the shaping of recent T. S. Eliot scholarship. In the Times of London Sir William Rees Mogg compared "The Crimson Letter" favorably to "The Metaphysical Club" by Louis Menand. Douglass Shand-Tucci lives in Boston's Back Bay, where the learned flow is sometimes interrupted by provocative reviews and comment. He has taught at Harvard, where he was Senior Affiliate in the History of Architecture in Eliot House, and at MIT and is now on the faculty of the Boston Architectural College.