Boston entered the twentieth century as an Irish Catholic city, no longer the Yankee town of its Puritan past. The dominance of the Irish Catholic population gave it political control of the city, and significantly, control of the public schools. Unlike in other American cities, Boston Catholics had little need for a large or influential parochial system: they had the School Committee, school principals, and the teachers. In Irish vs. Yankees, James W. Sanders considers the interplay of social forces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that led to the political rise of the Irish Catholic over the native Brahmin and the way this development shaped Boston's school system.