Event: Lowell High Civics Day – On Monday, May 18, 2026, I attended the Lowell Public Schools Civics Fair at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. More than 300 middle and high school students participated. Organized in teams of four, each group identified and researched a public policy issue then devised an advocacy strategy to implement their objectives. The four sessions I was briefed on were on improving literacy; making health care more affordable; educating younger students on resisting and reporting sexual assault; and improving the English Language Arts curriculum now in use in Lowell. All of the students I heard from were eight graders. They were uniformly impressive in their mastery of their topic and their ability to passionately convey their position on the issue.  

Book Review: “True Yankees: The South Seas and The Discovery of American Identity” by Dane Morrison (2014). When writing about the founding of Lowell, I always say that Francis Cabot Lowell and his colleagues made the money they invested in the new textile mills from trading with China and India. Beyond that simple assertion, I didn’t know much of the backstory, but I’m trying to learn more about it. In True Yankees, Dane Morrison explores how the “Great South Sea” trade (1784–1844) served as a crucible for American identity. Beginning with the Empress of China in 1785, these voyages transcended commerce; they functioned as vital evidence of a unified nation. Lacking the resources for a state-backed monopoly like the British East India Company, the U.S. relied on independent traders, several of whom published accounts of their journeys. This “China Trade” literature helped shape a national character of American exceptionalism. However, when European wars ended in 1815, the trading advantage held by the neutral Americans vanished and merchants sought other investment opportunities which is the origin of the funding that built the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. 

Obituary: Philip Caputo – “Philip Caputo, 84, Author of Blistering Vietnam War Memoir, Dies” by Joseph Berger, New York Times, May 10, 2026. Having been born in 1958, I was too young to have served in Vietnam, too young to have even worried about it. But I was fully aware of the war. Each night’s TV news broadcast brought the war into our house. That exposure, and the continuing importance of the Vietnam War on our culture and politics, has made me a lifelong student of that conflict. 1977 was a remarkable year for Vietnam books: Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War were both published that year. Despite having just graduated from high school, I bought both in hardcover and devoured each. Herr’s book still sits on my bookshelf, but I lost Caputo’s memoir although that had a bigger impact on me. 

Newspaper article: “Beijing Views Trump’s America As Sinking Empire” by Li Yuan, New York Times, May 14, 2026. This was truly an astonishing article to read. The reporter reviews various papers, speeches, and comments by Chinese leaders and academics over the past year. For most of its recent history, China has seen itself as striving to catch up to the west, but more recently, it sees itself as a superpower poised to surpass it. “Chinese nationalists and state-linked commentators say they have Mr. Trump to thank.” Whether it’s January 6th, violent immigration raids in Minnesota, erratic decisions on tariffs, irrational hostility towards longtime allies, and most recently, the war of choice against Iran, Trump has repeatedly done things, in the eyes of the Chinese, that have weakened America, all to the benefit of China. 

Podcast: “The History Wars and America at 250” New Yorker Radio Hour podcast. Historian Jill Lepore interviews fellow historians Beverly Gage and Jelani Cobb about the semisesquicentennial of the United States. Both Lepore and Cobb are staff writers at the New Yorker. Lepore teaches at Harvard and won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on the US Constitution. Cobb is the dean at the Columbia School of Journalism. Gage teaches at Yale, won the Pulitzer for her biography of J. Edgar Hoover, and is just out with a new book, This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through American History. Much of the podcast compared the feeling in the country about the 250th anniversary to the experience 50 years ago at the 200th anniversary. They agreed that each generation often feels that their time is the worst of all, but if you look objectively at the past, things have always been bad (and good). But they also agreed that there is something different about this era, mostly because the Trump regime is promoting a story of US history that excludes so many.