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Next Thursday (July 7) at 6:30 pm, the Pollard Memorial Library nonfiction book club will meet in the library’s Community Room to discuss “Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919” by Stephen Puleo. The book has been around for a while – it was published in 2003 –…
Read More »[original caption] Paul E. Tsongas (1941-1997) “Running Hard” in September of 1974 for the Massachusetts Fifth Congressional District seat, U.S. House of Representatives, which he won, defeating Republican incumbent Paul W. Cronin [Tony Sampas comment] While working with the Paul Tsongas Collection at UMass Lowell Libraries’ Center for Lowell History…
Read More »Mass Moments, the electronic almanac of Massachusetts history, reminded us that yesterday was the 336th anniversary of the start of King Philip’s War which, when measured by the percentage of population killed, was the deadliest war in the history of North America. Although the fighting broke out in Plymouth, it…
Read More »Frequent contributor Jim Peters shares his thoughts with us . . . I promise to have an article about Native Americans in this area in the next installment. I have been doing quite a bit of thinking lately, mostly about my father who is wrestling with cancer, mesothilioma, if I…
Read More »Last night, when New York became the sixth state in America to legalize same-sex marriage, it was an event of great historic import, but from this Massachusetts perch, it was a bit anti-climatic. Contrary to all the predictions of Western Civilization as we knew it collapsing back in 2004 when…
Read More »While the trial of former House Speaker Sal DiMasi last week came to a close, the jury verdict did not signal an end to the apparently wide-ranging investigation that led to that trial. Yesterday, the Globe reported that DiMasi’s convicted co-defendant, Richard McDonough, had, according to the Globe story which…
Read More »Club De Citoyens-American, 619 Market Street, Lowell MA USA — by Tony Sampas
Read More »Those of us who grew up watching The Rat Patrol harbor a latent interest in desert warfare of World War Two. While The Rat Patrol was entertaining TV, it also took some historical liberties. The series was loosely based on the British Army’s Long Range Desert Group, an elite unit…
Read More »The “Week in Review” section of this Sunday’s New York Times reported that only “only 12% of a representative sample of the nation’s high school seniors demonstrated proficiency in the subject last year” according to recent National Assessment of Educational Progress test results. While it’s critically important that we improve…
Read More »The Acre in the foreground. Smokestacks and the Eliot Church steeple in the background. —by Tony Sampas
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