Author Archive

South Common Update

The City of Lowell’s Department of Planning and Development hosted a public meeting last night at the Pollard Memorial Library meeting room to update residents on plans to renovate the city’s South Common. DPD’s Rachel Kisker facilitated the meeting and landscape architect Nina Brown (whose first project in Lowell was…

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Lowell Gallery Civil War Exhibit

Guy Lefebvre of the Lowell Gallery has a terrific collection of Civil War prints and memorabilia.  Many of the images used to illustrate my talk on Sunday about “Lowell and the Coming of the Civil War” came to me courtesy of Guy.   Please visit his shop and check out…

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Ben Butler saves Washington DC

Thanks to everyone who attended yesterday’s lecture on “Lowell and the Coming of the Civil War.” While the riot in Baltimore on April 19, 1861 which cost the lives of Luther Ladd, Addison Whitney, Charles Taylor and Sumner Needham and left two dozen of their comrades in the Sixth Massachusetts…

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The Wild Bull of the Pampas

Someone who recently visited Buenos Aires sent me this photo of the burial place of the famed boxer Luis Angel Firpo in La Recoleta Cemetery. Firpo is perhaps most famous for his 1923 fight against Jack Dempsey in which he knocked Dempsey out of the ring. Dempsey returned just in…

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