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MassMoments reminds us that on this day – January 21, 1861 – the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Militia was formally organized. In early January 1861, as civil war approached, the men of Massachusetts began to form volunteer militia units. Many workers in the textile cities of Lowell and Lawrence were among the first to join…
Read More »I don’t know why I’ve been watching as much TV news coverage of the Republican Party contest for the presidential nomination. I avoid Fox, but even on CNN and MSNBC and what we used to call the “network news” the reporting is staggeringly shallow. All the talk today, and this…
Read More »On this day – January 20, 1961 – John Fitzgerald Kennedy – son of Massachusetts – was sworn-in as the 35th President of the United States. As an eighteen-year old Irish, Catholic, Democratically-raised, Lowellian and avid Kennedy supporter, this was an important milestone in my life – details and impressions ever-remembered.…
Read More »Edgar Allen Poe Lowell, Massachusetts, late May to early June 1849 Daguerreotype On this day – January 19, 1809 – American short-story writer, poet, critic and editor Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Poe poularized the short-story and his tales of mystery and horror gave birth to the modern detective story. Among…
Read More »Harvard University just celebrated its 375th anniversary. But the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War is also of importance to Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust. A noted historian and scholar of the Civil War, Faust will speak in April at the Boston Public Library as part of the Lowell Lecture Series. Her lecture will focus on…
Read More »Here’s a memory painting of a night scene at the movies on Central Street in Lowell: “The Strand” by Richard Marion (c) 2012 See more artwork at www.richardmarion.net Here’s a link to Nancye Tuttle’s museum exhibition brochure about the movie theaters in Lowell. Her 1993 exhibit was called “Picture It: Lowell Goes to the…
Read More »Elizabeth Warren in Lowell, November 2011 In the January/February edition of Mother Jones Magazine, writer Tim Murphy talks about the revenge of Wall Street and its target Elizabeth Warren and her campaign for the U. S. Senate in Massachusetts. For her sin of taking on the banks, Warren is unrepentant and unbowed by the attack-mode…
Read More »With Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. being remembered tomorrow in a special way across the nation, I went back to a prose poem written after a family visit to Washington, D.C., in the early summer of 2004, another presidential election year. We were months away from seeing Barack Obama make news with a…
Read More »James Whistler “Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach” – Whistler’s emphasis on sensation and atmosphere over detailed description has been compared by some to the philosophy underpinning Gardner’s whole museum. “I see the entire museum as a correlative to these shadowy tone poems,’’ wrote the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum…
Read More »My brother Richard often stops by my home to drop off an interesting item he has found along the way in his travels, often a photocopy of a news article or a brochure that is not to be missed. Yesterday, he unfolded a large piece of paper that turned out…
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