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During the week of September 18, 1938, no one in Lowell was worried about a hurricane. The public’s attention was focused on two things: Germany was about to invade Czechoslovakia and on that Tuesday (September 20) voters would go to the polls for the state primary election. Lowell voters were…
Read More »I met Robert Reich in Lowell in 1981. Anyone who attended the annual Lowell Conference on Industrial History (LCIH) that year, when he was invited to comment on one of the scholarly papers, remembers how he stole the show with his brilliant, insightful, brief remarks about the relationship of government and…
Read More »NYTimes columnist Timothy Egan today writes about the “summer home” owned by all Americans, by which he means the vast tracts of public land and majestic national parks around the country. Lowell’s national park is about a place held in common by Americans, too, as well as an idea: the…
Read More »A note in today’s Globe about a vintage postcard exhibit at the Boston Public Library, reminded me of the value of post cards as historical and cultural documents. While this exhibit focuses on early 2oth century Boston, the millions of cards in the hands of private collectors and in local…
Read More »From the UMass Lowell Office of Public Affairs: “First-year students are officially welcomed to the university community at Convocation on Tuesday, Aug. 31 at 10 a.m. at the Tsongas Center at UMass Lowell. The keynote speaker is Bill Strickland, winner of a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius grant’ and more than 10…
Read More »I was astounded to find an Op-Ed by Paul Wolfowitz in today’s New York Times. The content of the piece is unremarkable – he suggests that we should use South Korea as a model for our future involvement in Iraq – but his mere presence in the newspaper is what…
Read More »The National Park Service has opened a $27 million visitor center overlooking the famous “Old Faithful” geyser at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Today’s NYTimes reports on the “cathedral to the shrine of nature.” We can be proud that Lowell is on the same distinguished list of important American places…
Read More »The headline above is the heading of a one-page appeal I received a few days ago from the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, whose work around the world is well known. The scale of this catastrophe is staggering. “The worst floods in 80 years have devastated the country….Over 20…
Read More »The following link takes you to a pretty useful summary of President Obama’s remarks on Sunday during an interview with Brian Williams of NBC-TV news. The report is by Tom Kavanaugh of AOL. What the President says reverberates in our local and state election campaigns this fall. The agenda put…
Read More »“Swedish actor Warner Oland poses as Charlie Chan in 1937” (web photo courtesy of time.com) No week goes by without a mention of Lowell’s Jack Kerouac in the major media outlets. Yesterday, the new Time magazine arrived in the mail. On page 65, there’s a review of scholar Yunte Huang’s book…
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