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The Boston Globe yesterday carried a story about the difficulties being encountered in erecting a statue in Boston honoring Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery in 1818, Douglass later escaped to freedom and became one of America’s foremost abolitionists in the years before, during, and after the Civil War. Writing on…
Read More »Jim Peters continues his series on the early system of public education in Lowell: While local newspapers carried the news of the war, the School Committee, in its efforts to allow the war to have little effect on the learning and new lessons, implemented educational changes that altered…
Read More »A poignant moment in the long struggle to uncover and record the grave markers and holdfast the history of the Irish in St. Patrick’s Cemetery as told by Lowell’s Irish historian Dave McKean… The twenty-year commitment may be coming to an end but read this cross-over post from LowellIrish for…
Read More »Earlier today on Facebook, Chath Piersath, a writer, poet, teacher, activist, and artist (and farmer in the region), posted a ringing statement about his optimism as a man in America. Chath has contributed to this blog in the past, so I asked him if I could reprint his thoughts here.…
Read More »The memories of the Kennedys are touched today on this anniversary of the wedding of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The couple was married in 1953 in historic St. Mary’s Church in Newport, Rhode Island in a ceremony presided over by Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston. The…
Read More »September 11, 2001 seems so recent to me but fourteen years is a long time. For instance, someone just four years old on that day is now a freshman in college. Through the years, we’ve written a number of blog posts about 9/11. I’ve compiled links to some of them…
Read More »With all the walking and talking about walking going on in the city, I thought I’d share this poem from 1984, which originally appeared in my book STRONG PLACE: POEMS ’74-’84 and was reprinted in WHAT IS THE CITY? in 2006. In the ’80s, I had a Sunday routine of…
Read More »At the New Bedford Whaling Museum yesterday, Rosemary and I found in the gift shop a collectible mug whose design features about 20 memorable first lines of books, including Melville’s “Call me Ishmael.” from MOBY DICK, which is why they had it on sale, but the mug also had “I…
Read More »Here we go again. Labor Day is near, and the four-year presidential election cycle will shift into high gear. For months, we had media reports of candidates tromping through the hills and valleys of our neighbor state New Hampshire. I’ve written about this before, but I have to repeat that…
Read More »For anyone who needs a reminder about the distinctive region around us, just check the new issue of the New Yorker magazine with two major articles about historical happenings and people from our general area. Our local history keeps making news. Pulitzer Prize-winner Stacy Shiff writes about “The Witches of Salem:…
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