History
Lowell Army & Navy Day, South Common, 1918
Lowell Army & Navy Day, Nov. 9, 1918, an event organized by the War Camp Community Service. Panoramic photograph by George Russell, courtesy of UMass Lowell Center for Lowell History. Click on the photo to see it larger. Here is the CLH background on Russell: George Hall Russell was born…
Read More »South Common, June 1944
An image from Lowell High School Field Day in June 1944 contributed by Eleanor Sullivan at a Mass. Memories Road Show event at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum of Lowell National Historical Park. The photo was published by the University Archives and Special Collections at UMass Boston, and can be…
Read More »South Common Improvement Plan
I walked our dog on the South Common this morning. The grass had turned green seemingly overnight, a refreshing sight after the long winter. Fat-chested robins in their red bibs poked at the defrosted ground on the sports field. In the high fir trees invisible birds called and sang brightly.…
Read More »Dennis Lehane Making Sense
“As a country, we used to respect knowledge that was earned over knowledge that was cherry picked.” —Dennis Lehane, Boston Globe,4/1/9/14 In today’s Boston Globe, author Dennis Lehane thinks aloud about the Boston Marathon Bombing, knowledge vs. opinion, intellectual relativism, bad narratives, and his belief that good ideas will prevail.…
Read More »April 19, 1861: Lowell soldiers killed in Baltimore
On a small patch of grass wedged between two busy streets in front of Lowell City Hall sits a twenty-five foot high granite obelisk. Few passersby know that this monument commemorates nineteen year old Luther Ladd and twenty year old Addison Whitney, two Lowell mill workers who, along with Sumner…
Read More »Charleston, South Carolina
For those interested in the history of the American Civil War, there are a number of iconic places that just have to be visited. One of them is Fort Sumter, the place where the shooting part of the Civil War began on April 12, 1861. Although I’d spent 20 years…
Read More »Another Lowell Poet Whom We Should Know
(re-posted from Sept. 14, 2008) “Thomas Fitzsimmons was born in Lowell in October 1926. He entered WWII as a young merchant mariner following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and left the US Army Air Force after the bombing of Hiroshima. He taught for many years at Oakland University in Michigan…
Read More »Lucy Larcom ~ Author, Poet, Lowell Mill Girl
MassMoments reminds us that writer Lucy Larcom – one of Lowell’s iconic Mill Girls in her youth, died on this day April 17, 1893. In her autobiography A New England Girlhood, Lucy Larcom wrote: “From the beginning Lowell had a high reputation for good order, morality, piety, and all…
Read More »Tip O’Neill Announces a Run for Congressional seated being vacated by John F. Kennedy
If you think that the Congress of today has always been this way, well just remember Massachusetts Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill – the way he served, his work ethic and the way he ran the House of Representatives when he was “Mr. Speaker.” A man of the 20th Century, he believed that government…
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