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This newly available photo of President John F. Kennedy just minutes – maybe seconds – before he was killed in Dallas, shows a smiling, welcoming crowd. See the series of eight photos here at Time Magazine/LightBox taken by H. Warner King, an amateur photographer. Read his daughter’s story of why they only recently…
Read More »Last Wednesday it was our privilege to be guests at the UMass Lowell 2013 Flag Raising Ceremony & Veterans Day Celebration held outside Cumnock Hall/North Campus. The flag-raising ceremony paid tribute to UMass Lowell’s more than 1,450 student veterans, 2013 Veterans Alumni Hall of Fame inductees and veterans throughout the…
Read More »Through January 20, 2014, in the Gund Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, you can see an outstanding exhibition of watercolor paintings by John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925), who is best known for his portraits. Rosemary and I spent the morning at the museum yesterday,…
Read More »An excerpt from “The Lighting Up,” an essay in The Prose Works of John Greenleaf Whitter: Volume II (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866). The essay was first published in book form in 1843 in a collection called The Stranger in Lowell, which brought together several essays that had appeared in a…
Read More »Lowell High senior Daniela Deny was the main speaker at the school’s Veteran’s Day program this past Friday. Daniela spoke of her experience last summer in the Normandy Academy program which took her to New Orleans and then France last summer to learn about the invasion of Normandy. She kindly…
Read More »Today’s Guardian online in the UK has a long piece by David Runciman in which he digs deeply into the ways a democratic system of government can be exasperating to its citizens. But, as others have said, Consider the alternatives. Here’s the essay. The insights here apply to the system down…
Read More »I am so encouraged by the many photos of campaign volunteers, especially so many younger people, that have been posted during this campaign season in Lowell, Mass. We don’t know what the results will be tonight after 8 pm, but I have to believe that our civic culture has been…
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A smiling President Truman enjoys the headline on the front page of the Chicago Tribune that falsely touted the election results of 1948 presidential election – Truman won! In this time of pervasive social media and instantaneous information sharing, the Chicago Tribune headline doesn’t seem possible – but it happened.…
Read More »But if Thoreau’s first book is flawed, it is a flawed masterpiece. Indeed, as critics have begun to recognize, even if Walden had not been written, A Week would nonetheless stand as one of the seminal works of the American Renaissance. —Linck C. Johnson, Thoreau’s Complex Weave: The Writing of…
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