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Henry and John Thoreau took themselves on a two-week boat trip up the Concord and Merrimack Rivers at the end of the summer in 1839. Henry wrote a book about their adventure, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849; he paid for it to be published…
Read More »On July 2, 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed in to law the Land Grant Act passed by Congress in June to provide funding for higher education. The bill was also known as the Morrill Act, named after its sponsor, Congressman Justin Morrill of Vermont. The measure gave every state, including…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. For real escape through summer reading, there’s no substitute for fiction. Here are a few books worth sharing. My top read this past year was The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. A 13-year-old boy in Manhattan survives a terrorist…
Read More »This weekend I finished reading a book that I ordered several months ago after learning about the author, Englishman Geoff Dyer, in a Paris Review interview. The book is The Missing of the Somme, published in 1994, but which has resurfaced in discussions this summer because of the centennial of World…
Read More »With the council not meeting last Tuesday because of the summer schedule and Independence Day falling on Friday, it was a relatively slow week. Gunfire in the Highlands Wednesday night’s gunfire at Wilder Street and Wilder Ave continues the infiltration of gun violence into the upper Highlands. If I recall…
Read More »I was on vacation last weekend and didn’t get a chance to post the real estate sales in Lowell for that week so we have two week’s worth today: June 23, 2014 – Monday 17 Powell St for $131,000. Prior sale in 2008 for $44,000 306 Aiken Ave Unit 20…
Read More »In today’s NYTimes, opinion-writer Frank Bruni profiles an unusual politician, the long-long-time mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, Joe Riley, who talks about what makes a city tick, civic psychology, diversity, nonpartisan public administration, problem-solving, justice, the arts and excellence, and more. Read the column here, and get the NYT if…
Read More »UMass Lowell’s 2014 Greeley Scholar for Peace Studies Albie Sachs, a lifelong friend of Nelson Mandela and one of the architects of South African democracy, has been named the 2014 Tang Prize Laureate in the Rule of Law. The Tang Prize which is less well known but akin to the…
Read More »Happy Independence Day from all of us at richardhowe.com
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