Since childhood, I’ve thought ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ was among the most ridiculous of patriotic ditties. But the song has a meaning that makes it just right for our…
Yellowed newspapers and old readers reveal what preceding generations thought important, what shaped our ancestors’ perceptions and ours. At a farm auction in 1958 when I was 12, I found…
In eastern Massachusetts, it’s Patriots Day Weekend, the annual celebration of the ‘Shot Heard Round the World’, fired in Concord (the irony of its name goes unmentioned) on…
Los Angeles: Getty Center Porch at Tea Time 11/2009 Fifteen years ago, few with power in Massachusetts exercised it with more relish and publicity than then Boston University president, John…
Few of the Minute Men at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, had ever been regular soldiers. A number had served as militiamen along side British professionals in the…