past and present
February 2015
January 6 vs. The Bonus Army: How the poor won government support
The attack on the Capital on January 6, 2021, filled many with horror. Armed domestic insurrectionists invaded the building in an attempt to keep their chosen presidential candidate in office after he lost the election. If we look at an earlier time in Washington D.C., when the Army attacked Americans, the need for a government that puts the needs of the people first becomes apparent.
February 2015
Moxie Man!
It’s not every day that Modern Moxie Man shows up at my door with two cans of the fabled tonic. Yes, tonic. You might call it a soda, but the dark beverage was marketed as a patent medicine named Moxie Nerve Food when it was first produced in the 1870s. With soda water added around 1884, the “delicious blend of bitter and sweet, a drink to satisfy everyone’s taste” was sold in bottles and at soda fountains. The drink’s inventor Augustin Thompson, a homeopathic doctor in Lowell, was on the road to wealth and fame. For a time, the drink with a bitter aftertaste was more popular than Coca-Cola, which now produces the soda.
Train Depot Open
When I see an unexpected sign on the side of the road, sometimes I follow it. I’d never really thought about Troy, New Hampshire, …
I hope he died well
“I hope he died well and I hope he died clean. Or, young Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?” from The Green Fields of France….
Clothing for a Union soldier
In September 1861, Thomas McNabb, a 35-year-old Irish-American laborer in Lowell, the father of four daughters, enlisted in the 26…
Lowell Bleachery — immigrant labor
In 1850, the Lowell Bleachery was important enough to merit the upper left-hand corner of a huge wall map. A service industry, it …
Thomas McNabb
A Civil War veteran’s stone sees daylightWe will never know Thomas McNabb. Did his friends call him Tommy? Why did he join the U…
The Lowell Offering
At the dawn of the industrial age, in the newest republic, wealthy corporation owners strove to enrich their workers’ lives with m…
Visiting the neighborhood
For my father Jack, doing the graves immediately before Memorial Day (so the flowers would make it through the weekend) was like a…s\
Tommy, we hardly knew ye
Nearly 160 years ago, men from the poorest, most despised ethnic group signed up to fight for the cause of a United States. The Ir…
The end of the road
Flying across the room
Not quite symmetrical, the wooden flying shuttle is purely utilitarian. The slots where a metal bobbin rested inside the bottomles…