Year-End Gratitude

2021 was not without it’s challenges, but we still managed to make history with you. We’re so thankful for the time we spent together, both in-person and online. We recorded a little video message to send off 2021, you can watch below: Did you miss an event in 2021? If there’s one great thing about…

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Guided Tour: Food and Mending in Central Square

Guided Tour

As a source of both physical and emotional sustenance, food is intricately tied to our survival as individuals and as a community. During the twentieth century, food also played an important role as a means by which Cambridge visitors and residents could learn about and connect with their neighbors across racial, ethnic and class lines.…

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Fall Conversation: How Has Food Mended Cambridge?

Over the course of 2021, History Cambridge has been exploring the ways in which the city has repaired its social, economic, and political fabric in the wake of historical crisis points—as well as the ways in which the need for mending remains. As a means of both physical and emotional nourishment, food has played a…

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History Café: Harriet Jacobs and the World of Abolitionist Cambridge Women

Harriet Jacobs is best known for her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in which she chronicles her enslavement in North Carolina, her subsequent period in hiding in a tiny attic garret, and her eventual escape north to freedom. But Jacobs was also for many years a resident of Cambridge, where she ran…

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History Café: Three Centuries of Black Cambridge

On June 9 we were joined via Zoom by Dr. Janie Ward for a discussion of the changing geographies of Black Cambridge. This History Café built on our previous program on Harriet Jacobs and the world of Cambridge’s abolitionist women, tracing the threads of the Black experience through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. We…

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Recap – The Basket Club and Mask-Making: The Fabric of Mending in Cambridge

The Basket Club and Mask-Making

Each year, the Cambridge Historical Society chooses a theme for our programs, which we phrase in the form of a question to invite Cantabrigians to come along with us as we explore our collective past. This year we are asking, “How Does Cambridge Mend?” We chose the word “mend” rather than “heal” because, whereas healing…

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COVID-19 Memorial

March 2021 marks the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. To honor the Cantabrigians who have died, we are installing markers on the lawn of our headquarters, the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House. Each marker, a butterfly, a symbol of hope and the shape of Cambridge itself, represents a life lost to the virus and a missing piece…

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Mercy Scollay and the Lifelong Work of Mending

By Katie Turner Getty, Independent Researcher and Writer When Mercy Scollay’s presumptive fiancé, Dr. Joseph Warren, was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June of 1775, she was thrust into emotional and financial turmoil that would both parallel and outlast the political upheaval of the American Revolution. As the caretaker and surrogate mother…

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Good Riddance 2020

Good Riddance 2020 Event GFX

On Sunday, December 13, drop by Cambridge Historical Society to write down the things you wish to leave behind from 2020. Your thoughts will be run through a shredder and recycled. Then write down your hopes, dreams, and wishes on a piece of seeded paper – all that you have learned and gained from 2020 that you want to take with you into 2021. Take home your fresh perspective and plant it.

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