Posts Tagged ‘holiday’
Celebrations of Washington’s Birthday reflect tangled legacies of immigration, integration
Honoring Washington as a beloved president came to include minstrel shows in the early 1900s. That these performances were by prisoners in prisons playing the role of Washington’s enslaved people adds yet another layer of complexity.
Read MoreA century ago, the Fourth of July was a chance to meld old and new traditions
In the early 20th century, the Fourth of July offered concerts, lectures, parades and sporting events to residents of Cambridge and many cities around the country. Whether celebrating in their own neighborhoods with luncheons hosted by local civic or religious groups, playing in or watching a pickup baseball game or track race, or watching the fireworks from the banks of the Charles, Cantabrigians had plenty of options for marking the nation’s birthday. But during the decade between 1910 and 1920, events around the world and across the nation made their way into the city’s Independence Day celebrations, demonstrating how the meaning of the holiday had grown and changed. The holiday is still evolving a century later.
Read MoreFrom Papists to Patriots: St. Patrick’s Day in Cambridge
In the 1840s and 1850s, as a blight on the potato crop left millions of Irish in dire straits, the Cambridge press shared detailed descriptions of their suffering and implored readers to donate to a growing number of relief societies to aid the starving Irish abroad. As the famine reached its peak in the late 1840s, waves of rural Irish arrived in Massachusetts and settled in Boston, Cambridge, and surrounding communities. By 1855, 22% of adults in East Cambridge reported having been born in Ireland, and Irish immigrants made up a sizeable portion of the workforce in the city’s clay pits, brickyards, and glass and furniture factories.[1] Although Cambridge was a welcome respite from their suffering at home, Irish immigrants were not uniformly embraced in their new city; as poor, foreign-tongued newcomers – and especially as Roman Catholics – they were often stereotyped, criticized, and even shunned by white Cantabrigians who considered themselves natives.
Read MoreThanksgiving in Civil War Cambridge
By Beth Folsom, 2021 From the beginnings of English settlement in the American colonies, both religious and secular leaders called for certain days to be set aside for fasting, prayer and thanksgiving, usually aligned with the change in seasons and their accompanying times of planting and harvesting. The earliest settlers to arrive in Massachusetts brought…
Read MoreSome Aspects of the East Cambridge Story
By John W. Wood, 1956 “This paper gives a totally inadequate account of an appealingly picturesque and colorful neighborhood, the area that might have been a slum and isn’t, the step-child of the University City. “ For some reason, the local history of East Cambridge has been almost completely neglected. It is a little hard…
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