Posts Tagged ‘immigration’
Changing Tides in Cambridge Industry
By the early 20th century, Cambridge was an industrial center with a broad array of factories. People from all over the country and the world came to work here. Why?
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 MoreS&S Restaurant is still serving up the comfort after more than a century in Inman Square
by Deb Mandel, 2022 In the decade preceding Cambridge Electric Light’s illumination of Cambridge Street, when trolley tracks ran from Inman to Porter Square, a little delicatessen began welcoming hungry patrons. From its opening in November 1919, Rebecca “Ma” Edelstein greeted guests with “es and es,” Yiddish for “eat and eat” – the phrase that lent the…
Read MoreCambridge and the Smallpox Epidemic, 1893-1903
By Beth Folsom, 2021 In our current era of COVID-19, heated discussions of vaccine mandates and the class and racial tensions inherent in these conversations may seem like a contemporary dilema, but an examination of Cambridge at the turn of the 20th century reveals that the city engaged in similar debates around the issue of…
Read MoreFall 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…
Read MoreWaves of Cambridge Migration: An Update
By Doug Brown, 2018 Why do people uproot their lives, move far from friends and family, and suffer the indignities that often come with being “new” to a place? Sometimes it’s for an education, or a different job, or a new relationship. Or maybe it’s simply to escape difficult circumstances, to reinvent oneself. The short…
Read MoreEarly Days at Newtowne Court
By Jane McGuirk Richards, 2014 We moved into Newtowne Court, door 30, apartment 265, in 1938, when I was one year old. We were among the first families to move in. There were seven of us, five children—two sets of twin girls and a single boy. Newtowne Court was a new concept in low income…
Read MoreSelf-Guided Tour: Women Activists of Riverside 50 Years After Suffrage
Stop 1: Begin the tour in Central Square With the passage of the 19th Amendment one hundred years ago this past August (2020), American women won the right to vote. Rather than a culmination, this event marked the beginning of a long fight for equal treatment and equity that is still far from over. Fifty…
Read More“The Absolute Majority of the Population”: Women in Twentieth-Century Cambridge
This article was originally published as a chapter in Cambridge in the Twentieth Century, edited by Daphne Abeel, Cambridge Historical Society, 2007. Inspired by Cambridge Historical Society’s 2020 theme—Who are Cambridge Women?—the author, Eva Moseley, has reviewed the manuscript and made a few updates which are noted in the text that follows. “The Absolute Majority…
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. “ – J. W. W. For some reason, the local history of East Cambridge has been almost completely neglected. It…
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