I’ve been on the road a lot lately, for me. After a spate of memorial services and my 40th reunion, I decided to schedule nothing all summer except a cruise on Lake Winnipesaukee, and maybe a trip to the races in Saratoga. I have a pile of books on the Underground […]

We note that the head of the Massachusetts Probation Department has been suspended due to a report Sunday by the Boston Globe Spotlight Team about patronage, waste and corruption in his department. Bear in mind, this corruption in the Massachusetts Department of Probation has been going  on right under the noses of […]

In my bibliography of the Underground Railroad in the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts, I omitted Robert H. Romer’s book Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts. Thankfully, in the electronic age, this omission is easily remedied. While it is set about 100 years before the period I’m more interested in, […]

I just returned from a trip to The Groton School where I met up with the other rogues and ne’er-do-wells from the Class of 1970, and it was a wonderful reunion. These are people I know better than almost anyone in the world, having spent five years together in the […]

“I can show you what is left,” writes Robert Penn Warren in his novel World Enough and Time.  “Here are the scraps of newspaper, more than a century old, splotched and yellowed and huddled together in a library, like November leaves abandoned by the wind, damp and leached out, back […]

I just attended the Commonwealth Opera performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Academy of Music in Northampton with my friend Catherine Stryker. The Academy is near and dear to my heart because it was there that Sarah and Shucks and I performed with Kurt Vonnegut, and it’s the home […]

Bluejays collect acorns and bury them in semicircles around a landmark like a rock or a stump, and so the trees in an oak  forest grow in semicircles. Back in the 1940s, three girls made friends at a school called Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut:  my mom, Sarah Dickson, Barbara […]

When I was a driver for a medical laboratory in Boston, I had to pick up blood samples from hospitals all over town. I remember when I figured out that Stuart Street turns into Kneeland Street, and it linked up two sectional maps in my brain. That happens a lot […]

I’ve been looking over the books I got at the David Ruggles Symposium in Florence Saturday and I feel like an eight-year-old trick-or-treater dumping my bag of candy out on my bed. This blog is generally about books I find at flea markets and rummage sales, but as Archie Goodwin […]

  I think everyone at the David Ruggles Symposium Saturday got that same sense that something really  important was happening. We had all met David Ruggles in the course of our research. He’s not hard to find. He’s the man who helped Frederick Douglass on his was to freedom. He […]