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 […]

I’m beginning to feel like a high school athlete psyche-ing up for a track meet. This weekend the David Ruggles Center in Northampton is holding a two-day symposium on the eponymous David Ruggles and the Underground Railroad in Northampton. For historians, the Underground Railroad is a difficult study. Those involved had […]

I found a great article in the April 2007 New Yorker about elections in the US, with some very practical solutions to some very glaring inequities. Hendrik Hertzberg points out that voters who live in late primary states have no real say in choosing candidates, and voters in safe “non-battleground” states […]

I’m having enormous fun with a book by Jack London called Smoke Bellew. It’s about a guy in San Francisco who has become a society journalist — how effete can you be? — who goes to the Klondike and gets into top physical shape and has amazing adventures. He starts […]

I went to a great new restaurant in Greenfield called Hope and Olive last week for an exhibit of oil paintings by E. Joseph McCarthy, who is actually more famous for his tile murals of aquatic scenes at places like Tampa International Airport and the Savannah Hotel in Barbados. I […]

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and my dad, God bless him, when it came to practical matters outside the legal profession, had a lot of inexplicable difficulties finding the right way to do anything. Bob Lloyd’s not here to back me up on this, […]

Nobody cares what I think, and why should they? I’m just a burned-out hippie from the Age of Aquarius. This is not a sad thing at all, just something to be recognized in order to be in better accord with the world as it is. You might not care what […]

I’ve been thinking about what to say at my dad’s memorial, and I have so many wonderful memories. He was such a great dad in so many ways, and a great friend to all who knew him. And I realized that there is no reason, on this occasion, to bring […]

I was driving home one day years ago, listening to the Albany public radio station, and they were talking about some former mayor of Albany — I didn’t catch the whole story — but someone said that this guy, although he went to “racist institutions like Groton” was not actually […]