Boston -- the place, the idea, its role in American history -- extends well beyond its city limits. "Boston" is Lexington and Concord and Longfellow's poem of Paul Revere's ride. "Boston" is the adjacent city of Cambridge, home base of Harvard and MIT. "Boston" is its Puritan founders and their tradition of universal literacy, so "Boston" includes Horace Mann, the Boston Latin School, and the collection of colleges in and around Boston. "Boston" has always encouraged freethinkers, so "Boston" is Walden Pond, Thoreau, Emerson, Transcendentalism, and Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science. "Boston" is John F. Kennedy. "Boston" extends out to Quincy, the home of John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams. "Boston" is cutting edge medicine and biotech, Mass General Hospital, and the other teaching hospitals in Back Bay. "Boston" is the nearby cities of Brookline, Revere, Malden, and Medford, for which my home town was named. "Boston" was the center of the American Revolution, then the center of Northern sentiment for abolition of slavery, and now it is the rival of Berkeley to be called the center for liberal progressive thought in America.
Tam Moore is visiting "Boston."
Tam Moore has been doing journalism for 65 years, going back to his time as a reporter for the Oregon State University newspaper. He was a TV journalist for KOBI, a Jackson County Commissioner, and a print reporter for the Capital Press. He is a second pair of eyes looking at this blog after I think it finished for the day, finding most of my grammar and typing mistakes before I send out the e-mail version of this post--except possibly today, because he is on the road exploring America.
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| Tam Moore |
Guest Post by Tam Moore
Boston, May 17, 2023
The Medford Moores are back on the road, resting and writing before the Boston Celtics begin their Eastern Conference second game with Miami. It’s not that we are Celtics fans – we did our best to root the Golden State Warriors into another championship run, and shifted to the Lakers when the Warrior mojo lost its spark – but we are here in Boston, soaking up 400 years of history in the seven days leading up to the Boston College graduation of Tyler Moore. We’d best be Celtic fans tonight.
At the top of the page is Park Street Church, where we didn’t go to worship Sunday morning because our departure from the hotel got delayed due to a bit of personal first aid on a stubbed toe. By the time we got there, the place was locked. But the Boston Common was crowded with locals and visitors enjoying a sunny 80-degree day. Kids were having their annual “Make Way for Ducklings” festival. Seniors like us were slowly strolling. Couples interested in each other were sunning themselves on the same ground which was a bivouac and parade ground for the British troops which enforced martial law on Boston in the 1775 run-up to what became the American Revolutionary War.
The Common has come a long way since Pilgrim folks with the Massachusetts Bay Company purchased the 48-acre site in 1634 to have livestock pasture for the village they established nearby. The Park Street Church next to the Common was started in 1818 by some Congregationalists concerned with the rise of Unitarianism and what they saw as the need to honor the
theology of a holy trinity. It was the congregation which sent all those missionaries to Hawaii and other far-away places.
The old, most of it well-preserved alongside the new. Towering skyscrapers dwarf the 217-foot-tall steeple at Park Street. Paul Revere’s house in the North End –built about 1680—is part of a well-kept complex of buildings telling the story of the Revolution through the eyes of one of the key participants in years leading up to 1776. We learned yesterday from Robert Shimp of the Revere House Foundation the Paul himself spent most of the War on Continental Army duty guarding one of the fortified islands in Boston Harbor. But Henry Wadsworth Longfellow decades later made Revere’s ride a national legend.
Tomorrow, we are off the Lexington and Concord to learn about the Massachusetts’s militiamen who bloodied the nose of the British troops.
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The Medford Moores are back on the road, resting and writing before the Boston Celtics begin their Eastern Conference second game with Miami. It’s not that we are Celtics fans – we did our best to root the Golden State Warriors into another championship run, and shifted to the Lakers when the Warrior mojo lost its spark – but we are here in Boston, soaking up 400 years of history in the seven days leading up to the Boston College graduation of Tyler Moore. We’d best be Celtic fans tonight.
At the top of the page is Park Street Church, where we didn’t go to worship Sunday morning because our departure from the hotel got delayed due to a bit of personal first aid on a stubbed toe. By the time we got there, the place was locked. But the Boston Common was crowded with locals and visitors enjoying a sunny 80-degree day. Kids were having their annual “Make Way for Ducklings” festival. Seniors like us were slowly strolling. Couples interested in each other were sunning themselves on the same ground which was a bivouac and parade ground for the British troops which enforced martial law on Boston in the 1775 run-up to what became the American Revolutionary War.
The Common has come a long way since Pilgrim folks with the Massachusetts Bay Company purchased the 48-acre site in 1634 to have livestock pasture for the village they established nearby. The Park Street Church next to the Common was started in 1818 by some Congregationalists concerned with the rise of Unitarianism and what they saw as the need to honor the
theology of a holy trinity. It was the congregation which sent all those missionaries to Hawaii and other far-away places.
The old, most of it well-preserved alongside the new. Towering skyscrapers dwarf the 217-foot-tall steeple at Park Street. Paul Revere’s house in the North End –built about 1680—is part of a well-kept complex of buildings telling the story of the Revolution through the eyes of one of the key participants in years leading up to 1776. We learned yesterday from Robert Shimp of the Revere House Foundation the Paul himself spent most of the War on Continental Army duty guarding one of the fortified islands in Boston Harbor. But Henry Wadsworth Longfellow decades later made Revere’s ride a national legend.
Tomorrow, we are off the Lexington and Concord to learn about the Massachusetts’s militiamen who bloodied the nose of the British troops.
3 comments:
Tourists can also visit the home of Louisa May Alcott. I think it is called Orchard House. It is a historic house museum in Concord.
In Cambridge, tourists can also visit the home of Margaret Fuller. It is a National Historic Landmark.
Anyone who appreciates literature and history might also wish to visit historic Salem, which is accessible by commuter train (not too far) on the North Shore of Boston. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a Salemite and you can visit the House of Seven Gables. You can also learn about the Salem witch trials of the late 17th century. There are several museums and historic house museums in Salem. I believe one is now called the Peabody-Essex Museum.
Follow up:
If interested, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. has a website and a Wikipedia page. There are also wonderful art museums in Boston.
The Boston area is accessible by subway (the "T"), the commuter rail system and buses.
Except for the weather, no city in California can hold a candle to Boston. The differences are profound.
Speaking of Boston’s Puritan origins reminds me of when books proudly touted “Banned in Boston” on their jackets. Works that were once banned there included such classics as Leaves of Grass, The Decameron, Elmer Gantry and A Farewell to Arms. The list would make a great literature class.
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