A MUTUAL COLLEAGUE of ours recently recounted for us a personal story of how a situation she would have normally loved – a classical music concert with some of her favorite pieces of music – turned into a nightmare of anxiety. Carol was out for an evening of fun and culture. Dinner with friends was […]
Arts and Culture
Posted inArts and Culture
High school junior wows Lawrence crowd
ALLISON CASTILLO, a junior at Methuen High School, got the call on New Year’s Eve. The singer that Lawrence City Clerk Diane LeBlanc had lined up to sing “God Bless America” at Monday night’s inauguration of city councilors and school committee members couldn’t make it. A possible stand-in also said she wasn’t available. LeBlanc heard […]
Posted inArts and Culture
Michael Rodrigues takes up cause of restoring Azorean Jewish heritage
PICTURES OF THE old synagogue show a decrepit building with peeling paint, broken furniture, and rotting wood. Prayer books were ripped. There were water leaks, vermin, and structural damage. It looked like what it was – a house of worship abandoned for more than 40 years, built to serve a community that no longer existed. […]
Posted inArts and Culture
CommonWealth’s most-read commentary pieces of 2021 covered the waterfront
WE ARE EAGER to have CommonWealth serve as a forum for healthy debate and the exchange of strongly argued points of view from a range of voices across the state. The most widely read op-ed pieces from 2021 certainly hit that mark in some ways, with commentary offerings from a sixth-grade student and one of […]
Posted inArts and Culture
Earmark process in ARPA bill undermines racial equity goals
THE RECENTLY PASSED $4 billion state spending bill appears generous to the arts and culture sector, particularly groups with ties to communities of color. It includes $135 million to help the arts community recover from the COVID pandemic, with explicit instructions that the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the state arts agency, “shall consider racial, geographic and […]
Posted inOpinion
Daniel Gookin and the full story of Thanksgiving
THIS WEEK MARKS the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving. That feast, which brought together Pilgrims and Native Americans, is celebrated as a moment of peace and togetherness. But lying just below the surface of this Thanksgiving veneer are troubling aspects of our early history that have not fully been told. Chief among them is […]
Posted inOpinion
Thanksgiving is what we make of it
THANKSGIVING WAS ALWAYS a mixed bag for me. The holiday of my youth was decidedly about large family gatherings accompanied by large amounts of food. The kitchen table (we had no dining room) groaned under the weight of the abundance and a folding card table served as the “kids table.” It was a very gender […]
Posted inArts and Culture
Sheffield statue to honor Mum Bett, 1st Mass. slave to sue for freedom
BEFORE THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION freed the slaves, before Rosa Parks or Harriet Tubman, there was Mum Bett. A Black slave in the Sheffield home of Colonel John Ashley, a prominent Berkshire judge, Mum Bett could not read or write. But she could hear. And in the 1770s in Ashley’s home, Mum Bett overheard plenty of conversations […]
Posted inArts and Culture
It’s time to end gun violence – on movie sets
A 16-YEAR-OLD BOY shivers. It’s cold, dimly lit, and windy outside an old, abandoned city warehouse. He should have worn more than his thin hooded sweatshirt. He pulls the hood tight against the cold. Car headlights approach. Hand in a pocket, he steps out from the shadows. The car stops, the window lowers. The boy […]
Posted inArts and Culture
SJC taking up challenge to Harvard’s ownership of slave photos
IN 1850, Harvard professor Louis Agassiz selected seven slaves on a South Carolina plantation to be photographed nude, as part of his attempt to prove the theory of “polygenism.” The theory was that Whites and Blacks were parts of different species, and Whites were inherently superior. Today, no one disputes that Agassiz’s theory was wrong […]