Happy Flag Day! A classroom of second grade students pledge allegiance to the American flag at the Rockport Elementary School in the seaside town of Rockport, Massachusetts, adorably. More adorable.
This photo was taken in Feburary of 1973 as part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 1970s Documerica project. We’ve had a series of posts on photos from the project.
In 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution for his support against the British, sat in seclusion in France. He had been at odds with the French establishment since Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1824, the American Congress passed a resolution inviting then-President Monroe to invite Lafayette to tour the States. Lafayette first arrived in New York, but traveled throughout the country to great fanfare. In Boston, he was greeted on the Common in “an occasion of special splendor, with a military review followed by a dinner for 1200 people under a marquee erected for the event.”
Festivities on May 20th, Lafayette Day conclude with the annual decoration of the Lafayette Monument (1924, the centennial of his visit) on the Boston Common.
Italian immigre Angela DiChiara, age 84, Jamaica Plain recalls her arrival as a child in Boston’s North End around the turn of the twentieth century in Not So Long Ago: Oral Histories of Older Bostonians, collected by Lawrence Elle.
Inevitably around the holidays, these sorts of stories tend to turn into what is this cranberry jelly stuff, but they’re still pretty charming.
I soon made friends with a little girl and in a few weeks we started to go to school. She could speak both Italian and English and she had a lot of explaining ot do for me. When I met the teacher for the first time she told her I had just come from Italy and did not speak any English. The teacher said, “That’s all right, she’ll learn,” and I did very fast.
Now it was around Christmas and the teacher was getting the room ready, starting to fix the windows with all kinds of pretty things before Christmas and I saw them carrying in a great big tree. I was all eyes. I did not know what they were about to do with it because no one had told me anything about the tree. I thought they were going to plant it in the room and I thought to myself they must be crazy in America. I asked my friend what were they going to do and she explained it all to me. When the tree was up everybody in the room helped to put all the trimmings on it. It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw in all my life. But the next day when we went to school I got the surprise of my life. I saw this nice big fat man all dressed up in red and a big white beard and he said, “Ho, Ho, Ho”, and sat under the tree with dolls and all kinds of toys and candy. In a little while he started to call all the girls by name and gave each a beautiful doll and a bag of candy. When I saw I had a doll in my hands I was so excited I was shaking because I had never seen a doll before. And to think it was mine to keep. I could hardly wait to get home to show it to my mother and father, and when I got home I could hardly talk I was so excited telling them all about what had happened at school.
Girls leading the Memorial Day procession in Chicopee, Massachusetts, May 31, 1920.
On this memorial day, the town unveiled a monument “In Memorium of the World War.” Note the “the,” with no expectations of a second World War in 1920.
Massachusetts has hosted some fine parades in its day. A huge collection of beautiful photos in the Digital Commonwealth project.
Happy Mother’s Day. Today is Boston’s annual Ducklings Day Parade for mothers and children.
We covered the story of Make Way for Ducklings, written by Robert McClosky in 1941. This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Ducklings Day Parade. The photo above is from the 2009 event.
Photo via the Boston Irish ReporterJulia Oliver O’Neil’s ten daughters sported matching outfits in every Commonwealth Avenue Easter Parade from 1940 to 1959. Julia, a native of Jamaica Plain, saved and scrimped to make the outfits herself each year, and present her daughters in style alongside the daughters of the city’s Yankee elite.
Photos of the O’Neil sisters appeared throughout the world, including on the cover of LIFE Magazine (see the great LIFE photos here, including the arrival of the sisters’ matching hats and gloves).
They even featured in a math textbook: What are the odds of having 10 girls in a row? (1-in-1,024).
The sisters appeared once more in the parade 1983. They have a WONDERFUL website full of photos and articles which you can find here. In 2007, they appeared in the Boston Globe, all grown up.
“It was one of these wink, wink, nudge, nudge things in it was a way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in a cloak of historical significance,” said Charles Swift, a historian who is the executive director of the Gibson House Museum in Back Bay. “Also, for Irish politicians, Evacuation Day was a way to tweak the British.”
from: This South Boston map won’t help on St. Patrick’s Day, Boston Globe, March 17, 2008
During the colonial period, when the main elected office in certain of the American colonies was the colonial governor, voters had to cover long distances to reach their polling locations. They often stayed overnight.
Election Day became a happily celebrated secular holiday in Puritan New England, where celebrations of religious holidays were often quite thin. Public festivals, called “Election Day Drinkings” were held by major families and the governor’s own household. To feed tired and hungry crowds of dutiful citizens, townswomen began baking thick, fruit studded election cakes, large species of English fruitcakes.
The first documented election cake was served in Hartford, Connecticut, at the colony’s expense (roughly £3). The first known recipe appears in Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery in 1796, the first cookbook for an American market–British cookbooks dominated up to this point (Simmons notably substitutes ingredients like maize for English oats). That recipe called for thirty quarts flour, 10 pound butter, 14 pound sugar, 12 pound raisins 3 dozen eggs and a quart of yeast.
By the 1830s, the politicians of Hartford reportedly offered Election Cake only to men who voted a straight party ticket.
In a letter found by old foodie, Janet Clarkson, young solider, Frederick Osborne, stationed in North Carolina in 1862 writes wistfully home to his family in Massachusetts:
“Aunt Jane has been making ‘lection cake I suppose, or is the time for it past?”
By the end of the century, it largely was.
Recipe for Election Cake, from the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1911, orig. 1896)
1/2 cup butter
8 finely chopped figs
1 cup bread dough
1 1/4 cups flour
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon soda
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup sour milk
2/3 cup raisins seeded, cut into pieces
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon clove
1/4 teaspoon mace
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon saltWork butter into dough, using the hand. Add egg well beaten, sugar, milk, fruit dredged with two tablespoons flour, and flour mixed and sifted with remaining ingredients. Put into a well-buttered bread pan, cover, and let rise one and one-fourth hours. Bake one hour in a slow oven. Cover with Boiled Milk Frosting.
You can locate your modern polling location here. The Culinary Institute of America offers one modern take on the Election Day recipe here.
January 11, 1768: The Boston Gazette, and Country Journal published an account of the New Year’s celebration of a Number of respectable Ladies of South Kingstown, Naragansett.
In case there were any doubts about New England’s puritanical roots, we are assured that “The whole Evenign was spend in a very mirthful, yet in the most decent, frugal and innocent Manner.”
Guests were served a ‘most genteel repast’ but you might have noticed the note that “no foreign tea…was set before them, nor was it expected.”
Though the steep tax on tea which led to the Boston Tea Party dumping tea shipments into Boston Harbor would not pass for another five years, a levy on tea and other imported goods had already been laid down the year before, 1667. Protests against taxation would lead Great Britain to rewrite and withdraw a number of tax bills leading up to the 1773 Tea Act. The rest, as they say…
Looking Backward 