A new history book about Lowell by Richard P. Howe Jr and Chaim Rosenberg to be published on March 11, 2013. To order a copy and to learn about local readings and book signings, check out our Legendary Locals of Lowell page.
The Bread & Roses Centennial Committee will host a Benefit Concert on Sunday October 23, 2011 4:00 pm Temple Emanuel, Andover. Performing at the concert will be A Besere Velt: Yiddish Community Chorus of the Boston Workmen’s Circle which will be performing The Cloth From Which We Are Cut: A Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.
This is a Benefit Concert to support Centennial Events Across 2012 in commemoration of the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike, know these days as the Bread and Roses Strike. The lessons of 1912 still resonate today.
Mass Moments reminds us today of the first use of the so-called “iron lung” developed by Harvard’s Dr. Philip Drinker. He was responding to a terrifying new disease that was causing sudden paralysis. Doctors called it poliomyelitis — or polio. First used on this day October 12, 1928 at Children’s Hospital in Boston, Drinker’s machine was designed to do the work of the lungs while they were paralyzed. Vacuums connected to it worked like a huge bellows. Although polio was commonly called infantile paralysis because of its tendency to strike children, youth and adults were not immune to the disease. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was struck by polio as a young adult. Iron lungs were eventually built in all sizes. In the 1950s, a vaccine was developed finally developed to combat polio. The number of cases and the need for the iron lung plummeted. By the 1960s, patients with difficulty breathing were using a modern compact respirator. Today an “iron lung” is a museum piece!
…in 1928, Children’s Hospital in Boston was the scene of the first use of an “iron lung.” Developed by a young Harvard doctor, it was little more than a galvanized iron box, a bed, and two household vacuum cleaners. A little girl whose lungs were paralyzed by polio was placed in the airtight metal cylinder with only her head exposed. The 700-pound, 3X 7 foot, galvanized metal machine breathed for her. Vacuum pumps connected to it drew the air in and out of the cylinder, causing the child’s lungs to rise and fall in regular breaths. For the next 30 years, this invention would mean the difference between life and death for victims of polio. It breathed for them.
The Occupy Boston protest has been much in the news lately. The map above shows the portion of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway in which most of the action has taken place. To the lower left is South Station; the darker gray shape across Summer Street is the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Just across Atlantic Avenue from both is Dewey Square, the public park in which the protestors have built their encampment. The green space extending up and right from Dewey Square is the start of the Greenway. The block depicted by the red star is where the one hundred plus arrests of protestors occurred the night before last. That’s the geography, the easy part.
The hard part is trying to understand just what is going on both in Boston and around the country. Why people are protesting against the established political and financial system should be no mystery to anyone. Former Florida Congressman Alan Grayson, appearing on a program with Bill Maher and conservative pundit P J O’Rourke (seen in this video) put it pretty well when he said people are frustrated because no one has been held accountable for Wall Street’s wrecking of the world economy and that relying on the established political process for reform is futile since one party (Republican) is a “wholly owned subsidiary” of Wall Street and “the other party (Democratic) caters to them as well.”
When people lose hope that the established system will treat them fairly is when large protest movements emerge. I think we have reached that stage. The election of Barack Obama gave many people hope that the reckless policies that have decimated the American middle 