Irish Heritage Trail
March 5, 2020 Ceremony at the Boston Massacre Grave Site March 5, 2020, Boston marks the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, a transformative event in history that launched the road to revolution in the American colonies. The Massacre took place on a wintry Monday night on March 5, 1770, when British troops fired into a…
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890-1995), who held the Kennedy family together through tragedy and triumph for much of the 20th century, is permanently enshrined along Boston’s waterfront, with the Rose Kennedy Garden and the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. The Rose Kennedy Garden is the first stop on Boston’s Irish Heritage Trail, a walking tour of twenty landmarks that tell three centuries of Boston Irish…
Maurice Tobin and his wife Helen Photo Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Presidential Library This Labor Day, the Boston Irish Tourism Association pays tribute to Boston native Maurice Tobin (1901-53), who served as mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts before being named US Secretary of Labor by President Harry S. Truman. Born in Roxbury’s…
By the time Irish immigrant John Boyle O’Reilly arrived in Boston in 1870, at age 26, he had already come face to face -in the most urgent manner- with issues of freedom, liberty and justice. As a child, born in 1844, he survived that terrible Irish Famine decade which killed one million Irish and sent…
Scotland’s poet and bard Robert Burns (January 25, 1759 – July 21,1796) is honored in Boston with a statue at Winthrop Square in Boston’s Financial District. Best known for composing the unofficial anthem to New Year’s Eve, Auld Lang Syne, Burns was a prolific poet who wrote over 300 poems, as well as various epistles and ballads. He was prolific in…
The 150th anniversary of the American Civil War (1861-65) starts in 2011, and organizers across the country hope it will help shape a national consensus – or at least a sincere dialogue – on American values and aspirations. The anniversary can also be a reminder of how society turns to art to explore grief, conflict…
In the early 1700s, Irish and Scottish settlers began infiltrating Boston’s solidly Puritan stock, coming by the boatload or as stragglers wandering up from New York of down from Halifax. They were indentured servants and small town merchants, sailors and mercenaries, farmers and preachers. Before basketball was invented, these were the original Boston Celtics! Many…
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