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It is arguably the most historic site in the Commonwealth. Its original name was Massachuset. Yet its historical significance is commemorated in a wink and a nod. The last time Great Blue Hill got respect befitting its historical significance was on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826, when a local parade marched to the summit and its spokesperson declared, “This mountain is consecrated and hallowed ground, dedicated to Liberty and Independence.” But even that grand gesture overlooked the historical significance of this landform to this commonwealth. I’d like to set the record straight once and for all for some high ground that deserves a whole lot higher regard than we accord it: Great Blue Hill. The Friends of the Blue Hills say it best: “Massachusetts, an Algonquin name, translates as ‘At the Great Hill.’ Four hundred years ago the local Native Americans used the term to refer to themselves. In adopting the name for their settlement, the Bay colonists ensured that the entire state would be named after Blue Hill.” The fact survives in web sites and history books (1), even the official state poem, but nowhere on the hill itself is there a sense of shrine or even a plaque bearing the message connecting this place to its original name. The closest equivalent is a passing reference in an exhibit in the Trailside Museum at the hill’s base. 1. "This word was the name for an Indian tribe who lived around the vicinity of Massachusetts Bay. The word Massachusetts, according to Roger Williams, signifies, in the Indian language, Blue-Hills”, John Warner Barber, Historical Collections of Massachusetts (Worcester: Dorr Howland & Co., 1839), 10. “..there is general agreement about the translation of certain [Native American] names such as Massachusetts to ‘Great Blue Hill,’” concurs Arthur J. Krim, in “Acculturation of the New England Landscape: Native and English Toponymy of Eastern Massachusetts,” in New England Prospect: Maps, Place Names, and the Historical Landscape, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings (Boston: Boston University, 1980), 70 If only it had been a whole lot higher, things might have been different. At an elevation of 635 feet, the glacially scoured, bald-pate granite rock may not look like Mount Fuji or Kilimanjaro. It is only a hundred feet taller than the next tallest of its nineteen neighbors collectively known as the Blue Hills, so they steal some of its thunder. So what if Big Blue is the highest peak so near the coast from Maine to Mexico. So what if the nearest inland peak towering any higher over the land at its base is Wachusett, fifty miles away. This has just not been enough to put Big Blue over the top, respected at last in her own Valhalla. As we drive by Big Blue on Route 128 in Canton, or look down Blue Hill Avenue, we mostly damn her with faint praise. That Big Blue is ground zero for the native American place name of Massachuset is far from our thoughts. Among the half of the states with native American names, Massachusetts came first. Yet no matter how often we utter the syllables, we have to remind ourselves that a name like Massachusetts is not some Angloname like Maryland or Virginia or New Hampshire. Most of the time, we mouth these four syllables without recognizing that they are Algonquin, let alone that this foursome and the hundreds of other place names all around us describe elemental landscapes. The fact that our fair state is named for something indigenous and not insignificant—a specific place—is mostly ignored, occasionally mentioned in passing, and rarely grasped in full, remaining vaguely known and vaguely shown. Adding to the blue haze that veils the subject is that most sources say Massachusetts means “at the great (blue) hills” and leave it at that, as if pinpointing anything more precise would be overreaching. And yet just such precision seems not only possible, but compelling as well. In its first appearance in print, the word “Massachuset” was linked specifically to two things: an indigenous people and the hill currently known as Great Blue. The year is 1614, six years before the Pilgrims and fourteen years before the Puritans set foot here. In his Description of New England, Captain John Smith, self-styled Admiral of New England (the same bloke whose case Pochahantas took up), first described “the Countrie of the Massachusets, which is the Paradise of all these parts,” and “the high mountaine of Massachusit” or “Massachusets Mount.” While most subsequent interpretations seem to assume Smith must have meant the collective Blue Hills, Smith’s language, as well as his engraved map, points to a single peak, by which the highest summit in the group must be meant. The name might have stuck to the hill, except Smith deferred to Prince Charles, an English royal with delusions of dominion, a fifteen-year-old who for less than clear reasons renamed Massachusetts Mount and its adjacent range as the Cheviot Hills, after the hills on the Scottish border that are three times taller and three times further inland from the coast than our Blue Hill Range. This high-handed first attempt at importing a place name from Old England to New here did not exactly take where it mattered, here on these shores, although when Amsterdam-based cartographer Nicholas Visscher compiled a map of these shores from the work of Smith, Champlain and others published in 1655, he clearly delineated the grouping of “Chevyot Hills”, the tallest of which is “Mons Massachuset”. Thirty editions that are close copies of that map kept that name in print over the next fifty years, but not in use in these parts. Here, Charles’ meddling was royal mischief enough to deprive the tallest of the hills of its rightful name ever after. As king, Charles went on to lose his head in other ways, and the Puritans, who might have honored the indigenous name for the landmark, instead started calling the range the “Blew Hills” as found on a map from 1642. Circa 1665-84 a map of land in Dorchester showed “Top of Blue Hill”.(2) By 1778, the State of Massachusetts Bay Council could ratify the hill-versus-hills confusion by ordering a beacon placed “upon the highest or most proper place of the Hill known by the name of Blue Hills.”(3) 2. Arthur J. Krim, in “Acculturation of the New England Landscape: Native and English Toponymy of Eastern Massachusetts,” in New England Prospect: Maps, Place Names, and the Historical Landscape, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings (Boston: Boston University, 1980), 75-7 3. Harold G. Travis, The Beacon on Sanderson Hill, Weston Historical Society Bulletin, c 1974, 3 For Captain Smith, as for all who sailed in after him, the undulating pale blue profile of the cluster of hills crowned by Great Blue was the first landform sighted on approaching these low-studded shores. Echoing generations of earlier European boat people for whom this beacon beckoned, John Adams put it like this: “If there is a Bostonian who ever sailed from his own harbor for distant lands, or returned to it from them, without feelings at the sight of the Blue Hills, which he is unable to express, his heart is differently constituted from mine.” In his pioneering description, as I say, Smith also recorded “the Massachusets” as the name of a now lost people. Too busy to study the language, Smith left for others the question of translating the term. Among the very few Anglos who took the trouble to learn Algonquin was Roger Williams, who worked tirelessly for the rights of the native peoples and settled among them in Rhode Island. Williams is barely remembered for compiling his Key into the Language of America, which he published in 1634, much less for writing in 1682, “I have learnt that the Massachusetts was called so from the Blew Hills.” As well it might, since evidence of Native American presence in the hills goes back at least eight thousand years. In the fifty years after Smith offered his version of the tribal name, the name went through many iterations. The original autograph Royal charter of 1629 refers to “Massachusetts alias Mattachusets alias Massatusets. (Yes, Massatusetts: there you go, southern readers!) William Wood’s map of 1634 boasts the first instance of the now standard spelling in print, perhaps accidentally, since his spelling for another well-known harbor comes out as “Marvil Head”. However often the natives uttered their name to the Anglos, our dialect-bewildered scribes and their successors mostly ignored Smith’s precedent. Other trails through the linguistic wilderness include “Massachuseuck” (in Williams’ Key), “Masathulets”, “Massawateusek”, “Messachusiack”, “Massawachusett”, and “Massachisans”. Sometimes singular, sometimes plural or possessive. From the generation of Anglos that included Raleigh and Shakespeare, who are not exactly known to have been sticklers for spelling even their own names the same way twice, we would expect no less. Heck, even now we still can’t agree on Algonquin, Algonkian or Algonquian. In that wilderness, many voices were not heard as one overnight. Standardization of spelling, let alone meaning, took time. So many sounds, so tempting to play with in the translation. We’ll get to the variant translation in a minute, but the translation that has enjoyed scholarly near-unanimity is the one I’ve mentioned, in which massa means “great”, wachu “hill”, and sett “at”, specifically referring to the Blue Hills, if we are to believe Williams, and most specifically, if we are to believe Smith, the mount formerly known as Massachuset. The name is unique in the region for its thematic focus. Unlike any other southern New England people whose name has come down to us, the people who welcomed the first Anglos to these shores named themselves not for a lowly water feature but for the high ground of their world. You had to go inland as far as Wachusett to find another mountain-named people. (Incidentally, this name, too, incorporates “wachu” and “sett”.) In conflating their name and place name, the original Friends of the Blue Hills seem to have been honoring these hills with a respect that surpasses ours. That downhill slide began when Smith’s Mount Massachuset et al. became a.k.a. the Blew Hills. Look again at Great Blue. Perhaps it lacks an obvious Old Man of the Mountain or Squaw Rock profile, but in its subtle curvature it is indeed a logo for our time. Long before art deco streamlining, the glaciers refined the rough edges of the region, unifying drumlins of extruded gravel and mountains of granite in a common undulation. Long before the British Invasion, we can only suppose that Algonquins considered the hills and above all Great Blue something more than a hunting ground. Perhaps they recognized in Great Blue’s radial simplicity of shape something more sacred than a mere landmark. The geometry of Big Blue is more perfect than any other solid rock landform in its compass that extended as far as Nantasket, Woonsocket, Wachusett, Monadnock. This bastion of rock that so humbly yet elegantly lords it over all the other Blue Hills, as they in turn lord it over all the other hills for miles around, suggests an understated brand of leadership, a loose confederation, perhaps the perfect logo for what we are now. I suspect that Algonquins would agree. If the name Massachusetts in a sense slid off this smooth hill, it briefly lingered on two other landscape features, and finally came to rest in a third: fields, river, bay. First, Massachusetts Fields. There was such a place, but it’s long gone. The first Puritans arrived to find hundreds if not thousands of acres of cleared cornfields along the shore, backed up with grove-like forests kept free of undergrowth by controlled burning. One cluster of these coastal clearings was known from the start as Massachusetts Fields, as they had been cleared at the behest of Chickatawbut, sachem of the Massachuset nation. The first Anglo settlers found their work not so much cut out for them as done for them, so conveniently had the planters of these fields recently been decimated by some virus that the English confused with the will of God. The Massachusets, who had once been able to field three thousand braves, were down to only a few hundred hardy but harmless souls, who got the boat people settled, without getting them too unsettled. As New Englanders know perfectly well, fields, unlike rivers and hills, are perishable landscapes. This quintessential lost landscape, the Massachusetts Fields were eventually buried beneath the Wollaston section of Quincy, and emblazoned on the city seal. Fortunately, before the era of photography, Eliza Susan Quincy recorded the vestigial landscape in several watercolors now preserved in the Massachusetts Historical Society. Besides patches of marsh and grass along Quincy Shore Drive and Blacks Creek, the closest surrogate landscape we have today is World’s End in Hingham. Second, Massachusetts River: still with us after all these years. Smith’s name of choice for a certain well-known local waterway got nixed by His Highness Prince Charles, who much preferred the idea of naming the river after himself, and what fifteen year old would not? But for this mischief, the river would perhaps still be named for the people who were named for the hills. Third, Massachusetts Bay. We’ll always have the bay named for the people named for the hills that crown the skyline of the broad-arc bay. How’s that for circular logic? The bay logically gave the coastal colony its name once the name came to encompass all the waters between Cape Anne and Cape Cod, although originally the term meant Boston Harbor proper, and before that, simply the waters off the Quincy shore that once lapped against the Massachusetts Fields. And speaking of the Quincy shore, Moswetuset Hummock plays a supporting role in the saga. Though a hummock (“hammock” in the coastal south) is a coastal knoll, terra firma in a sea of salt marsh, this one looms larger. Here Chickatawbut, who spent the cooler season near the Neponset falls, spent the warm season. The fishing was easy, and the skyline above the Massachusetts Fields danced to the pale blue undulations of the Blue Hills. Moswetuset Hummock may be the oldest documented summer place on the east coast, a classic native American landscape. Chickatawbut was a mensch; did lots to help Anglos, and they loved his table manners. He and his people took nothing from the Anglos and left nothing but footprints. Still pristine and elemental, surrounded by acres of salt marsh, this acre-plus rocky mount, once covered with red cedar, now covered with red oaks as it probably was in Chicktawbut’s day, is unfortunately beleaguered on all sides by the heavy-handed ways of our world. The quaint moniker Sachem’s Knoll has fallen into disuse, and with it a little more of our collective imagination about the diminished Massachuset people. When the Commonwealth rolled out its tercentennial historic markers in 1930, the hummock is where they chose to explain the state name. Some readers may have missed this, so let me quote it in full. “Moswetuset Hummock was the seat of Chickatawbut, sachem of the Massachusetts Indians; adjoining were their planting grounds. ‘Massachusetts’ means ‘at the great (blue) hills.’ With Chickatawbut Governor Winthrop made a treaty which was never broken.” This mini-Blue Hill actually borrows its native name from Big Blue. I side with not only Roger Williams but also our early historian, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, whose landmark History of the Colony of Massachusets Bay came out in 1764. “At Massachusets, near the mouth of Charles river, there used to be a great rendezvous of Indians. That circle which now makes the harbours of Boston and Charlestown, round by Malden, Chelsea, Nantasket, Hingham, Weymouth, Braintree and Dorchester, was the capital of a great Sachem [Chickatawbut], much reverenced by all the plantations of Indians roundabout, and to him belonged Naponset (Dorchester Mills now Milton) Punkapog (Stoughton) Wessagusset (Weymouth) and several places upon Charles river, where the natives were seated.” So? But then in a footnote Hutchinson makes a clear reference to the misnamed hummock: “The tradition is that this sachem had his principal seat upon a small hill or rising upland, in the midst of a body of saltmarsh in the township of Dorchester [now Quincy], near to a place called Squantum, and it is known by the name of Massachusets hill, or mount Massachusets to this day. The blue hills, so called, in the township of Milton, &c. are called in Capt. Smith’s map of 1614, Chevi hills, but they were called before Massachusets mount. Prince Charles changed the name, and also gave the name of Charles’s river to what had been before called Massachusets river.” Why is it the good stuff is often hidden in a footnote? To this fragile and underappreciated place labeled Moswetuset ought to be restored its rightful name: Massachusets Hummock, which was its name on a plan made as early as 1687. In the view from the puddingstone peninsula of Squantum it all comes together: look shoreward, and the rounded profiles of hummock and hill that once shared a people and a name are in perfect alignment. A sachem in his own time, Governor Hutchinson summered on Milton Hill, halfway between the greater and lesser hills that he was so careful to name properly. Naturally, he gave his modest estate a Native place name: Unquity, and that, too, seems like a first. Like Chickatawbut’s, his place in the sun survives: Hutchinson Field, on the crest of Adams Street in Milton. (4) 4. Lost in the 1890s, both the one and a half story house with portico and gardens with a ha-ha wall were designed by Sir Francis Bernard (another Royal Governor in MA transferred from NJ), also architect of Harvard Hall. Hutchinson’s Field has been preserved by the Trustees of Reservations, the world’s first land trust, since 1898. Effectively, if inadvertently, the Anglos dislodged the Algonquin place-name tribe-name from its rightful locations, appended the English place-word “bay” to it, and affixed it to a greater whole than even the Algonquins ever dreamed naming as one entity. For the next century, until 1780, Massachusetts Bay was the name the whole colony or province went by. Meanwhile, the remnants of the Massachuset nation were resettled in villages of “Praying Indians”, among which Ponkapog’s perfect feng-shui just south of the Blue Hills, so fitting, just was not good enough. King Philip’s War in 1676 abruptly ended that utopian experiment, and all the others, and from then on the denizens didn’t have a prayer. Whatever insensitivity affected their treatment of their hosts, whatever precluded the colonists’ command of the local language, to their credit the Anglos here at least honored their hosts with a proclivity to retain their hosts’ place names. But appropriation of the name Massachuset for statewide duty comes at a cost. Because the hill long known as Great Blue failed to keep its native American name, because the river failed to keep the name of the people who were named for the hill, because the primordial fields formerly known as Massachuset's were long ago built over, and because the hummock’s name has been quaintly retooled and redeployed, the ground zero for the name we all take for granted is obscured if not forgotten. Gradually, ever more oblivious to the historical significance of this stark landform that we call Great Blue Hill, we slowly belittle its stature and dilute its symbolic power. Here are the ups and downs of the last century. In 1893 the Blue Hill Range fittingly became the largest urban wildland in the oldest Metropolitan Park system in the country (equally fortunately, four decades later tiny Moswetuset Hummock was added to the system), a magnificent recognition of its landscape importance marred only by the woeful silence on its historical importance that greeted Sylvester Baxter’s 1891 proposal that the Blue Hills be called Massachusetts Forest. True, in honor of Chickatawbut’s many kindnesses to his interlopers, their descendants named the second tallest of the hills after him, but this gesture makes only the most tenuous of connections between a hill and a hummock and a four-syllable place name. The best memorial we have come up with so far is the Blue Hills Trailside Museum, established in 1959 at the base of Big Blue, and now short of state funding commensurate with its significance. Yet even here, there is only the passing reference that the state got its name from the “Massadchuseuck” tribe, “people of the great hills”. The Department of Conservation and Recreation’s recreational mission here crowds out any focus on Blue Hill as an historic site of immense significance to the Commonwealth. Superseding the observatory plunked down on the summit 150 years ago was a more permanent observatory and weather station privately built in 1885, joined by a very retro castellated tower in 1908, and operated by Harvard. In the New Deal, the Civilian Conservation Corps subtracted a forest for a ski area on Big Blue’s northwest flank and added a handsome stone observation tower near the summit. In the early 1950s some other Anglo do-gooders led by Ralph Lowell crowned the observatory with a tower for an educational radio station. Its call letters WGBH paid inadvertent homage to Great Blue Hill as the primal beacon of local Algonquins, who long before radios and weather balloons knew all about using this high place for observing and broadcasting. In the mid fifties came the freestanding WGBH-TV tower and a state police radio tower. At these infractions, Big Blue has been lucky, almost held in high regard; indeed, along the way, a third tower has apparently been removed. No water tower here either. Meanwhile, less protected hills, Bear Hill in Waltham for one, are becoming a hill matador’s dream of bristling airwave-barbs. In our own era it seems that, for a price, no wild hilltop can long continue to meet the broadband sky unskewered. The hills are alive with the sound of static. Wireless wins, the hillsides wither. The message dims that at least one summit hereabouts, Great Blue, Ground Zero for Massachusetts, ought to be sacred to all of us. Or at least to those who smoke the pipe of peace on Beacon Hill. What to do? Long before there was a Beacon Hill, there was Mount Massachusetts. Too much time is spent bickering on one, and too little communing with the other. While it is way too much to suggest so bold a rectification of names as resurrecting the original name for Big Blue, if any state deserves to have and really ought to have an Official State Hill, this is it. Anything else? A modest degree of sacred memorialization designed by a Massachuset, at last setting the record straight, would hardly be amiss up there; I for one would love to trade one of the two transmission towers for a simply inscribed granite boulder. Perhaps here lies an opportunity for the denizens of Beacon Hill to come together and show how far removed their hill is from Mount Gridlock. © 2023 Thomas M. Paine

Height matters. We don’t have to be in Steamboat Springs at eight thousand feet, either suffering from oxygen deprivation or enjoying a Rocky Mountain high, to be aware of the local altitude. Granted, we cannot distinguish between degrees of elevation the way we can nuances of color, but our standard equipment does include basic calibration. We conserve kinetic energy, subconsciously remembering that what goes up must come down. We know we are on a height as much by recalling the climb as by looking at the view. At least in relative terms, we know where we stand. Blessed as we are with the gift of imagination, and sometimes acute memory retention, no height scaling experience is done vapidly. Oh, no. Leaning out over the edge of the Empire State Building clutching our cellphone cameras, or descending the Mount Washington on old brakes and tires, makes us feel alive in ways that plain living on the plain cannot top. Whether we go queezy or simply tighten every muscle, a visceral response is only the primate thing to do. The higher we get, the more we calculate the risks of every little misstep. This is no cowardly climb-down, as the Brits so cutely put it, this is just plain common sense. We climb so that we may see, knowing as axiomatic that the higher we climb, the further the view. For some that process of unfolding, in the climb and then in the contemplation, is as profound as life gets. I suspect that such emotions were profound enough in millennia past for all manner of allusions to altitude to become embedded deeply within our cultural roots and our language. Perhaps altitude attitude all goes back to the most primitive forms of religion. Our unknown valley-dwelling ancestors looked to the skies for the basic necessities of sun and rain; and marveled at the nocturnal mysteries of the moon and stars, of all realms the most inaccessible and inexplicable. Somehow, over the eons, bending their chins skyward inculcated in them a sense of divinity in absolute altitude: the Most High. I suspect that from such a widespread response to the physical organization of a world perceived as flat, a kind of baseline above which extended vast heavens, height took on layers of meaning at first religious and later more broadly cultural. Societies did not need to build pyramids and ziggurats to direct religious awe at the heavens. Perhaps long before people felt comfortable climbing them, many societies held mountains to be sacred, like Mount Olympus of the Greeks, Mount Tmolus of the Lydians at Sardis, or Mount Tai in early dynastic China. There are more citadels than sacred mountains. Rarely do they coincide. Mostly the fortified heights include places of worship directed at even loftier heights elsewhere that were both too revered and too inaccessible. The citadel itself was a place for regular worship and ritual, and occasional crisis management. The Acropolis in Athens and Mont-Saint-Michel may be the quintessential examples of habitable heights as places accorded lofty status without being themselves divine. But the cathedral towns on hills—Durham, Orvieto, and Vezelay—are the exception, and even there fortification preceded veneration. For most low-lying cities, the ideal compromise site for the cathedral was the local hill or mound but usually such sites were unavailable. As for places, so, too for people. Once upon a time, for winning in war and for keeping the peace, taller was more “respectable”. Certainly, taller was stronger. The “high and mighty” were to be feared, if not respected. Perhaps in most societies, people have always accorded tall people a sense of superiority, deserved or not, and I suspect that we have been wired for it since our primitive primate days. In elevated language, the wiring reveals itself. A hill could be called an eminence, as a person could be called eminent. In ordinary usage, the wiring reveals itself even more. For example, we still talk of looking up to people who are in a sense “elevated” by virtue, of respecting what is on the up and up, of looking down on people with gigantic failings, and of lifting the spirits of those who have an inferiority complex. We have high hopes and hold the highest regard for those who are high-class or take the high road or occupy the moral high ground or risk high stakes in a high-minded cause. Social climbers make the upward mobility all too obvious. Class means high-class, high-brow, living the high life, if not exactly sitting at high table. We greatly value what we value highly. I am not a musician, but people like me imagine musical high notes as hovering over the low ones as if in three dimensional space, and understand that in some sense higher is better here too. Small wonder then that there are more sacred mountains than sacred valleys. If we rhapsodize over the view of lofty heights, or the view from sublime heights, this should still strike us as manifestly unfair. If we would love our immediate world, there are lots of common-sense reasons to worship valleys and rivers more than mountains. Perhaps the peoples of Papua New Guinea and the upper Amazon are more balanced in their focus than are the descendants of the oldest “civilizations”. Ever since Eden, we tend to sully the paradise of valleys we would inhabit. In nineteenth century America the closest valleys came to being held sacred was in their artistic worship by Hudson River School landscape painters and romantic poets as vales, intervales, and dells. And then Grand Canyon and Yellowstone and Yosemite trumped all. At last America had valleys worthy of being held sacred, which in our secular culture means being declared National Parks. If the fate of valleys became a bit less unfair, still it is the mountains that rule. The void of one would not exist but for the solid of the other. Were it not for El Capitan and the other peaks, there would be no Yosemite Valley; even Grand Canyon has its sacred San Francisco mountains. Most profoundly for us today, the sense of the sacred on high remains embedded in the imagery of our secular patrimony. Consider that the idealized image of the New England community is usually expressed not as a village nestling in a valley but as a city on a hill. Many of New England’s most photographed villages are hilltowns like Litchfield, Petersham, and Craftsbury Common. These are inspiration enough for a nation, but they are merely the literal embodiment of something much more profound than photogenic form, and that is the underlying meaning, the metaphor of the ideal on high. Even as his good ship Arbella had yet to anchor off these shores, John Winthrop launched the language that would in centuries to come stand as the metaphor for the unfolding American ideal: for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us. As luck would have it, the site Winthrop finally settled on for the seedling city of Boston boasted not one, but three hills, the middle one itself a “Trimountain,” whose highest ground soon sprouted a beacon, so utilitarian a use for height, and so apt a metaphor for what Boston would become. Boston’s leading lights in the generation of Sam Adams would launch a revolution armed first and foremost with rhetoric of fair representation, liberty, and independence. Once that revolution bore the fruit of idealized government, the founding fathers faced the task of housing that government in a suitable setting. Consider the idealism that guided them still. When the Massachusetts state government outgrew its old digs in the heart of Boston, and years of indecision over a proper new site turned to impatience, there could have been no more fitting site for the New State House than dome-like Beacon Hill, John Hancock’s old pasture, now suddenly available. It was the perfect marriage of building to site. Eight years before the site became available, Boston-bred architect Charles Bulfinch had thought to crown his proposed design for the state house, presented to now-Governor Sam Adams, with a dome. Once the dome-like form of the topmost fifty-plus feet of gravelly hill behind the building was carted into Back Bay, the New State House dome crowned what was left. Within, representatives met in a radially organized space echoing the dome without. All in all, it was a flourish worthy of the occasion. Modest Mr. Bulfinch pioneered an architectural form of such enduring aptness that he was asked to design the U.S. Capitol, as well as the capitol in Augusta, Maine. Launched on Beacon Hill, the Bulfinch form of dome on pediment on hill would inspire, by way of Capitol Hill itself, half of our state capitols. In Bulfinch’s design and all its successors, Winthrop’s grand idea became visible for all the people. Government was no longer the citadel arrogantly rebuffing popular scrutiny, but the shrine serving to inspire with exemplary conduct. A tall order to aspire to, indeed. What free nation before had seated government on hilltops? The overarching metaphor of a City on a Hill, a Beacon calling forth the better angels of our nature, was heady stuff for a city given to restraint, understatement and smugness; by the nineteenth century, Boston’s moral high ground soon commanded so vast a dominion that Oliver Wendell Holmes was to dub it the Hub of the Universe. By the twentieth the message was deeply embedded in the national psyche, even if the source was dimly remembered. Lest there be any doubt of this, two presidents with a gift of the gab let the beacon shine for them. In January 1961 President-elect JFK addressed the legislature on Beacon Hill in words so eloquent they are a joy to read: "I speak neither from false provincial pride nor artful political flattery. For no man about to enter high office in this country can ever be unmindful of the contribution this state has made to our national greatness. "Its leaders have shaped our destiny long before the great republic was born. Its principles have guided our footsteps in times of crisis as well as in times of calm. Its democratic institutions--including this historic body--have served as beacon lights for other nations as well as our sister states. "For what Pericles said to the Athenians has long been true of this commonwealth: 'We do not imitate--for we are a model to others.' "And so it is that I carry with me from this state to that high and lonely office to which I now succeed more than fond memories of firm friendships. The enduring qualities of Massachusetts--the common threads woven by the Pilgrim and the Puritan, the fisherman and the farmer, the Yankee and the immigrant--will not be and could not be forgotten in this nation's executive mansion… "But I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier. "'We must always consider,' he said, 'that we shall be as a city upon a hill--the eyes of all people are upon us.' "Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us--and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill--constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities. For we are setting out upon a voyage in 1961 no less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arabella in 1630. We are committing ourselves to tasks of statecraft no less awesome than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it was then by terror without and disorder within. "History will not judge our endeavors--and a government cannot be selected--merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these. "For of those to whom much is given, much is required. And when at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each one of us--recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state--our success or failure, in whatever office we may hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions: "First, were we truly men of courage--with the courage to stand up to one's enemies--and the courage to stand up, when necessary, to one's associates--the courage to resist public pressure, as well as private greed? "Secondly, were we truly men of judgment--with perceptive judgment of the future as well as the past--of our own mistakes as well as the mistakes of others--with enough wisdom to know that we did not know, and enough candor to admit it? "Third, were we truly men of integrity--men who never ran out on either the principles in which they believed or the people who believed in them--men who believed in us--men whom neither financial gain nor political ambition could ever divert from the fulfillment of our sacred trust? "Finally, were we truly men of dedication--with an honor mortgaged to no single individual or group, and compromised by no private obligation or aim, but devoted solely to serving the public good and the national interest. "Courage--judgment--integrity--dedication--these are the historic qualities of the Bay Colony and the Bay State--the qualities which this state has consistently sent to this chamber on Beacon Hill here in Boston and to Capitol Hill back in Washington. "And these are the qualities which, with God's help, this son of Massachusetts hopes will characterize our government's conduct in the four stormy years that lie ahead." President Ronald Reagan embarked on his administration referring to that same city on a hill, and unlike JFK lived to give a Farewell Speech, where the image appears again, by now a metaphor for America. Penned by Peggy Noonan, the speech is worth quoting at length: "I've been reflecting on what the past 8 years have meant and mean. And the image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one--a small story about a big ship, and a refugee, and a sailor. It was back in the early eighties, at the height of the boat people. And the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea. The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him. He yelled, `Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man.' … "…I've thought a bit of the `shining city upon a hill.' The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free. "I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. "And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was 8 years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home." More than any other leader in recent memory, Kennedy and Reagan made Winthrop’s rhetoric our own, and with it did much good, at home and abroad. Bostonians did not vote for Reagan as they did for JFK, but Reagan voted for Boston. Here was another reason for Bostonians to feel smug in the ideal if wary of the reality; lofty buildings in high places do not always inspire lofty rhetoric, and lofty rhetoric in high places does not always inspire confidence. But we sure miss it when our leaders stumble over their first language, let alone fail to invoke a dream, much less make strides toward it. And if Beacon Hill has had its ups and downs, at times itself transformed into Mount Gridlock, and if Capitol Hills in Washington and beyond at times lose sight of the beacon, ours is still a system as stern as Winthrop and as optimistic as JFK and Reagan, and that is reason enough to keep aiming higher. Height will always matter. © 2023 Thomas M. Paine

Contributed to PEM / 06 NOV 2015 / By Tom Paine The CCTV (China Central Television) film crew working with award-winning director Gu Jun on the forthcoming Chinese documentary Maritime Silk Road found its way to PEM because they wanted to follow the story of an American working in China whose family also had long ties with China. For some reason, they ignored all the other better qualified candidates that are surely out there…and chose me. When I first visited the Peabody Museum in the early 1960s, I had no idea that I had an ancestor involved in the China trade. Nor did I know it when I first went to Asia in 1976-7, practicing as a landscape architect in the Taiwan Tourism Bureau. My wife had been named a Henry Luce Scholar that year. To prepare for our year in Taiwan, we took beginning Chinese at Harvard Summer School with a Harvard undergrad named Nancy Berliner, later a curator at PEM and the genius behind Yin Yu Tang. We next ran into Nancy, by chance, on the streets of Beijing in 1988. Small world. Around then I finally learned I had a China trader ancestor. For years all I knew about my ancestor John Bryant was that he formed a firm called Bryant & Sturgis. Full stop. The first hint of a China connection emerged in an article published in 1943 in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register. I soon discovered that the sea voyage memoir Two Years Before the Mast took place on Bryant & Sturgis ships. After I spent 2007 in a Shanghai design firm, I decided to see what Baker Library at Harvard Business School and PEM had on Bryant & Sturgis. While the former had an account book in Bryant’s hand, the latter had two logbooks, one in Bryant’s hand telling tales of pirate attack in the Pearl River and the other illustrated with vivid watercolors of ships on the Pearl River. Now I was hooked. Log book in Bryant’s hand telling tales of pirate attack. Courtesy photo In early 2014, Colin Lin, a Guangzhou-based entrepreneur, approached me requesting help in organizing a Boston cultural and trade delegation to Guangzhou. He wanted to commemorate, on August 28, 2014, the 230th anniversary of the first direct contact between Americans and Chinese, when the Boston built ship Empress of China, carrying the future first envoy to China, a Bostonian named Samuel Shaw, dropped anchor on the Pearl River. I was all in. Though I had worked all over China over my eight years with AGER, a Chinese design firm (running its Boston office), I had never even been to Guangzhou. John Bryant, who arrived in 1809, would have asked me, “What took you so long?” So might my great Aunt Helen Paine Kimball, who visited China both just before and just after the 1911 Revolution and took thousands of photographs of ordinary Chinese people, and newly elected President Sun Yatsen, close up. In extending invitations to cultural institutions to join in the delegation, I approached PEM, the Forbes House Museum and the Chinese Historical Society of New England. Back in 1977 while working at the Taiwan Tourism Bureau I had organized a historical tour of Taiwan for Crosby Forbes’s Museum of the American China Trade, now part of PEM, so filling his shoes this time out was his son, historian and Forbes Museum Trustee Rob Forbes. I also engineered a State Resolution proclaiming August 28, 2014 as Guangzhou Guangdong Boston Massachusetts Day through State Rep. Jonathan Hecht, a fellow Overseer at Massachusetts Historical Society who had spent time in China. On the big day in Guangzhou, I presented a first edition of the memoir of Samuel Shaw to Gu Jianqing, chief sponsor of the delegation, chairman of the Guangzhou Association of Social Science Studies and a China trade history buff. Mr Gu loved the Empress of China story and was thrilled to get the book. Now CEO of Guangzhou Daily Media Company, Mr. Gu would indeed love to visit PEM someday. But there was more. I learned that the founder of my profession of landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted, long before he found his calling, but already with the eye of a journalist, had shipped to Guangzhou as a common sailor in 1843, and somehow gotten himself into the city where foreigners were not allowed. He had been welcomed, despite his lack of status, into the homes, shops, temples and shipyards of ordinary Chinese people. This lesson in kindness toward strangers, which he called “civility,” came to mind later when he formed his vision for parks for the people, beginning with Central Park in New York. In its way, Guangzhou had helped inspire that vision. I thrilled the Mayor of Guangzhou when as a member of the delegation I told him this story at his banquet on that commemorative day last year. It was my turn to be thrilled after wondering aloud how moving it would be if a descendant of Howqua, the fabled hong merchant and mentor to the Forbes brothers, could join us, when sure enough, Wu Lingli, Howqua’s descendant, a civil engineer, joined us in a Starbucks near People’s Park in Guangzhou and showed Rob Forbes and me family photos over the generations on his laptop. Guangzhou Daily loved the Bryant and Olmsted story, and so did Rui Huang of CCTV, who was scouting for the forthcoming Maritime Silk Road production. Fortunately I had brought copies of my monograph on John Bryant to give people like her. It is illustrated with many images from the PEM collections, including its wonderful view of Guangzhou painted ca. 1800. I was amazed at what survived in the city from the China trade era — not the famous 13 factories, but an ancient pagoda and watch tower clearly depicted in PEM’s view, perhaps the most accurate view of the entire city from that era. Fortuitously, my book on urban public open space best practices, Cities with Heart, was just then being published in a bilingual edition by the China Architecture and Building Press, and I was planning a book tour. CCTV wanted to include that and my whole story in China, which meant from John Bryant in 1809, to Helen Paine Kimball in 1908-13 to Tom Paine in 2007-2015. The CCTV film crew made a visit to PEM in late October. All this interest from the Chinese side in the Old China Trade and the good far outweighing the bad that it brought to China — and to the West — is most welcome. We can expect more interest and someday to be reading English translations of Chinese monographs of the origins of this exciting bilateral relationship. Editor’s Note: In a further celebration of trade, representatives from PEM are currently in the port city of Shanghai to present the new Guanfu Museum with a reproduction of a treasure from PEM’s collection. This month, the Shanghai Tower, the second tallest in the world, opens with a branch of the Guanfu Museum. PEM is giving a reproduction of an 11-foot panorama of the Shanghai Bund from 1882. The panorama is the largest of its kind and comes with 81 handwritten notes that describe commercial, maritime, diplomatic and recreational activities that took place along the waterfront at that time.

Life is organized by setting boundaries, most of them somewhat arbitrary. There are the too-much-fought-over boundaries between nations, of course. Not mountain ranges or rivers or coastlines, but straight lines crisscrossing the land, like the Mason-Dixon Line, or the Four Corners where Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico meet. Then there are the dividing lines between all sorts of arbitrarily organized groupings. Think of the color spectrum—where do you draw the line between red and orange, between orange and yellow? And yet we do. At what height do we consider someone short, or tall? Setting boundaries is an arbitrary business, sometimes with unfair consequences. We live in a world in which we can say something has crossed the line, is excessive, or is beyond the pale and yet be unable to pinpoint that boundary. Fuzzy boundary lines can be the cause of much mischief, unfairness, and even injustice. If ever a blurry boundary came with unfair consequences, hate-based tribalism is it, and it is on the rise. By hate-based tribalism I mean a propensity to dismiss, distrust, disparage, deride, demean, and demonize “the other” with a sense of righteous intolerance. However much we may feel justified in forming tribes based on a shared hatred of others holding certain ideas and beliefs, tribalism focusing on racial hatred is in denial of a fundamental fact of life. Race is the ultimate blurry line. So blurry that it is now rejected as a viable concept. And yet racial constructs continue to infect most people. Even the concept of ethnicity is fuzzy. Maybe the time has come to stop referring to someone’s race or ethnicity but simply to one’s ancestry. The aphorism that we are all one human family is no exaggeration: we are all related, no matter what skin color we have. Sorry, but we are all 120th cousins or closer, all sharing at least one ancestor, man or woman, who lived 3,500 years ago. Scientists have done the math. (Douglas T. Rohde, Steve Olson & Joseph T. Chang, “Modeling the recent common ancestry of all living humans,” Nature, vol. 431, September 2004, 562-5). To help with processing that bombshell, start counting your ancestors working backwards, from two parents to four grandparents to eight great-grandparents and so on. If you go far enough back, you will get a generation far larger than the population of the entire planet, then or now. The only way to fill all those slots in our family trees is for specific men and women to appear in multiple slots. Lots of pairs, lots of times. In other words, their descendants are marrying cousins, albeit distant ones. I can see the process at work in my own family tree. Going back to the late sixteenth-century, I have been able to document that I am the descendant of thirty-four couples who were cousins, descended from fifty-one couples who married between 1580 and 1688, roughly twelve generations back. The couples vary from first to eighth cousins, marrying in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. My parents, Dad from Boston, Mom from Virginia, had no idea that they were cousins ten times over, eighth and ninth cousins. But as I say, if we could fill in actual names in our family trees back to 1022, a majority of the names would be at least thirtieth cousins. And so on back 120 generations. If all humans are related, then whatever else we may choose to argue about, racial purity is a hoax. And once we come to regard the construct of race as a form of fake news, the question is how to live in a world where boundaries between so-called races are blurred and fuzzy, calling into question any judgment as to who is in and who is out. Why is a swarthy “white” perceived differently from a fair-skinned Black? If the local KKK leadership faced a lineup of ten men of varying skin tone from “white” to “black” and were asked to vote in secret on which of the ten was most likely to have dishonored the local white girl, how would they vote? I have no idea, but I know the lines are blurred. How Black is too black, how Asian is too Asian? And really, how white is white enough for white supremacists? We are all beautiful! We are all consanguineous! We just need to stop the family feud. What anti-abolitionist David Goodman Croly in 1863 called miscegenation is no longer taboo: “racial” intermarriage is trending. Nowadays, stories of ancestral intermarriage are not a source of shame, but of pride. That trend is healthier than the opposite extreme, inbreeding. How closely related can couples be before their offspring would be considered inbred? Again, the boundaries are blurry. In the West, that seems to mean first cousins, blurring on the way to second cousins, and no longer setting off alarms by maybe fourth cousins, whereas some other cultures actually prefer close-cousin marriages. And even incest taboos, while almost universal, vary in the specifics. How easily we empathize across ethnic and cultural boundaries may turn out to be a leading indicator of whether we play a part in advancing human progress. And maybe the blurriness of the boundaries assists us in bridging our way slowly across. Nevertheless, however many of us find love after hate, history shows us that there are always gainsayers and skeptics who cling to their fears and grievances, and cling to each other. Many tribal beliefs spreading through social media are hoaxes—like the QAnonsense of preposterous conspiracy theories that defy logic and science. The more idiotic, the more buy-in. Ignorance loves company. The know-nothings vilify those who are too educated, too liberal, too connected with the wider world as being “not-our-kind” or even as evil-doers. Nothing reminds us of this foolishness as much as facing a common external threat. After the unprovoked attacks of 9-11, for a good while Americans came together to appreciate what we cherish about this country, for all its imperfections. Unlike other nations, we are bound together first and foremost not by the bond of one ethnicity and one religion, but by the belief in something that transcends ethnicity and religion, that we are “a new nation,” as only Lincoln could put it, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men [and women] are created equal.” We are the first such nation born of that belief. In the political strife of recent years, the spirit of sharing in that belief has eroded, but if history is any guide, this too shall pass. The unprovoked war in Ukraine is having an effect similar to that of 9-11. We need to get past the notion that cultural appropriation is theft. Heavens, our human species has been at it from the get go. I see it as the sincerest form of flattery. Whites honor First Peoples in their placenames—the names of twenty-seven out of fifty states—countless names of towns, mountains, rivers, lakes, brooks and islands. We know we are using their words for papoose, powwow, sachem, squaw, tomahawk, wampum, and wigwam. But we also evoke the Algonquian world every time we say canoe, chipmunk, hickory, moccasin, moose, muskrat, opossum, pumpkin, raccoon, skunk, squash, succotash, toboggan, woodchuck, or caucus. Yes, caucus. We don’t even give our assimilation a second thought. But language assimilation can remind us how the boundaries that we use to define us versus them are mercifully permeable. So then let us rather feel a sense of belonging based on a shared culture. And let that culture sooner or later reject hatred and cultivate empathy. Let it evolve beyond norms now deemed unjust, and embrace others, indeed live by the Golden Rule, which has been there all along, if only we would practice what we preach. The tribe I am proudest to belong to believes in human decency. As Theodore Parker said, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. And that boundary, too, will expand, despite the gainsayers yet unborn. Our more enlightened forebears who were ahead of their peers show us how we too can be out in front of our more skeptical peers, to the eternal gratitude of our more enlightened descendants who will do their part to bend that arc toward justice for all. © 2022 Thomas M. Paine

After 9-11, 2001, I began to collect a list of local innovations of broad significance. Here is what I wrote back then: We have all come to appreciate more than ever what we cherish about this country, for all its imperfections. Unlike other nations, we are bound together first and foremost not by the bond of one blood and one religion, but by the belief in something that transcends blood and religion, that we are “a new nation,” as only Lincoln could put it, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” We are the first such nation born of that belief. In the political strife of recent years, the spirit of sharing in that belief has eroded, but if history is any guide, this too shall pass. Boston is the unofficial capital of the entire New England region. What this region has done in the service of that belief, and done with that belief, forms an extraordinary legacy of innovation across all fields, a legacy that ought to inspire us to aim higher still. Boston sits within a region whose heart, conscience, and intellect concentrates here as nowhere else. The municipality of Boston is still the hub, but much credit also goes to the spokes and rims. Alas, for want of the opportunity, Bostonians and more broadly New Englanders forget just how pivotal their role has been in delivering on the promise of freedom and equal opportunity, both long before and long after the Revolution that grabs all the attention. This greater Boston is truly America’s Motherland of Invention, America’s Homeplace. The last time a native really bragged about Boston, he called it the Cradle of Liberty, the Hub of the Universe. These metaphors have found their way into an official State web page: the New World’s hub of liberty and culture, its cradle of commerce and industry. And that starts to suggest just how wide the range of innovation is: technology, education, medicine, sports, the arts, environmentalism. The web page is a start. But it is hardly enough. Many of the region’s innovations have had global reach. People from afar often come here in search of the roots of these things, even looking for a way to say thanks. We ought to find a truly open-armed way to celebrate Boston as the front door of New England, through which the regional legacy has spread, sometimes in ripples, sometimes in a tidal wave, from this well-harbored metropolis to the far shores of the globe. What happens in Boston does not stay in Boston. Boston inspires. Truly an idea this big deserves a public place in the heart of the nation’s oldest city—as well as in the hearts of its citizens. It should be open at all hours, free of charge. To the designers of such a space, I say this: do not reduce ideas to a statue or a plaque. No large cradles, please. Let the idea spread across the space like a treasure hunt. Let there be a parade of compelling historic images projected on unexpected surfaces, perhaps different each day, even interactive with real-time images. Perhaps there is a media wall. Let the space be infused with content and meaning, not burdened or overwrought, but subtly saturated, in keeping with Boston’s traditional restraint. What follows may begin to suggest the fun we will have. There is truly something for everyone. Boston Firsts, Favorites, Heroes and Celebrities Gathered together like a who’s-who gala, the list that follows is a what’s what of ideas and accomplishments that ought to be celebrities. Not all are from literally Boston proper, but every last one is from within the Boston orbit. Most are “firsts,” a few more are “oldest existing,” but few will be “biggest.” That, in the main, I leave to others. If the word “first” seems pushy and petty, maybe “earliest” feels better. I hasten to add that just because a thing is first does not mean that all after-versions are beholden to it. Adding a category for “seconds” would add depth, even accuracy, to the story, pointing to regional trends and rivalries, but I leave that for another day. There are bound to be errors, and competing claims (who invented the steamboat, hamburger, frisbee, etc.) And there are certainly omissions, especially among the other five New England States. These are matters of judgment, but the list is open to nominations in all categories that represent what is most admirable about us. Boston isn’t about the past. It’s the place where the future happens first. Whose “first”? The “firsts” apply at least to the United States. Firsts of the first order of significance nationally are in boldface. Worldwide firsts, or persons or works of global stature, in common judgment, are boldface and underlined. We look forward to correcting and adding to the list. Begin in 2002 with 200 items, the list is now over 700 items long and growing, a work in progress. They are organized by these rough categories, within which items are chronologically listed: Respect for Native Americans Freedom, Equality, the Rule of Law, Justice, and Human Rights National Celebration and Commemoration Education Secular Belief Systems Communication including media introductions Transportation Flight Culture and Entertainment Vigilance, Defense and Safety Medicine and Public Health Other Technology and Invention of High Tech Food, Clothing, and Shelter Recreation, Sports, and Fitness Conservation, Preservation, and Environment Economic System and Business Reform, Philanthropy, Activism, and Association Connections with China Everyday Things As an encore is a list American Legends and Heroes—famous for being famous, and a whole lot more. Fasten your seatbelts. Respect for Native Americans First Native American/Anglo friendship (Plymouth) First Linguist: First Systematic Study of Native Languages, Translation of Bible into Native Language, Preaching in Native Language (Roger Williams, John Eliot) First State/Colony to Adopt a Native American Name (Massachusetts, Connecticut) Freedom, Equality, the Rule of Law, Justice, and Human Rights First Expression of New England Democracy (Civil Body Politic via Mayflower Compact, 1620) preceded by Virginia in 1619 First Town Meeting or home rule (Dorchester, 1633) First Women’s Property Rights (Bill of Rights, Plymouth Colony, 1636) First Advocacy of Complete Religious Freedom (Roger Williams, RI, 1636) First Town Founded by a Woman (Taunton, MA, Elizabeth Poole, 1637) First Government Granting Civil and Religious Liberty (Portsmouth Compact, RI, 1638) First Colony Founded by a Female (Portsmouth RI, Anne Hutchinson, 1638) First Written Constitution to Embody Democracy (Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, 1639) First Detailed Protection of Rights (Body of Liberties, Nathaniel Ward, 1641) including replication of English Statute of Monopolies (1623) granting patents for 14 years First Colony to Legalize Slavery (Massachusetts Bay, 1641) to be reversed 1783 First Articles of Confederation (United Colonies of New England, 1643) Oldest Structure Used for Worship (Lothrop House, now Sturgis Lothrop Library, Barnstable, 1644) First Formal Legal Protection of Religious Freedom (Charter from King Charles II granted to Dr. John Clarke on behalf of Rhode Island, 1653) First Quakers (MA, 1656 persecuted/RI 1657 welcomed) First Copyright (John Usher, for his work The Book of General Laws and Liberties, Massachusetts General Court, May 15, 1672) Oldest continuously functioning appellate court in the Western Hemisphere (Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, 1692) First Political Apology (Salem Witch Trial Judge and Jurors, 1697) the colony declares a day of fasting and prayer to atone for the injustices of 1692 trial. Second in world after 1077 Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV apology to Pope Gregory VII. Compensation follows in 1711 First Bar Association (Massachusetts, 1761) First Synagogue (Touro Synagogue, Newport, RI, 1763) First Protest Meetings (Faneuil Hall, Boston: Sugar Act 1764, Stamp Act 1765, Townshend Acts 1767) First Liberty Tree Day (Boston, August 14, 1765) On September 11, 1765, a 3.5' by 2.5' copper plate bearing the inscription The Tree of Liberty in large golden letters was placed on its trunk. First College Student Resistance to Authority (Harvard College, May 1766) in keeping with zeitgeist First Public Gallery in a Government Building (Old State House, 1766) Virginia House of Burgesses a few months earlier, preceded by Irish Parliament earlier still, per Brian LeMay of Old State house 2/2017 First Known Black Elected to Public Office (Wentworth Cheswell, Town Constable, Newmarket NH, 1768) First Martyr of the American Revolution (Crispus Attucks, Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770) a man of African-Wampanoag descent leads the way First Act of Resistance (Boston Tea Party, 1773) First Petition by Blacks to End Slavery as an Institution (Felix Holbrook et al., petition to Massachusetts General Court, 6 Jan. 1773). Precedes similar efforts in New or Old England. First Use of Metaphor “Cradle of Liberty” (nickname for Faneuil Hall, Boston, by 1774) First Formal Protest to Crown (Suffolk Resolves, Milton, 1774) First Display of “Liberty and Union” on a flag (Taunton Green, 1774) First Bloodless Expulsion of British Authority (many towns, MA, 1774) First Armed Resistance to British Regulars (Col. David Mason et al., Salem, February 26, 1775) First Shot in American Revolution (Lexington, April 18, 1775) the “shot heard round the world” First Display of Grand Union Flag (Prospect Hill, Somerville, New Years Day, 1776) First Signer of Declaration of Independence (John Hancock, MA, 1776) First Racially Integrated Institution (Fourteenth Massachusetts Continentals, Marblehead area, 1776) First State Constitution to Outlaw Slavery and Include Universal Male Suffrage (VT, 1777) First State Constitutional Convention of, for and by the people (NH, 1778) First Black Regiment (First Rhode Island Regiment, 1778) First Constitution in Continuous Use (John Adams et al., MA, 1780), model for US constitution and many other nations: three branch government, independent judiciary, bill of rights. First Bill of Rights (at beginning of Massachusetts Constitution, John Adams, MA, 1780) First State to Abolish Slavery (Justice William Cushing, MA Supreme Court, Robert Treat Paine Attorney General, Walker v. Jennison, 1783) First judicial decision declaring that slavery violates Constitutional guarantee of liberty; Quock Walker case. First State to Enact Copyright Law (Massachusetts, 1783) incorporated in US Constitution Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 First Unitarian Church (Kings Chapel, Boston, broke ties with Episcopal Church, 1785) First Event to Focus Attention on Urgency of a Constitutional Convention (Shays Rebellion, Massachusetts, 1787) First State to Ratify Bill of Rights (John Hancock presiding, MA, 1788) First State to Abolish Slave Trade (MA, 1788) First State to Join the Union (VT, 1791) First Church Built by Free Blacks (African Meeting House, 8 Smith Court, Boston, 1806) First Female Author on Women’s Rights (Hannah Mather Crocker, Observations on the Real Rights of Women, Boston 1818) Predates Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1845 First Black Elected to State Legislature (Alexander Twilight, Vermont, 1836) First Anti-Slavery Society (David Walker, Thomas Dalton et al., Massachusetts General Colored Association, 1826) First Public Anti-Slavery Speech (William Lloyd Garrison, Park Street Church, 1829) Most Famous Speech in US Senate History: Liberty and Union, Now and Forever” (Daniel Webster, MA, January 26, 1830), use of phrase “made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people” First Abolitionist Newspaper (Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, 12 Post Office Square, 1831) First Association for Immediate Abolition (New-England Anti-Slavery Society, followed by Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society a month later, 1832) First Public Speech by a Woman on Abolition and Woman’s Rights (Maria Stewart, a Black, Franklin Hall, Boston, 1832) to a mixed audience of men and women. First Anti-Slavery Book (An Appeal in Favor of the Class of Americans Called Africans, Lydia Maria Child, Boston, 1833) First School for Blacks (Abiel Smith School, 46 Joy Street, Boston, 1835) First Black Elected to Public Office as State Legislator (Alexander Twilight, Vermont, 1836) First Female to Address Massachusetts Legislature (Angelina Grimke, presenting antislavery petition signed by 20,000 women, 1838) First Integrated Church (in US) (First Baptist Free Church or Tremont Temple Baptist Church, 88 Tremont Street, 1839) First Probation (John Augustus, before Boston Police Court, Court Street, Boston, 1841). Statewide system adopted 1878 First to Call for Federal Force in Defense of Black Civil Rights (“Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord, 1844). First Black Admitted to Bar (Macon Bolling Allen, ME, 1845, then first in MA) First Black Lawyer to Win a Jury Trial in US (Robert Morris, Boston, 1847) Lincoln’s First Acceptance of Eventual Abolition (Visit to Boston and nine nearby communities campaigning for Zachary Taylor, September 1848) Civil Disobedience (Henry Thoreau, Concord, 1849) to Gandhi, back to Martin Luther King, Jr. First National Women’s Rights Convention (Worcester, 1850) First Lawsuit to Win School Desegregation (Robert Morriss lawyer, William Cooper Nell historian, Benjamin Franklin Roberts printer, Roberts v. Boston, 1850) First Published Black Historian (William C. Nell (1816-1874), Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812, 1851) Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, CT and ME, 1852) First Use of phrase “Of the people, by the people, for the people” (Theodore Parker, New England Anti-Slavery Convention, Boston Melodeon, Washington St., Boston, 1850), adopted by Parker from Daniel Webster and adopted from Lincoln by Sun Yat-sen, Father of Modern China (Three Principles of the People) First Woman to Keep her Own Name after Marriage (abolitionist-suffragist Lucy Stone, West Brookfield,1855) First Integrated School (Phillips and Abiel Smith Schools, Boston, 1855) after Massachusetts passes first law banning school segregation First Black Jurors (Francis U. Clough and William H. Jenkins, Worcester, 1860) First Union Troops to Die in Civil War (Massachusetts Sixth, on the anniversary of Battle of Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1861) combat-ready in DC First Black Union Troops in Civil War (Gen. Benjamin Butler of MA, Louisiana, 1862, Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, 1863) Most Losses of any Union regiment (Fifth New Hampshire Regiment) First Black Female MD (Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, New England Female Medical College, Boston, 1864) First Black Judge in a northern state (George Lewis Ruffin, Boston, 1883). He was first Black graduate of Harvard Law School, 1869 First State to Adopt Secret Ballot Voting (Massachusetts, 1888). So-called Australian ballot First Black Female Nurse (Mary Eliza Mahoney, Boston, 1879) First Articulation of Right to Privacy (Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, Harvard Law Review, 1890) First National Conference of Black Women of America (Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Boston, 1895) also first black woman to own, edit, and publish a newspaper for Black women First State to Adopt Minimum Wage Law (Massachusetts, after Lawrence female millworker strike, 1912) First Black Female Member of the Massachusetts Bar (Blanche Woodson Braxton, Boston, 1923) First Female U. S. Legislator (Edith Nourse Rogers, MA, 1925) introduced GI Bill of Rights First Jew on U.S. Supreme Court (Louis Brandeis, MA, 1916) First Region to Claim Philosophical Suitability as “Global Capital” (UN search for HQ site, Boston, Newport RI, 1946) First Female Senator elected in her own right (Margaret Chase Smith, ME, 1948) Peace Corps (JFK, 1961) First Black Senator since Reconstruction (Edward W. Brooke, MA, 1966) First Female Governor elected in her own right (Ella Grasso, CT, 1975) First Governmental Adoption of Freely Accessible, Non-Proprietary Editable File Format (ODF or Open Document Format) (MA, 2005) National Celebration and Commemoration First Thanksgiving (Plymouth, 1621) First History (William Bradford and Edward Winslow, Mourt’s Relation, 1622, and William Bradford History of Plimmoth Plantation, 1630-50) Yankee Doodle (lyrics, CT, 1755) First Fireworks and First Obelisk (Boston streets, in honor of surrender of Louisburg, July 8, 1765; John Hancock, Boston Common with Paul Revere designed obelisk as part of Sons of Liberty celebration, May 19, 1766; the obelisk burned before it could be placed at Liberty Tree as planned) First Official Celebration of July 4 (Col. Thomas Crafts and Robert Treat Paine, fireworks over Boston Common, July 4 1777, first designation as a state celebration, Massachusetts General Court (Legislature), July 3, 1781; designation by City of Boston, 1783) First July 4th Parade (Bristol, R.I., 1785) First Public Display of American Eagle Icon, First Monument to American Revolution (Bulfinch’s Beacon Hill Column, 1789) First Historical Society (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1791) First Domed Capitol (Boston State House, Charles Bulfinch, 1795) First Hilltop Siting of Capitol (ditto) Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington and Martha Washington (Athenaeum Portraits) First Significant Campaign Song (Adams and Liberty, Robert Treat Paine Jr., Boston, 1800) to tune of British tune Anachreon in Heaven, as also used for Star Spangled Banner in 1814 First Memorial to Washington (Bust in Old North Church, 1815) First Historical Museum (Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth, 1824) First Major Revolutionary War Monument (Bunker Hill Monument, 1825) Tallest structure in the US. Prototype of much taller Washington Monument, DC, completed 1888 and then tallest structure in world. First call for Thanksgiving as National Holiday (Sarah Josepha Hale in her Boston Ladies Magazine, by 1827, then Godey’s Lady’s Book after 1846, finally proclaimed by Lincoln in 1863) America, My Country ‘Tis of Thee (Samuel Francis Smith, Newton, MA, first sung Park Street Church, Boston, July 4, 1831) First Genealogical Organization (New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston, 1845) inspired by founder of systematic genealogy, John Farmer (1789-1838) b. Chelmsford MA First Designation of Washington’s Birthday as a State Holiday (Massachusetts, 1857) First Statue of a non-allegorical Woman (Hannah Duston, Boscawen NH, 1874) survivor of Indian kidnapping in 17th c First Centennial (Concord, April 19, 1875) attended by President Grant, then on to Lexington First Joint Celebration of North and South Civil War Veterans (Bunker Hill Centennial, Boston, 1875) Minuteman Statue (Daniel Chester French, Concord, 1875) Pledge of Allegiance (Rev. Francis Bellamy, Boston, 1892) America the Beautiful (Katherine Lee Bates, Falmouth, 1893) First Monument to a Group rather than one hero (August Saint-Gaudens, Mass. 54th Regiment Monument, Boston, 1897) Lincoln Memorial (Daniel Chester French, Stockbridge, 1920) First Outdoor Museum (Wayside Inn area, Sudbury, Henry Ford, 1923) First Automobile Museum (Larz and Isabel Anderson, Brookline, 1927) First Living History Museum (Pioneer Village, Salem, 1930) Four Freedoms (Norman Rockwell, Arlington VT, Stockbridge MA, 1943) First Self-Guided Walking Tour (Boston journalist William Schofield, Freedom Trail, Boston, proposed 1951, red line installed 1958) First Historic Districts in North (Beacon Hill and Nantucket, 1955 Education First Public Education (Boston Public Latin School, 1635) Closed briefly 1775-1776 First College for Men (Harvard College, 1636) First Free Public School (Mather School, Dorchester, 1639) First Colony to Mandate Public Education for All Communities (Massachusetts, 1642) Oldest School in Continuous Operation (John Eliot and Daniel Gookin, Roxbury Latin School, 1645) First Reading Primer (The New-England Primer, Benjamin Harris, Boston, 1687) First Campus Quadrangle (Harvard, 1718) First Endowed Professorship (Harvard, 1721) Hollis Professor of Divinity First Long-Distance Learning (Caleb Phillips, Boston, 1728) Boston Gazette ad for learning new method of short hand by mail. First Independent Boarding School (Governor Dummer Academy, South Byfield, 1763) First Academic Honor Society (Phi Beta Kappa, oldest continuous branches, Harvard and Yale, 1779) First University (Harvard, 1780) American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston, 1780) First Medical School (Harvard, 1782) First Native-born Professional Architect (Charles Bulfinch, Boston, first commission Hollis Street Church, 1788) First Higher Education for Women (Emma Willard, Middlebury VT, 1815) First Law School (Tapping Reeve, Litchfield CT, 1784, Harvard, 1817) First School for Deaf (Ct Asylum for the Education…of Deaf and Dumb Persons, Hartford CT, 1817) First Sunday School (Park Street Church, Boston, 1818) First Private Military College (Alden Partridge, American Literary, Scientific and Military Academy, Northfield VT, 1819) Also first engineering, physical education, ROTC programs. Now Norwich University First High School (English High School, Boston, 1820) First Black to Receive Degree from College (Alexander Twilight, Middlebury College, VT, 1823) First College Gymnasium (Charles Follen, Harvard College, 1826) First School for the Blind (Samuel Gridley Howe, Perkins Institute, 1829) Helen Keller is the most famous alumna, first deaf and blind person to graduate college and write a book. First Music School (Boston Academy of Music, Lowell Mason,1833) First School Built for Black Children (Abiel Smith School, 46 Joy St., Boston, 1834-5) Oldest Extant College for Women (Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, now College, 1837) First Music Education in U.S. Public Schools (Lowell Mason, Boston Public Schools, 1838) First Public Training Facility for Teachers (now Framingham State College, Horace Mann, 1839) First Agricultural Experiment Station (Yale, 1847) First Massachusetts Woman to Earn a College Degree (Lucy Stone, Oberlin College, 1847) First Chemical Laboratory (Eben N. Horsford, Lawrence Scientific School, Harvard, 1847-48) First State to Integrate Public Schools (Massachusetts Legislature, 1855) until overturned by U S Supreme Court in 1896, then reinstated by same in 1954 First State with Compulsory Education for Children ages 7-14 (1852) First Kindergarten (Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, 1860) First Technology School (MIT, 1861) First Training Facility for Female Doctors (Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, New England Hospital for Women and Children, 1862) Now Dimock Community Health Center First African-American Woman to earn medical degree (Rebecca Lee Crumpler, New England Female Medical College, 1864) now BU School of Medicine. Crumpler (1831-1895) lived at 67 Joy Street Boston in 1869 First Architecture School (MIT, 1865) First Dental School (Harvard School of Dental Medicine, 1867) First Independent Music School (New England Conservatory, 1867) First U. S. Fish Commissioner (Spencer Baird, Woods Hole, 1871) First step to National Marine Fisheries Service, First Fisheries Program First Art College (Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, 1873) First Female Technology Graduate (Ellen Swallow Richards, B.S., MIT, 1873) First Female Nursing School Graduate (Linda Richards, New England Hospital for Women and Children, Roxbury, 1873) First Art History Education (Charles Eliot Norton, Harvard University, 1875) First Black to Earn a Ph.D. (Edward Alexander Bouchet, physics, Yale, 1876) First Woman to Earn a PhD (Helen Magill White, BU, 1877) First Black to Graduate from Nursing School (Mary Eliza Mooney, Boston, 1879) First Marine Biological Laboratory (Wood’s Hole, 1888); second is Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institution, Henry Bryant Bigelow, 1930) First Electrical Engineering Curriculum (Charles R. Cross, MIT, 1882) Invention of Term “Home Economics” (Ellen Swallow Richards, MA, 1899) First Landscape Architecture School (Harvard University, 1900) First College of Social Work (Simmons College, 1904) First MBA Program (Harvard Business School, 1908) First Law School for Women (Bertha Maclean, Portia School of Law, Boston, 1908) First Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Freud on only visit to United States, with Jung, Clark University, Worcester, 1909) First School of Public Health (William T. Sedgwick, MIT, 1912) First Aeronautical Engineering Curriculum (MIT, 1914) First Montessori School (Burton barn, Newton, according to Virginia Lee Burton, before 1917?) First Formal Graduate Program in City and Regional Planning (Harvard Graduate School of Design, 1923) First Art Research and Conservation Laboratory (Edward W. Forbes, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1928) First Private Nonprofit Adult Education Center (Boston Center for Adult Education, 1933) First Nuclear Physics Curriculum (MIT, 1935) First Program in Executive Education (Sloan Fellows Program, MIT, 1940) First Formal Graduate Program in Urban Design (Harvard Graduate School of Design, 1960) First Vocational High School (MA, date??) First Day Care Center (North End Boston, ??) Secular Belief Systems Transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Concord-Boston, 1836-60) Nature (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord, 1836) Self-Reliance (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord, 1841) The Dial (Margaret Fuller, editor, 1840-42) Walden (Henry David Thoreau, Concord, 1854) Pragmatism (Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, Cambridge, 1878 ff) The term Pragmatism, coined by William James, 1907 Psychology (William James, Harvard, 1875-76) considered father of modern psychology Theory of Justice (John Rawls, Harvard, 1971) Communication Content First Secular Vital Records For All —births, marriages, deaths— First Use of Metaphor City on a Hill (John Winthrop, on Arbella, 1630) First Almanac (Samuel Danforth, An Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1647, Cambridge) First Published Poet (Anne Bradstreet, Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, 1650) First Children’s Book (Rev. John Cotton, Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in Either England Drawn out of the Breasts of both TESTAMENTS for their souls Nourishment: But may be of like use to any Children, Boston, 1656) Cotton had Boston England roots. First Published Road Map (Tulley’s Almanac, Boston, 1698) First Published Black Poet (Phyllis Wheatley, first published poem 1767, first book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, 1773) First Newspaper Coverage of Battles of Lexington and Concord (Isaiah Thomas, Massachusetts Spy, May 3, 1775) First Dictionary (Noah Webster, CT, 1783, expanded Amherst MA 1828, soon Merriam, Springfield MA) First American Novel (William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy, Worcester, 1789) First Book on Penmanship (John Jenkins, The Art of Writing, Reduced to a Plain and Easy System (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1791) First American Novel by a Woman (Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette, or the History of Eliza Wharton, Brighton, 1797) First Published Female Historian (Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, 1805) First Literary Magazine (William Tudor, North American Review, Boston, 1815) First National Pharmacopoeia (Jacob Bigelow, 1820). First Historical Novel (Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times, 1824) First Woman’s Magazine Edited by a Woman/ First Woman Editor (Ladies Magazine, Sarah Josepha Hale, Boston, 1828-30) First Published State Survey and Soil Map (Edward Hitchcock, Report on the Geology, Mineralogy, Botany and Zoology of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1833) First Published Article on Photography (Boston Daily Advertiser, February 23, 1839) First (Oldest surviving) National Scientific Periodical (Scientific American, Rufus Porter, Maine, also Mass., Connecticut, 1845) Invention of term “Anaesthesia” (Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Boston, 1847) predicting it “will be repeated by tongues in every civilized race of mankind.” First Literary/Cultural Capital of US (Boston, Athens of America, 1850s) First Woman-Owned and Written Suffrage Periodical (The Una, Pauline Wright Davis, Providence, 1853) Moves to Boston First Novel by a Black Woman, (Harriet Wilson, Our Nig or Sketches From the Life of a Free Black Rand & Avery, Boston 1859) author was born in Milford NH (1825-1900) Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (bookseller John Bartlett, Cambridge, 1855) First Professional Architectural Periodical (American Architect and Building News, Boston, 1876) First Novel on Electronic Romance (telegraphic: Ella Cheever Thayer, Boston, Wired Love, 1879) First Magazine Published by a Black Woman (The Woman’s Era, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, 1886). Media Introductions First Printing Press (Stephen Daye, Cambridge, 1638) First Post Office (Richard Fairbanks’ tavern in Boston, appointed by King Charles I, 1639) First Beacon (Beacon Hill, 1639) First Municipal Public Library (Bequest to the “towne of New Haven", 1656) Oldest Library Building (Lothrop House, Barnstable, 1644, Sturgis Lothrop Library since 1863) First Public Library (Boston, 1653) First Newspaper (Benjamin Harris, Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestic, Boston, 1690, followed by Boston News-letter, 1704) First Gazetteer (The American Gazetteer, Jedidiah Morse, Boston 1797) First Law Library (Social Law Library, Boston, 1803) First Telecommunication (Jonathan Groat, Jr., Vineyard to Telegraph Hill Dorchester, 1801) 16 semaphore beacons in 9 minutes First Color Printing (Jacob Bigelow, 1817) First Chromolithography (William Sharp, Boston, 1840) Sharp introduced it from England. First Typewriter (Charles Thurber, Worcester, 1840) First Free Public Library (Peterboro, NH 1833, Boston 1854) First Stereoscope (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Boston, 1860) First Humor Magazine (Harvard Lampoon, 1876) Lampoon style goes national with National Lampoon 1970 and Hollywood thereafter (Simpsons et al.) First Telephone (Alexander Graham Bell, Boston, 1876), first line State Street office to Somerville residence, 1877, first city with telephone numbers Lowell, MA, 1880, first long distance call, Boston to New York City, 1884 First International Wireless Communication (Theodore Roosevelt and Marconi, South Wellfleet, 1903) Marconi is the father of radio, grandfather of cellphones First Radio Broadcast (Reginald Fessenden, from transmitter south of Boston/Brant Rock, Marshfield, 1906). First Triode Tube, Birth of Radio (Lee de Forest, educated in MA and Yale, 1912) First Commercial Radio Station in New England (WBZA, Springfield, WNPH New Bedford, both 1921) First Television Commercial (I. J. Fox Furriers, video of CBS radio orchestra program The Fox Trappers on W1XAV, Boston, 1930) First Polaroid Camera (CT, 1934) First Color Movies (Technicolor Corp, named for MIT by MIT grad founders Herbert Kalmus and Daniel Frost Comstock, 1935). Process invented by them 1916, first shown in Tremont Temple, Boston, 1917 First Instant Camera (Edwin Land, Polaroid, Cambridge, 1948) First Color Television (CT, 1948) First Inertial Guidance System for Aircraft (Charles Stark Draper, MIT, 1953) First Microchip (MIT grad Robert Noyce, Fairchild Semiconductor, 1959) First Vision of the Internet (MIT, 1960) First Graphical User Interface (Sketchpad, Ivan Sutherland, MIT, 1963) First Computer Dating Service (Operation Match, Jeff Tarr, Harvard undergrad, 1965) First Internet Prototype, ARPANET (Bolt Beranek & Newman, 1969) First Email (Ray Tomlinson, Bolt Beranek & Newman, 1971) First Close-Captioned Television (WGBH, Boston, 1972) First Reading Machine (Ray Kurzweil, 1976) First Noise Canceling Earphones (Amar Bose, Bose Corp. MA, 1989) First Television Video Description for Blind (WGBH, Boston, 1990) First Internet Archive (Brewster Kahle MIT graduate, 1996) First Electronic Paper Device (Dr Joseph Jacobson and Russ Wilcox, E Ink, Cambridge, 1997) Largest Social Network (Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard College, 2004) Transportation First Oceangoing Vessel Launched in New World (Virginia of Sagadahoc, Popham Colony, ME, 1607) First Ferry (Chelsea to Boston, 1631) First Highway (Boston Post Road to New York, now US Route 20, first delivery 1673) First Printed Roadmap (Tulley’s Almanack, Boston, 1698) First Schooner (Andrew Robinson, Gloucester, 1713) First Long Distance Stage Coach Line (Levi Pease, Shrewsbury, Boston to New York, 1783, first stagecoach mail delivery, Boston and Albany 1797) First Railroad (Bulfinch’s Beacon Hill inclines, 1795, then 1805, well before long-undisputed Quincy granite railway, Gridley Bryant, 1826) First Canal (Middlesex Canal, Boston to Lowell, 1807) First Destination for Regular Transatlantic Steamer Service (Britannia, Cunard Line, Boston, 1840) First Commuter Rail (Boston & Worcester Railroad as far as West Newton, 1843) season passes $60 First Rickshaw (Albert Tolman, missionary, Worcester, 1846-8, for South America; spread to Asia) First Elevator (Elisha Otis, Vermont later New York City, 1853) Fastest Clipper Ship (Flying Cloud, Donald MacKay, East Boston, 1854) First Major Tunnel (Hoosac Tunnel, Berkshires, 1852-73) First Bicycle (velocipede, Pierre Lallemont, CT, 1866) Rode from Ansonia to New Haven Green First Cog Railway (Sylvester Marsh, Mount Washington, 1869) Thence to Switzerland First Manufacture of Bicycles (Albert Pope, Boston, Columbia Bicycle, Pope Manufacturing Co., Hartford, 1877) Bought Lallemont patent First Marketable Gas-powered Automobile, Rubber Tires (Charles and Frank Duryea, Springfield, 1892) First Mass Transit Subway (Tremont Street, Boston, 1897) First Solo Circumnavigation of Globe under Sail (Joshua Slocum, Spray, Boston to Newport, 1898-1901) First Motorcycle (Indian Motorcycle, Springfield 1901) First Underwater Subway Tunnel (Boston to East Boston, now T Blue Line, 1904) First Gas Station (Jenney Building, Central Wharf, Boston waterfront, 1915) First Liquid Fuel Rocket (Dr. Robert Goddard, Auburn, 1926) First Helicopter (Sikorsky, CT, 1929, 1939; K225, Charles Kamar, Hartford, 1949) First Circumferential Highway or Beltway (Route 128, MA, 1948-58) First Cancellation of Federal Highway Construction (Gov. Francis Sargent, MA, 1970) Inner Belt, Southwest Corridor First Mandated Inclusion of Mass Transit with Federal Highway Funding (Frederick P. Salvucci, Metro Boston, 1973-4) First Personal Transportation Device aka Segway (Dean Kamen, NH, 2000) Flight (all from one source so needs to be checked against other entries not in this section—most seem to be US only firsts) First Successful Heavier than Air Flight (John Childs using homemade wings, steeple of North Church Boston, September 13, 1757) First magazine article on ballooning published in the U.S. (“Explanation of the Air Balloon,” Boston Magazine, January 1784) First Atmospheric Sounding (kite borne thermograph 2030 feet over Abbott Lawrence Rotch’s Blue Hill Observatory, Milton, MA, August 4, 1894) First Aeronautical Society (Boston Aeronautical Society, William Pickering, President, March 19, 1895) First Aeronautical Club (Ballonist Charles J. Glidden, Aero Club of New England, January 9, 1902) First International Balloon Race (organized by Aero Club of America at Pittsfield, MA March 10,1906) First Aerial Lettering on record (Amherst College in 35 foot letters, Amherst MA March 31, 1909) First Balloon Honeymoon (Roger Burnham and Eleanor Wering, from Woods Hole, MA to an orchard in Holbrook, MA, June 20, 1909) First Major Aviation Exhibition (The Boston Aero Show with18 prototype aircraft, February 16, 1910) First Aircraft manufacturer (Burgess and Curtis Co., Marblehead, MA February 11, 1911. The Wright Company of Dayton, OH licensed the Wright Model B that was then produced by the Burgess Company as the Burgess-Wright Model F. First Intercollegiate Glider Competition (7 colleges organized by Harvard Aeronautical Society, Squantum, MA, May 28-30, 1911) First Intercollegiate Balloon Race (sponsored by Williams College Aeronautical Society, with Dartmouth, Williams and M.I.T, held in North Adams, MA June 3, 1911)- First U.S. Air Mail Pilot (Earle L. Ovington, Newton MA, first mail to New York September 23, 1911) First aeronautical engineering course at a college (MIT, Boston, April 1914) First Monoplanes for U.S. Government (Pigeon Hollow Spar Company of East Boston, MA, 1917) First Naval Air Reserve Unit (LCDR Richard E. Byrd, Naval Air Reserve Base, NARB Squantum, MA August 13, 1923) for World War One experienced pilots First Regular Passenger Service in the U.S. (Colonial Airlines, Boston and New York, April 4, 1927 First American to win an International Soaring Certificate (Ralph S. Barnaby, 15 minute 6 second glider flight from Corn Hill, North Truro, MA August 18, 1929) the first official flight to exceed the U.S. gliding record set by Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk NC, October 24,1911. First Commercial Dirigible (New England Airship Company of New Bedford, MA 1930) First Radio-meteorograph transmission of temperature data (from an airplane at altitude of 17,000 feet, later balloon at altitude of 52,500 feet, to Blue Hill, Milton MA, 1935) First Operation of a Jet Engine (General Electric Co., Lynn, MA April 18, 1942) First Transatlantic Crossing by Nonrigid Airships (U.S. Navy airships of ZP-14 from NAS South Weymouth MA to Port Lyautey, Morocco, MA, May 29-June 1,1944) First Commercial Landplane non-stop service to Europe (American Overseas Airlines, from Hanscom Field, Bedford MA,1945) First Transatlantic Helicopter Fight (Sikorsky H-19s from Westover AFB, Chicopee, MA to Wiesbaden, Germany, 1952) First Sport Parachuting Center in the U.S. (Jacques-Andre Istel, Orange MA, 1959) Culture and Entertainment First Church to Acquire an Organ (Kings Chapel, Boston, 1713) First Men’s Club (Old Colony Club, Plymouth, 1769) ? First Circus (Newport, 1774) First Choral Society (Elijah Dunbar, Stoughton Musical Society, 1786) First Theater Designed by American Architect (Charles Bulfinch, Federal Street Theatre, Boston, 1793) Federal at Franklin Streets, burned 1798 First Museum (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, 1799) First Collegiate Social Club (Hasty Pudding Club/Institute of 1770, Harvard College, 1795) First Major American Composer (William Billings, 1746-1800) Oldest Performing Arts Organization (Handel and Haydn Society, Kings Chapel then Park St. Church, Boston, 1815) First Performance of Handel’s Messiah (Handel & Hayden Society, Boston, Christmas 1818) First County Fair or Agricultural Fair (Topsfield, MA, 1818) Mary Had A Little Lamb (Sarah Josepha Hale, music by Lowell Mason, Newport NH, 1823) First College Art Museum (Yale, New Haven, 1832) First Christmas Tree (Charles Follen, Cambridge, by 1832) founder of Follen Community Church Lexington 1839 which commemorates the Christmas Tree tradition First Commercially Produced Board Game (Mansion of Happiness, S. B. Ives, Salem, 1843, later bought by Parker Brothers) First Art Museum (Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, 1844) The New England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day or Over the River and Through the Wood (Lydia Maria Child, Medford, 1844) sometimes appropriated for Christmas First Collegiate Theatrical Organization (Hasty Pudding Theatricals, Harvard College, 1844) It Came Upon a Midnight Clear (Edmund Hamilton Sears, Wayland, 1849) Jingle Bells (James Pierpont, Boston, 1857) Battle Hymn of the Republic (Julia Ward Howe, Boston, 1862) O Little Town of Bethlehem (Phillips Brooks, pre-Boston, 1867) First Proposal for Mother’s Day (Julia Ward Howe, Boston, 1872) First Community Theatre (Footlight Club, Eliot Hall, Jamaica Plain, 1877) First Artists Association (Copley Society, Boston, 1879) First Amusement Park (William Emerson Baker, Ridge Hill Farms, Needham-Wellesley, 1880 ff) (“Fairyland of the Beautiful and Bizarre” including bear pits, grotto, rides, hotel) First Vaudeville Theater (Gaiety Museum, Boston, 1883) First Pops Orchestra (Boston Pops, 1885) First Non-Profit Crafts Organization (Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, 1897) Best Acoustics in a Symphony Hall (Symphony Hall, Boston, 1900) First Private Old Master Art Museum (Fenway Court, Isabela Stewart Gardner, 1903) First Outdoor Christmas Caroling (Beacon Hill, Boston, 1908) First Hotel to offer in-room radio in every room (Boston Park Plaza, EW M Statler, 1927 First Dance Festival (Jacob’s Pillow, Becket, 1932) First Craft Fair (Lake Sunapee, NH, 1932) First Feminist Superhero: Wonder Woman (William Moulton Marston, born Cliftondale MA, Harvard trained, 1941) First Female Principal Player in Major Orchestra (Flutist Doriot Anthony Dwyer, Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1952) First Festival Marketplace/Downtown Pedestrian Mall (Faneuil Hall Marketplace, James Rouse and Ben and Jane Thompson, 1967-78) First New Years Night Celebration (First Night, Boston, 1976) Vigilance, Defense, and Safety First Militia (Salem, 1629-31). First Precursor of the National Guard (Massachusetts General Court, 1636) organizes militia regiments First Military Society (Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, Boston, 1637) Third oldest on world First Fire Engine (Joseph Jencks, Lynn, 1654, offered Selectmen of Boston after Great Fire) First Fire Department (Boston, 1679) publicly funded, non-volunteer First Lighthouse in Western Hemisphere (Boston Light, 1716), also oldest continuously operated. First Street Light (Boston) Oldest Military Organization in Continuous Operation under Original Charter (Artillery Company, Newport RI, 1741) First Minutemen First Ship of U.S. Navy (schooner Hannah, Beverly, 1775). Sailed from Marblehead into first battle First Submarine (David Bushnell, Turtle, CT, 1776) First National Lighthouse and Navigational Aid Legislation (Elbridge Gerry of Marblehead, sponsor, 1789) First Rifle Manufacture in First U. S. Armory (Springfield Armory, 1795) Oldest Commissioned Navy Vessel (U.S.S. Constitution, Boston, 1797) First Revolver (Samuel Colt, Hartford, 1835-6) First Gas Streetlights and Sewer System (Boston, 1837) First Police Force (Boston, 1838) First Telegraphic Fire Alarm System (Boston, April 29, 1852) First Burglar Alarm (patent Rev. Augustus Russell Pope, Somerville MA 1853, manufacture Edwin Holmes, Boston 1858) First State Police (Gov. John A. Andrew, Massachusetts, 1965) First Mounted Police (Boston, 1870) First Town Lit by Electric Street Lights (Great Barrington, 1886) First Motorized Fire Truck (Knox Mfg. Co., 1907) First Marine Aviator/Airplane (Alfred A. Cunningham, W. Starling Burgess plane, Marblehead, 1912) First Nuclear Powered Submarine (USS Nautilus, Groton, CT, 1954) First Nuclear Powered Surface Vessel (USS Long Beach CG (N) 9, Quincy, 1961) Medicine and Public Health First Inoculation (Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, smallpox, Turkish method, Boston, 1721) Oldest Continuously Operating Medical Society (Massachusetts Medical Society, 1781) First Medical Facility (New England Dispensary, now Tufts New England Medical Center, 1796) First Board of Health (Paul Revere first President, Boston, 1799) First Smallpox Vaccination (Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse of Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, 1800) Beginning with his own children First Public Health Drive (Milton, Smallpox inoculation, 1809) Oldest Continuously Used Hospital Building (Charles Bulfinch, MGH, Boston, 1811) Oldest Continuously Published Medical Journal (New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. James Jackson and Dr. John C. Warren, 1812) First Publicly Financed Insane Asylum (Worcester State Hospital, 1833) First Statewide Investigation of Problem of the Mentally Ill and Indigent (Dorothea Dix, Massachusetts, 1841) First Anesthesia (Horace Wells, Hartford, 1844) First Modern Surgery/Use of Ether (Dr. William T. G. Morton, Massachusetts General Hospital, 1846) First use of the term “Anesthesia” (Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in letter to Dr. Morton, Boston, 1846) First Public Institution for Care of People with Developmental Disabilities (Fernald Center, Waltham MA, Samuel Gridley Howe, 1848) Closed 2014. First Accepted Use of Forensic Evidence (Parkman Murder Trial, Boston, 1849) First Hospital with All Female Staff (Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, New England Hospital for Women, Roxbury, 1862) First Appendectomy (Dr. Reginald Fitz, Massachusetts General Hospital, 1866) First TB Clinic (New England Medical Center, 1899) First Air Conditioned Hospital (Boston Floating Hospital, 1906) First Visit of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to US (James Jackson Putnam, Clark University, Worcester, 1909) First Treatment of Lead Poisoning (Massachusetts General Hospital, 1926) First Hinton Syphilis Test (New England Medical Center, 1927) First Iron Lung (Dr. Philip Drinker, Children’s Hospital, Boston, 1928) First Successful Operation for Hyperthyroidism (Massachusetts General Hospital, 1929) First Measurement of Human Skin Heat Loss through Temperature and Wind (Windchill Factor, Paul A. Siple, Clark University Ph.D., 1937) First Diagnostic Medical Clinic (New England Medical Center, 1938) First Successful Procedure to Correct Congenital Cardiovascular Defect (Dr. Robert Gross, Children Hospital, 1938) First In Vitro Fertilization (Free Hospital for Women, 1944) First Chemotherapy (Dr. Sidney Farber, 1947) Successful remission of acute Leukemia First Human Organ Transplant (Kidney by Dr. Joseph Murray, Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, 1954) First Chemical Synthesis of Penicillin (MIT, 1957) First Immunosuppression (New England Medical Center, 1958) First Birth Control Pill (Gregory Pincus and John Rock MD, Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, 1956-60) First Reattachment of Severed Arm (Massachusetts General Hospital, 1962) First Use of Electric Current to Restore Rhythm of Heart (Dr. Bernard Lown, Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, 1962 First Freezing of Blood for Storage (Massachusetts General Hospital, 1964) First to Decode DNA (Walter Gilbert, Harvard, 1970s) Nobel Prize, 1980, founder of Biogen First Medical Infusion Pump (Dean Kamen, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 1976) First Birth of In-vitro Baby (Judith Carr, of Wesminster MA gave birth to Elizabeth, 1981) However the birth took place in Norfolk VA as the procedure was then illegal in MA First Laser in Open Heart Surgery (New England Medical Center, 1983) First Laboratory Grown Human Skin (Dr. Howard Green, Harvard Medical School, 1984) for skin replacement of burn victims First Patent on a Living Animal (Philip Leder and Timothy Stewart, Harvard Medical School, 1988) Patent on mouse bred to develop cancer, licensed to Dupont; ethical controversy leads to moratorium on animal patents. First Laser Treatment to Remove Tattoos (Massachusetts General Hospital, 1988) First Proposed Decoding of Human Genome (Whitehead Institute, Cambridge, 1990) First Intra-Operative Magnetic Resonance Imaging System (Brigham and Womens Hospital, Boston, 1994) First Genome Mapping (Eric Lander, Human Genome Project, Whitehead Institute, Cambridge, 2000) first mapping of all human genes First Implantable Artificial Heart (Abiomed, Danvers, 2001) First In-Utero Cardiac Implant (Boston Children’s Hospital, 2006) stent for Grace VanDerwerken First Required Universal Health Insurance (“Romneycare,” Massachusetts, 2006) First Full Face Transplant (Dr. Bohdan Pohamac and team of 30, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 2011) for Mr. Dallas Wiens of Fort Worth Other Technology and Invention of High Tech First Industrial Canal (Mother Brook, 3 miles, Dedham, 1640) First Patent (Samuel Winslow, Massachusetts General Court, 1641) new method for salt making First Manufacturing/Toolmaking Patent (Joseph Jenckes Sr., Saugus Ironworks, 1646) First Forge (James and Henry Leonard, Taunton, 1652) First Paper Manufacture (Boies & MacLean Mill, Neponset, 1728) Birthplace of American Industrial Revolution (Samuel Slater, Blackstone River, Pawtucket, Rhode Island, 1793) First Copper Rolling Mill (Paul Revere, Canton, 1801) Hence the name Revere Ware First Accurate Global Positioning System (Nathaniel W. Bowditch, American Practical Navigator, Newburyport, 1802) Birthplace of Integrated Manufacturing/First Venture-Funded High-Tech Company (Francis Cabot Lowell et al., Boston Manufacturing Company, Waltham 1813) First commercial company with stock-holders 1813. Lowell 1822. First Use of Term “Technology” (Jacob Bigelow, Harvard, 1828) First Platform Scale (Thaddeus Fairbanks, Vermont, 1830) First Steam Shovel (William Otis, Canton, 1836) First Vulcanized Rubber (Charles Goodyear, Woburn, 1839) allows lawn tennis First Photograph (Edward Everett Hale, Harvard Hall, Cambridge, March 1839) lost; bust of Apollo in window was quite clear First Self-Portrait Photograph (Edward Everett Hale, South Congregational Church, Boston, 1840) lost First Monkey Wrench (Loring and Aury Coes, Worcester, 1840) First Hydraulic Turbine (James B. Francis, Lowell, 1849) First Standardization of Time of Day (Harvard College Observatory, telegraph signal to William Bond & Son, Boston, 1851), known as Boston Time. Railroads further standardize time in 1883 First House Lit by Electricity (Moses G. Farmer, 11 Pearl Street, Salem MA, 1859) First Cylinder Lock (Linus Yale, Shelburne Falls, 1860) First Vote Recording Machine and Stock Ticker (Thomas A. Edison, 109 Court Street, Boston, 1868-9) First Square-Bottom Paper Bag Machine (Margaret Knight, Boston, 1879), among 90 inventions First Color Photograph (CT, 1881) First Electric Lamp with Carbon Filament (Lewis Latimer, son of slaves, born Chelsea, 1884) First Mass Production of Shoes (Shoe lasting machine patent Jan Matzeliger, 1883, Lynn, 1885) First Commercial AC Transformer (William Stanley, Great Barrington, 1886) First X-Ray (Physicist Arthur W. Wright, Yale U., 1896) Roentgen’s discovery in Germany was several weeks earlier. First Major Acoustical Engineering Project (Symphony Hall, Boston, Wallace Clement Sabine, 1900) First X-Ray Tube (William D. Coolidge, MIT, GE, 1913) First Lie Detector (William Moulton Marston, Harvard, 1915) First Ethyl Gasoline (Thomas Midgley, MA??, 1922) First Mechanical Computer (Vannevar Bush, MIT, 1928) First Polarized Filter (Edwin Land, 1929) For sunglasses, 3D photography, glare free headlights First Strobe Flash (Harold Edgerton, MIT, 1931) First Gyroscopic/Inertial Navigation System (Charles Stark Draper, MIT, 1930s) First Programmable (Digital) Computer (Howard Aiken, Harvard, 1944) First Computer Magnetic Core Memory (Jay Forrester, MIT, 1948) then An Wang, 1955 First Use of Term Artificial Intelligence (John McCarthy, MIT, 1955) cofounder with fellow AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, cofounded MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1959 First Snowmaking Machine (Larchmont Engineering, Lexington, 1952) at Great Blue Hill First Computer Compiler (Grace Hopper, educated at Yale, 1952) Also invented COBOL First Microcomputer Manufacturer (Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1957) First Video Game (“Spacewar”, MIT students on Massachusetts-made Digital Equipment Corp minicomputer) First Desktop Calculator, Word Processor (An Wang, 1965 ff) First Mass-produced Holograms (Dr. Stephen A. Benton, Cofounder, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, 1968) First Electronic Spreadsheet (Dan Bricklin, HBS student, “Visicalc” for Apple II, HBS, 1978-9) First Open Source Linux Operating System (Richard Stallman, Cambridge, 1984) First Haptic Computer Interface PHANToM (Thomas Massie, MIT grad, 1995) First PhotomosaicTM (Robert Silvers, MIT student, 1995) Silvers trademarked the term First Use of Non-Economic Metrics (Boston Indicators Project, Boston, 1998)? Food, Clothing, and Shelter First Weathervane Maker (Shem Drowne, grasshopper on Faneuil Hall, 1742) Also first tinplater First Classic Portico (Redwood Library, Newport RI, Peter Harrison, 1748) First Calico Printery (Boston, 1712) Oldest Continuously Operating Inn (Howes Tavern, now known as Wayside Inn, Sudbury, 1716 First Plastics Industry (Comb Manufacture, Obadiah Hills, Leominster, 1770, diverse and largest industry by 1920s) First Cotton Mill (John Cabot, Beverly, 1787) First Cotton Gin (Eli Whitney of Westboro, in New Haven, 1793) First Attached Rowhouses on a curve, first monumental town planning (Charles Bulfinch, Tontine Crescent, Franklin Place now Franklin Street, Boston, 1794) Oldest Jewelry Store (Shreve Crump & Low, Boston 1796) First Cotton Cloth (James Beaumont, Canton MA 1802) Bartlett Pear (imported from England by Enoch Bartlett, Dorchester, 1799 or 1812) First Steam Powered Loom (Waltham, 1813) First Canned Food (William Underwood, Russia Wharf, Boston, 1821) Oldest Continuously Operating Restaurant (Union Oyster House, Boston, 1826) First Indoor Shopping Mall (Russell Warren and James Bucklin, Providence Arcade, RI, 1828) First Graham Crackers (Sylvester Graham, CT, 1829) First ‘Modern’ Hotel (Tremont House, Isaiah Rogers, 1829) i.e., private room with key at front desk First Rattan Furniture (Cyrus Wakefield, S. Reading later Wakefield, 1844) First Steam Heated Building (Eastern Hotel, Boston, 1845) First Sewing Machine (Elias Howe patent, Boston-Cambridge, 1846) First Zipper (Elias Howe patent, Cambridge MA 1851) precedes refinement (Gideon Sundbäck, 1913) and “zipper” name (B. F Goodrich, 1923) First Public Display of Female Trousers aka “bloomers” (Amelia Bloomer, Boston Common, 1851) First Clothespin (David M. Smith, Springfield, VT, 1853) improved by Solon E. Moore, VT, 1887 Oldest continuously running hotel (Parker House, Boston, since 1855), Introduced Parker House rolls and the term scrod. First Boston Cream Pie (Parker House, Boston, 1856) The state’s official dessert. First Baking Powder (Prof. Eben Norton Horsford, Harvard, patented 1865) Calcium acid phosphate First Houses Designed by Female Architect (Annie Raeburn Cobb, Newton Highlands, 1874 ff) Cobb (1830-1911) was one of two female architects to exhibit at Chicago Worlds Fair in 1893 First Bottled Carbonated Beverage (Moxie, Dr. Augustin Thompson, Lowell, MA, 1876) First Shoe Lasting Machine (Jan Matzeliger, 1883) Revolutionizes shoe industry First Shredded Wheat (Worcester, Henry Perky, 1890) First Fig Newtons (James Henry Mitchell, Kennedy Biscuit Works later Nabisco, named for Newton, MA, 1891) First Hamburger (New Haven, CT, 1895) Alternatively, some claim 1885 in Wisconsin First Safety Razor (King Camp Gillette and William Emery Nickerson, Boston, 1901) First Fried Clams (Essex, MA, 1914) First Bra (Mary Jacob, Boston, 1914) sold to Maidenform Co. First Commercially Successful Electric Clock (Henry Ellis Warren, Ashland, MA, 1916) First Marshmallow Fluff (Archibald Query, Somerville, MA, 1917) First Baby Formula (Similac, New England Medical Center, 1919) First Frozen Food (Clarence Birdseye, Gloucester, MA, 1925) First Chocolate Chip Cookie (Ruth Graves Wakefield, Framingham State Normal School alumna, Toll House Inn, Whitman, MA, 1937) First Microwave Oven (Percy Spencer, Raytheon, 1946) First Geodesic Dome (R. Buckminster Fuller, patent, 1954) International figure “Bucky” Fuller was born in Milton, MA, and buried Mt Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA. Buckyball molecules are named for his invention. First Indian Pudding First Thanksgiving Turkey Dinner First Lobster Meal First Clam chowder First Corn on the Cob First Cranberry Sauce First Necco Wafers First Commercial Yogurt (Columbo, Andover, MA)? Recreation, Sports, and Fitness First Summer Resort (Wolfeboro, Lake Winnipesaukee, NH, 1760s) and Vacationland (ME, NH, MA) First Outdoor Gymnasium (Latin School, Salem, 1821) First Baseball (Pittsfield, 1791) record discovered 2004 overturns Manhattan reference of 1823 First Outdoor Gymnasium and Playground with Supervision and Instruction (Round Hill School, Northampton, MA 1825) First Swimming School (Francis Leiber, 1827) First Public Park (Boston Common, 1830) First Boat Club (Springfield Yacht and Canoe Club, 1850) ? First YMCA (Captain Thomas V. Sullivan, Washington Street, downtown Boston, 1851) First Intercollegiate Event (Harvard Yale Crew Race, Lake Winnepesaukee, 1852) First Intercollegiate Baseball Rivalry (Amherst-Williams, 1859) First American Football (Gerrit Smith Miller, Dixwell School’s Oneida team vs Latin School, Boston Common, 1862) First Roller Rink and first turning roller skates (James Plimpton, MA and Newport, 1863) First Playground of the Super Rich (Newport, RI, 1870s) First Baseball Dynasty (Boston Red Stockings, 4 straight National Association of Professional Baseball Players championships, 1871-1874) First Public (Municipal) Playground (Brookline, MA, 1872) First legislation authorizing funding First Lawn Tennis Court (Robert Treat Paine, Stonehurst, Waltham, by 1876)—Staten Island Cricket Club 1874 via Mary Outerbridge earliest in US, from Clermont, Bermuda 1873; Newport RI court 1881. Paine diary Nov 6 1876 notes tennis court elevation. First Lawn Tennis Club (Longwood Cricket Club, Chestnut Hill, 1877) First Bicycle Club (Boston Bicycle Club, 1878) First Country Club (Brookline, 1881) First Use of Term “Body Building” and fitness classes (Robert J. Roberts, Boston YMCA, 1881) First High-School Football Rivalry (Needham-Wellesley, 1882) First Sand Gardens (Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Assn., Parmenter Street, North End, Boston 1885) For toddlers and young children in inner city neighborhoods First Triple-Win of America’s Cup (Eastern Yacht Club, Marblehead, Puritan 1885, Mayflower 1886, Volunteer 1887) First Candlepin Bowling (Worcester, 1888) First Public Outdoor Gymnasium (Dudley A. Sargent, Charlesbank, Boston, 1889) free, supervised, for men and boys First Foot Race (Bemis-Foslund Pie Race, Mt. Hermon School, Mt. Hermon MA, 1890) First Basketball (James Naismith, Springfield, 1891) First Volleyball (William Morgan, Holyoke, 1895) First American Olympic Team (Boston Athletic Association, 1896) First Marathon (Boston, 1897) First International Tennis Competition, the Davis Cup of International Lawn Tennis Association (Harvard student and cup donor Dwight Davis, Longwood Cricket Club, 1900) First Polar Bear Club (L Street Brownies, South Boston, 1902) First World Series Victory (Boston Americans, 1903) First Football Stadium (Soldiers Field, Harvard University, 1903) designed by McKim Meade $ White and inspired by Panathenaic Stadium built for 1896 Olympics in Athens First Intrastate Long Distance Hiking Trail (Long Trail in Vermont, conceived by James P. Taylor, Windsor, Vt., 1910; begun 1912; completed 1930) First Amateur to win U. S. Open (Francis Ouimet, Country Club, Brookline, 1913) First International Figure Skating Champion (George H. Browne, Cambridge MA, 1914) First U.S. Hockey Team (Boston Bruins, 1924) First Ryder Cup Competition (Worcester Country Club, 1927) First Interstate Long Distance Hiking Trail (Appalachian Trail, conceived by Benton MacKaye, Shirley, MA, 1921; begun 1923; completed 1937) First National Women’s Squash Champion (Eleonora Sears, Boston and Beverly, 1926) First Slalom (Taft Trail, Cannon Mountain NH, 1933) First Ski Tow (Gilbert’s Hill, Woodstock VT, 1934) First Public Sailing Program (Community Boating, Charles River Basin, 1937) First Aerial Tramway (Cannon Mountain, NH, 1938) First Public Boating Program (Community Boating, Boston, 1946) First Frisbee (Yale, 1940s, pie tin from local William R. Frisbie Bakery) First Snowboard (Jake Burton Carpenter, VT, 1970s) First Marathon to Admit Women (Boston, 1972) First Rail-Trail (Cape Cod, 1979) Biggest Comeback in Sports History (Boston Red Sox win World Series, 2004) First City to have all 4 sport teams win a championship in a 7 year span (Patriots: 2001, 2003, 2004, Red Sox: 2004, 2007, Celtics: 2008, Bruins: 2011). Bruins 1st NHL team to win the Cup on three game-7 wins. Conservation, Preservation, Environment First Conservation Land (Town commons and village greens e.g., Boston Common, 1634) First Cluster Subdivisions (17th c, 20th c) First Public Shade Tree planting in New World (Liberty Tree, at today’s Washington Street near Essex Street, Boston, 1646) Tree destroyed by British 1775 First Public Square (North Square, North End of Boston, 1649) First Urban Renewal (Alexander Parris, Quincy Market, 1824-26) Copied by Covent Garden, London First Horticultural Society (William H. Sumner, Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Boston, 1829) also first exhibits in Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall, now New England Flower Show First Large-scale Designed Public Landscape and First Rural (Garden) Cemetery (Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, 1831) first use of “cemetery” for “grave-yard” or “burying ground” First Homeowners Association (Louisburg Square Proprietors, Boston, 1844) First Commemorative Wall Art? (Liberty Tree bas relief, Windsor & Brothers ship carvers for David Sears, 1850) still extant, corner of Boylston and Washington Streets. First Village Improvement Society (Laurel Hill Association, Stockbridge, 1853) First Public Park by Purchase (Bushnell Park, Hartford CT, 1854) First Litigation on Environmental Impacts of industrialization (Merrimack Dams, MA, 1856) First Environmental Impact Statement (George Perkins Marsh on Connecticut R. fisheries, 1857) First Ecologist, Environmental/Public Health Research (Ellen Swallow Richards, MIT, 1872-3) first survey of water quality, by first woman admitted to MIT First Conservation and Recreation Organization (Appalachian Mountain Club, Boston, 1876) First Preservation of a National Historic Site (Old South Meeting House, Boston, 1876-77) site of 1773 Boston Tea Party deliberations First Artificial Saltmarsh (Frederick Law Olmsted, Back Bay Fens, Boston, 1879) First Urban Greenway (Frederick Law Olmsted, Emerald Necklace, Boston, 1880) First Public/Private Partnership for Public Open Space (City of Boston and Harvard University for Arnold Arboretum, 1882) First Public Arboretum (Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Sprague Sargent, Arnold Arboretum, 1882) First Mountain Hut System (Appalachian Mountain Club, beginning with Madison Spring Hut, 1888) First Land Trust (The Trustees of Public Reservations, 1891) Borrowed by British National Trust and back to National Trust for Historic Preservation. First Metropolitan Park System (Charles Eliot, Boston, 1893) First Public Beach (Charles Eliot, Revere Beach, 1896) First Protected Salt Marsh (Neponset Estuary, 1899) First State Audubon Society (Minna Hall, Massachusetts Audubon Society, 1896) First Regional Preservation Organization (William Sumner Appleton, Historic New England, Boston, 1910) First Zoning Bylaw (Wellesley, MA, 1914) First Multi-purpose Nature Center (Mass Audubon, Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary, Sharon MA, 1918) First Reintroduction of “Extinct” Tree Species (Dawn Redwood rediscovered China, Arnold Arboretum, 1948) First Historic District in New England (Beacon Hill, Boston, 1955) First Wetlands Protection Legislation (Francis W. Hatch, Hatch Act, Massachusetts, 1965) First Main Streets Program (Roslindale Village of Boston, 1985) First Non-Profit Community Organization Eminent Domain for Low Income Housing (Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Boston, 1988) First Wholly Privately Funded Public Park (Norman Leventhal, Post Office Square Park, Boston, 1991) First State Wetland Restoration Program (MA, 1994) First City to Require Development to be LEED certifiable (Boston, 2007). Economic System and Business First/Oldest Fishing Port (Gloucester, 1623) First/Oldest American Metropolis (Boston) First center of capital formation First Corporation in western hemisphere (President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1650) First Business Woman (Elizabeth Poole, Iron Forge or Bloomery, Taunton, 1652) First Powder Mill (Milton, 1674) First Official Paper Money in the Western world and first official currency in America (Massachusetts, 1690) Massachusetts colony bills of credit for soldiers First Pier (Long Wharf, Boston, 1710) First Chocolate Mill (James Baker, Dorchester, 1765) later Walter M. Baker Company First Bell Foundry (Col. Aaron Hobart of Abingdon, MA, then Paul Revere, by 1770) First Commercial Bank (Massachusetts Bank, now Bank of America, Boston, 1784) First Insurance Company (Norwich, CT, 1795) First American Millionaire (Elias Hasket Derby, Salem, by 1799) First Leader in China Trade (Salem then Boston, 1790-1830) First Piano Factory (Benjamin Crahore, Milton, 1800) First Big Business (Boston Manufacturing Company, Waltham, 1815) All under one roof First Mutual Savings Bank (Provident Institution for Savings in the Town of Boston, 1816) First Corporate Trust Company (Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company, 1818) Sets standard for trusteeship, “strict male” and “strict female” trusts First Insurance Industry Center (Hartford CT) First Venture Capital Center (Railroads, AT&T, United Shoe, General Electric, Boston) First Department Store (Ford’s Store, Duxbury, 1826) Many claimants First Ready-Made Suit (John Simmons, Boston, 1826) First Ornamental Glass Company (Deming Jarvis, Mount Washington Glass Works, Boston, 1837) now Pairpoint Glass Co, Sandwich MA First Planned Industrial City (Holyoke, 1848) First Actuarially Based Science of Life Insurance (Elizur Wright, Medford, MA 1850s) First Safe Deposit Vaults (Col. Henry Lee, Union Deposit Vaults, Boston, 1868) First Nationally Successful Woman Business Entrepreneur (Lydia E. Pinkham, Lynn, MA, 1875) Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound First Women’s Exchange (Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, Boston, 1877) First Gold Flute Manufacturer (William S. Haynes Flute Co., Boston, 1896) First Chamber of Commerce (Grain Exchange 1885, merged into Chamber of Commerce, 1909) First Business Consulting and Contract Research Firm (Arthur D. Little, Boston, 1886) Modernized paper industry, set up GM’s R&D, developed nonflammable film, fiberglass, cigarette filters, synthetic penicillin, inkjet printing, Slim Fast First Credit Unions (Edward Filene, Boston, Massachusetts Credit Union Act, 1909) goes national in 1934 First Regional Community Foundation (Charles E. and Charles M. Rogerson, Boston Foundation, 1915) First Supermarket (Upham's Corner Market, Dorchester, ca. 1920) First Radio Shack (Boston, 1921) First Mutual Fund (L. Sherman Adams, Massachusetts Investors Trust, Boston, 1924) weeks before (Richard Cushing Paine, Richard Saltonstall and Paul Cabot, State Street Investment Corp aka Boston Mutual Fund, Boston, 1924) First Roadside Restaurant Franchise Chain (Howard Johnson’s, Quincy, 1935) First Modern Venture Capital Firm (American Research and Development or ARD, Georges Doriot, Harvard Business school, 1946) Funded Digital Equipment Corp. First Master Planned Industrial Park (New England Business Center, Needham at Rte 128, Cabot Cabot & Forbes, 1948) First Donut Chain (Dunkin Donuts, William Rosenberg, 543 Southern Artery, Quincy, 1950) Now largest coffee and baked goods chain in world First Discount General Merchandise Retailer (Lechmere Sales, 1913, 1950s) First Mutual Fund Check Writing (Fidelity, Boston, 1970s) First Independent Biopharmaceutical Company (Biogen, Cambridge, 1978) Reform, Philanthropy, Activism, and Association First Feminism (Anne Hutchinson, Boston, 1635-37) First Private Charity in New England (Scots’ Charitable Society, Boston, 1657) First Black Fraternal Order (Prince Hall Freemasonry, Prince Hall, 1775) Prince Hall (1738-1807) First Temperance Society (Litchfield, CT, 1789) Many claimants First Coastal Rescue Organization (Massachusetts Humane Society, Boston, 1786) precursor of Congressional authorization of U.S. Coast Guard fleet in 1790. First Black Fraternal Order (Black Masons, Boston, 1790) First Mental Hospital (now McLean Hospital, Belmont, originally Somerville/Charlestown, 1816) First Industrial Labor Strike (Waltham, female workers, 1821) First Prison Aid (Park Street Church, Boston, 1824) First State Reform School (Westboro, 1846) First International Humanitarianism (Jamestown voyage to relieve Irish potato famine, Robert Bennet Forbes, Boston, 1847) First State Law Prohibiting Sale of Alcohol (ME, 1847) First Identified Slum (Fort Hill, Boston, 1850s) First Modern Philanthropist (George Peabody 1795-1869, born poor in North Danvers MA, beginning in 1852), donated to many Peabody Institutes and Museums First YWCA (Boston, 1859, 1866) First Free Public Bath (L Street, 1866) First Public Agency dedicated to Public Health (Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, MA, 1869) First Model Housing Company (Boston Cooperative Building Company, Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, 1871) First Women’s Exchange (Womens Educational and Industrial Union, Boston, 1877) First Factory Inspection Law (Massachusetts, 1877) American Red Cross (Clara Barton, from Oxford, MA, 1881) First Pure Food Law (Ellen Swallow Richards, Massachusetts, 1882) First Women’s College Club (College Club, Boston, 1890) First Board of Health Inspections of Workplace Safety (Massachusetts, 1903) First Interracial Non-sectarian Youth Organization (Campfire Girls, Charlotte Gulick, Springfield, 1910) First Nutrition Clinic (New England Medical Center, 1918) First Tumor Clinic (Massachusetts General Hospital, 1925) First Woman Cabinet Member (Frances Perkins, Boston, Secretary of Labor, 1933) First “Village” to Allow Seniors to Live at Home (Beacon Hill Village, Boston, 2002) Non-profit alternative to retirement community Exploration/Discovery/Astronomy/Scientific Frontiers First American Chart (Map) Maker (Cyprian Southack of Boston, Chart of the English Empire, 1717, Survey of seacoast from New York to Canada, 1734) Discovery of Northwest/Columbia River and (Joseph Barrell, Columbia Redivia Capt John Kendrick, and Lady Washington, Robert Gray, out of Boston, around Horn, 1787) First American Circumnavigation of Globe (Joseph Barrell, Columbia Rediviva, Captain John Kendrick, out of Boston, returning 1790) First American to Visit Japan (Captain John Kenrick, Orleans, 1791) First American Voyage to Hawaii (Thaddeus, out of Boston, 1819) First Aerial Photograph (James Wallace Black in Samuel Archer King’s balloon the “Queen of the Air” on ascent from Boston Common, October 13, 1860, after attempt in Providence) National Geographic Society (Gardiner Greene Hubbard and Alexander Graham Bell, 1888) First American Plant Collector to Reach Remote China (Ernest Henry Wilson for Arnold Arboretum, after 1899) First Precise Measurement of Star Distance (Henrietta Levitt, Harvard, 1912) Chaos Theory (Edward N. Lorenz, mathematician and meteorologist, MIT, “butterfly effect” 1961) First Accurate Mapping of Numerous Mountains including McKinley, Muldrow Glacier, Everest (Bradford Washburn, MA, 1970s-90s) Discoverer of Titanic, Bismarck, Yorktown, Lusitania wrecks and thermal vents (Robert Ballard, Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute, Mystic Marinelife Aquarium, Mystic, CT, 1985 ff) Connections With China First American Consul/Trade Representative to China (Samuel Shaw in Canton/Guangzhou, from Boston, 1786) First American Town named Canton (Massachusetts, 1797) followed by Connecticut (1806) and 17 other states First Missionary to China (Elijah C. Bridgman, Belchertown, MA, 1830) First Protestant Medical Missionary to China (Dr. Peter Parker, Framingham, 1834) opens first eye hospital in Canton First major journal of sinology (The Chinese Repository, Shanghai, Elijah C. Bridgman, Belchertown, MA, 1832) First US-China Treaty Negotiator (Caleb Cushing, Newburyport MA, 1844) First School for Girls in China (Shanghai, Eliza Jane Gillett Bridgman, Derby, CT, 1850) First Chinese to Graduate from an American University (Yung Wing 容闳, Yale, 1854) First American to become a Chinese Citizen and Mandarin (Frederick Townsend Ward of Salem MA for services in putting down Taiping Rebellion, 1860 ff) First Technological Transfer from U. S. to China (Yung Wing 容闳, Fitchburg MA, 1863) Viceroy Tseng Kuo-Fan sent Yung (1828-1912), to Fitchburg, Massachusetts, to purchase machines from Putnam & Co. for the Kiang-Nam Arsenal in Shanghai, China’s first modern arsenal. First Chinese Civic Organization in U. S (Chee Kong Tong, Boston Lodge of Chinese Freemasons, 1868) Everyday things First One-way Street (Change Avenue, Boston, originally seven foot wide Pierce's Alley, 1639) First Wrench (Solyman Merrick, Springfield, 1835) First Use of “OK” (Charles Gordon Greene, Boston Morning Post, 1839) First Mass-produced Valentine (Esther Howland, Worcester, 1840) First Mass-produced Board Game (Milton Bradley, Springfield, 1860s) First Shipment of Bananas to US (Lorenzo Dow Baker, Wellfleet/Boston, 1871) First Metal Pipe Wrench (Daniel Stilllson, Walworth’s factory, Cambridge, 1869) Wood pipe was being replaced by metal pipe. Stillson’s wrench became a household name First Postcard (Morgan Envelope Factory, Springfield, 1873) First Mass-produced Christmas Card (Louis Prang, Roxbury, 1874-5) First Toothpicks (imported from S. America by Charles Forster of Maine, Union Oyster House, Boston, 1870s) First Toothpaste and Toothpaste Tube (Washington Sheffield, New London CT, 1881) First Department Store Santa (James Edgar, Boston Store, Brockton, 1890) First Quonset Hut (Quonset Point Naval Air Station, Rhode Island, 1942 Silly Putty (GE, New Haven, 1943, rights sold to Peter Hodgson for $147) Tupperware (Earl Tupper, Leominster, 1945) Pink Flamingo (Don Featherstone, Leominster, 1956) Smiley Face (Harvey R. Ball, Worcester, 1963) The Springfield Armory in the 19th and 20th centuries became the site of numerous technological innovations of global importance, including interchangeable parts, the assembly line style of mass production, and modern business practices, such as hourly wages. (wiki) American Legends and Heroes—famous for being famous, and a whole lot more, in roughly chronological order…so many omissions Tisquantum aka Squanto The Yankee Hannah Duston (heroine, 1697, first American woman represented in statue, two of them, 1870s) Ben Franklin (Boston and Philadelphia) Sam Adams (Boston) James Otis (Cape and Boston) Paul Revere (Boston) John Hancock (Boston) Nathan Hale (CT) John Adams (Quincy) Abigail Adams (Quincy) John Paul Jones (NH) Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman, Leominster, 1774) Uncle Sam (Congress declared in 1961 that Samuel Wilson of Arlington, MA, who provided casks of beef with "U.S." for American troops during the War of 1812, was indeed the real Uncle Sam) John Singleton Copley (Boston) Gilbert Stuart (RI, Boston) Samuel F. B. Morse (Charlestown, Yale) Loammi Baldwin (Father of Civil Engineering) Henry David Thoreau (Concord) Daniel Webster (NH, MA) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (ME, MA) Edgar Allan Poe (Boston) John Brown (CT) Ralph Waldo Emerson (Concord) Emily Dickinson (Amherst) Margaret Fuller (Cambridge) Mark Twain (Hartford CT) Henry Adams (Boston) Henry James (Cambridge) Louisa May Alcott (Boston) Horatio Alger (Revere, South Natick) Susan B. Anthony (Adams) Clara Barton (Oxford) Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (ME) P. T. Barnum (CT) Fannie Farmer (Cambridge) Phillips Brooks (Boston) John Singer Sargent (Boston) Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (Boston) Isabella Stewart Gardner (Boston) Charles Dana Gibson (Roxbury) Amy Lowell (Brookline) Louis Brandeis (Boston) Kahlil Gibran (Boston) Amelia Earhart (Medford) Robert Frost (NH) Howard Johnson (Quincy, MA) Robert Lowell (Boston) R. Buckminster (“Bucky”) Fuller Edwin Land (Cambridge) Charles Ives (Danbury CT) Helen Keller (Cambridge, Wrentham) e. e. cummings (Cambridge) Cole Porter (Yale) Norman Rockwell (Arlington VT, Stockbridge MA) N. C. Wyeth (Needham) Andrew Wyeth (ME) Arthur Fiedler (Boston) Fred Allen (Cambridge, born John Florence Sullivan) Ted Williams (Fenway Park) Erle Stanley Gardner (Malden) Jack Kerouac (Lowell) Sylvia Plath (Boston, Wellesley, Smith) Jack Lemmon (Newton) John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Brookline) Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (Newport) F. Lee Bailey (Waltham) Theodore Geisel aka "Dr. Suess" (Springfield) Rocky Marciano (Brockton) Leonard Bernstein (Lawrence) Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr. (Boston) Ted Kennedy (Brookline) Jack Welch (Salem) Joan Baez (Belmont) Marvin Hagler (Brockton) Yo-Yo Ma (Cambridge) John F. Kerry (Boston) Michael Bloomberg (Boston/Brookline) Elizabeth Warren (Harvard Law School, Senator) © 2023 Thomas M. Paine

When it comes to stories of long-lost loved ones being reunited, I am a proud sentimentalist. The classic movies Casablanca and Dr. Zhivago come to mind as does the TV series A Town Like Alice, based on the Nevil Shute novel, and the recent movie Lion, in which an India-born man never gives up hope of finding his mother, from whom he was tragically separated as an illiterate child in a place he can barely remember. My novel Double Happiness (1997) was about the reunion of a mother and daughter given up for adoption as an infant. I cried writing some of the scenes. But even more moving are the stories describing the reconciliation of longtime enemies, led by Gandhi, Dr. King, and Nelson Mandela. I would add the story of Eric Lomax, whose autobiography The Railway Man became a movie starring Colin Firth as the World War Two POW in Malaysia tortured by the Japanese, who overcomes hatred to meet his former torturer, now wracked with regret, and forgive him. Yes, that too much neglected Christian virtue of forgiveness, and Love Thine Enemy. It is the opposite of hate, bullying, enslavement, lynching, cruelty, and all the related dark impulses. On May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II was crossing St Peters Square when he was shot. The would be assassin Mehmet Ali Ağca was caught and incarcerated. In 1983 John Paul went to his cell and forgave him. They had a private conversation, and emerged as friends. The pope stayed in touch with Ağca’s family during the latter's incarceration, and in 2000 requested that he be pardoned. The request was granted. Ağca was released and deported to Turkey, where he was imprisoned for the life sentence he had fled decades prior. He converted to Christianity while incarcerated, and was finally released in 2010. In December 2014, he returned to Rome and laid two dozen white roses at the pope’s tomb. Apparently there is a thing called reconciliation and reunification therapy for families. Anyone who knows more about this, please share! There are other reconciliations, like between different races, ages, orientations. I am struck by marriages where the age difference is “large”. Or how about height difference? Some couples are almost 2 feet apart in height. Love conquers all. In South Korea, there is an International Consultation on Peace, Reconciliation and Reunification of the Korean Peninsula. The terms show up in a number of websites related to Korea. In one, Lincoln is cited as a model of reconciliation (Second Inaugural Address, and the story of Lincoln in a hospital shaking hands with a wounded Confederate colonel who was forever moved by that moment). When he came to Appomattox to surrender to General Grant, General Robert E. Lee noticed Colonel Ely Parker, a Seneca from New York who served as Grant’s adjutant and greeted him saying, “I am glad to see one real American here.” To which Parker replied, “We are all Americans.” In March 2020 (just before Covid), my friend Eric Pape told me of a remarkable story of reconciliation, reunion, and forgiveness. Decades pass before an American vet finds a way to meet the daughter of the Vietnamese soldier he killed and return to her the only photo ever taken of her with her dad in 1968. Online, the story is in Vietnamese, (https://maybienvh.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/noi-am-anh-tu-1-tam-hinh-trong-chien-tranh/), roughly translated below: Obsession From 1 Picture In War In 1967, Rich Luttrell turned 17, living in a poor family in Illinois. Rich volunteered to join the army and went to Vietnam in 1968, in the 101st Airborne Task Force. The story begins on a hot day when Rich is present in an operation. Rich did not know that he and the enemy were in a position a few yards apart in the middle of an old forest From the corner of his eye, he suddenly saw a movement and realized a CS soldier was leaning against his AK 47. Rich was within range of the enemy and death was only a heartbeat away. He felt as though his entire body froze in the eyes of the CS soldier as they stared at each other. That was when Rich’s finger pulled the trigger, and the enemy soldier collapsed. Immediately the whole forest was shaking with the rain of bullets...When the battle ended, the soldiers spread out to search for memorabilia on the enemy corpses. A piece of paper fell from the wallet of the soldier shot down by Rich. He bent down to pick up a picture that was only the size of a postage stamp showing a soldier and a little girl. The two in the picture were definitely father and daughter, too solemn, too sad. Did they take this picture just before they said goodbye? Rich felt pain and decided to keep the picture. More than once he was asked about the reason for such a decision and could only answer: I don’t know. I’ve thought a million times. But what grabbed me in the picture was the girl, and she seemed so sad. After that first battle, Rich quickly became a fighter. However, Rich still could not avoid the calamity of the battlefield when there were only 20 days left to expire to repatriate. On that day, Rich’s unit was ambushed and while rushing to save a teammate, he was hit by a bullet in the back. When being picked up by an injured helicopter, he felt guilty for abandoning his teammates. But Rich got used to the quiet pace of life at home, especially after getting married and having two daughters. Rich’s relatives didn’t hear Rich talk about the war, but they knew Rich had a picture in his wallet and had a special attachment to the picture. The picture didn’t weigh as much as a gram but always weighed Rich’s heart until he was over forty years old. Now the thought that always surfaced in Rich’s mind was that the little girl in the photo had no Father. In 1989, when he visited the Vietnam War Memorial Washington DC, Rich decided to free himself by leaving the picture at the foot of the Wall. Rich sat across from the photo, looking at the man he had shot down over 20 years ago, writing a short letter: Sir, for 22 years now, I kept his picture in my wallet. That day I was only 18 years old, when we saw each other on the trail near Chu Lai, Vietnam. Please forgive me for killing you. Many times over the years, I have looked at pictures of you and the girl I guess is your daughter. Every time my heart burns with the pain of guilt. Please forgive me. Rich placed a picture and a letter at the foot of the Wall, naming 58,000 US soldiers killed in Vietnam. For him the action was the final solemnity. The soldier died fighting for his faith. And this was a way of honoring and paying homage to him. He was no longer an enemy, but a friend. Like saying goodbye to a friend. At that moment, Rich felt as if he had just finished a fight and dropped his backpack to rest. The burden he had carried until that day was no more. But reality is not entirely like that. Seven years later, in 1996, when Rich almost forgot the picture, an acquaintance, Congressman Ron Stephens suddenly found him. Stephens placed a book on Rich’s table and opened it to page 53, with the picture with the full text of the short letter Rich had written. The picture left by Rich at the Wall had caught the eye of another veteran, Duery Felton. Duery, the gallery manager at the monument, was immediately fascinated by the photo and the letter and decided to keep it. Duery was unable to articulate why the decision had been made, but rather described it as both a natural and mysterious act. The little girl left Rich to haunt Duery again until a publisher asked Duery to help complete a book about the Memorial Wall. Duery put the picture and letter in the book with the words: “This picture haunts me for years, though I do not know who she is.” The book happened to be in the hands of a Friend of Rich. So, seven years later, the picture came back to Rich. The old obsession returned. Rich contacted Duery to ask for the photo. Duery flew from Washington to Illinois to meet Rich. Two unfamiliar, never-before-seen men hugged each other because of the picture of a little girl whom they had never met. Later, Rich felt compelled to let everyone know that he was looking for the little girl. So Rich answered an interview of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and the story was posted on the front page of the newspaper. Rich cut the article, stuffed it into an envelope and a letter to the Hanoi Ambassador in Washington, saying he needed help finding the daughter and soldier’s family in the photo. Of course the recipient had to move back to Hanoi, but the story was like finding a needle in a haystack when the help was just a newspaper in Hanoi reprinting the picture and story as a normal article. The article did not attract readers and the story was not taken into account by any Hanoi government. But the lucky newspaper was used to pack things sent by a son in Hanoi to his mother’s village. When opening her son’s package, she noticed the crumpled newspaper printed with a soldier’s picture. Strangely enough, she immediately recognized the person in the picture and immediately took the newspaper to a small neighborhood, informing a family member there that the picture was their Father. So from the United States three thousand miles away, Rich received a letter three weeks later from the Embassy saying a man named Nguyen Van Hue wrote that he believed that the picture was the picture of his father Nguyen Trong Ngoan., and that the little girl was his sister. Then Rich received a second letter, which he had to find an interpreter to translate. It was from Nguyen Thi Lan, the Little Girl in the picture, writing as follows: “Dear Mr. Richard, The child you have looked after over the picture for over 30 years has now grown up. That child went through many sufferings in her childhood because of losing her Dad and missing him. I hope he will bring joy and happiness to my family.” So 30 years after seeing the picture for the first time, Rich knew the baby in the picture is named Lan, is 40 years old and has children. But the good news turned hopeless when the internal investigation agency of Hanoi authorities said that Nguyen Thi Lan’s father could not be in the picture, because military records prove Nguyen Trong Ngoan died at a place different from where Rich said. The situation became even more confusing when 3 other families spoke out to receive the picture of their Father. Rich no longer knew whom to believe, but then one of his dead teammates confirmed that Nguyen Trong Ngoan was his teammate and father of Nguyen Thi Lan. Rich decided to fly over to Vietnam to personally place the photo in the Little Girl’s hand. It was the Spring of 2000 and the 33rd year since Rich saved the picture. It was an overcast Wednesday in Hanoi. It seemed like it was going to rain as Rich stepped into the van to make a two-and-a-half hour trip to Lan’s village. The car drove past an unfamiliar area, past markets full of surprised faces when it saw a crowd of tourists and a silver-haired American. Then Rich walked over a stone wall and saw the woman. Facing her, Rich repeated the Vietnamese phrase he had memorized: Today I return the picture of you and your father that I have kept for 33 years. In the end it all poured out like a terrific relief, Lan hugged Rich and cried as if Rich was the Father who had returned from the war. The Brother said that they believed that their Father’s soul lives through Rich. For them today their Father’s soul has returned. The whole village gathered to see the photo returned and the picture touched everyone. Rich thought of a solemn ceremony, but in the end was just a simple sentence for the interpreter: Tell her this is a picture I took from her father’s wallet the day I shot him, and today I bring it back. The now 40-year-old woman buries her face in her father’s picture. This is the first time that she can see her father since she was 6 years old and Father was gone. This is also the first and only photo of soldier Nguyen Trong Ngoan. Lan and her younger brother Hue put the picture on their parents’ altars. Rich attended a prayer service in front of the altar. Rich said their father was a brave man, and he died like a courageous soldier. He is not in pain. I am sorry. Hours later, Rich had the opportunity to meet his victim’s comrades again, and the old enemies exchanged war memories as if they were teammates. It was too hard for Rich to find this place, and it was too hard for Rich to leave here. Rich and Lan hugged each other goodbye and Rich cried when he got into the car. Thirty-three years ago, Rich came to this country to fight. Today he returned to bring joy to a poor little girl, after 30 years of sorrow. Rich knows he will continue to contact Lan and her relatives. When he returned to the US, he received a letter from Lan’s younger brother, Hue, recalling the past meeting: “During his visit to my family, everyone in the village realized that you were a very kind person. When you left Vietnam, I felt like my Father had returned.” Rich has become a consolation for a pain in the midst of countless pains buried in oblivion throughout Vietnam. Over time, there will certainly be many questions that arise from such pain in order to understand the true cause of the pain and the heart to share. Sample of original Vietnamese language at the website translated above: Khi về tới Mỹ , Ông nhận được thư của người Em Trai , Huệ , nhắc lại ngày gặp gỡ vừa qua : – Trong thời gian Ông viếng thăm gia đình Tôi , mọi người trong làng nhận thấy Ông là người rất tốt và tử tế . Khi ông rời VN , Tôi cảm thấy như Cha Tôi đã trở về . Rich đã trở thành niềm an ủi cho một nỗi đau giữa hằng hà sa số nỗi đau đang bị vùi lấp giữa lãng quên trên khắp đất nước VN . Cùng với thời gian chắc chắn sẽ còn không ít câu hỏi trỗi lên từ những nỗi đau như thế để hiểu rõ về nguyên do thực sự đã dẫn đến những nỗi đau cũng như những tấm lòng chia sẻ . text © 2022 by Thomas M. Paine

In August 1977 my wife and I were headed home after a stimulating year in Taiwan, where she had taught college students philosophy on a Henry Luce Fellowship, while I had practiced landscape architecture in the Taiwan Tourism Bureau. That year changed everything, turning the abstraction of Asia as we once understood it into something relatable. Where East met West was hard to say, for they were as overlapped as a Venn diagram, as interconnected as yin and yang. We knew we were back in the West when we reached Italy, where we immersed ourselves in Rome, Florence, Venice, and smaller cities in between. In Ravenna, a UNESCO World Heritage site renowned for its early Christian mosaics, we came across San Vitale, a magnificent octagonal basilica consecrated in 547 AD. Inside, the mosaic figures of the Emperor Justinian, the Empress Theodora, and their retinue had been dazzling visitors with their vivid color for 1430 years. In a nearby mosaic shop, we fell head over heels in love with a replica of a San Vitale mosaic of Giovannina, an attendant of Theodora, garbed in a robe of green, orange, and gold, against a shimmering green and gold background. Its square tiles (technically “tessera”), each smaller than a postage stamp, each of a solid color, matched precisely those of the original. We were smitten, but it was pricey. The young man behind the sales counter figured us for two Americans and announced, “Elvis e morto.” We looked confused, so he started to gyrate and croon some Elvis until we got it. This really was the end of an era. Elvis was now mystically connected to Giovannina. We had to leave for home without her, just a postcard of her, with the price (420,000 lire) and address (Scuola de Mosaicisti, via Chartres) penned on the back. Two years passed, and we had not forgotten the mosaic. For our upcoming fifth wedding anniversary, we decided to contact the shop to see if by any chance they still had the mosaic. With the help of an Italian-born student, I typed up an airmail letter, and not knowing how else to address the envelope (I had misplaced the postcard with the address), simply drew a map with the approximate location marked by an arrow. It got there. And they still had the Giovannina. As once Elvis crooned, some things are meant to be. The expertly crated and beautifully crafted mosaic arrived two months later. Paintings can fade, but mosaic tile colors are eternal. In the ensuing four decades, Giovannina became a member of our family, eyeing us in the dining room and later in the front hall. Indeed, according to the numbers, the sixth-century Giovannina is at least a distant cousin, if not aunt or grandmother, to everyone with European forebears. As we entered the digital age, I began to think of mosaic tiles as forerunners of pixels. They each have their own identity, and yet they are part of something much bigger than themselves. The image that they collectively form is an interconnected community. Coincidentally, my mantra in life had become E. M. Forster’s exhortation, Only connect. Two decades after our year in Asia, in 1996, Life Magazine’s 60th anniversary cover boasted an image of Marilyn Monroe composed of a grid of Life Magazine covers, created by the MIT Media Lab student Rob Silvers, who had just trademarked the term photomosaic. Suddenly, photomosaics were going viral, spreading the idea of communities made of human tesserae. They particularly lent themselves to patriotic themes, such as Lady Liberty, powerfully embodying the notion of commonwealth, and one that is not so much a melting pot as a multicultural community. A decade later came the emergence of LED light panels composed of a dense grid of diodes. Each diode was like a mosaic tile, but each could change colors, and together the light panels could form images like logos. I envisioned LED wall displays with a higher calling—not to sell products, but to move people with engaging images. Three decades after our year in Taiwan 2006, I was back, pitching just that in what I called Yin Bing Men (Welcome Guests Gate), a public plaza design, to my old colleagues at the Tourism Bureau. The public plaza featured an LED photomosaic covering a wall, like an interactive mural, made up of the friendly faces of visitors and Taiwanese people. Coincidentally, our son Mallory, a software engineer at Apple, had come up with a photomosaic screensaver. It turned one’s entire photo library into tiles, collectively forming an image from the photo library. But it was not a one-off image. Heavens no. After five seconds it slowly receded into the distance to become a tile in yet another image from the photo library that took its place filling the screen for five seconds, before it too slowly receded, and so on. The community of images was interconnected in a wholly new way, and each image had its place of honor, its moment of fame, being celebrated by all the others. Each image morphed into the next by becoming immersed in it. When my son showed it to me, I was smitten again. My MacBook proudly used the photomosaic screensaver until it too receded into the distance, superseded by the usual still images. When our three children married over three years, and six grandchildren appeared over five years, Lynn and I came to realize that we had somehow launched a family diaspora spread across the land. With Covid sequestration, we connected across the generations and across space on Facetime. I had time to create an online version of our family tree that until now had only existed in my handwriting on family tree fan-charts I had started as a teenager. The digital world of a tree constructed on ancestry.com, with its branches extending back generations and built using a community’s sharing of their own trees, spoke to a sense of interconnectedness, an ecosystem. It was just a matter of time before I came to realize that a photomosaic built of tiles of family images could express the wonder of this same interconnectedness. The juxtaposition of images, whose positions are determined solely by their role in the overarching color scheme, but are otherwise random, unleashes other unexpected connections, as if neighboring tiles are engaged in a lively cross-generational conversation. Images of one’s whole life gathered in a photomosaic is like a perennial garden, landscape, a map, each tile of which is composed of digital bytes, each of them in turn composed of electric impulses interacting with silicone, in a vast cosmos of subatomic particles defying time and space. Mosaics are indeed a metaphor for one’s place-moment in the space-time continuum, not to mention the perfect metaphor for one’s family, and the human family. And for me it all started with Giovannina. © 2023 Thomas M. Paine

Years ago, as a young landscape architect, I sang the praises of New England commons, those timeless green spaces at the heart of their community. Some are even called greens, an ancient usage. In their simple splendor of stately trees towering over a bandstand or monument or flagpole, they are iconic, they evoke nostalgia, sacrifice, patriotism and reconciliation. They are quintessentially American. And they are taken for granted. I was concerned then about issues like the intrusion of paving and overhead wires. All the Litchfield Greens and Woodstock Commons and their offspring across the land, I wrote, should be revered and lovingly preserved. The slow erosion of their physical integrity should be firmly pushed back. May it never be said, as it once was said in England when commons were fenced off for the private enjoyment of the landed gentry, that The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from the goose. Recently I served on jury duty in Wrentham, Massachusetts. On our morning break, I left the county courthouse and strode across the common, musing on the privilege of serving on a jury—a privilege I admit I have sometimes overlooked—and the privilege of walking across a common, planted with majestic oaks, maples, sycamores and spruces, their fall colors today gently muted in autumn mist. I walked past a new bandstand, past a monument to Union soldiers and another to Vietnam veterans. Then I came across a monument to Helen Keller, “symbol of strength, courage and determination.” I had no idea that she had lived here. I closed my eyes and blocked my ears, to try to sense what she had sensed here a century before me. This remarkable woman was not so deaf and blind that she could not observe and know and share and speak for a society where the disadvantaged are given a chance to live a decent life and even inspire others, where the accused have the right to a public trial before a jury of their peers, and where Americans are free to walk across the common. Wrentham Common and Courthouse are America in haiku. These days we hear a lot about the erosion of common ground of a different sort. Americans have been diverse since the first colonists lived among indigenous peoples, and have only become more so. We now live in a world where to politicize is to polarize. Sadly, our diversity and polarization lull us into overlooking how much we share and agree on that we simply take for granted. Daily we crisscross the American Common without looking up at the canopy of lofty ideals that shelter us. These ideals did not just appear out of nowhere. They were planted. I feel profound gratitude for our predecessors whose actions created this sublime space. They did their work so well that they little realized how they were setting a high standard for the world. They were not egotistical, they were not exceptional people, but their collective handiwork has become known as American exceptionalism. Let us review just how much we agree on. Not to the last person, of course, but by a vast majority. We agree that we are bound together not by common ethnicity but by common ideals. That is, we share a civic definition of citizenship, not an ethnic one. We believe in the inherent goodness of most people. We believe that most of our fellow Americans are upstanding, moral citizens. We hold in highest regard our unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We believe in the right to self-determination, which by definition is free of outside interference. We agree on the system of government enshrined in our sacred Constitution, including its checks and balances and provision for fair and open elections. The extraordinary legacy of constitutions around the world that were inspired by ours makes the case for American exceptionalism like nothing else. We agree on the rule of law—and that no one is above the law. We cherish our four freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. We agree that free speech includes freedom of the press. We cherish freedom of association, and the right of peaceful assembly. We agree on the right of non-violent protest. We agree on the rights of the individual, among them the right to private property. We agree on the principles of fairness and equal opportunity although we may disagree on what that means. We—and this includes a strong majority of Republicans—are concerned that widening income inequality and plutocracy are bad for America.1 We believe in the American Dream: social mobility. We believe in the freedom to live where we want and how we want. We believe in family, although we disagree on the details. We believe that everyone deserves access to public education. We know these beliefs face challenges that test our collective will. We agree on the right to a clean environment. Despite the loud protests of climate-change deniers, most of us agree that climate change is real, and that it is possible both to protect the environment and protect jobs. We believe in patriotism, we honor heroism and military service, even if sometimes wars become quagmires. We are proud of our global leadership in innovation across so many fields of endeavor. We believe in creating an economic environment where private enterprise can flourish. We believe that the economic environment should be mostly laissez-faire. We believe that no matter how imperfect government may be, government is not always the problem: some things that it does should not be left to the private sector, but the government should always strive to do a better job. We agree that citizens in nations everywhere deserve the same, but we may disagree on how we try to advance that vision. We abhor terrorism, especially if it seeks to undermine our way of life. We agree that human rights matter in every nation. These ideals are our common wealth. How we should live up to these ideals? How do we choose between competing goods? How do we reconcile competing arguments? We may never agree on where the double standards are, or what were the mistakes made in our name, or which details bedevil us. And we will always agree on the right to disagree. Yet knowing how much we have in common, and mindful of that wonderful concept of the loyal opposition, the next time an argument comes up, let us walk across the American Common, cease with uttering false equivalencies and whataboutisms, hear each other out with empathy, talk to each other and not past each other, and give each other time to respond respectfully. If we do that, we will slowly rebuild lost trust. © 2017 Thomas M. Paine [1] http://prospect.org/article/most-americans-are-liberal-even-if-they-don’t-know-it, November 29, 2017

Years ago, talking about one’s ancestors was not done, except maybe at Thanksgiving or some other family occasion, but nothing to boast about outside one’s kin. So none of my friends suspected that I was deep into my family tree, way beyond my siblings. Names and dates were a start, but pretty soon I wanted to know what these forebears had done with their lives. Best of all was reading their own words in letters or diaries that thankfully no one had thrown out. I loved family portraits, old photographs, daguerreotypes, cartes de visite. If an ancestral house survived into our world, I had to go see it. I was born nostalgic. My nostalgia was purely aesthetic, a longing to visit, but not be forever confined to, a lost physical world. Places and things shrouded with oldness, like 17th century saltbox houses, the Wayside Inn, New England greens, country roads bordered by stone walls, and ancient elms and oaks, were sacred, and I was a pilgrim. When old places got demolished, I took it personally. I became a landscape preservationist decades before the words environmental sustainability suggested a different kind of nostalgia: we long for a return to a proper balance of nature. That is a nostalgia for a past truth. Alas, our world is beset with irreversible climate change and Covid disruption. We can forget going back to cooler days, and maybe even a Covid-free world. We will adapt to a Brave New World. Looking at lost worlds through rose-tinted glasses can still entertain and soothe us, but now we know how much it deceives us. Nostalgia for what used to be called a golden age needs a reality check. Halcyon is dead. That bygone era was not what it is cracked up to be. If we take those glasses off, and look at the past dispassionately, we can experience fraught history with a deeper appreciation for what our forebears faced. Now more than ever, we are reminded of Faulkner’s apt observation that the past is never dead, it is not even past. That is usually applied to the persistence of evil, but it applies no less to the remarkable persistence of decency, indeed, the arc of the moral universe. So if nostalgia is not what is used to be, that is all to the good. An honest look at the flawed world of former generations actually gives us hope and encourages us to persist. Henry Louis Gates’ Finding Your Roots on PBS demonstrates the widespread interest in family history and rediscovering family stories, balm or bombshell. Tell-all genealogy is coming of age. If a child was born only two months after his parents’ marriage in 1770, no big deal anymore. If an ancestor of European descent has married a Native American, no more need to hide it as somehow improper. Nowadays, some of us are eager to celebrate the fact. Ancestry.com is now big business, with $1 billion in annual revenue: the private equity firm Blackstone acquired it in 2020 for $4.7 billion. Ancestry.com TV ads show young people of all the ethnicities connecting with their past. People are swabbing their saliva to learn their DNA, explore their ethnicity, and discover their inner diversity. The West is rightly alarmed that the misplaced nationalist nostalgia of Russian and Chinese irredentism might trigger World War Three. What would their Russian and Chinese ancestors say? But weaponized nostalgia should raise a red flag anywhere. Here in America, the envy of the world, we are divided. Some of us reject the science of climate change and vaccination and want to do a U-turn on the arc of the moral universe away from equal access to justice, toward a misplaced nostalgia for tribalism. Some things are apparently worth fighting for in the good-old-fashioned way—brawling and shooting. Conversely, some demand a perfect union, with their notion of perfect justice realized right now, going for woke. Most radically, some demand that reparations be paid by our tax dollars for righting the wrongs perpetrated by countless white males of yore. Civility be damned. Both sides need to take a deep breath and look at how the human species has actually evolved. We can shake our heads in unison at many past norms that are thankfully in decline or gone for good at least in the West, like beheading, scalping, and lynching. On the other hand, gun violence is surging. Yet too many of us have the arrogance to assume that we, in this generation, in this moment, are finally able to grasp, as previous generations never could, a perfect understanding of what is right, what is wrong, what matters. As if we are in the End-State at last and forever after. We need to trade in our hubris for some humility. At the very least, we need to be reminded that others in previous generations had said the same, that their milestone was where all human progress was meant to stop. The availability heuristic—our tendency to be swayed by information that comes to mind easily—is no help. And that flawed thinking also applies to the originalists who claim to have explained, for all time, what our ancestors understood by the Second Amendment. It accords gun rights to “the people” in “a well-regulated militia.” Let’s remember that the only arms that the Founding Fathers had seen were single-shot pistols and muzzle-loading muskets, not revolvers, and certainly not AK-47s or hand-held nuclear devices or whatever else will weaponize us before long. Let’s also remember that collective rights and individual rights are not synonymous. Most of our ancestors went along with the norms of their day, just as most of us do now. To blame members of past generations for failing to imagine how future generations would come to look back on, say, the intolerance of their times, is harsh. But to thank them for what they got right seems like something we can get right. Some members of previous generations went to extremes, and we must call the perpetrators out. My perspective is uninformed by what it is like to be descended from a KKK lyncher or slave trafficker or terrorist or Nazi, but anyone who feels nostalgic for such inhumanity should seek help, and find life after hate. That would be heroic. Thankfully, other members of past generations were on the right side of history. If you have been interested in ancestry all your life, by the time you become a grandparent, as I have been lucky to become, you have had time to delve deeper than names and dates. You may even have found pure gold—a deeply moving story of an ancestor’s amazing pluck in the face of the challenges of her time, doing what we today would call the right thing, despite the mainstream gainsayers of their time. If they acted with great courage or overcame intolerance, they are worthy of gaining newfound appreciation from a wider audience than descendants and historians. They have remained unsung heroes for too long. They belong to all of us, inspiring us to take heart and take action as we face the dangers and hatreds of our own time. We have entered an era in which those whom we choose to honor in public space as heroes must now pass the test of whether their actions sought to undermine what we now consider to be basic humanity. If they did so, then their continued presence in public must include a disclaimer. There are degrees of slavery enablement and enslavement complicity, and the conversation is just beginning. Among my ancestors, I find such imperfections. A 17th c. forebear owned a slave whom he planned to set free but a transaction stood in the way and he never got it done. An 18th c. forebear had a house-slave, Cato, who volunteered twice to fight in the French & Indian War. I wish I knew more about his life. Cato is a hero. My great grandfather’s attitude toward Blacks matured greatly during the time that he served in uniform on the Union side in the Civil War. As the freed men of color under his command proved themselves on the battlefield, he laid to rest some tiresome old epithets, and started referring to them simply as men. Indeed, they won Medals of Honor. When the war was over, he worked to assure the Black vote in North Carolina, where he was stationed. The men under his command had taught him something. His story is worth sharing. If you reach age seventy-five, you will have lived one quarter or even one third of the history of this young country. You may come to feel that your ancestors did not live as long ago as you once thought, when you were twenty, and had lived only a tenth of the span of the nation. Our forebears are more present than we realize, and more relatable. If only our ancestors were here to weigh in, they might right a few wrongs in our perceptions of them, and remind us about disruption of yore. But since they cannot make it, our responsibility is to try to hear what they once said. Not literally of course, but through circumstantial evidence. The standouts among them who faced challenges as daunting as our own might truly have answers, if only we would listen to them. © 2022 Thomas M. Paine