May 15th, 2024 | Boston, Changes, Education, Genealogy, General, Indigenous Peoples, Memory
Revolutionary Spaces leads with its mission statement: “Open History. Enter Democracy.” Today that phrase resonates as strongly as it might have at the establishment of our Union. Based in the Old State House and Old South Meeting House, the organization presides over...
January 9th, 2024 | Education, General, literature and poetry, Politics, Popular Culture
I now have my guidance for 2024: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. My goal is to arrive at Wednesday, November 6, assured that Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason have been returned to the Kingdom of Wisdom. I want to know that the Demons populating the Mountains of...
November 21st, 2023 | Education, Friends, General, Memory, Time Passes
Let us now praise those who keep their ephemera in immaculate order, fully identified and thoughtfully edited. Okay most of us aren’t people of particular cultural or historical import. Our scraps of paper, tchotchkes, photographs and whatnot are unlikely to be the...
October 11th, 2023 | Education, Europe, General, Memory, Politics, Society at Large
I expected the village of Žiežmariai to be a quick stop. My target was the church, St James the Apostle, where so many Tomkuses had been baptized, married and seen off to the hereafter. The wooden prayer house those ancestors would have known was replaced in 1924 by...
June 28th, 2023 | Architecture and Design, Education, General, visual arts
Marcia Gayle Snee is a wonderful artist and dear friend, so when she said her work had been accepted into a juried exhibition at Harford Community College’s Chesapeake Gallery, I was thrilled for her. Curious, also, about just what might be in the exhibition....
March 25th, 2023 | Education, General, visual arts
One pleasant morning, in the late 1980s, I started my work as the Education Curator at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa. The phone rang; it appeared we had a problem with an upcoming tour of elementary school children who were also scheduled for a studio-art...