17th Century hysteria
From the show “Witch Panic!: Massachusetts Before Salem’’ (witch trials), at the Springfield (Mass.) Museums through Nov. 2
The curator writes:
“Discover a time when people accused of being witches walked among us. Forty years before the infamous trials in Salem, fear gripped the small settlement of Springfield, Massachusetts. Neighbors whispered about Mary and Hugh Parsons as rumors simmered for years, exploding into hysteria that eventually consumed the town. Witch Panic! dives into the daily lives of the Parsons, examining the circumstances that led to their 1651 accusation and arrest for witchcraft.
“Learn about the folklore surrounding witches, like their association with broomsticks, black cats, and cauldrons, or design your own ghoulish familiar, a small creature believed to help witches.’’
A bit of Iowa
Connecticut Valley in Sunderland, Mass., looking south toward Amherst (high buildings at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
— Photo by enFrantzDale
“Between Amherst and the Connecticut River lies a little bit of Iowa — some of New England’s more favored farmland. The summer and fall of 1982, Judith bicycled, alone and with Jonathan, down narrow roads between field of asparagus and corn, and she saw the constructed landscape with new eyes, not just looking at houses but searching for ones that might serve as models for her own. She liked the old farmhouses best, their porches and white clapboarded walls.’’
— From House (1982), by Tracy Kidder
Most educated, but might drown
Harvard master's degree gowns
Edited from a Boston Guardian report.
The ZIP code in America with the highest percentage of highly educated people?
If you guessed any of the ZIP codes associated with Harvard or MIT, you guessed wrong.
According to data recently published in The Boston Business Journal, the country’s most educated ZIP code is 02210, which encompasses the Seaport district. 93 percent of its residents have a college degree or higher.
In terms of bright ZIP codes in Massachusetts, the Seaport is followed by:
• Wellesley Hills (02481)
• Waban (02468)
• Newton Highlands (02461)
• Lincoln (01773)
• Dover (02030)
• Brookline (02445)
• Cambridge (02138)
• Lexington (02420)
• Lexington (02421).
Other Boston ZIP codes on the list are 02215 (Fenway/Kenmore Square) at number 11, 02114 (Beacon Hill/West End) at 18 and 02113 (North End) at 24.
If you live anywhere else, study harder.
Speaking to fantasies about under-represented cultures
“CONERICOT” (paper, cardboard and glue, by Justin Favela, in his show “Do You See What I See?’’ at the New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art, through June 22.
The curator explains:
“Brilliant colors, tissue paper, cardboard, and untold stories converge in “Do You See What I See?’’ Nestled throughout the galleries, this exhibition is an exploration of the artist's quest to see himself and the vibrant Latinx community represented within the museum's esteemed collection.
“CONERICOT,’’ Favela’s piñata-inspired mural, draws inspiration from depictions of Latin America from the permanent collection. His immersive installation alludes to the beauty of those landscapes, as well as the fantasies that often color Americans' perceptions of these under-represented cultures.’’
‘For one song more’
Wood Thrush
As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music — hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went —
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.
“Come In,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Sneaking ‘under the heavy door of learning’
Bronze statue of Dr. Seuss and his character “The Cat in the Hat” outside the Geisel Library at the University of California at San Diego.
Ad done by the author and artist who became the famous Dr. Seuss that ran in the July 14, 2028 issue of The New Yorker.
“Dr Seuss, the creation and the creator, was unlike most adults. He remembered. He retained a sense of the absurd, including the absurdity of the idea that growing up means losing your humor. So, while too many adults spend their time teaching children the seriousness of the situation, he managed to sneak under the heavy door of learning, asking, “Do you like green eggs and ham?”
— Columnist Ellen Goodman (born 1941), on Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991), aka Dr. Seuss. He grew up in Springfield, Mass., and graduated from Dartmouth College.
—
Robert Whitcomb: Morgan’s book says a lot about America
This first appeared in GoLocal24.com
“Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations on the rear window of their automobiles.’’
-- Paul Fussell (1924-2012), American historian
In reading William Morgan’s brilliantly written and gorgeously illustrated new book, Academia – Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States, you might recall Winston Churchill’s famous line: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.’’
I thought of this looking back at an institution I attended, a then-all-boys boarding school in Connecticut called The Taft School, founded by Horace Taft, the brother of President William Howard Taft. Its mostly Collegiate Gothic buildings made some of us students feel we were in a hybrid of a medieval church and a fort. This, I think, encouraged a certain personal rigor and seriousness of purpose, amidst the usual adolescent cynicism and jokiness.
The style originally reflected a certain Anglophilia embraced by some American nouveau riche as they accumulated fortunes in a rapidly expanding economy. Rich donors, and the institutional architects they got hired, wanted to create buildings evoking kind of elite, aristocratic culture at certain old Protestant colleges and universities and private boarding schools. (Many of the latter were modeled on English boarding schools catering to the aristocracy.) There was often a lot of snobbery involved. But the style spread to other institutions, too, including businesses and government offices, around the country.
Some of this included fantastical (to the point of silliness) ornamentation and instant aging of stonework to suggest the wear of centuries on what were brand-new buildings, perhaps most flamboyantly at Yale. Get out those gargoyles!
This book is about much more than architecture. It’s also about personalities, many of them colorful, class, including social climbing, economics, politics and many other things.
One of the book’s joys is Mr. Morgan’s footnotes, which besides adding to the understanding of the main text, are often very entertaining, sometimes even hilarious.
Robert Whitcomb is editor of New England Diary.
Tragic and frequent
“The Tragedy of War,’’ by Craig Masten. The painting won the New England Watercolor Society’s first prize in the organization’s 2023 New England Regional Exhibition.
Two business questions
Centreville Bank Stadium in early 2025, shortly before construction was completed.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
A question about the new Centreville Bank Stadium, in Pawtucket, home of the Rhode Island FC soccer team, is whether that it was sold out on May 3, for the team’s first home match, suggests that it will be a long-term success. Or were many of the about 10,700 attendees mostly there out of curiosity to see the pretty place, which will cost Rhode Island taxpayers around $132 million over 30 years? Americans’ increasing interest in the nearest thing to the world sport will help, but the seats are expensive – from $34 to $436 -- and baseball, football and basketball are deeply embedded in the national psyche.
Hasbro’s notably unpretentious headquarters, in the old mill town of Pawtucket.
Poor Hasbro, with so much of its manufacturing in China, has its hands full trying to adapt to Trump’s volatile tariff policies. Executives of the toy and entertainment giant hope to be making fewer than 40 percent of its products in China by 2026, down from about 50 percent now. It will not be moving much manufacturing to the U.S., but rather will seek cheap labor and special favors in other Asian nations or maybe in Africa or Latin America.
A big question in Rhode Island is whether the cost of the tariff trauma will lead Hasbro to decide not to move to Boston but rather to stay in Rhode Island, where most costs are cheaper and there are many designers, in part because of RISD. To get it to stay, will state politicians promise it tax and other incentives that would deplete those that could be offered to smaller companies to stay in, or move to, the Ocean State?
UVM researchers strive to reduce honeybee mortality
Beekeeper at work
— Photo by Ich -
“Skep Sisters” (encaustic painting), by Nancy Whitcomb.
Edited from a New England Council report
“The University of Vermont recently released a study offering hope for stemming the recent debilitating losses of bees in the country and suggestions for breeding more disease-resistant colonies. Beekeepers across the U.S. lost over 55 percent of their colonies in the past year, the highest loss rate reported since records started being kept, in 2011.
“The Vermont Bee Lab at UVM, led by Samantha Alger, works with beekeepers to breed ‘hardy, disease-resistant’ honeybee colonies by using a test (UBeeO) developed by researchers at the University of North Caroline at Greensboro to help identify ‘hygienic’ behaviors in colonies….
“The Vermont Bee Lab found that the UBeeO testing method detects more pathogen loads than was previously thought, letting UVM researchers use the test to better analyze methods to encourage disease-resistant colonies.
“‘It’s definitely more desirable for a beekeeper to have bees that are better adapted at taking care of their diseases themselves rather than using chemical treatments and interventions to try to reduce these pathogen loads, which of course may have negative impacts on the bees. … UBeeO has been known to identify colonies that are able to better resist Varroa mites, but it had not been used to look at other pest or pathogens. We found this new assay could be used to identify colonies that are resistant to these other stressors,’ said Algers.’’
Mosaic master
From Sandra K. Basile’s (video) mosaic show at the Providence Art Club through May 29.
Rick Baldoz: The long history of America’s politically motivated deportations
Cartoon by Archibald B. Chapin in the South Bend News-Times of Nov. 8, 1919
From The Conversation, except for image above
Rick Baldoz is an associate professor of American Studies at Brown University.
He does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations.
PROVIDENCE
The recent deportation orders targeting foreign students in the U.S. have prompted a heated debate about the legality of these actions. The Trump administration made no secret that many individuals were facing removal because of their pro-Palestinian advocacy.
In recent months, the State Department has revoked hundreds of visas of foreign students with little explanation. On April 25, 2025, the administration restored the legal status of many of those students, but warned that the reprieve was only temporary.
Because of their tenuous legal status in the U.S., immigrant activists are vulnerable to a government seeking to stifle dissent.
Critics of the Trump administration have challenged the legality of these removal orders, arguing that they violate constitutionally protected rights, including freedom of speech and due process.
The administration asserts that the executive branch has nearly absolute authority to remove immigrants. The White House has cited legislation passed during the peak of the nation’s Cold War hysteria, like the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which expanded the government’s deportation powers.
I’m a historian of immigration, U.S. empire and Asian American studies. The current removal orders targeting student activists echo America’s long and lamentable past of jailing and expelling immigrants because of their race or what they say or believe – or all three.
The arrest of Turkish graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk by Department of Homeland Security agents in Somerville, Mass., on March 25, 2025.
The United States’ current deportation process traces its roots to the late 19th century as the nation moved to exercise federal control of immigration.
The impetus for this shift was anti-Chinese racism, which reached a fever pitch during this period, culminating in the passage of laws that restricted Chinese immigration.
The influx of Chinese immigrants to the West Coast during the mid-to-late 19th century, initially fueled by the California Gold Rush, spurred the rise of an influential nativist movement that accused Chinese immigrants of stealing jobs. It also claimed that they posed a cultural threat to American society due to their racial otherness.
The Geary Act of 1892 required Chinese living in the U.S to register with the federal government or face deportation.
The Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of these statutes in 1893 in the case of Fong Yue Ting v. United States. Three plaintiffs claimed that anti-Chinese legislation was discriminatory, violated constitutional protections prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure, and contravened due process and equal protection guarantees.
The Supreme Court affirmed the Geary Act’s deportation procedures, formulating a novel legal precept known as the plenary power doctrine that remains a key tenet of U.S. immigration law today.
Court confirms the law
The doctrine included two key assertions.
First, the federal government’s authority to exclude and deport aliens was an inherent and unqualified feature of American sovereignty. Second, immigration enforcement was the exclusive domain of the congressional and executive branches that were charged with protecting the nation from foreign threats.
The court also ruled that the deportation of immigrants in the country lawfully was a civil, rather than criminal matter, which meant that constitutional protections like due process did not apply.
The government ramped up deportations in the aftermath of World War I, fueled by wartime xenophobia. American officials singled out foreign-born radicals for deportation, accusing them of fomenting disloyalty.
The front page of the Ogden Standard, from Ogden City, Utah, on Nov. 8, 1919, announcing the arrest and planned deportation of ‘alien Reds.’ Library of Congress
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who ordered mass arrests of alleged communists, pledged to “tear out the radical seeds that have entangled Americans in their poisonous theories” and remove “alien criminals in this country who are directly responsible for spreading the unclean doctrines of Bolshevism.”
This period marked a new era of removals carried out primarily on ideological grounds. Jews and other immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were disproportionately targeted, highlighting the cultural affinities between anti-radicalism and racial and ethnic chauvinism.
‘Foreign’ agitators
The campaign to root out so-called subversives living in the United States reached its apex during the 1940s and 1950s, supercharged by figures like anti-communist crusader Sen. Joseph McCarthy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
The specter of foreign agitators contaminating American political culture loomed large in these debates. Attorney General Tom Clark testified before Congress in 1950 that 91.4 percent of the Communist Party USA’s leadership were “either foreign stock or married to persons of foreign stock.”
Congress passed a series of laws during this period requiring that subversive organizations register with the government. They also expanded the executive branch’s power to deport individuals whose views were deemed “prejudicial to national security,” blurring the lines between punishing people for unlawful acts – such as espionage and bombings – and what the government considered unlawful beliefs, such as Communist Party membership.
While deporting foreign-born radicals had popular support, the banishment of immigrants for their political beliefs raised important constitutional questions.
Harry Bridges, a West Coast labor leader, and his daughter, Jacqueline, 14, as they listen to proceedings during Bridges’ deportation hearing in San Francisco in July 1939. Underwood Archives/Getty Images
Prosecution or persecution?
In a landmark case in 1945, Wixon v. Bridges, the Supreme Court did assert a check on the power of the executive branch to deport someone without a fair hearing.
The case involved Harry Bridges, Australian-born president of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union. Bridges was a left-wing union leader who orchestrated a number of successful strikes on the West Coast. Under his leadership, the union also took progressive positions on civil rights and U.S. militarism.
The decision in the case hinged on whether the government could prove that Bridges had been a member of the Communist Party, which would have made him deportable under the Smith Act, which proscribed membership in the Communist Party.
Since no proof of Bridges’s membership existed, the government relied on dodgy witnesses and assertions that Bridges was aligned with the party because he shared some of its political positions. Accusations of “alignment” with controversial political organizations are similar to the charges made against foreign students currently at risk of deportation by the Trump administration.
The Supreme Court vacated Bridges’s deportation order, declaring that the government’s claim of “affiliation” with the Communist Party was too vaguely defined and amounted to guilt by association.
As the excesses and abuses of the McCarthy era came to light, they invited greater scrutiny about the dangers of unchecked executive power. Some of the more draconian statutes enacted during the Cold War, like the Smith Act, have been overhauled. The federal courts have toggled back and forth between narrow and liberal interpretations of the Constitution’s applicability to immigrants facing deportation – shifts that reflect competing visions of American nationhood and the boundaries of liberal democracy.
From union leaders to foreign students
There are some striking parallels between the throttling of civil liberties during the Cold War and President Trump’s crusade against foreign students exercising venerated democratic freedoms.
Foreign students appear to have replaced the immigrant union leaders of the 1950s as the targets of government repression. Presumptions of guilt based on hyperbolic claims of affiliation with the Communist Party have been replaced by allegations of alignment with Hamas.
As in the past, these invocations of national security offer the pretext for the government’s efforts to stifle dissent and to mandate political conformity.
Intersection of painting and ecology
“We Are Always Growning,’’ by Stephanie Manzi, in the group show “Spring 2025 Solo Exhibition,’’ at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester through June 22.
She says in her artist statement:
“As I paint, draw and collage, marks collide into bands of color and form that map, frame, measure, separate and merge disparate elements. Information is revealed and concealed into new configurations through processed based systems of repetition and recycling. In the studio, I grapple with concepts of landscape in relation to painting and eco-theory through environmental interaction. Within landscape and ecology, deeply imposed structures around nature create distance between ourselves and our understanding of the natural world. Painting can mirror the same distancing. It creates a window, an object, and conceptually separate pictorial space that can feel detached from the viewers reality. Therefore, the experience of painting and conversations within ecology are similar; both beautiful complex, dark and concerning, hopeful and light. My work straddles similar contradictions: permission and limitation, play and serious inquiry, accumulation and loss, structure and the unbound.
“As a painter, I exist in both worlds. I have no direct solutions, only recorded personal observations of my environments. My hope is that as the work continues to develop, my interest with the intersection of painting and ecology can create a space of conversation, joy, connection and inquiry.’’
Haverhill’s socialist experiment
Text excerpted from Historic New England
The 1890s were turbulent years in New England—and Haverhill, Massachusetts, was no exception. Following the financial panic of 1893, the ‘Queen Slipper City’ quickly felt the effects of the national economic decline.
“At that time, Haverhill’s booming factories produced ten percent of the country’s shoes, employing a workforce of over 11,000 men and women engaged in cutting, stitching, lasting, trimming, and packing at over 230 factories. When the economy struggled, however, consumer demand for shoes decreased. An unexpected increase in the cost of leather cut further into profit margins, and employers quickly turned to several austerity measures to recoup their losses. They initiated a wave of lockouts, firings, and unfair ‘ironclad’ contracts while allowing working conditions to decline, leading to a massive general strike in 1895 in which over 3,000 shoe workers left the factories in protest.
“The strike was a warning for the local government. Haverhill’s workers wanted more for themselves and their families. They wanted better alignment with national unions, and they wanted the local government to recognize their needs more responsively.’’
Chris Powell: Public schooling danger exceeds home schooling’s in Conn.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
At the recent week's hearing at the Connecticut Capitol on false claims of home-schooling that conceal child abuse, state officials stressed that they weren't accusing home-schoolers of doing anything wrong. They were only asserting the need to check periodically on children who have been removed from public schools -- to make sure that they are indeed being home-schooled and not being abused, as a few supposedly home-schooled children in Connecticut have been abused in recent years, as a boy in Waterbury recently was reported to have been imprisoned at home and abused for decades.
Home-schooling parents took offense at the hearing anyway. Of course home schoolers are not the problem, but there is a problem with false claims of home schooling, and home schoolers should acknowledge it. At present no one in authority in Connecticut checks on children who don't attend public school.
Unfortunately there is a far bigger problem of child neglect and abuse involving public schooling, but it has not yet been acknowledged by state child-protection and education officials, the governor, and state legislators.
The solution to the danger demonstrated by the Waterbury case and others is obvious, and the acting state child advocate, Christina Ghio has articulated it. Ghio wants state law to require parents each year to show proof of enrollment for children said to be in private school and, for home-schooled children, to demonstrate to the state each year their academic progress and safety at home.
The far bigger problem is that no one in authority checks on the academic progress and safety at home of most children in public school.
For if annual academic testing to prove achievement is a good idea for home-schooled students, why isn't it already in effect for public school students?
Connecticut gives its public-school students very few standardized tests, and none is used to determine advancement from grade to grade and graduation. That is, all public education in Connecticut is based on social promotion, and, as a result, for years the occasional national standardized testing done in the state has shown that most students perform far below grade level in English and math and never master high school work before being given diplomas.
Indeed, as the Yankee Institute's Marc E. Fitch reported in January, many school systems in Connecticut, including Hartford's, New Haven's and Waterbury's, actually prohibit teachers from giving failing grades even where students learn nothing and have seldom attended class.
Additionally, nearly 20 percent of public school students in Connecticut are classified as chronically absent, missing 10 percent or more of their classes. The rate is much higher in the cities. Chronic absenteeism in New Haven's high schools recently reached 50 percent.
Unless it is caused by a student's illness or disability, chronic absenteeism is child neglect if not abuse at home. So is failure to learn. But there is no punishment of parents for it, just coddling and coaxing of those who fail their responsibility. Sometimes that coddling and coaxing works for a while, and absenteeism is reduced, and sometimes it doesn't. No matter.
Last September the Connecticut Mirror interviewed a recent Hartford Public High School graduate who confessed that she had just been graduated though she remained illiterate. The city's school superintendent and the state education commissioner promised investigations but have reported nothing and seem to expect the case to be forgotten.
Of course because of their lack of parenting and living in poverty, many public school students get into trouble. More public school students lose their lives to drugs and crime than home-schooled and supposedly home-schooled students lose theirs to neglect and abuse at home. But state government considers the worsening failure of public education to be the natural order of things, and it very much wants everyone to worry about home schooling instead.
For worrying about home schooling will distract from the real catastrophe of child neglect and abuse and public education, for which state government is directly responsible but about which no hearings will ever be held.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Creative destruction?
The vast United Shoe Machinery Corp. plant in Beverly, Mass., was closed in 1989.
The One Day
“There are ways to get rich: Find an old corporation,
self-insured, with capital reserves. Borrow
to buy: Then dehire managers; yellow-slip maintenance;
pay public relations to explain how winter is summer….’’
From “The One Day,’’ by New Hampshire-based poet Donald Hall (1928-1918).
But nothing gold can stay
“Fenway Dusk” (oil on wood panel with gold leaf), by Jim Connelly. The painting was recently sold at the show at the Copley Society of Art, Boston, entitled “Small Works: Continuum,’’ which runs through July 3.