Local writers meet weekly to share support, suggestions and criticism. 

Local writers meet weekly to share support, suggestions and criticism. 

Local writers meet weekly to share support, suggestions and criticism. 

Local writers meet weekly to share support, suggestions and criticism. 

Local writers meet weekly to share support, suggestions and criticism. 

Rare book expert Kenneth Gloss of Cambridge's Brattle Bookshop will give a talk about rare books and appraise items. The Brattle Bookshop is one of America's oldest and largest book shops.

This presentation is a one hour slide lecture that chronicles the saga the two immigrant Italian anarchists Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The story begins with the robberies in Bridgewater and Braintree Massachusetts and then the famous trial at Dedham is examined and the seven years of attempts to get a new trial are recounted. Lastly the worldwide protests and demonstations will be discussed and then the finally the last days of Sacco and Vanzetti will be highlighted with a vivid description of their sentencing and execution.

Irish Need Not Apply is a 90 minute slide lecture in which the many facets of the early Irish experience in Boston are examined.

The lecture begins with a look at the evidence there is of the Irish who were brought over unwillingly as indentured servants in the mid 17th Century. Then the first real migration of the Irish in 1718 - the arrival of the Scot-Irish or the "Ulster Irish" will be discussed. Next we will explore the slow pre-famine trickle of Irish Catholic immigrants coming into Boston as well as the corresponding increase in Anti-Irish/Catholic sentiment within Boston beginning with the notorious Pope's Day celebrations and then the discussion will turn to the burning of the Ursuline Convent in 1834 in Charlestown and the Broad Street Riot of 1837.

In the third quarter of the lecture the massive wave of immigration into Boston after the Great Potato Famine will be examined with respect to the condition of the new arrivals, the neighborhoods they settled, how they banded together, the kinds of work they did to survive and their eventual assimilation into American culture.

Finally there will be a discussion of the rise of the Irish within the sphere of Boston politics and the emergence of the "Ward Boss." Short vignettes on such Irish political leaders such as Patrick Collins, Hugh O'Brien, Martin Lomasney, Patrick J. Kennedy, John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald and of course the old "Rascal King" himself James Michael Curley will be given.