J.L. Bell recounts the battle in 1775 between Abigail Adams and a tenant who was refusing to leave her Braintree house even as she was trying to make room for a family from Boston, which, as you might realize from the date, was at the front lines of the burgeoning Revolution - and while her husband John was in Philadelphia for the second Continental Congress.

Today's news that the Washington NFL team is finally changing its name (after FedEx and other sponsors vowed to walk away) ends an 88-year racist streak that started at Fenway Park. Read more.

Greg Cook has the details of the vote to remove the statue that shows Lincoln standing over a half-naked now former slave.

Corrinne Bourgoin wonders: Read more.

The State Library of Massachusetts recounts the struggle to get the Robert Gould Shaw memorial built across from the State House - including an effort in the 1980s to add the names of the Black soldiers who fell in battle with Shaw added to the names of the white officers whose names had initially been the only ones inscribed there.

The opening of the Lechmere viaduct across the mouth of the Charles in 1912 meant a dramatic reduction in the time it took trolleys to cross the river, from ten down to just three minutes - except when a cargo schooner came through and the trolleys had to stop for the viaduct's drawbridge to go up to let it through. Read more.

As long as white people are getting woke, they need to do something about that cringe-worthy statue sort of hidden away in Park Square that shows a benevolent Lincoln waving away slavery on top of a half-naked black man on his knees - like get Mayor Walsh to stick the thing in a warehouse somewhere, Tory Bullock exclaims: Read more.

Jake at HUB History took this photo today as crowds gathered at City Hall Plaza for the latest vigil and march. You would think a National Guard unit in Massachusetts, of all places, would know the significance of the large circle in front of the Old State House and not park an armed soldier and battle-ready Humvee right where authorities killed a black man, triggering events that ended with a revolution.

Juliette Kayyem, who has been writing a lot of late about the current pandemic, reports on how the discovery of an old photo in a space nobody in her family knew about until they opened a bathroom ceiling due to water damage led her on a search that ended with her connecting online with the great niece of a woman whose daughter lived in the house until she died there in the third wave of the 1918-19 flu pandemic.