Richard Auffrey tells their story - at first driven by the fact that discrimination meant there were few other jobs available to Chinese immigrants here.

The folks at the Boston City Archives wonder if you can place this scene. See it larger.

On Memorial Day, 1886, Civil War veterans from Boston and New York gathered at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Boston Common. Read more.

No, not Jan. 6, but May 22, 1856, when US Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat US Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a gutta-percha stick on the floor of the Senate, after Sumner had insulted the family honor by declaring that Brooks' uncle, a South Carolina senator, had a mistress, "the harlot, Slavery."

The Ephemera Society of America has an overview of the sign work of Vincent Zarrilli, who made hundreds of black-on-yellow stencilled signs protesting what would become the Big Dig, along with the "Dukakis Artery rats" he said would flood the city during construction, and promoting his alternative for a "Bay Bypass" - basically a double-decker bridge across Boston Harbor, from Dorchester to Charlestown. Read more.

You never know what you'll find just lying or blowing around the streets of Boston. Take this thank-you note, written by Toni Peabody, or, as she was known more formally back in the day, Mrs. Endicott Peabody (or perhaps even Mrs. Endicott "Chub" Peabody), i.e., she was married to the governor of the Commonwealth. Read more.

The folks at the Boston City Archives wonder if you can place this scene. See it larger.

A group of ten citizens - six of whom live in the same West End building - last week sued the Boston Landmarks Commission as part of a bid to save three buildings left over from the destruction of the West End that Mass. General wants to raze so it can build a 14-story clinical center along Cambridge Street. Read more.

The Guardian looks at the history of the book, which started in the Boston area: The clitoris, pain and pap smears: how Our Bodies, Ourselves redefined women’s health.