Stories Featured

First National Women’s Rights Convention

First National Women’s Rights Convention was held in Worcester in 1850 organized by Abby Kelley Foster (pictured). Worcester played a major role at the center of radical abolitionist activity and social reform.

Robert Goddard – Father of Modern Rocketry  

Born in Worcester, MA, Robert Goddard attended WPI and Clark University. Goddard invented the liquid fueled rocket that he launched in 1926 in a field in Auburn. Dr. Laurie Leshin, a rocket scientist and former NASA official, worked in a building named in Goddard’s honor, is WPI’s current president.

Dr. Laurie Leshin, President, Worcester Polytechnic Institute will talk about how Goddard’s experiments and vision impacts space exploration today. Dr. Leshin served as the deputy director of NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, where she was responsible for oversight of NASA’s future human spaceflight programs and activities. Leshin also worked as the director of science and exploration at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

In Their Shirtsleeves

The exhibit at Worcester Historical Museum, In Their Shirtsleeves, tells the ongoing story of the innovators, workers, and investors who made industry the story of Worcester. More than one hundred years of diversity and invention have been the hallmarks of Worcester industry since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century.

Smiley Face

The international icon, and now emoji, Smiley Face was born in 1963 in Worcester at the talented hands of Harvey Ball. Smiley is everywhere. From Forrest Gump, to major retailers, to hundreds of thousands of novelty items, Smiley has made an impact worldwide and now has a “World Smile Day.”

Worcester Revolution of 1774

The American Revolution actually started in Worcester, seven months before Lexington and Concord, on Sept. 6, 1774 when more than 4,000 militia men from Worcester County gathered on Main Street to force the British magistrates from county government in a non-violent act.

Photo courtesy of sean/flickr

Authors Interviewed

Robert Smith, Author of Keeping the Republic: Ideology and Early American Diplomacy

Robert Smith, Author and Assistant Professor in History and Political Science at Worcester State University

How did the ideology that inspired the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution translate into foreign policy?

John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton each struggled with this question as they encountered foreign powers.

Jim Dempsey, Author of The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer

Jim Dempsey, Author and Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and writer-in-residence at Bancroft School in Worcester.

Scofield Thayer was gatekeeper and guide for the literary modernism movement. His editorial curation introduced the ideas of literary modernism to America and gave American artists a new audience in Europe. Thayer suffered from schizophrenia and faded from public life.

Ousmane Power-Greene, Author of Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle Against the Colonization Movement

Ousmane Power-Greene is an Author and Associate Professor of History at Clark University

Against Wind and Tide tells the story of African Americans’ battle against the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816 with the intention to return free blacks to its colony Liberia. Although ACS members considered free black colonization in Africa a benevolent enterprise, most black leaders rejected the ACS, fearing that the organization sought forced removal.

Edward O'Donnell, Author of Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age

Edward O’Donnell, Department of History at the College of the Holy Cross

America’s remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the nineteenth century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest. Edward T. O’Donnell’s exploration of George’s life and times merges labor, ethnic, intellectual, and political history to illuminate the early militant labor movement in New York during the Gilded Age.

Janette Greenwod, Author of First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862-1900

Janette T. Greenwood, Author and Professor of History at Clark University

A narrative that offers a rare glimpse into the lives of African American men, women, and children on the cusp of freedom, First Fruits of Freedom chronicles one of the first collective migrations of blacks from the South to the North during and after the Civil War. Even in the North, white sympathy did not continue after the Civil War.