Few people have lived through such earth-changing times; journalist John Reed famously wrote about “ten days that shook the world” in reference to the Russian Revolution, which he and Louise Bryant both observed first-hand; but before that, they...
The long line of Whorf fishermen and sea captains goes back to John Whorf, born in Provincetown in 1760. Thomas Ryder Whorf Jr, who lived between 1815 and 1887, built the famous 400-foot-long Whorf’s Wharf (apparently no one thought anything of the odd...
In the late 19th century, summer art colonies were becoming increasingly popular. Charles Hawthorne selected Provincetown as the site for his summer school, and he taught his students to do plein-air paintings—paintings out of doors. A model would sit on a...
During the Civil War, two defensive batteries were built on Long Point to protect Provincetown’s valuable harbor from a possible Confederate blockade. The batteries were essential: Provincetown had strategic importance for the war and both the fishing fleet...
The building that is now the Provincetown Public Library started out in 1860 as the Center Methodist Episcopal Church, and was already famous: with a 900-person capacity, it was the United States’ largest Methodist church! The church was abandoned and then...
Kunitz attended Harvard University, where he earned a B.A. degree in 1926 and an M.A. in 1927. While working as an editor, he contributed poems to magazines, eventually compiling them in his first book, Intellectual Things. He served in the army during...
Marie Louise Hersey was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1894 and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1916. In Modern Verse (1921), author Anita Forbes writes, “In few towns along the New England coast is the contrast between the old America and the...
There’s community theatre… and then there’s community theatre. Only the Provincetown Players could boast producing one Nobel prize and five Pulitzer prizes, though as Mary Heaton Vorse said, “No group of people ever had less sense of...
Note: From time to time we venture farther afield than Provincetown to bring you history snippets. Today we’re going slightly up-Cape to remember Henry Beston in honor of the opening of Outermost Art & Objects in Ptown. American writer and...
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and America was at war. While up until then the Pilgrim Monument had been lit with powerful floodlights, the day after the declaration of war, the Monument was no longer the beacon of light it had been...
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