There was a moment when a one-of-a-kind personality brightened our streets, parks and squares with his presence – a bard whose lyrical musings came wrapped with musical sounds and a simple message of love for nature, life and one another. His name was Brother Blue.

In his own recounting of his historic April 18, 1775 ride, Paul Revere uses the body of an enslaved person as a landmark. To today’s reader, the reference is likely shocking.

“Cambridge Love Letters” – to people, places and the city itself – take the stage Tuesday at Starlight Square, featuring letters past and present, drawn from the attics and basements and long-kept diaries of Cambridge lovers just like you.

This Memorial Day, people will observe or not observe the holiday as they see fit. The Black veterans of Cambridge’s Isaac Wilson Taylor Post should be remembered and thanked for their courageous service.

Big changes are coming to the Cambridge Historical Society – so big that you’ll begin to see it in a whole new light, starting with the most fundamental of things: its name.

Benjamin F. Olken partially financed his MIT engineering degree by swapping or selling secondhand goods. After graduation in the 1930s, Olken began a tiny bicycle rental business – and by the 1970s was catering to a booming market with rentals (tandems extra), sales, maps and touring guidance.

A Fayerweather Street School class in the 1980s spent five months studying a stretch of Huron Avenue, with students from age 8 to 11 interviewing the elderly, shopkeepers, customers and passersby, surveying, mapping and finally publishing an intensive snapshot of the era.

Cambridge’s Basket Club was a women’s community service organization in the 19th and 20th centuries that sewed linens for donation to hospitals, orphanages and other charities – like many Cantabrigians did during the spring and summer of 2020.

From its creation by a group defined by religious and political extremism, Cambridge has been the home of people with strongly held convictions.

Statues, plaques and memorials across the city commemorate people and events from its nearly 400 years of settlement. But who decides what is worthy of commemoration, and how does the memorial landscape of the city reinforce certain narratives of Cambridge history and exclude others?