History
General George Washington gathered troops on Cambridge Common during the American Revolutionary War. A commemorative plaque marks the location of the Washington Elm, a tree under which a (likely false) legend claims Washington stood as he first assumed command of the Continental Army. Nearby is a trio of bronze cannons, a plaque for Henry Knox, and another for Tadeusz Kościuszko.
Slightly southeast of the centre of the Common is a memorial to the American Civil War with a statue of Abraham Lincoln in a covered area near the base of the memorial. On top of the memorial is a statue of a soldier.
Cambridge Common is also the site of an Irish Famine Memorial, dedicated on July 23, 1997 by then President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, and unveiled to an audience of 3,000 people. The Memorial sculpture was created by Maurice Harron, a sculptor from Derry, Northern Ireland. There is a very similar memorial in downtown Boston.
Read more about this topic: Cambridge Common
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)