J. L. Bell has a series of articles up on Owen Richards, one of His Majesty's customs agents, who was tarred and feathered on May 18, 1770 for seizing a schooner for smuggling - and then paraded around town for four hours:

A court filing in January 1771 stated he “lost his Cloaths, Money, and Papers to the Amount of near £20 st[erling]. And in order to satiate their abandoned Brutality, they set fire to the Feathers as they stuck in the Tar, upon his naked back.”

Lisa Johnson writes that while going through some photos at her mother's house, she came across one showing her father, a Boston school teacher, with Mayor Kevin White in City Hall in 1971. And that got her to thinking about Boston political history - and her dad.

Update, Friday morning: And just like that, the sign is covered over again.

For several decades now, the space next to the convenience store on Washington Street across from Washington-Beech has been a laundromat. It's getting remodeled, though, and today it returned to its days in the 1960s and early 1970s, when it was a discount clothing store, with a '60s-style sign that was never taken down, just boarded over. Read more.

Set some time aside for Cynthia Yee's reminiscences of life as a young girl in Chinatown in 1958, trying to navigate between two different worlds:

I spoke Taishanese, a country dialect from southern China, like a Chinese peasant girl. But I wasn’t. I was a city street urchin from Boston, United States of America. Don’t let my face mislead you. A Boston accent crept into my English, and into my Taishanese, too. I spoke Chinese with a Boston accent.

Thanks to ever vigilant reader Charles Bahne, we know that the ruling in the Legal Sea Foods decision today was issued by none other than Judge Nathaniel Gorton. Read more.

The Madison Park Development Corp. looks at the history of Hibernian Hall in Nubian Square, which opened its doors in 1913 and which continues to serve the community around it, initially Irish-American, today Black.

H/t Citizen. Coping.

The Cambridge Historical Commission recounts Lincoln's visit to Cambridge on Sept. 20, 1848, to give a speech in support of that year's Whig ticket of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore.

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

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