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Dark nights and holiday lights! It’s December in Boston and studying for finals won’t be forever, so…time to start thinking about enjoying all the Boston-area has to offer to celebrate the December holidays!
Not sure what there is to do? Let us help you find the perfect way to enjoy this holiday season by sharing some fabulous guides!
Boston Holiday Events (from bostoncentral)
“Our December list of holiday kids and family activities guide gives you a one-stop shop to find fun things to do in and around Boston with the family. This handy list is organized by region to make it easy to find something fun to do no matter where you are in the Greater Boston area.”
Boston Holiday Performances (from bostoncentral)
“Many cherished holiday traditions are back, after a challenging year+. From the twinkling lights, festive concerts, shows, & celebrations taking place throughout the city, Boston really comes alive during the holidays.”
December Events at Seaport
There’s a lot going on just a mile from the Boston campus, including…curling!!!! From curling to holiday markets, check out all there is to do this month in Seaport.
Annual Kwanzaa Concert and Tafuta! A Young Child’s Search for the True Meaning of Kwanzaa
The OrigiNation Cultural Arts Center will presenting two Kwanzaa events this December at the Main Stage Theater at Roxbury Community College. The Annual Kwanzaa Concert will be on Saturday December 10th at 3pm featuring “students from OrigiNation’s Performing Arts Academy and our Professional Dance Division.” A performance of Tafuta! A Young Child’s Search for the True Meaning of Kwanzaa will be held on Saturday December 17that 3pm. Ticketing information for the events is available at the links above.
Menorah Lighting
“Join Chabad of Downtown Boston for their annual Menorah lighting ceremony at One Seaport on Thursday, December 22 at 6:00pm. The event will include lighting a tall 9′ Menorah, individually packaged Chanukkah treats, and more!” There will also be a lighting on December 18th in Copley Square. Both events are free.
Candlelight Carols and Handel’s Messiah
Two “treasured Advent-Christmas traditions” presented by Trinity Church Copley Square: Candlelight Carols and Handel’s Messiah. Learn more about times and tickets for these events at the link above.
Please enjoy this guest post from our Judy Rabinowitz, our Scholarly Communication Librarian
October 24th-30th, we celebrate Open Access Week, a time to focus on what we can do to improve how scholarly research is shared, utilized, and discovered. Open Access (OA), at its core, makes research literature freely available on the Internet with few copyright or license restriction. This year’s theme, “Open for Climate Justice,” highlights the power open access can have on boosting innovation, discovery, and improvements in our world.
As SPARC, a non-profit open access advocacy group, notes, “Openness can create pathways to more equitable knowledge sharing and serve as a means to address the inequities that shape the impacts of climate change and our response to them.” As a globally pervasive issue, the climate crisis demands the unbarred and swift exchange of information and data across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries in order to tackle it comprehensively, which open access can facilitate.
And, we can choose to ensure open access is the norm in scholarly publishing. We can publish our research in open access journals, become peer reviewers in open access publications, and advocate and promote with our colleagues and networks effective and equitable OA business models, such as those that utilize low or no article processing charges and have no embargoes on contents.
Ask Us how you can do more for open access. Happy Open Access Week!
By Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0 https://foto.wuestenigel.com/political-elections-coming-soon/
Election Day 2022 is less than a month away, folks! If you haven’t yet registered to vote in Massachusetts – or – have not yet requested an absentee ballot to vote in another state, then the time is now! That is why this blog post is focusing on how to getting the information you need to get your vote counted this year!
If you are a resident of the state of Massachusetts and intend to vote in next month’s election, please check out the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ “Elections and Voting” site: https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/eleidx.htm
Registered to vote in Massachusetts and mystified by this year’s ballot questions? Then, check out this primer: https://www.necn.com/news/local/a-closer-look-at-the-2022-massachusetts-ballot-questions/2832683/
Are you registered to vote in another state and need to complete an absentee ballot? Luckily, we can direct you to all the information you need! Information for every state is available at Vote.org (https://www.vote.org/). You might also want to check out the “How to Vote in Every State” YouTube series, which is a collection of quick 2 minute videos that tells you everything you need to know in order to vote for every state: https://www.youtube.com/c/howtovoteineverystate/featured
Now, get out there and VOTE!
Well. It’s been a wild few months for the MBTA. We at Hirsh know many of you commute in from other parts of Boston. (Some of our staff certainly do.) So, we decided to create some helpful guides so you can navigate the new school year– or even just navigate to […]
Well. It’s been a wild few months for the MBTA. We at Hirsh know many of you commute in from other parts of Boston. (Some of our staff certainly do.) So, we decided to create some helpful guides so you can navigate the new school year– or even just navigate to class– with relative ease.
As long as the weather’s nice, biking part of your commute might be part of your commute plans.
And today, I’d like to bring your attention to… Blue Bikes! These bikes are all around Boston, and courtesy of the University, you can get a discount on a yearly membership (~60$ a year, whichy is cheaper than a monthly link pass with the MBTA)
Here is a more comprehensive map of the Blue Bikes available around the Greater Metro area. You can see a few of them are within a block from 145 Harrison Ave.
Watch out! The Mass Department of Conservation & Recreation reports any changes to bike paths or detours for the greater metro area. For instance, the Southwest Corridor Bike Path might have rolling repairs during September, so keep your eye on the MassDCR Twitter feed.
And, please: WEAR A HELMET!
June 17th 2022 marks 247 years since the Battle of Bunker Hill (aka How Many Kids From New England Learned About the Concept of a Pyrrhic Victory). Considered by many to be the first true battle of the American Revolution, many thought the events starting the evening of June 16th would not result in a battle at all.
By Siddharth Mallya. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
When the time came to engage, it is estimated that approximately 2,400 trained British soldiers faced off against 1,500 colonists, a mix of militiamen and locals. The bloody battle that ensued lasted approximately two hours, and resulted in massive casualties, numbering over 1,000 British fighters and more than 400 Revolutionaries. While British forces did seize the hills, the casualties they suffered facing off against the colonists were devastating, and led to substantial rethinking of how the occupying British would engage with colonial forces in battle.
There is so much more to tell about this pivotal battle of American Revolution, so if you are interested, check out this National Park Service article, this Timeline of the Revolution, and this Smithsonian Magazine piece debunking some of the tales you may have learned about the battle in history class.
Of course, the best way to learn about the Battle of Bunker Hill is to visit the Boston National Historic Park sites in Charlestown! There is major renovation work taking place in the Monument and Lodge, but you can still visit the site and the Museum across the street.
The day that so many have been waiting for has finally arrived!
As of April 19, 2021, adults in every U.S. state, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico are now eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine.
This is an exciting time for many of us, who have been waiting (possibly impatiently) for our shot. But with so many people clamoring for appointments, how can you secure an appointment for that sweet, sweet vaccine?
NMCSD First COVID-19 Vaccine by Navy Medicine is in the Public Domain
Here are some proven tips from your already-vaccinated friends at the Hirsh Health Sciences Library**:
- If you haven’t yet, sign up for the Massachusetts pre-registration system. Please note that this system only covers Mass vaccination & regional collaborative locations, and that the mass vaccination sites currently require this pre-registration for appointments.
- Search the Commonwealth’s Covid-19 Vaccine Finder for appointments at local pharmacies and sites run by local boards of health.
- Visit www.macovidvaccines.com and sign up for text notifications. This is a third-party site that scrapes data from other websites to consolidate available appointments. This is the famous site built by Olivia Adams, a software engineer, while she was on maternity leave.
- Check out Massachusetts Covid Vaccination Help for help and information on booking your own appointment, or advice on booking for others.
- Visit VaccinateMA for locations providing vaccinations.
- Consider VaxBot, a service that uses the Monal chat app to notify users of available local appointments.
- Explore the various Twitterbots designed to notify users of availability: Try CVS Vaccine MA for appointments at our local ubiquitous pharmacy chain, or vaccinetime, which covers appointments at a variety of retail, Commonwealth, and local sites.
Good luck and good health everyone!
**please note that these resources are listed for informational purposes, and the Hirsh Health Sciences Library is not affiliated with any site or service listed above.
Tax season is happening here in the United States! If you’re like me, and this is your first year filing your taxes as an independent (and you’re hoping for that sweet stimulus check this time!), then filing your taxes can seem like a complicated project. It is not as painful as […]
Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash
Tax season is happening here in the United States! If you’re like me, and this is your first year filing your taxes as an independent (and you’re hoping for that sweet stimulus check this time!), then filing your taxes can seem like a complicated project. It is not as painful as you might expect. If you’ve just realized that you haven’t filed your taxes, these links below should help you navigate this process.
If you need free filing, this is the TurboTax Free File link; here is the H&R Block Free File link. These should cover both federal and state taxes. Depending on your income level and your student status, these should be free filing options for you. (I used one of them this year).
If you are filing in the state of Massachusetts, among other things, you’ll need to fill out a Schedule HC form. This proves you have health insurance. The vital numbers you’ll need is the name of your insurance, their Federal ID number, and your subscriber number. This is the form here.
For more information about the Federal Tax Filing, please visit their website here.
For more information about the Massachusetts State Tax Filing, please visit their website here. For questions about what and how you should be applying, you can call them directly.
The deadline for the 2021 Federal Tax return is May 17th, but if you start now you’ll be able to put it out of your mind! If, for any reason, you need an extension to file your taxes, you should make the request as soon as possible. You can do that here.
We’ve passed the year mark into this pandemic, and although vaccines are rolling out, it might not feel fast enough. There are board exams, non-board exams, love lives, family lives, making sure you’re eating enough – a lot of different things that can stress a person out. What is one to do?
Well good news: we have a few ideas for you!
First of all, there’s the Tufts Health & Wellness group. They’ve put together this page on stress and anxiety. It has resources, included guided meditations and tips on managing stress on the go. Definitely worth your time to check out!
Secondly: take a drink of water right now. Hydration is important, and not to be undervalued!
Perhaps you’re someone like me, who occasionally just wants nice calm scenes to look at in the background, while they work on other things. Well regardless of the weather or your ability to make it somewhere you find relaxing, good news: we have technology to help! Explore.org has a whole YouTube channel of various nature cams. The feeds seem to primarily be at rescues, so if you’re into wolves, you’ll see wolves. Eagles? They got that. Or maybe you just want to watch a bunch of kittens play together? I have that feed up as I write this!
There is a very wide variety of cameras available, of course, because people are people. Thrillist has a great write-up of a ton of live stream cams for you.
Finally, you could always put your printing allotment at the library to use, and get yourself some coloring pages to print out and color in. For example, Crayola has a whole section of free pages. Or if you wanted to support small business, you could always run a search on Etsy or similar sites. (Fair warning though: there’s no guarantee about whether your results will be safe for work.)
We here at Hirsh Library hope you’re able to relieve any stress as well as you can, and hope your Aprils are as low stress as highly-motivated graduate students in demanding programs can possibly be!
Instead of a prank for you, we have true fun facts about April Fools!
In France, they say “Poisson D’Avril” or April Fish! This same thing in Italy is “Pesce d’aprile.”
Do you have any “April Fools” phrase equivalents in your country or culture? Leave a comment down below!
** Please enjoy this repost, chock-full of Boston Massacre info! While 2021’s social-distancing rules prevent Revolutionary Spaces from holding the annual reenactment in front of the Old State House, if you are interested in the events of 1770, Crispus Attucks Day, and the wider history of the fight for racial and social justice in Boston, join Revolutionary Spaces March 5th at 5:00 pm for Grief, Remembrance, Justice: the Boston Massacre Anniversary. This panel discussion will reflect on the legacy of Melnea Cass and will be held via Zoom. **
…Your estates and your freedom, your children and Wives; A story I’ll tell you that’s truth now indeed, And when you hear of it your hearts will bleed.
The above comes from A Verse Occasioned by the late horrid Massacre in King-Street, a broadside published in Boston in 1770 to express outrage over the events of the evening of March 5th, the event we now know as the Boston Massacre. On the evening of March 5, 1770, a row broke out in front of the Custom House on King Street (now State Street) in Boston. Accounts of what provoked the trouble are mixed, but most include a soldier striking a boy, and a mob of Bostonians replying by hurling both snowballs and insults at the soldier. As the crowd grew more hostile, more soldiers were called in, and eventually nine armed British soldiers faced a rowdy group of over 50 colonists. Eventually, the soldiers fired into the mob, and when the casualties were totaled, five men were dead and six more were injured. The events of that March evening were seized upon by Boston radicals, and spun to create even more animosity toward the Crown. One of the most famous pieces of propaganda is Paul Revere’s compelling (if inaccurate) depiction of the event, which circulated wildly in the spring of 1770.
Paul Revere, “The Bloody Massacre in King-Street, March 5, 1770.” Boston, 1770. (Gilder Lehrman Collection)
Of course, this event took place a short walk from the Hirsh Health Sciences Library. Commemorate this event with a Boston Massacre Study Break! Start on the Freedom Trail, and visit the Boston Massacre Marker on the corner of State and Congress Streets, right near the Old State House. Head back toward campus on Tremont Street, and stop in at the Granary Burying Ground. You’ll find the grave marker for the victims of the Massacre next to Samuel Adams. You can also visit with John Hancock and Paul Revere while you’re there. As you follow Tremont toward Boylston Street, take a detour into Boston Common at Avery Street, and enjoy the beautiful Boston Massacre/Crispus Attucks Monument, erected in 1888.
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Load More...Please, for the love of all that you hold dear, REMOVE YOUR BACKPACK ON THE T.
A little courtesy goes a long way. Please take off your backpack and hold it between your feet or by your side while on T vehicles. Help make space for your fellow riders.
For more rider guides and tips, visit: http://mbta.com/rider-etiquetteSarah Rosenberg-Scott, assistant professor of family medicine at @TuftsMedSchool, has been awarded the Massachusetts Academy of Family Physicians Educator of the Year Award.
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