HISTORY MATTERS  

Samuel Langhorne Clemens is back. This week the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn is sharing the bestseller list with the likes of Glen Beck, George Bush, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, TV comedian Jon Stewart, and a girl with a dragon tattoo. Not bad for a guy who has been dead exactly 100 years. (Continued below)

HISTORY MATTERS

Once each year we working stiffs can parade through the streets of Portsmouth acting as insane and tasteless as a candidate running for re-election. That day is Halloween, formerly a holiday for children. But in recent years adults have stormed the haunted castle and stolen Halloween away. (Continued below)

HISTORY MATTERS  

Granite-staters don’t talk much about explorer Martin Pring, the “Christopher Columbus of the Piscataqua” region. No monuments mark his arrival. We don’t celebrate Martin Pring Day. The textbooks skirt the facts about why this young adventurer was here. Perhaps we can’t handle the truth. (Continued below) 

HISTORY MATTERS

If the city cannot preserve its massive humpback whale mural, it won’t be the first time Portsmouth has failed at whaling. In the 1990s enviro-artist Robert Wyland urged us to save endangered species with his “Whaling Wall,” now itself endangered. But in the 1830s and 40s Portsmouth entrepreneurs set out to kill every whale in sight. Their attempt to turn New Hampshire’s only seaport into the next Nantucket or New Bedford met with limited initial success, then sank like an anchor. (Continued below)