May Sarton

Boston, MA

This rose garden on Boston's waterfront honors Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890–1995), the daughter of colorful Boston mayor John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald and matriarch of one of America's most storied political families. Born in the North End to Irish-American parents at the height of Boston's immigrant era, she raised nine children—among them a president, an attorney general, and a long-serving U.S. senator—and became a public symbol of faith and perseverance through decades of family triumph and tragedy. The garden's setting near the harbor ties her memory to the Boston neighborhoods where the Fitzgerald and Kennedy families rose from immigrant roots to national prominence.

Cambridge, MA

David Joseph Brodette served in Company F of the 168th Infantry Regiment, part of the famed 42nd "Rainbow" Division of the American Expeditionary Forces sent to fight in France during World War I. He was killed in action on October 29, 1918 — barely two weeks before the Armistice silenced the guns on November 11 — at just 23 years old. Cambridge answered his loss the way countless American towns did after the Great War: by giving a piece of the community itself, a memorial circle, his name, so that a neighbor who never came home would remain part of the landscape he left behind.

Boston, MA

These four lines are among the most famous in Hungarian literature — the poet Sándor Petőfi's ringing pledge that liberty outweighs even love, and that he would give both for his country. Petőfi was the voice of Hungary's 1848 revolution against Habsburg rule, a young writer who turned verse into a rallying cry and, by tradition, vanished in battle at just twenty-six. Monuments bearing his words stand far beyond Hungary, raised by Hungarian communities who carried his poetry with them across the ocean.

Boston, MA

This plaque honors Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, Jr., the Cambridge-born son of Boston's Irish Catholic community who rose to become one of the most powerful figures in 20th-century American politics. A New Deal Democrat, he served for decades in the U.S. House of Representatives and held the Speaker's gavel from 1977 to 1987, sparring famously with the Reagan White House while defending Great Society social programs. He is perhaps best remembered for the maxim that came to define his craft: "all politics is local."