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المحتوى المقدم من Boston Athenæum. يتم تحميل جميع محتويات البودكاست بما في ذلك الحلقات والرسومات وأوصاف البودكاست وتقديمها مباشرة بواسطة Boston Athenæum أو شريك منصة البودكاست الخاص بهم. إذا كنت تعتقد أن شخصًا ما يستخدم عملك المحمي بحقوق الطبع والنشر دون إذنك، فيمكنك اتباع العملية الموضحة هنا https://ar.player.fm/legal.
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Lipstick on the Rim
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1 Amy Schumer & Brianne Howey on the Importance of Female Friendships, Navigating Hollywood's Double Standards, Sharing Their Birth Stories, and MORE 50:05
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This week, in what might be the funniest episode yet, Molly and Emese are joined by co-stars Amy Schumer and Brianne Howey. They get candid about motherhood, career evolution, and their new film, Kinda Pregnant —which unexpectedly led to Amy’s latest health discovery. Amy opens up about how public criticism led her to uncover her Cushing syndrome diagnosis, what it’s like to navigate comedy and Hollywood as a mom, and the importance of sharing birth stories without shame. Brianne shares how becoming a mother has shifted her perspective on work, how Ginny & Georgia ’s Georgia Miller compares to real-life parenting, and the power of female friendships in the industry. We also go behind the scenes of their new Netflix film, Kinda Pregnant —how Molly first got the script, why Amy and Brianne were drawn to the project, and what it means for women today. Plus, they reflect on their early career struggles, the moment they knew they “made it,” and how motherhood has reshaped their ambitions. From career highs to personal challenges, this episode is raw, funny, and packed with insights. Mentioned in the Episode: Kinda Pregnant Ginny & Georgia Meerkat 30 Rock Last Comic Standing Charlie Sheen Roast Inside Amy Schumer Amy Schumer on the Howard Stern Show Trainwreck Life & Beth Expecting Amy 45RPM Clothing Brand A Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us at @sonypodcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email podcastadsales@sonymusic.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices…
Boston Athenæum
وسم كل الحلقات كغير/(كـ)مشغلة
Manage series 1137365
المحتوى المقدم من Boston Athenæum. يتم تحميل جميع محتويات البودكاست بما في ذلك الحلقات والرسومات وأوصاف البودكاست وتقديمها مباشرة بواسطة Boston Athenæum أو شريك منصة البودكاست الخاص بهم. إذا كنت تعتقد أن شخصًا ما يستخدم عملك المحمي بحقوق الطبع والنشر دون إذنك، فيمكنك اتباع العملية الموضحة هنا https://ar.player.fm/legal.
The Boston Athenæum, a membership library, first opened its doors in 1807, and its rich history as a library and cultural institution has been well documented in the annals of Boston’s cultural life. Today, it remains a vibrant and active institution that serves a wide variety of members and scholars. With more than 600,000 titles in its book collection, the Boston Athenæum functions as a public library for many of its members, with a large and distinguished circulating collection, a newspaper and magazine reading room, quiet spaces and rooms for reading and researching, a children’s library, and wireless internet access throughout its building. The Art Department mounts three exhibitions per year in the institution's Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery, rotating selections in the Recent Acquisitions Gallery, and a number of less formal installations in places and cases around the building. The Special Collections resources are world-renowned, and include maps, manuscripts, rare books, and archival materials. Our Conservation Department works to preserve all our collections. Other activities for members and the public include lectures, panel discussions, poetry readings, musical performances, films, and special events, many of which are followed by receptions. Members are able to take advantage of our second- and fifth-floor terraces during fine weather, and to search electronic databases and our digital collections from their homes and offices.
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220 حلقات
وسم كل الحلقات كغير/(كـ)مشغلة
Manage series 1137365
المحتوى المقدم من Boston Athenæum. يتم تحميل جميع محتويات البودكاست بما في ذلك الحلقات والرسومات وأوصاف البودكاست وتقديمها مباشرة بواسطة Boston Athenæum أو شريك منصة البودكاست الخاص بهم. إذا كنت تعتقد أن شخصًا ما يستخدم عملك المحمي بحقوق الطبع والنشر دون إذنك، فيمكنك اتباع العملية الموضحة هنا https://ar.player.fm/legal.
The Boston Athenæum, a membership library, first opened its doors in 1807, and its rich history as a library and cultural institution has been well documented in the annals of Boston’s cultural life. Today, it remains a vibrant and active institution that serves a wide variety of members and scholars. With more than 600,000 titles in its book collection, the Boston Athenæum functions as a public library for many of its members, with a large and distinguished circulating collection, a newspaper and magazine reading room, quiet spaces and rooms for reading and researching, a children’s library, and wireless internet access throughout its building. The Art Department mounts three exhibitions per year in the institution's Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery, rotating selections in the Recent Acquisitions Gallery, and a number of less formal installations in places and cases around the building. The Special Collections resources are world-renowned, and include maps, manuscripts, rare books, and archival materials. Our Conservation Department works to preserve all our collections. Other activities for members and the public include lectures, panel discussions, poetry readings, musical performances, films, and special events, many of which are followed by receptions. Members are able to take advantage of our second- and fifth-floor terraces during fine weather, and to search electronic databases and our digital collections from their homes and offices.
…
continue reading
220 حلقات
Kaikki jaksot
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1 Author Talk | BREAKING BIAS: Where Stereotypes and Prejudices Come From by Anu Gupta 55:34
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For readers of Caste, Sapiens, and The Dawn of Everything, join us for a page-turning deep-dive into how bias is learned—plus a strikingly original and highly effective set of tools to un-learn it. Drawing on two decades of original research and experience training thousands of students, Anu Gupta, a lawyer, scientist, and educator whose work focuses on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, has written a comprehensive and compellingly readable guide for anyone who wants to understand and unlearn conscious and unconscious biases.…
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1 Lisa Napoli, Ellen Clegg, & Margaret Low, "Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Founding Mothers of NPR" 56:48
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In the years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women in the workplace still found themselves relegated to secretarial positions or locked out of jobs entirely. This was especially true in the news business, a backwater of male chauvinism where a woman might be lucky to get a foothold on the “women’s pages.” But when a pioneering nonprofit called National Public Radio came along in the 1970s, and the door to serious journalism opened a crack, four remarkable women came along and blew it off the hinges. Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie is journalist Lisa Napoli’s captivating account of these four women, their deep and enduring friendships, and the trail they blazed to becoming icons. They had radically different stories. Cokie Roberts was born into a political dynasty, roamed the halls of Congress as a child, and felt a tug toward public service. Susan Stamberg, who had lived in India with her husband who worked for the State Department, was the first woman to anchor a nightly news program and pressed for accommodations to balance work and home life. Linda Wertheimer, the daughter of shopkeepers in New Mexico, fought her way to a scholarship and a spot on-air. And Nina Totenberg, the network's legal affairs correspondent, invented a new way to cover the Supreme Court. Based on extensive interviews and calling on the author’s deep connections in news and public radio, Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie will be as beguiling and sharp as its formidable subjects.…
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1 Peter S. Canellos and Farah Stockman, "The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan" 56:47
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They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, it was John Marshall Harlan’s words that helped end segregation, and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom. But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John’s father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court. At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. As case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation’s prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the United States. Harlan’s dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan’s Plessy dissent his “Bible”—and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan’s words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras. Spanning from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, The Great Dissenter is an epic rendering of the American legal system’s greatest failures and most inspiring successes.…
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1 Louis Menand and Maya Jasanoff, "The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War" 55:14
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The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense―economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Rights spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.…
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1 Ben Railton, "Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism" 56:24
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When we talk about patriotism in America, we tend to mean one form: the version captured in shared celebrations like the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance. But as Ben Railton argues, that celebratory patriotism is just one of four distinct forms: celebratory, the communal expression of an idealized America; mythic, the creation of national myths that exclude certain communities; active, acts of service and sacrifice for the nation; and critical, arguments for how the nation has fallen short of its ideals that seek to move us toward that more perfect union. In Of Thee I Sing, Railton defines those four forms of American patriotism, using the four verses of “America the Beautiful” as examples of each type, and traces them across our histories. Doing so allows us to reframe seemingly familiar histories such as the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Greatest Generation, as well as texts such as the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance. And it helps us rediscover forgotten histories and figures, from Revolutionary War Loyalists and the World War I Espionage and Sedition Acts to active patriots like Civil War nurse Susie King Taylor and the suffragist Silent Sentinels to critical patriotic authors like William Apess and James Baldwin. Tracing the contested history of American patriotism also helps us better understand many of our 21st century debates: from Donald Trump’s divisive deployment of celebratory and mythic forms of patriotism to the backlash to the critical patriotisms expressed by Colin Kaepernick and the 1619 Project. Only by engaging with the multiple forms of American patriotism, past and present, can we begin to move forward toward a more perfect union that we all can celebrate.…
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1 Akhil Reed Amar, "The Words that Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840" 56:15
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When the US Constitution won popular approval in 1788, it was the culmination of thirty years of passionate argument over the nature of government. But ratification hardly ended the conversation. For the next half century, ordinary Americans and statesmen alike continued to wrestle with weighty questions in the halls of government and in the pages of newspapers. Should the nation's borders be expanded? Should America allow slavery to spread westward? What rights should Indian nations hold? What was the proper role of the judicial branch? In The Words that Made Us, Akhil Reed Amar unites history and law in a vivid narrative of the biggest constitutional questions early Americans confronted, and he expertly assesses the answers they offered. His account of the document's origins and consolidation is a guide for anyone seeking to properly understand America's Constitution today.…
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1 Martha S. Jones and Karen Holmes Ward, "Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers" 57:47
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In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women—Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more—who were the vanguard of women's rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.…
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1 Robert Mrazek, "The Indomitable Florence Finch: The Story of a War Widow Turned Resistance Fighter" 57:09
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When Florence Finch died at the age of 101, few of her Ithaca, NY neighbors knew that this unassuming Filipina native was a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, whose courage and sacrifice were unsurpassed in the Pacific War against Japan. Long accustomed to keeping her secrets close in service of the Allies, Finch waited fifty years to reveal the story of those dramatic and harrowing days to her own children. With a wealth of original sources including taped interviews, personal journals, and unpublished memoirs, The Indomitable Florence Finch unfolds against the Bataan Death March, the fall of Corregidor, and the daily struggle to survive a brutal occupying force. Award-winning military historian and former Congressman Robert J. Mrazek brings to light this long-hidden American patriot. The Indomitable Florence Finch is the story of the transcendent bravery of a woman who belongs in America's pantheon of war heroes.…
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1 Diana Greenwald, "Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art" 58:48
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Painting by Numbers presents a groundbreaking blend of art historical and social scientific methods to chart, for the first time, the sheer scale of nineteenth-century artistic production. With new quantitative evidence for more than five hundred thousand works of art, Diana Seave Greenwald provides fresh insights into the nineteenth century, and the extent to which art historians have focused on a limited—and potentially biased—sample of artwork from that time. She addresses long-standing questions about the effects of industrialization, gender, and empire on the art world, and she models more expansive approaches for studying art history in the age of the digital humanities. Examining art in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Greenwald features datasets created from indices and exhibition catalogs that—to date—have been used primarily as finding aids. From this body of information, she reveals the importance of access to the countryside for painters showing images of nature at the Paris Salon, the ways in which time-consuming domestic responsibilities pushed women artists in the United States to work in lower-prestige genres, and how images of empire were largely absent from the walls of London’s Royal Academy at the height of British imperial power. Ultimately, Greenwald considers how many works may have been excluded from art historical inquiry and shows how data can help reintegrate them into the history of art, even after such pieces have disappeared or faded into obscurity.…
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1 Don Hagist, "Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution" 1:06:40
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Redcoats. For Americans, the word brings to mind the occupying army that attempted to crush the Revolutionary War. There was more to these soldiers than their red uniforms, but the individuals who formed the ranks are seldom described in any detail in historical literature, leaving unanswered questions. Who were these men? Why did they join the army? Where did they go when the war was over? In Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution, Don N. Hagist brings life to these soldiers, describing the training, experiences, and outcomes of British soldiers who fought during the Revolution. Drawing on thousands of military records and other primary sources in British, American, and Canadian archives, and the writings of dozens of officers and soldiers, Noble Volunteers shows how a peacetime army responded to the onset of war, how professional soldiers adapted quickly and effectively to become tactically dominant, and what became of the thousands of career soldiers once the war was over. In this historical tour de force, Hagist dispels long-held myths, revealing how remarkably diverse British soldiers were. He directs his focus on the small picture, illuminating the moments in an individual soldier’s life—those hours spent nursing a fever while standing sentry in the bitter cold, or writing a letter to a wife back home. What emerges from these vignettes is the understanding that while these were “common” soldiers, each soldier was completely unique, for, as Hagist writes, “There was no ‘typical’ British soldier.”…
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1 Boston Art Song Society, "Art Songs of Black American Composers" 1:26:52
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Guest baritone Emery Stephens and pianist Ann Schaefer will perform a recital of works by African American composers. This program will include an open forum discussion about African American experiences in classical music. Dr. Stephens’ Singing Down the Barriers project aims to empower and encourage singers, voice teachers, voice coaches, and researchers of all ethnicities to study and perform the historically rich vocal music of classically-trained African American composers.…
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1 Emma Smith and Stephen Greenblatt, "This is Shakespeare" 58:53
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A genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no other. A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality, and literary mastery. A man who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else. Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of. But it doesn’t tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant. In This Is Shakespeare, Emma Smith takes us into a world of politicking and copycatting, as we watch Shakespeare emulating the blockbusters of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd (the Spielberg and Tarantino of their day), flirting with and skirting around the cutthroat issues of succession politics, religious upheaval, and technological change. Smith writes in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity, and sex. Instead of offering the answers, the Shakespeare she reveals poses awkward questions, always inviting the reader to ponder ambiguities.…
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1 Ralph Keyes, "The Hidden History of Coined Words" 55:08
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Successful word-coinages—those that stay in currency for a good long time—tend to conceal their beginnings. We take them at face value and rarely when and where they were first minted. Engaging, illuminating, and authoritative, Ralph Keyes's The Hidden History of Coined Words explores the etymological underworld of terms and expressions, and uncovers plenty of hidden gems. It is sure to appeal not just to word mavens, but to history buffs, trivia contesters, and anyone who loves the immersive power of language. He also finds some fascinating patterns, such as that successful neologisms are as likely to be created by chance as by design. A remarkable number of new words were coined whimsically, originally intended to troll or taunt. Knickers, for example, resulted from a hoax; big bang from an insult. More than a few resulted from happy accidents—such as typos, mistranslations, and mishearing (bigly and buttonhole)—or from being taken entirely out of context (robotics). Neologizers (a Thomas Jefferson coinage) include not just scholars and writers but also cartoonists, columnists, children's book authors. What’s more, coinages are often contested, controversy swirling around such terms as gonzo, mojo, and booty call. Keyes considers all contenders, while also leading us through the fray between new word partisans and those who resist them strenuously. He concludes with advice about how to make your own successful coinage.…
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1 Annalee Newitz and Sarah Parcak, "Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age" 58:49
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In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers―slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers―who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.…
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1 Jamal Greene and Randall Kennedy, "How Rights Went Wrong" 56:47
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Rights are a sacred part of American identity. Yet they were an afterthought for the Framers, and early American courts rarely enforced them. Only as a result of the racial strife that exploded during the Civil War—and a series of resulting missteps by the Supreme Court—did rights gain such outsized power. The result is a system of legal absolutism that distorts our law and debases our politics. Over and again, courts have treated rights conflicts as zero-sum games in which awarding rights to one side means denying rights to others. Eminent legal scholar Jamal Greene reveals how the explosion of rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.…
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1 Janice P. Nimura, "The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women" 55:28
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Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of "ordinary" womanhood. Though the world at first recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity ultimately won her the acceptance of the male medical establishment. In 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician. Exploring the sisters’ allies, enemies, and enduring partnership, Janice P. Nimura presents a story of trial and triumph. Together, the Blackwells founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women. Both sisters were tenacious and visionary, but their convictions did not always align with the emergence of women’s rights―or with each other. From Bristol, Paris, and Edinburgh to the rising cities of antebellum America, this richly researched new biography celebrates two complicated pioneers who exploded the limits of possibility for women in medicine. As Elizabeth herself predicted, "a hundred years hence, women will not be what they are now."…
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1 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America" 56:48
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Winner of the PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the Southern Historical Association Sydnor Award Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters chose vastly different lives. Seeking their fortunes in the North, Grace and Katharine reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation’s attention to issues of region, race, and labor. In Sisters and Rebels, National Humanities Award–winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters, who were “estranged and yet forever entangled” by their mutual obsession with the South. Tracing the wounds and unsung victories of the past through to the contemporary moment, Hall revives a buried tradition of Southern expatriation and progressivism; explores the lost, revolutionary zeal of the early twentieth century; and muses on the fraught ties of sisterhood as the Lumpkins wrestle with orthodoxies of race, sexuality, and privilege.…
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1 John Matteson and Amy Cherry, "A Worse Place Than Hell: How Fredericksburg Changed a Nation" 57:03
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December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln’s government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country’s law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American. Guided by patriotism, driven by desire, all five moved toward singular destinies. A young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. confronted grave challenges to his concept of duty. The one-eyed army chaplain Arthur Fuller pitted his frail body against the evils of slavery. Walt Whitman, a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by the guardians of propriety, and Louisa May Alcott, a struggling writer seeking an authentic voice and her father’s admiration, tended soldiers’ wracked bodies as nurses. On the other side of the national schism, John Pelham, a West Point cadet from Alabama, achieved a unique excellence in artillery tactics as he served a doomed and misbegotten cause. A Worse Place Than Hell brings together the prodigious forces of war with the intimacy of individual lives. Matteson interweaves the historic and the personal in a work as beautiful as it is powerful.…
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1 Bettye Kearse, "The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President’s Black Family" 57:53
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For thousands of years, West African griots (men) and griottes (women) have recited the stories of their people. Without this tradition Bettye Kearse would not have known that she is a descendant of President James Madison and his slave, and half-sister, Coreen. In 1990, Bettye became the eighth-generation griotte for her family. Their credo—“Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president”—was intended to be a source of pride, but for her, it echoed with abuses of slavery, including rape and incest. Confronting those abuses, Bettye embarked on a journey of discovery—of her ancestors, the nation, and herself. She learned that wherever African slaves walked, recorded history silenced their voices and buried their footsteps: beside a slave-holding fortress in Ghana; below a federal building in New York City; and under a brick walkway at James Madison’s Virginia plantation. When Bettye tried to confirm the information her ancestors had passed down, she encountered obstacles at every turn. Part personal quest, part testimony, part historical correction, The Other Madisons is the saga of an extraordinary American family told by a griotte in search of the whole story.…
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1 Robert Darnton and John Buchtel, "Pirating and Publishing" 1:05:44
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In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the "Fertile Crescent" countries located along the French border, stretching from Holland to Switzerland pirated the works of prominent (and often banned) French writers and distributed them in France, where laws governing piracy were in flux and any notion of "copyright" very much in its infancy. Piracy was entirely legal and everyone acknowledged tacitly or openly that these pirated editions of works by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot, among other luminaries, supplied a growing readership within France, one whose needs could not be met by the monopolistic and tightly controlled Paris Guild. Darnton's book focuses principally on a publisher in Switzerland, one of the largest and whose archives are the most complete. Through the lens of this concern, he offers a sweeping view of the world of writing, publishing, and especially bookselling in pre-Revolutionary France--a vibrantly detailed inside look at a cut-throat industry that was struggling to keep up with the times and, if possible, make a profit off them. Featuring a fascinating cast of characters lofty idealists and down-and-dirty opportunists this new book expands upon on Darnton's celebrated work on book-publishing in France, most recently found in Literary Tour de France. Pirating and Publishing reveals how and why piracy brought the Enlightenment to every corner of France, feeding the ideas that would explode into revolution.…
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1 Alice Baumgartner, "South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War" 1:00:25
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The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837. In South to Freedom, historian Alice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery's future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico.…
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1 Justyne Fischer, "The Implications of Blackness in Birth of a Nation" 1:00:53
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D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, glorified and revived the Ku Klux Klan in America. In contrast, Justyne Fischer’s woodcut examines the legacy of deep-rooted racism within American systems and institutions. Fischer’s Birth of a Nation renders the Klansmen as mountains, grand and carved into the American landscape. They are not hidden in the shadows or part of a long-forgotten practice—they are ingrained, established, and immovable. Join Fischer as she discusses the deliberate compositional choices she made to depict the dark side of American history and how it shaped us as a nation.…
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1 Jo Marchant, "The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars" 1:00:07
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For most of human history, we have led not just an earthly existence but a cosmic one. Celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives. Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are—our religious beliefs, power structures, scientific advances, and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves from the universe that surrounds us. And that disconnect comes at a cost. In The Human Cosmos, Jo Marchant takes us on a tour through the history of humanity's relationship with the heavens. We travel to the Hall of the Bulls in Lascaux and witness the winter solstice at a 5,000-year-old tomb at Newgrange. We visit Medieval monks grappling with the nature of time and Tahitian sailors navigating by the stars. We discover how light reveals the chemical composition of the sun, and we are with Einstein as he works out that space and time are one and the same. And we find out why stargazing can be really, really good for us. It is time for us to rediscover the full potential of the universe we inhabit, its wonder, its effect on our health, and its potential for inspiration and revelation.…
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1 Theo Tyson, "The Harriet Hayden Albums: A History of Photography, Agency & Identity in Boston" 59:19
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Join Theo Tyson, Polly Thayer Starr Fellow in American Art and Culture as she shares her insights and inquiries on a set of nineteenth-century photo albums that belonged to Harriet Bell Hayden (1816-1893), a survivor of slavery and anti-slavery activist. Married to famed abolitionist Lewis Hayden (1811-1889), Mrs. Hayden’s albums are a unique opportunity to explore the racial, social, and cultural history of Boston’s thriving Beacon Hill anti-slavery community. Tyson will discuss the types of visual and material culture needed to create and sustain archival collections. She will address how institutions can accurately share the histories of African Americans, formerly enslaved Black people, and especially Black women.…
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1 Peniel E. Joseph and David Waters, "The Sword and the Shield" 54:51
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To most Americans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. represent contrasting ideals: self-defense vs. nonviolence, black power vs. civil rights, the sword vs. the shield. The struggle for black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. While nonviolent direct action is remembered as an unassailable part of American democracy, the movement's militancy is either vilified or erased outright. In The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph upends these misconceptions and reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives. This is a strikingly revisionist biography, not only of Malcolm and Martin, but also of the movement and era they came to define. “[As] Peniel E. Joseph argues in his incisive, smartly written new book, The Sword and the Shield, history has turned both men into caricatures. We’ve lost sight of King’s true radicalism. We’ve lost sight of Malcolm’s more moderate approach to black nationalism that emerged after his break with the Nation of Islam. And, in Mr. Joseph’s view, we’ve lost sight of how each man shaped the other.” —Jonathan Eig, The Wall Street Journal…
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1 Grace Talusan and Elif Armbruster, “The Body Papers: A Memoir” 41:50
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March 3, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum. Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that her family’s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were “illegal.” Family, she’s told, must be put first. The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remove her breasts and ovaries. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher. On a fellowship, Talusan and her husband return to the Philippines, where she revisits her family’s ancestral home and tries to reclaim a lost piece of herself. Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of this debut memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating such abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.…
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1 Heidi Pribell and Theo Tyson, “Curator’s Choice: Art + Design” 30:51
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March 4, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum. Art + Design is part of a trio of events for ‘Curator’s Choice’ hosted by the Boston Athenæum’s Polly Thayer Starr Fellow in American Art & Culture Theo Tyson and Assistant Curator Ginny Badget. An evening to celebrate the historical and contemporary intersections of fashion, art, and design, Tyson will begin by unpacking the subtle, yet salient feminism and sartorial commentary embedded in one of Polly Thayer Starr’s most popular and painterly portraits, Shopping for Furs, and share fashion plates from our special collections. She will then be joined by longtime Boston Athenæum member and interior designer, Heidi Pribell for a candid conversation on how fashion and art influence her practice.…
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1 EmpowerHER: Black Women in the Arts 1:05:12
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February 19, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum. In partnership with the Network for Art Administrators of Color Boston (NAAC). Join us for an artful conversation with three preeminent leaders catalyzing change in Boston to make its cultural landscape more inclusive and supportive of Black women artists. Representing backgrounds ranging from music and museums, to the public art sector and philanthropy, our experts and advocates will explore their views on the importance and necessity of the work they’re doing to empower Black women artists. The Athenæum is excited and fortunate to welcome Lyndsay Allyn Cox, Director of Theater Arts at the Boston Center for the Arts, Catherine T. Morris, Founder and Executive Director of Boston Art & Music Soul (BAMS) Fest and Manager of Public Programs at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Courtney D. Sharpe, Director of Cultural Planning for the City of Boston, as our featured guests. The event will be interspersed with performances by Boston-based Black women artists, including movement and dance artist Victoria Awkward, musician Allegra Fletcher, poet and organizer Amanda Shea, and Miss Massachusetts USA 2020 Sabrina Victor. This lively conversation moderated by Polly Thayer Starr Fellow in American Art & Culture Theo Tyson will feature performances by local Boston artists, co-selected by our partner and co-producer, the Network for Art Administrators of Color (NAAC). The NAAC Boston is an ArtsBoston program that was established to enhance the visibility of professionals of color in Greater Boston’s arts and culture sector, as well as widen the leadership pipeline and highlight opportunities for professional and personal growth in the field.…
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1 Nancy Seasholes, “The Atlas of Boston History” 43:18
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February 26, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum. Few American cities possess a history as long, rich, and fascinating as Boston’s. A site of momentous national political events from the Revolutionary War through the civil rights movement, Boston has also been an influential literary and cultural capital. From ancient glaciers to landmaking schemes and modern infrastructure projects, the city’s terrain has been transformed almost constantly over the centuries. The Atlas of Boston History traces the city’s history and geography from the last ice age to the present with beautifully rendered maps. Edited by historian Nancy S. Seasholes, this landmark volume captures all aspects of Boston’s past in a series of fifty-seven stunning full-color spreads. Each section features newly created thematic maps that focus on moments and topics in that history. These maps are accompanied by hundreds of historical and contemporary illustrations and explanatory text from historians and other expert contributors. They illuminate a wide range of topics including Boston’s physical and economic development, changing demography, and social and cultural life. In lavishly produced detail, The Atlas of Boston History offers a vivid, refreshing perspective on the development of this iconic American city.…
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1 Russell Maret, “The Making of Character Traits” 33:09
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February 11, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum. In this talk Russell Maret will discuss the three year process of making his most recent artist’s book, Character Traits. The book continues Maret’s investigation into alphabetical form, which he has undertaken over the last twenty years in a series of printed books and manuscripts, many of which are in the Athenæum’s collection. This newest project is composed of two parts: a volume of essays about alphabetical character traits, specifically how different lettering technologies affect alphabetical form; and a portfolio of twenty-five prints that explore these ideas in a series of texts chosen for their insights into human character traits, each of which is set in unique lettering designed by Maret. The making of Character Traits took on a whole new level of production because during the preliminary work on the project Maret realized it would be conceptually inconsistent to print the plates using the printing method in which he is trained—letterpress. Instead, he purchased an etching press and spent a year learning the necessary skills to print the plates intaglio. The ensuing process of teaching himself a new printing medium, while also wrestling with the creative and conceptual aspects of the project, resulted in many humorous episodes. The talk will cover the ups and downs of this process, and discuss the ideas that lead Maret to make the book in the first place.…
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1 Richard Bell, “Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home” 36:06
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February 6, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum. A gripping and true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South—and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice. Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home. Their ordeal—an odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward still—shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War. Impeccably researched and breathlessly paced, STOLEN tells the story of five boys whose courage forever changed the fight against slavery in America.…
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1 Rabbi Dan Judson, Dr. Lorna Rivera. Rajini Srikanth, and Sarah Turner, “Community Conversations” 40:35
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February 5, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum. To demonstrate the variety and richness of “essential knowledge” and the ways it can be defined, the cabinet in “Required Reading: Reimagining a Colonial Library” is filled with titles selected by ten community partners. Join Rabbi Dan Judson, Dean of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College; Lorna Rivera, Director of the Gaston Institute for Latino Public Policy at UMass Boston; and Sarah Turner, President of North Bennet Street School for a panel discussion moderated by Rajini Srikanth, Dean of the Honors College at UMass Boston, centered on the question, "What qualifies as knowledge and how is it transmitted?"…
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1 Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, “Plymouth Colony First Lady Penelope Winslow” 45:03
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January 28, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum. Penelope Pelham Winslow was a member of the English gentry (her third great-grandmother was Anne Boleyn's sister Mary) who was married to Plymouth Colony Governor Josiah Winslow. Although she was one of the most powerful women in Plymouth's history, she, like most of her female contemporaries, has been largely forgotten. Penelope authored or is mentioned in just a few surviving documents; however, a wealth of physical evidence survives to tell her story, ranging from surviving homes and possessions to archaeological artifacts. These items also offer insight into the world of Plymouth Colony's women. In her new book, Penelope Winslow, Plymouth Colony First Lady: Re-Imagining a Life, Michelle Marchetti Coughlin discovers that blending historical records with material culture provides the keys to re-imagining Winslow's world in all its rich complexity.…
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1 Kerri Greenidge, “Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter” 22:20
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January 20, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum. This long-overdue biography reestablishes William Monroe Trotter’s essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and King in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes. William Monroe Trotter (1872– 1934), though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post- Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of black liberation that prefigured leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Synthesizing years of archival research, historian Kerri Greenidge renders the drama of turn- of- the- century America and reclaims Trotter as a seminal figure, whose prophetic, yet ultimately tragic, life offers a link between the vision of Frederick Douglass and black radicalism in the modern era.…
January 14, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum. In Dawson’s Fall, a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson’s great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson’s tale weaves her family’s journal entries and letters with a novelist’s narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the country’s new political, social, and moral landscape. Dawson, a man of fierce opinions, came to this country as a young Englishman to fight for the Confederacy in a war he understood as a conflict over states’ rights. He later became the editor of the Charleston News and Courier, finding a platform of real influence in the editorial column and emerging as a voice of the New South. With his wife and two children, he tried to lead a life that adhered to his staunch principles: equal rights, rule of law, and nonviolence, unswayed by the caprices of popular opinion. But he couldn’t control the political whims of his readers. As he wrangled diligently in his columns with questions of citizenship, equality, justice, and slavery, his newspaper rapidly lost readership, and he was plagued by financial worries. Nor could Dawson control the whims of the heart: his Swiss governess became embroiled in a tense affair with a drunkard doctor, which threatened to stain his family’s reputation. In the end, Dawson―a man in many ways representative of the country at this time―was felled by the very violence he vehemently opposed.…
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1 Ted Reinstein, “Wicked Pissed: New England's Most Famous Feuds” 55:26
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January 16, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum. From sports to politics, food to finance, aviation to engineering, to bitter disputes over simple boundaries themselves, New England’s feuds have peppered the region’s life for centuries. They’ve been raw and rowdy, sometimes high minded and humorous, and in a place renowned for its deep sense of history, often long-running and legendary. There are even some that will undoubtedly outlast the region’s ancient low stonewalls. Ted Reinstein, a native New Englander and local writer, offers us fascinating stories, some known, others not so much, from the history of New England in this fun, accessible book. Bringing to life many of the fights, spats, and arguments that have, in many ways, shaped the area itself, Reinstein demonstrates what it really means to be “Wicked Pissed.”…
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1 Bettina Norton, “A Foray into Forgery and the Boston Athenæum's Role in Exposing It” 47:03
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January 9, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum. An over-zealous Boston art dealer in the early years of the 20th century made knowingly false attributions of 18th-century portraits from the Salem-Boston area. The attributions were promulgated by colleagues and later by art scholars until disproved by two other historians. The saga is a sub-chapter in Norton’s upcoming book on the Salem 18th-century portrait artist, Benjamin Blyth. Sometimes mistaken for Copleys, Blyth’s portraits include the Massachusetts Historical Society’s iconic images of the newly married John and Abigail Adams, the Providence man who started the US postal system, the clergyman who promoted settlement of the Northwest Territory, and numerous figures of the American Revolution and their families. The upcoming book by Norton doubles the attributions for pastels and oils and, for the first time, lists miniatures.…
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1 Brent Budsberg, Ellen Kaspern, and Jeff Altepeter, “Reading Craft” 58:52
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December 16, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. Panelists from Current Projects and North Bennet Street School—representing the worlds of traditional woodworking and craft bookbinding—explore the significance of their work for the Required Reading exhibition: a full-scale replica of a unique Colonial Revival bookcase; a faithful copy of a seventeenth-century “bookpress;” and leather-bound books emulating those in the historic King’s Chapel Library. By reproducing historic objects, we reach a level of intimate dialogue between past and present difficult to achieve through other means. What new questions emerge when we move beyond merely examining a piece to actively remaking it? How does the process of reproducing an object serve as a form of research, lending insight into past practices, tools, materials—and even the object’s social functions?…
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1 Ben Railton, “We the People: The 500-Year Battle Over Who is American” 47:23
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December 12, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. "We the People." The Constitution begins with those deceptively simple words, but how do Americans define that "We"? In his new book We the People, Ben Railton argues that throughout our history two competing yet interconnected concepts have battled to define our national identity and community: exclusionary and inclusive visions of who gets to be an American. From the earliest moments of European contact with indigenous peoples, through the Revolutionary period's debates on African American slavery, 19th century conflicts over Indian Removal, Mexican landowners, and Chinese immigrants, 20th century controversies around Filipino Americans and Japanese internment, and 21st century fears of Muslim Americans, time and again this defining battle has shaped our society and culture. Carefully exploring and critically examining those histories, and the key stories and figures they feature, is vital to understanding America, especially when the battle over who is an American can be found in every significant debate and moment.…
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1 David J. Silverman, “This Land is Their Land” 59:49
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November 19, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, historian David J. Silverman offers a transformative new look at the Plymouth colony’s founding events, told for the first time with the Wampanoag people at the heart of the story, in This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. Silverman is a professor of Native and Colonial American history at George Washington University and has worked with modern-day Wampanoag people for more than twenty years. Through their stories, other primary sources, and historical analysis, Silverman sheds profound new light on the events that led to the creation, and bloody dissolution, of the alliance between the Wampanoag tribe and the Plymouth settlers. The result complicates and deepens our current narrative of the first Thanksgiving, presenting us with a new narrative of our country’s origins for the twenty-first century.…
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1 John Buchtel, “All Necessary and Useful Knowledge: Thomas Bray’s Libraries for Colonial America” 50:19
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November 13, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. This free-for-members event is made possible with support from the William Orville Thomson Endowment, which is generously funded by Athenæum Proprietor Peter Thomson. In 1697, Thomas Bray, a priest in the Church of England, published a detailed report (Bibliotheca Parochialis) in which he outlined all the “necessary and useful” books that he thought would constitute the essential knowledge needed to equip Anglican church leaders to minister effectively in the English colonies in North America. At the same time, Bray began fundraising to assemble libraries based on his published plan. By the time he turned his project over to his successors in 1704, Bray’s remarkable enterprise resulted in more than 40 collections of books being sent to various locations in the American colonies. One of those libraries, the collection sent to King’s Chapel in Boston in 1698, survives intact as part of the collections of the Boston Athenæum. This talk will explore Bray’s expressed purposes behind his selections for his libraries, as well as telling the story of the King’s Chapel collection, including its remarkable survival during the American war for independence. The talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Required Reading: Reimagining a Colonial Library,” on view at the Athenæum from September 17, 2019 through March 14, 2020.…
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1 Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz, “The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall” 41:56
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November 7, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. Despair, mania, rage, guilt, derangement, fantasy: poetry is our most intimate, personal source for the urgency of these experiences. Poems get under our skin; they engage with the balm, and the sting, of understanding. In The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall—its title inspired by a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins—acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky gives us more than 130 poems that explore emotion at its most expansive, distinct, and profound. For this event, poet and professor Maggie Dietz will engage Pinsky in conversation on this remarkable anthology of poems. With seven illuminating chapters and succinct headnotes for each poem, Pinsky leads us through the book’s sweeping historical range. Each chapter, with contents chronologically presented from Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes, Dante to Patricia Lockwood, shows the persistence and variation in our states of mind. “The Sleep of Reason” explores sanity and the imagination, moving from William Cowper’s “Lines Written During a Time of Insanity” to Nicole Sealey’s “a violence.” “Grief” includes Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” and Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” and “Manic Laughter” highlights both Lewis Carroll and Martín Espada. Each poem reveals something new about the vastness of human emotion; taken together they offer a sweeping ode to the power of poetry. Guided by “our finest living example of [the American civic poet]” (New York Times), The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall demonstrates how extreme feelings can be complementary and contradicting, and how poetry is not just an expression of emotion, but emotion itself.…
October 30, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. Biographer and historian Iris Origo, the internationally famous biographer and historian, dazzled readers and critics with her writings, ranging from depictions of the Irish countryside to an account of her heroic attempt to save 28 refugee children from German soldiers during World War II. Katia Lysy, Origo’s granddaughter, will discuss her legacy and the journey of bringing these elegant works to American audiences.…
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1 James B. Conroy, “Jefferson’s White House: Monticello on the Potomac” 1:03:49
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October 31, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. As the first president to occupy the White House for an entire term, Thomas Jefferson shaped the president’s residence, literally and figuratively, more than any of its other occupants. Remarkably enough, however, though many books have immortalized Jefferson’s Monticello, none has been devoted to the vibrant look, feel, and energy of his still more famous and consequential home from 1801 to 1809. In Monticello on the Potomac, James B. Conroy, author of the award-winning Lincoln’s White House offers a vivid, highly readable account of how life was lived in Jefferson’s White House and the young nation’s rustic capital.…
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1 Desiree Taylor, "The Life and Saga of Harriet Jacobs" 1:00:02
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October 29, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. Harriet Jacobs lived in the United States at a time fraught with political unrest. She was born into slavery in 1813 and spent her life striving to make a fulfilling life for herself and her family in a country that defined her as less than. To history she left a scandalous autobiography chronicling her life as a fugitive slave, and through it exposed the ugly reality of life for female slaves. However, in the twentieth century, scholars considered Jacobs’s story to be a work of fiction written by a white female abolitionist in the service of the abolitionist cause. At the end of the twentieth century a feminist scholar laid to rest any doubt that Jacobs existed and was in fact the author of her autobiography. Join researcher and storyteller Desiree Taylor for a presentation of the life and the saga of Harriet Jacobs.…
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1 Karen Abbott, “The Ghosts of Eden Park” 49:05
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October 24, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. In the early days of Prohibition, long before Al Capone became a household name, a German immigrant named George Remus quit practicing law and started trafficking whiskey. Within two years he was a multi-millionaire. The press called him “King of the Bootleggers,” writing breathless stories about the Gatsby-esque events he and his glamorous second wife, Imogene, hosted at their Cincinnati mansion, with party favors ranging from diamond jewelry for the men to brand-new Pontiacs for the women. By the summer of 1921, Remus owns 35 percent of all the liquor in the United States. Pioneering prosecutor Mabel Walker Willebrandt was determined to bring him down. Willebrandt’s bosses at the Justice Department hired her right out of law school, assuming she would pose no real threat to the cozy relationship they maintained with Remus. Eager to prove them wrong, she dispatched her best investigator, Franklin Dodge, to look into his empire. It was a decision with deadly consequences. With the fledgling FBI on the case, Remus was quickly imprisoned for violating the Volstead Act. With her husband behind bars, Imogene began an affair with investigator Dodge. Together, they plotted to ruin Remus, which sparked a bitter feud that soon reached the highest levels of government–and ended in murder. Combining deep historical research with novelistic flair, The Ghosts of Eden Park is the unforgettable, stranger-than-fiction story of a rags-to-riches entrepreneur and a long-forgotten heroine, of the excesses and absurdities of the Jazz Age, and of the infinite human capacity to deceive.…
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1 Evan Thomas and Oscie Thomas, “First: Sandra Day O’Connor” 43:46
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Sandra Day O’Connor was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she applied and was accepted into Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her law school class in 1952, no firm would interview her--but Sandra Day O’Connor’s story is that of a woman who repeatedly shattered glass ceilings, and did so with a blend of grace, wisdom, humor, understatement, and cowgirl toughness. After becoming the first ever female majority leader of a state senate, and then judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals, she arrived at the United States Supreme Court in 1981, appointed by President Ronald Reagan. Her quarter-century tenure on the Court ultimately shaped American law. Diagnosed with cancer at fifty-eight, and caring for a husband with Alzheimer’s, O’Connor endured every difficulty with grit and poise.…
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1 KL Pereira, “A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality” 50:46
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A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality is both literary and speculative, both magically real and viscerally strange, and in the tradition of writers like Angela Carter, Karen Russell, and Jorge Luis Borges. Within the collection of short stories, Pereira uses elements of fairy tales, folk tales, and myths to highlight the lives of women, children, and immigrants. Lucid prose underscores the tenacity of those who are the most vulnerable, who live on the edges, between neat and clear definitions of who they are and who they want to be. Pereira explores rebirth amid darkness, free of normative ideas of gender, class, race, and sexuality.…
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1 Avis Berman, “Missionaries of Impressionism: The American Collectors of Renoir” 49:47
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Commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of the great French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, writer and historian Avis Berman will examine the artist’s legacy from the perspective of the pioneering Americans who embraced and supported his work well before French collectors or officials did so. Berman will chronicle Renoir's career, beginning in the 1880s when Renoir and the other Impressionists were first exhibited in the U.S.--and with their acceptance by no means guaranteed--and concluding in the mid-1930s, when Renoir had become an essential purchase for museums, moguls, and movie stars. Join us to learn more about the provocative artists, dealers, and collectors from this time period and to discover some of the most sumptuous and significant Renoirs in America, in addition to the portraits and photographs of the people who collected them.…
July 16, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. The acclaimed, award-winning author Liza Wieland of A Watch of Nightingales imagines in a sweeping and stunning novel what happened to the poet Elizabeth Bishop during three life-changing weeks she spent in Paris in 1937--the only year Elizabeth, a meticulous keeper of journals, didn't fully chronicle. Amidst the imminent threat of World War II, the novel brings us in vivid detail from Paris to Normandy where Elizabeth becomes involved with a group rescuing Jewish “orphans” and delivering them to convents where they will be baptized as Catholics and saved from the impending horror their parents will face. Poignant and captivating, Liza Wieland’s Paris, 7 A.M. is a beautifully rendered take on the formative years of one of America’s most celebrated—and mythologized—female poets.…
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1 Sonia Purnell, "A Woman of No Importance" 1:04:13
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April 11, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. This lecture is in conjunction with the Royal Oak Foundation. In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent command: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young socialite from Baltimore, who, after being rejected from the Foreign Service because of her gender and prosthetic leg, talked her way into the SOE, the WWII British spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly warfare." Hall, known as the "Madonna of the Resistance," was one of the greatest spies in American and English history, yet her full story remains untold. At a time when sending female secret agents into enemy territory was still strictly forbidden, Hall coordinated a network of spies to report on German troop movements, arranged equipment parachute drops for Resistance fighters, and recruited and trained guerrilla units to ambush enemy convoys and blow up bridges and railroads. Even as her face covered WANTED posters throughout Europe, Hall refused orders to evacuate. She finally escaped in a death- defying climb over of the Pyrenees into Spain, her cover blown, and her associates imprisoned or executed. But, adamant that she had more lives to save, she plunged back into the field with the American OSS secret service, directing partisan armies to back up the Allied forces landing on Normandy beaches. A Woman of No Importance: The Spy Who Helped Win WWII will reveal the captivating story of a formidable, yet shockingly overlooked, heroine whose fierce persistence helped win the war.…
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1 Anita Diamant and Fred Sullivan, Jr., “Cymbeline: A Conversation” 56:02
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July 27, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. The Boston Athenæum and the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (CSC) have partnered together to bring you two fantastic events in one night that interrogate and celebrate Shakespeare's Cymbeline, a mystical dramedy full of intrigue, mistaken identities, and romance. The production of Cymbeline marks CSC's 24th season of Free Shakespeare on the Common (July 17 through August 4, 2019). The evening begins at the Boston Athenæum at 6:00pm with a conversation between Anita Diamant, best selling author, and Fred Sullivan Jr., director of CSC's Cymbeline. They will discuss the themes of integrity and forgiveness running throughout this tragicomic romance and fairy tale plot. In particular, they will explore the trials of the heroine, Imogen, an isolated and wronged young woman facing down threats in a violent world--and how she persists.…
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1 Elizabeth Cobbs, "The Tubman Command: A Novel" 42:53
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June 19, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. In celebration of Juneteenth. By the bestselling author of The Hamilton Affair, The Tubman Command is an impeccably researched historical novel that brings to light the bravery and brilliance of American icon Harriet Tubman. It’s May 1863. Outgeneraled and outgunned, a demoralized Union Army has pulled back with massive losses at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Fort Sumter, hated symbol of the Rebellion, taunts the American navy with its artillery and underwater mines. In Beaufort, South Carolina, one very special woman, code named Moses, is hatching a spectacular plan. Hunted by Confederates, revered by slaves, Harriet Tubman plots an expedition behind enemy lines to liberate hundreds of bondsmen and recruit them as soldiers. A bounty on her head, she has given up husband and home for the noblest cause: a nation of, by, and for the people. The Tubman Command tells the story of Tubman at the height of her powers, when she devises the largest plantation raid of the Civil War. General David Hunter places her in charge of a team of black scouts even though skeptical of what one woman can accomplish. For her gamble to succeed, “Moses” must outwit alligators, overseers, slave catchers, sharpshooters, and even hostile Union soldiers to lead gunships up the Combahee River. Men stand in her way at every turn--though one reminds her that love shouldn’t have to be the price of freedom.…
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1 Michael Bronski, "Why the Commonly Told Story of Stonewall Is the Least Interesting Thing About It" 50:36
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June 11, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. In the early morning of June 28th 1969, lesbians, gay men, drag queens, street hustlers, and transgender people fought the police and rioted for three nights on Christopher Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. The Stonewall Riot, as it came to be called, was the birth of the modern day Gay Liberation and Gay Rights movements. This was a momentous historical moment. It is also, possibly, the least interesting part of the story. Stonewall is the founding myth of today LGBTQ movements – but it is also the story of a moment in history that gripped the imagination of the nation crossing racial, gender, political, and social divides. It is a tale of riots, rebellion, revolt, freedom, and not least of all, drugs, sex and rock and roll.…
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1 Jenna Blum & Randy Susan Meyers, "Writers with Obsessions" 42:39
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Jenna Blum & Randy Susan Meyers, "Writers with Obsessions" by Boston Athenæum
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1 Nina Campbell, "Nina Campbell Interior Decoration: Elegance and Ease" 55:44
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May 30, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. Nina Campbell’s almost fifty-year career exemplifies the best of English interior design. Campbell imparts her design wisdom through a biography of her career and recent decorating projects, sharing tips and secrets of the trade. A selection of the designer’s own London residences outlines her experimentations and passions—from pared-back grandeur to bold plays of scale and modern use of texture and color. A survey of Nina’s high-profile commissions completed in the last five years demonstrates how she employs the key principles of her design aesthetic in a variety of contexts, from prestigious addresses in London and New York, a pied-à-terre in Rome, and a retreat in the English countryside to a historic German hotel, a viewing pavilion at the Ascot, and a Los Angeles bedroom suite. The running theme is how Campbell has taken the tenets of classic English style and uses them to create a style germane to the twenty-first century. This eponymous book masterfully illustrates one of the most enduring decorating styles of the past fifty years in English design—traditional interiors with vibrant colors, luxurious textiles, pared-down elegance, and, above all, true comfort.…
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1 Christian Di Spigna, “Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren” 49:10
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May 28, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. A rich and illuminating biography of America’s forgotten Founding Father, the patriot physician and major general who fomented rebellion and died heroically at the battle of Bunker Hill on the brink of revolution. Little has been known of one of the most important figures in early American history, Dr. Joseph Warren, an architect of the colonial rebellion, and a man who might have led the country as Washington or Jefferson did had he not been martyred at Bunker Hill in 1775. Warren was involved in almost every major insurrectionary act in the Boston area for a decade, from the Stamp Act protests to the Boston Massacre to the Boston Tea Party, and his incendiary writings included the famous Suffolk Resolves, which helped unite the colonies against Britain and inspired the Declaration of Independence. Yet after his death, his life and legend faded, leaving his contemporaries to rise to fame in his place and obscuring his essential role in bringing America to independence. Christian Di Spigna’s definitive new biography of Warren is a loving work of historical excavation, the product of two decades of research and scores of newly unearthed primary-source documents that have given us this forgotten Founding Father anew. Following Warren from his farming childhood and years at Harvard through his professional success and political radicalization to his role in sparking the rebellion, Di Spigna’s thoughtful, judicious retelling not only restores Warren to his rightful place in the pantheon of Revolutionary greats, it deepens our understanding of the nation’s dramatic beginnings.…
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1 Lynne Murphy, “The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English” 42:32
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May 13, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. In conjunction with The English-Speaking Union “English accents are the sexiest.” “Americans have ruined the English language.” Such claims about the English language are often repeated but rarely examined. Professor Lynne Murphy is on the linguistic front line. In The Prodigal Tongue she explores the fiction and reality of the special relationship between British and American English. By examining the causes and symptoms of American Verbal Inferiority Complex and its flipside, British Verbal Superiority Complex, Murphy unravels the prejudices, stereotypes and insecurities that shape our attitudes to our own language. With great humo(u)r and new insights, Lynne Murphy looks at the social, political and linguistic forces that have driven American and British English in different directions: how Americans got from centre to center, why British accents are growing away from American ones, and what different things we mean when we say estate, frown, or middle class. Is anyone winning this war of the words? Will Yanks and Brits ever really understand each other?…
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1 Suzanne Preston Blier, Stephen S. Lash, Akili Tommasino, and Murray Whyte, "What's It Worth?” 50:07
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May 9, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. For many, art has an essential worth independent of commercial value. It exists in its own priceless realm of cultural heritage and personal meaning. And yet, artworks are also subject to commodifying forces that often take them away from the public eye or the peoples who created them. For instance, at auction houses private collectors pay stunning sums for artworks that are then whisked behind closed doors. Meanwhile, museum curators must negotiate the value of artworks according to a unique set of acquisition practices and parameters quite different from private collectors. And then some artists’ works--however brilliant--never gain recognition while others’ become virtually priceless. Join us for an evening with four experts who will examine the “value” of art in its myriad forms.…
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1 Robert W. Fieseler and Jeremy Hobson, “Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire” 40:13
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May 2, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. An essential work of American civil rights history, Tinderbox mesmerizingly reconstructs the 1973 fire that devastated New Orleans’ subterranean gay community. Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016. Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue-collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community. The aftermath was no less traumatic—families ashamed to claim loved ones, the Catholic Church refusing proper burial rights, the city impervious to the survivors’ needs—revealing a world of toxic prejudice that thrived well past Stonewall. Yet the impassioned activism that followed proved essential to the emergence of a fledgling gay movement. Tinderbox restores honor to a forgotten generation of civil-rights martyrs. Robert W. Fiesler will be joined in conversation with Jeremy Hobson of WBUR.…
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1 Emily Bazelon and Adam J. Foss, “Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution” 55:12
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April 29, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. Join us for a conversation with two leading voices in the movement to bring about criminal justice reform, New York Times Magazine journalist Emily Bazelon and Boston-based advocate and former prosecutor Adam Foss. In their respective fields, both grapple with the fact that the image of the American criminal justice system as a contest between the prosecution and the defense with judges ensuring a fair fight does not, in fact, match the reality. Much of the time, it is prosecutors more than judges who control the outcome of a case, and oftentimes with devastating consequences. Emily Bazelon’s new book entitled Charged examines this heretofore unchecked power of prosecutors and how this power undermines the American criminal justice system. She exposes the damage overzealous prosecutors can inflict alongside those—like Adam Foss—who seek to reform the system. Adam Foss, who formerly served as Assistant District Attorney in the Juvenile Division of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, has firsthand insight into the connection between prosecution and mass incarceration. Since his viral Ted Talk on prosecution in February in 2016, Adam Foss has gone on to found Prosecutor Impact, a non-profit developing training and curriculum for prosecutors to reframe their role in the criminal justice system. With participants uniquely suited to speaking on the present issues afflicting the justice system, this event will shine a light on the little known cause for enormous injustice, while also offering a vision for a better future.…
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1 Mary Norris and Gregory Maguire, “Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen” 36:47
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April 23, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. In her New York Times best-selling Between You & Me, Mary Norris delighted readers with her irreverent tales of pencils, punctuation, and punctiliousness over three decades in The New Yorker’s celebrated copy department. In Greek to Me, she delivers another wise and witty paean to the art of expressing oneself clearly and convincingly, this time filtered through her greatest passion: all things Greek. From convincing her New Yorker bosses to pay for Ancient Greek studies to traveling the sacred way in search of Persephone, Greek to Me is an unforgettable account of both her lifelong love affair with words and her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, and reveals the surprising ways Greek helped form English. Filled with Norris’s memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek gods, Greek wine—and more than a few Greek waiters—Greek to Me is the Comma Queen’s fresh take on Greece and the exotic yet strangely familiar language that so deeply influences our own.…
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1 Cara Robertson, “The Trial of Lizzie Borden” 42:49
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March 28, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. The Trial of Lizzie Borden tells the true story of one of the most sensational murder trials in American history. When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Reporters flocked to the scene. Well-known columnists took up conspicuous seats in the courtroom. The defendant was relentlessly scrutinized for signs of guilt or innocence. Everyone—rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and laypeople—had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence. Was she a cold-blooded murderess or an unjustly persecuted lady? Did she or didn’t she? The popular fascination with the Borden murders and its central enigmatic character has endured for more than one hundred years. Immortalized in rhyme, told and retold in every conceivable genre, the murders have secured a place in the American pantheon of mythic horror, but one typically wrenched from its historical moment. In contrast, Cara Robertson explores the stories Lizzie Borden’s culture wanted and expected to hear and how those stories influenced the debate inside and outside of the courtroom. Based on transcripts of the Borden legal proceedings, contemporary newspaper accounts, unpublished local accounts, and recently unearthed letters from Lizzie herself, The Trial of Lizzie Borden offers a window onto America in the Gilded Age, showcasing its most deeply held convictions and its most troubling social anxieties.…
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1 Karen Corsano and Daniel Williman, “John Singer Sargent in the Circle of Annie Adams Fields” 48:41
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April 18, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. This event was held in collaboration with the Somerset Club. John Singer Sargent, the most sought-after portraitist of his age, painted hundreds of women, the rich and famous, noble and artistic. Perhaps the most interesting woman he ever painted was the social reformer, women's-rights advocate, hostess, author and Athenæum member Annie Adams Fields. He painted her in 1890, his crucial American year. Both before and after that, during Sargent’s stays in Boston and Annie’s trips to London, the two fostered a mutual admiration within their overlapping circles of friends. Annie’s portrait has just come home from a big Sargent show in Stockholm. We want to welcome her back by exploring the backstory of this Athenæum treasure.…
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1 Jessie Morgan-Owens, “Girl in Black and White” 36:54
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March 22, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. When a decades-long court battle resulted in her family’s freedom in 1855, seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams unexpectedly became the face of American slavery. Famous abolitionists Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Albion Andrew would help Mary and her family in freedom, but Senator Charles Sumner saw a monumental political opportunity. Due to generations of sexual violence, Mary’s skin was so light that she “passed” as white, and this fact would make her the key to his white audience’s sympathy. During his sold-out abolitionist lecture series, Sumner paraded Mary in front of rapt audiences as evidence that slavery was not bounded by race. Weaving together long-overlooked primary sources and arresting images, including the daguerreotype that turned Mary into the poster child of a movement, Jessie Morgan-Owens investigates tangled generations of sexual enslavement and the fraught politics that led Mary to Sumner. She follows Mary’s story through the lives of her determined mother and grandmother to her own adulthood, parallel to the story of the antislavery movement and the eventual signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Girl in Black and White restores Mary to her rightful place in history and uncovers a dramatic narrative of travels along the Underground Railroad, relationships tested by oppression, and the struggles of life after emancipation. The result is an exposé of the thorny racial politics of the abolitionist movement and the pervasive colorism that dictated where white sympathy lay―one that sheds light on a shameful legacy that still affects us profoundly today.…
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1 Henry Adams and Bill Cross, “John Hubbard Sturgis Eaton Endowed Lecture: Homer at the Beach” 20:44
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March 21, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. In the late 1860s, an ambitious New York illustrator – not yet recognized as an artist – made his first picture of the sea. Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was 33 years old, freshly back from France, and finding his way. Over the next 11 years Homer’s journey would take him to a variety of marine destinations, from New Jersey to Maine, but especially – and repeatedly – to Gloucester and other parts of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. It was on Cape Ann that Homer made his first watercolors, and where he learned his great calling: to be a marine artist. And it was there, in Gloucester in 1880, at the end of these 11 years, that he enjoyed the most productive season of his life, composing more than 100 watercolors of astonishing beauty. In August, 40 public and private collections will share some of Homer’s finest marine works at the Cape Ann Museum, in the heart of Gloucester, for the first close examination of the making of this great marine artist. Homer’s journey forever changed his life, and the art of his country. This exhibition – running concurrently with a complementary Homer exhibition at Harvard – will reveal new aspects of Winslow Homer, for the first time placing these paintings, drawings and even ceramic work in their rich geographic, cultural and historical settings. Hear the two curators of Homer at the Beach preview the exhibition on March 21st.…
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1 Jed Willard, “Nationalism: Here, There, and Everywhere?” 41:00
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March 13, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. Join us for an evening with one of the nation’s leading experts on global engagement, Jed Willard, who will give a lecture and lead a neutral discussion on the rise of global nationalism. This event is held in collaboration with Civic Series--an organization that designs non-partisan events to explore complex issues in a non-confrontational way. An extended Q&A and discussion will follow a 30 minute overview. For the last two decades, the focus of cooperation and globalization has helped grow economies and bring prosperity to most, but clearly not all. The President of the United States declared himself a nationalist and joined an increasing number of far-right leaders in Russia, Germany, Brazil, and Turkey. As countries start to build diplomatic barriers against each other, decades-old global relationships are dissolving and across the world power is shifting toward isolationism and new allegiances are being formed. Questions such as the following will be addressed: what happens when America withdraws from treaties and United Nations activities? how are neighboring countries affected by the election of far-right candidates? and is protectionism the best way forward for emerging economies?…
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1 Lindsay Leard-Coolidge, “Sublime Impressions: Prints and Printmakers of the Grand Canyon” 40:13
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March 3, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. Topographers, illustrators, and painter-printmakers explored and created images of the Grand Canyon, and the evolution of these genres parallels the history of American printmaking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with geological studies and including prints for tourists and collectors, printmakers have approached the Canyon from the vantage point of line, tone, and pattern. In so doing, they made significant contributions to imaging one of the United States’ most renowned geological monuments, yet their works have not been extensively studied like those of painters and photographers. Sublime Impressions: Prints and Printmakers of the Grand Canyon traces the history of printmaking in the Grand Canyon from the topographical images of the first explorers to the abstracted works of twentieth-century modernists to show how a medium changed the way the Grand Canyon was represented and, thus, the public’s perception of it.…
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1 Joshua S. Goldstein, Steffan A. Qvist, and Steven Pinker, “Bright Future" 47:35
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January 10, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. As climate change nears potentially disastrous tipping points, a solution is hiding in plain sight. Several countries have successfully replaced fossil fuels with low-carbon energy sources by combining renewable energy with a quick buildout of nuclear power. By following their example, the world could dramatically cut fossil fuel use by midcentury, even as energy consumption continues to rise. Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Qvist explain how clean energy rapidly replaced fossil fuels in such places as Sweden, France, South Korea, and Ontario, Canada, while enhancing both prosperity and the natural environment. They encourage a fresh look at the assumptions that have long shaped the climate change debate. The event will be moderated by Harvard Professor and acclaimed scientist Steven Pinker.…
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1 Anne Boyd Rioux, “Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters” 38:46
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September 12, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. On its 150th anniversary, discover the story of the beloved classic that has captured the imaginations of generations. Soon after publication on September 30, 1868, Little Women became an enormous bestseller and one of America’s favorite novels. Its popularity quickly spread throughout the world, and the book has become an international classic. Alcott’s novel has moved generations of women, many of them writers; Simone de Beauvoir, J. K. Rowling, bell hooks, Cynthia Ozick, Jane Smiley, Margo Jefferson, and Ursula K. Le Guin were inspired by Little Women, particularly its portrait of the iconoclastic young writer, Jo. In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Rioux recounts how Louisa May Alcott came to write Little Women, drawing inspiration for it from her own life. Rioux also examines why this tale of family and community ties, set while the Civil War tore America apart, has resonated through later wars, the Depression, and times of changing opportunities for women. In gauging its current status, Rioux shows why Little Women remains a book with such power that people carry its characters and spirit throughout their lives.…
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1 Robert Zimmerman, Jr., “Nature’s Design: Land, Water, and Climate Change in Boston” 43:05
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December 10, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. This free-for-members event is made possible with support from the William Orville Thomson Endowment, which is generously funded by Athenæum Proprietor Peter Thomson. We often allow ourselves to be lulled into the notion that the real impacts of climate change will come with sea level rise sometime much later in this century. The truth is that the significant changes of climate are upon us, and the likelihood that we will be hit by catastrophic precipitation-based flooding increases annually. The expectation is that we will suffer flooding like Pensacola, Florida; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Columbia, South Carolina; and Houston, Texas sooner than later, and very likely in the coming twenty years. Yet there are things we can do now to mitigate and even eliminate any impacts, the necessary changes can largely pay for themselves, and those changes would dramatically improve the appeal and livability of our city and region. Join Bob Zimmerman, former executive director of the Charles River Watershed Association, for an in-depth evaluation of our options.…
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1 Nathaniel Philbrick, “In the Hurricane's Eye” 41:46
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December 3, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In the fall of 1780, after five frustrating years of war, George Washington had come to realize that the only way to defeat the British Empire was with the help of the French navy. But as he had learned after two years of trying, coordinating his army’s movements with those of a fleet of warships based thousands of miles away was next to impossible. And then, on September 5, 1781, the impossible happened. Recognized today as one of the most important naval engagements in the history of the world, the Battle of the Chesapeake–fought without a single American ship–made the subsequent victory of the Americans at Yorktown a virtual inevitability. In a narrative that moves from Washington’s headquarters on the Hudson River, to the wooded hillside in North Carolina where Nathanael Greene fought Lord Cornwallis to a vicious draw, to Lafayette’s brilliant series of maneuvers across Tidewater Virginia, New York Times bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick details the epic and suspenseful year through to its triumphant conclusion. A riveting and wide-ranging story, full of dramatic, unexpected turns, In the Hurricane’s Eye reveals that the fate of the American Revolution depended, in the end, on Washington and the sea.…
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1 Kendall Taylor, Ph.D, “The Gatsby Affair” 44:40
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November 7, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. The romance between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre has been celebrated as one of the greatest of the twentieth century. From the beginning, their relationship was a tumultuous one, in which the couple’s excesses were as widely known as their passion for each other. Despite their love, both Scott and Zelda engaged in flirtations that threatened to tear the couple apart. But none had a more profound impact on the two—and on Scott’s writing—than the liaison between Zelda and French aviator Edouard Jozan. Though other biographies have written of Jozan as one of Scott’s romantic rivals, accounts of the pilot’s effect on the couple have been superficial at best. In The Gatsby Affair: Scott, Zelda, and the Betrayal That Shaped an American Classic, Kendall Taylor examines the dalliance between the southern belle and the French pilot from a fresh perspective. Drawing on conversations and correspondence with Jozan’s daughter, as well as materials from the Jozan family archives, Taylor sheds new light on this romantic triangle. More than just a casual fling, Zelda’s tryst with Edouard affected Scott as much as it did his wife—and ultimately influenced the author’s most famous creation, Jay Gatsby. Were it not for Zelda’s affair with the pilot, Scott’s novel might be less about betrayal and more about lost illusions.…
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1 Daniel Breen, "The Unkempt Bibliomaniac of Tremont Street: William Shaw and Federalist Boston" 37:45
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November 8, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In the precarious first decades of the Boston Athenæum, no one did more to keep the fledgling institution alive than its first librarian, William Smith Shaw. Slovenly in his appearance and extreme in his politics, Shaw could easily come across as disagreeable to his Boston contemporaries. Yet Shaw was much more than the prickly personality who looks disdainfully down at us from his portrait in the Athenæum Newspaper Room. His character was marked by considerable virtues as well, and it is these virtues that should inspire us today, in the troubled and perplexing twenty-first century. In telling the colorful and tragic story of Shaw's life, we will look behind the portrait to find the glowing strengths that helped preserve the Athenaeum in its infancy, strengths that may help inform the institution's work in its maturity.…
November 28, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual false alarm. As one fireman recounted later, “Once that first stack got going, it was Goodbye, Charlie.” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2,000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed 400,000 books and damaged 700,000 more. Investigators descended on the scene, but over thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? Weaving her life-long love of books and reading with the fascinating history of libraries and the sometimes-eccentric characters who run them, award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean presents a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling story as only she can. With her signature wit, insight, compassion, and talent for deep research, she investigates the legendary Los Angeles Public Library fire to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives. Along the way, she reveals how these buildings provide much more than just books—and that they are needed now more than ever. Filled with heart, passion, and unforgettable characters, The Library Book is classic Susan Orlean, and an homage to a beloved institution that remains a vital part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country and culture.…
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1 Simon Winchester, “The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World” 51:42
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June 19, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Precision is an essential component of the modern world. Much of what is important in our everyday lives—our cell phones, our computers, our cars, our ballpoint pens—is fitted together with precision to operate with near-perfection. But, what is precision and why is it important? Who invented it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in our world blinded us to other things of equal value? Can the precise and the natural co-exist in society? The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World locates the origins of precision in Industrial Age England and introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production. Thomas Jefferson brought their discoveries to the United States, setting the fledgling nation on its course to become a manufacturing titan. Through Winchester’s inimitable, learned, and charming storytelling, you will discover why so many words having to do with cars and driving—“garage,” “chauffeur”—come from the French and where the expression “lock, stock and barrel” originated. You’ll learn about the relationship between the making of guns and the design of shoes, and what a shower head had to do with the design of the Hubble Telescope.…
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1 Caroline Light, “Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense” 45:32
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June 7, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Today the United States represents about 5% of the world’s population but possesses approximately 40% of its guns. We also experience the highest number of mass shootings, which represent only a small fraction of our annual gun deaths. Perhaps ironically, the spread of guns and naturalization of gun deaths is linked to a widespread acceptance of self-defense, the right to fight back with lethal force when one feels threatened. Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair With Lethal Self-Defense explores the complex path by which the English common law “duty to retreat” from threat was transformed into a selective right to kill. Caroline Light will discuss how our nation’s history influences contemporary understandings of vulnerability and threat, and how appeals to race, gender, and class difference shape the adjudication of self-defense cases. In the process, Light seeks to illuminate a history hidden in plain sight, by showing how violent self-defense has been legalized for the most privileged while weaponized against the most vulnerable.…
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1 Philip Dray, “The Fair Chase: The Epic Story of Hunting in America” 52:05
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May 30, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. From Daniel Boone to Teddy Roosevelt, hunting is one of America's most sacred-but also most fraught-traditions. It was promoted in the 19th century as a way to reconnect "soft" urban Americans with nature and to the legacy of the country's pathfinding heroes. Fair chase, a hunting code of ethics emphasizing fairness, rugged independence, and restraint towards wildlife, emerged as a worldview and gave birth to the conservation movement. But the sport's popularity also caused class, ethnic, and racial divisions, and stirred debate about the treatment of Native Americans and the role of hunting in preparing young men for war. This sweeping and balanced book offers a definitive account of hunting in America. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of our nation's foundational myths.…
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1 Stephen Greenblatt, “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics” 43:54
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October 22, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. As an aging, tenacious Elizabeth I clung to power, a talented playwright probed the social causes, the psychological roots, and the twisted consequences of tyranny. In exploring the psyche (and psychoses) of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, Coriolanus, and the societies they rule over, Stephen Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the catastrophic consequences of its execution. Cherished institutions seem fragile, political classes are in disarray, economic misery fuels populist anger, people knowingly accept being lied to, partisan rancor dominates, spectacular indecency rules—these aspects of a society in crisis fascinated Shakespeare and shaped some of his most memorable plays. With uncanny insight, he shone a spotlight on the infantile psychology and unquenchable narcissistic appetites of demagogues—and the cynicism and opportunism of the various enablers and hangers-on who surround them—and imagined how they might be stopped. As Greenblatt shows, Shakespeare’s work, in this as in so many other ways, remains vitally relevant today.…
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1 Erin Corrales-Diaz, “A Great National Painting: James Walker’s The Battle of Gettysburg" 53:23
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May 23, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Six years in the making, James Walker’s twenty-foot long The Battle of Gettysburg debuted in Boston on March 14, 1870. No less than five major Boston newspapers lauded the work’s sweep and substance, praising its “remarkable minuteness and comprehensiveness and . . . fidelity.” Indeed, several of the generals depicted in the work (Longstreet, Meade, Hancock, Webb, Hall, and others) vouched for its accuracy—and its pathos. After its first appearance, The Battle of Gettysburg embarked on a cross-country tour with owner, the historian John Badger Bachelder, to “delight and instruct” American audiences. The popularity of the picture and the narrative of the battle of Gettysburg generated a souvenir market including guide books, descriptive keys, and small-scale print reproductions. This commercial industry around Walker’s panoramic painting enabled Bachelder to shape popular perceptions on how Americans interpreted the battle that continue to the present day.…
June 28, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. As a response to his desire to make a work of art, unique in character and materiality, Aaron Sinift created the Five-Year Plan project. The inspiration came from the artworks printed onto the side of sling bags called “jholas” that are commonly made by Gandhi ashram collectives throughout India. The cloth they are made from, called khadi, is made from hand-spun cotton thread woven on hand-looms, a cloth with deep resonance in India. Sinift commissioned 1.4 kilometers, almost a mile, of khadi from the Manav Seva Sannidhi Ashram in Modinagar, which employs 700 spinners, the majority of whom are women over the age of 55. The ashram also employs 45 weavers, and 35 helpers. Most of these workers are Dalit Muslim or low-caste Hindu, and are the sole providers for their families. The ashrams who created this book made it entirely from khadi cloth featuring screen- and block-printed artworks by 24 artists from 8 countries. He commissioned well-known artists like Francesco Clemente, Yoko Ono, and Chris Martin to contribute one page each. Spinning and weaving the khadi for the Five-Year Plan created more than 2,400 days of work for the ashram and kept 100 families employed for a month.…
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1 Dr. Adam Koppel, Dr. David Meeker, Dr. Craig C. Mello, and Carl Zimmer : Biotechnology Panel 1:31:34
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May 21, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Join us for a panel discussion that will explore exciting developments in the life sciences. The latest trends in gene therapy, gene editing, and RNA interference--to name a few subjects--will be examined. The panelists will also trace the journey of consumer and clinical products from the spark of an idea to product-testing in the lab. Other questions for discussion include: What are current trends in the life sciences and how can they be extended into the future? And what impact will those trends have on the greater Boston area? Come learn about this fascinating field and its impact on both an individual and societal level. Carl Zimmer, esteemed science writer for the New York Times, will serve as moderator for the panel comprised of three outstanding speakers: Nobel Laureate Dr. Craig C. Mello representing academic research, Dr. Adam Koppel of Bain Capital Life Science Ventures representing venture capital, and Dr. David Meeker of KSQ Therapeutics, formerly of Genzyme/Sanofi, representing industry.…
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1 Poets' Theatre, “The Poet Behind the Mask (or Dramatis Personae)” 1:08:20
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May 7, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Poets are supposed to pour their souls into their work. In so doing, however, they often adopt masks, speaking through others. This cast of characters can be extremely varied: genders are switched, professions are tried on, contrary ideas rehearsed, Phillis Wheatley hangs out with Robinson Crusoe, Sacagawea headlines with Crazy Jane. This set of readings by actors from The Poets' Theatre, which ranges from Erica Funkhouser to Alfred Lord Tennyson to Richard Howard, from the Earl of Rochester to Elizabeth Bishop to Lloyd Schwartz, reveals poets in masquerade, ventriloquizing a wide array of extraordinary individuals, even pretending to be... versions of themselves.…
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1 Marilyn Yalom, “The Amorous Heart: An Unconventional History of Love” 46:51
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May 22, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. The symmetrical, exuberant heart is everywhere: it gives shape to candy, pendants, the frothy milk on top of a cappuccino, and much else. How can we explain the ubiquity of what might be the most recognizable symbol in the world? In The Amorous Heart, Marilyn Yalom tracks the heart metaphor and heart iconography across two thousand years, through Christian theology, pagan love poetry, medieval painting, Shakespearean drama, Enlightenment science, and into the present. She argues that the symbol reveals a tension between love as romantic and sexual on the one hand, and as religious and spiritual on the other. Ultimately, the heart symbol is a guide to the astonishing variety of human affections, from the erotic to the chaste and from the unrequited to the conjugal.…
May 8, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Lucas Cowan, Public Art Curator for The Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, will present on The Greenway's 2018 Public Art Curatorial theme titled GLOW, a public exhibition of commissioned light-based artworks, historically significant Massachusetts light based roadside architecture, and interactive experiences that showcases the rapidly evolving concept of light and art, helping to shape our sense of place, and our collective and individual identities. With the 2018 exhibition GLOW, spectators will have the opportunity to interact with the The Greenway in the evenings and see how the public will actually use the park after dark. The project centers on the exhibition of 8 large scale historic neon signs from local businesses c.1914-1965 that once existed throughout Massachusetts. The exhibition of the historical neon signs also presents a tremendous opportunity to engage new audiences who are interested in 20th century popular culture. Furthermore, the exhibition represents our first time working with a collector, and we are excited to present Dave Waller’s story to the public—why he collects, and how he restores and preserves these signs.…
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1 Joseph L. Koerner, “Hieronymus Bosch, Enemy Painter” 53:23
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May 17, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Joseph Leo Koerner pays tribute to the enigmatic artistry of Hieronymus Bosch. Active in the Netherlands around 1500, at the eve of the Protestant Reformation, Bosch was a master-portraitist of devils, nightmares, cosmic catastrophes, and hellish punishments. In cultivating evil as his strange artistic specialty, Bosch also cast himself as potentially demonic, a painter of enemies who might also be an enemy painter. A person of his time, Bosch nevertheless has relevance today, in our era of increased xenophobia and polarized politics. An absorbing study of the dark paradoxes of human creativity, Bosch and Bruegel is also a timely account of how hatred can be converted into tolerance through the agency of art. It takes readers through all the major paintings, drawings, and prints of these two unforgettable artists ― including Bosch’s notoriously elusive Garden of Earthly Delights, which forms the core of this historical tour de force.…
May 10, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Every day, Americans make decisions about their privacy: what to share and when, how much to expose and to whom. Securing the boundary between one’s private affairs and public identity has become a central task of citizenship. How did privacy come to loom so large in American life? Sarah Igo tracks this elusive social value across the twentieth century, as individuals questioned how they would, and should, be known by their own society. Popular journalism and communication technologies, welfare bureaucracies and police tactics, market research and workplace testing, scientific inquiry and computer data banks, tell-all memoirs and social media all propelled privacy to the foreground of U.S. culture. Jurists and philosophers but also ordinary people weighed the perils, the possibilities, and the promise of being known. In the process, they redrew the borders of contemporary selfhood and citizenship. The Known Citizen reveals how privacy became the indispensable language for monitoring the ever-shifting line between our personal and social selves. Igo’s sweeping history, from the era of “instantaneous photography” to the age of big data, uncovers the surprising ways that debates over what should be kept out of the public eye have shaped U.S. politics and society. It offers the first wide-angle view of privacy as it has been lived and imagined by modern Americans.…
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1 Noah Wilson-Rich, “Our Future with Bees” 55:38
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November 29, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. If you eat food, you need bees. The world’s bees can create economic and ecological sustainability, if only we let them. As pollinators, bees bring us over 100 fruit and vegetable crops and provide feed for our livestock industry. Yet bees are dying at an alarming rate. Data from urban environments indicate that bees are doing better in cities. Why is this? Learn how to get involved in urban beekeeping, and how to save these vitally important creatures.…
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1 Robert Kuttner, “Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?” 32:03
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April 26, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Before and after World War II, a serendipitous confluence of events created a healthy balance between the market and the polity—between the engine of capitalism and the egalitarian ideals of democracy. Under Roosevelt’s New Deal, unions and collective bargaining were legalized. Glass-Steagall reined in speculative finance. At Bretton Woods, a global financial system was devised explicitly to allow nations to manage capitalism. Yet this golden era turned out to be lightning in a bottle. From the 1970s on, a power shift occurred, in which financial regulations were rolled back, taxes were cut, inequality worsened, and disheartened voters turned to far-right, faux populism. Robert Kuttner lays out the events that led to the postwar miracle, and charts its dissolution all the way to Trump, Brexit, and the tenuous state of the EU. Is today’s poisonous alliance of reckless finance and ultra-nationalism inevitable? Or can democracy find a way to survive?…
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1 Joseph Rosenbloom, “Redemption: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Last 31 Hours” 46:48
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April 17, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Redemption is an intimate look at the last thirty-one hours and twenty-eight minutes of King's life. King was exhausted from a brutal speaking schedule. He was being denounced in the press and by political leaders as an agent of violence. He was facing dissent even within the civil rights movement and among his own staff at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In Memphis, a federal court injunction was barring him from marching. As threats against King mounted, he feared an imminent, violent death. The risks were enormous, the pressure intense. Drawing on dozens of interviews by the author with people who were immersed in the Memphis events, Redemption features recently released documents from Atlanta archives, and includes compelling photos. The fresh material reveals untold facets of the story including a never-before-reported lapse by the Memphis Police Department to provide security for King. It unveils financial and logistical dilemmas and recounts the emotional and marital pressures that were bedeviling King. Also revealed is what his assassin, James Earl Ray, was doing in Memphis during the same time and how a series of extraordinary breaks enabled Ray to construct a sniper's nest and shoot King. Redemption is an "immersive, humanizing, and demystifying" (New York Times) look at the final hours of Dr. King's life as he seeks to revive the non-violent civil rights movement and push to end poverty in America.…
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1 Nathaniel Silver, “Fra Angelico: Heaven on Earth” 55:15
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March 29, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In 1899, Isabella Stewart Gardner acquired the first Fra Angelico painting in America. The exhibition Heaven on Earth at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum reunites for the first time the founder's magnificent Assumption and Dormition of the Virgin with its three companions from the Museo di San Marco, Florence. Conceived as a set of jewel-like reliquaries between 1424 and 1434 for one of the most important churches in Florence, they tell the story of the Virgin Mary’s life. This lecture explores how a Dominican friar in Renaissance Florence transformed the history of western art with breathtaking paintings of peerless originality. Immerse yourself in the material splendor of his craftsmanship and enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at the preparations for this exhibition. Renaissance master Fra Angelico (c. 1400-1455) transformed the history of western art with his breathtaking paintings. Heaven on Earth reunites for the first time the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s magnificent Assumption and Dormition of the Virgin with its three companions from the Museo di San Marco, Florence. Conceived as a set of jewel-like reliquaries for one of the most important churches in Florence, they tell the story of the Virgin Mary’s life. Brought together with unprecedented loans from Italy and the United States, the exhibition invites you to explore Fra Angelico’s ground-breaking narrative art, marvel at his peerless creativity and immerse yourself in the material splendor of his craftsmanship. This lecture will take you behind the scenes in the preparation for this exhibition, into the conservation laboratory where all four reliquaries were recently conserved and reveal some of the important discoveries made along the way. It will also unfold the fascinating history of Mrs. Gardner's Assumption and Dormition of the Virgin, a landmark in the history of American collecting as the first Fra Angelico painting to come to the United States.…
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1 Michael J. Klarman, “The Framers' Coup” 50:50
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March 27, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Americans revere their Constitution. However, most of us are unaware how tumultuous and improbable the drafting and ratification processes were. As Benjamin Franklin keenly observed, any assembly of men bring with them "all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests and their selfish views." One need not deny that the Framers had good intentions in order to believe that they also had interests. Ultimately, both the Constitution's content and its ratification process raise troubling questions about democratic legitimacy. The Federalists were eager to avoid full-fledged democratic deliberation over the Constitution, and the document that was ratified was stacked in favor of their preferences. And in terms of substance, the Constitution was a significant departure from the more democratic state constitutions of the 1770s. Definitive and authoritative, The Framers' Coup explains why the Framers preferred such a constitution and how they managed to persuade the country to adopt it. We have lived with the consequences, both positive and negative, ever since.…
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1 Sarah McBride, “Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality” 31:19
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March 8, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In April 2012, when transgender issues had yet to break onto the national scene, Sarah McBride made headlines—and history—when she came out publicly as a transgender woman while serving as American University’s student body president. With a viral Facebook post that announced her identity, she suddenly found herself on the forefront of a movement, fighting for positive change. Since that day in April, Sarah has continued to make history, eventually becoming the first openly transgender person to address a major party convention. Before she became the first transgender person to speak at a national political convention in 2016 at the age of twenty-six, Sarah McBride struggled with the decision to come out—not just to her family but to the students of American University, where she was serving as student body president. She’d known she was a girl from her earliest memories, but it wasn’t until the Facebook post announcing her truth went viral that she realized just how much impact her story could have on the country. Four years later, McBride was one of the nation’s most prominent transgender activists, walking the halls of the White House, advocating the passing of laws, and addressing the country in the midst of a heated presidential election. And, she’d found her first love and future husband, Andy, a trans man and fellow activist, who complimented her in every way... until cancer tragically intervened. Informative, heartbreaking, and empowering, Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality is McBride’s story of love and loss, a powerful entry point into the LGBTQ community’s battle for equal rights and what it means to be openly transgender. From issues like bathroom access to health care, McBride weaves the important political and cultural milestones into a personal journey that will open hearts and change minds.…
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1 Joel Richard Paul, “Without Precedent: John Marshall and His Times” 47:42
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March 5, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. No member of America's Founding Generation had a greater impact on the Constitution and the Supreme Court than John Marshall, and no one did more to preserve the delicate unity of the fledgling United States. From the nation's founding in 1776 and for the next forty years, Marshall was at the center of every political battle. As Chief Justice of the United States - the longest-serving in history - he established the independence of the judiciary and the supremacy of the federal Constitution and courts. As the leading Federalist in Virginia, he rivaled his cousin Thomas Jefferson in influence. As a diplomat and secretary of state, he defended American sovereignty against France and Britain, counseled President John Adams, and supervised the construction of the city of Washington. D.C. This is the astonishing true story of how a rough-cut frontiersman - born in Virginia in 1755 and with little formal education - invented himself as one of the nation's preeminent lawyers and politicians who then reinvented the Constitution to forge a stronger nation. Without Precedent is the engrossing account of the life and times of this exceptional man, who with cunning, imagination, and grace shaped America's future as he held together the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the country itself.…
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1 Giles Milton,Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare:The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat 45:41
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February 28, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In the spring of 1939, a top-secret organization was founded in London: its purpose was to plot the destruction of Hitler’s war machine, through spectacular acts of sabotage. The guerrilla campaign that followed was as extraordinary as the six men who directed it. One of them, William Fairbairn, was a portly pensioner with an unusual passion: he was the world’s leading expert in silent killing, hired to train the guerrillas being parachuted behind enemy lines. Another, Cecil Clarke, was an engineer and caravan-designer turned maverick bomb-maker. Led by dapper Scotsman Colin Gubbins, these men—along with three others—formed a secret inner circle that, aided by a group of formidable ladies, changed the course of the Second World War: a cohort hand-picked by Winston Churchill, whom he called his Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.…
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1 Robert Shiller, “The Transformation of the American Dream” 45:22
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February 15, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In his 1931 book The Epic of America James Truslow Adams first popularized the concept of the “American Dream" as "being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations." But the meaning of the term changes through time as culture changes, and as opportunists try to redefine to their own advantage. It is this dream which he thought "lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores." But he also thought that, even in 1931, many were losing sight of this dream. The situation has worsened since he wrote. Now the American Dream is most often equated with the dream of owning a spacious home. In the United States, the new values affect major government decisions on housing, regulation, and mortgage guarantees. Conflating the American Dream with expensive housing has had dangerous consequences—it may have even contributed to the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis of 2008.…
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1 Martin Puchner, “The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization” 41:50
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February 13, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In “The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History”, Martin Puchner tells the story of literature and its power to shape people, civilizations, and world history by exploring sixteen selected key stories from over 4,000 years of world literature. Beginning with the Iliad's influence on Alexander the Great to J. K. Rowling today, Martin Puncher takes us on a remarkable journey through history, as he tells stories of people whose lives and beliefs led them to create groundbreaking texts that affected the world they were born into, and the world in which we live today. Along the way, we learn fascinating facts and insights about people—how Gutenberg paved the way for Luther, Benjamin Franklin’s pioneering work as a media entrepreneur, Goethe’s invention of world literature in Sicily, and Akhmatova’s and Solzhenitsyn’s secret writings in the Soviet Union. Throughout The Written World, Martin Puchner captures the inventions—writing technologies, the printing press, the book—that have shaped religion, politics, and commerce.…
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1 Dr. John A. Buchtel, “A Picture of a Book is Not a Book” 50:35
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February 7, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. For two centuries the members and proprietors of the Boston Athenæum have pooled their resources, interests, and expertise to create an extraordinary shared collection of rare books. From a hand-colored copy of the monumental 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle to the imaginative sculptural structures of contemporary book artist Julie Chen, the books in the Athenæum's collection are available to each and every member, as well as to a broader community of scholars, learners, and book-lovers. Incoming Curator of Rare Books and Head of Special Collections Dr. John A. Buchtel explores what it means for an athenæum to continue collecting, cataloging, preserving, and providing access to physical books in our increasingly digital age. Books, he argues, convey a range of meaning, emotional and aesthetic power, and historical connectedness that extends far beyond their texts. Drawing on examples he has encountered during two decades in the field, Buchtel meditates on the human presences revealed in books considered as artifacts: their producers, owners, and readers. Offering examples of books he anticipates pulling off the shelves when he takes up his new position at the Boston Athenӕum in June 2018, he reflects as well on the first-hand enjoyment of finely wrought bookbindings, illustrations, and typography.…
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1 Georgia Barnhill, What Makes Fitz Henry Lane's Lithographs So Special? 52:38
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February 6, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In this richly illustrated talk, Georgia Barnhill sheds fresh light on the beloved American luminist painter and printmaker Fitz Henry Lane, the subject of her current exhibition, Drawn from Nature & On Stone: The Lithographs of Fitz Henry Lane at the Cape Ann Museum. Barnhill, curator emerita of graphic arts at the American Antiquarian Society, considers Lane’s work within the context of his contemporaries, Benjamin Chimney, Robert Cooke, Benjamin F. Nutting, Robert Salmon, David Claypoole Johnston—among others and explores his deep association with the Boston Athenæum, where the artist first exhibited in 1841.…
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1 Nancy Koehn, “Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times” 47:10
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January 29, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. An enthralling historical narrative filled with critical leadership insights that will be of interest to a wide range of readers—including those in government, business, education, and the arts—Forged in Crisis, by celebrated Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn, spotlights five masters of crisis: polar explorer Ernest Shackleton; President Abraham Lincoln; legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass; Nazi-resisting clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and environmental crusader Rachel Carson. What do such disparate figures have in common? Why do their extraordinary stories continue to amaze and inspire? In delivering the answers to those questions, Nancy Koehn offers a remarkable template by which to judge those in our own time to whom the public has given its trust.…
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1 Jane Goodrich, “The House at Lobster Cove” 36:37
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January 25, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. In The House at Lobster Cove, you see behind the doors of Kragsyde, the famous shingle-style house that once sheltered and shaped the elusive Bostonian George Nixon Black. While Black was probably content to slip away unnoticed, Kragsyde was to have no such fate. Published many times when it was first designed, and adored by architects and scholars ever since, the marvelous and photogenic house has made it impossible for Black to disappear. Using characters, letters and events from history, Jane Goodrich's first novel is part family saga and part love story, as well as an engaging personal journey for the author. Although Kragsyde was demolished in 1929, it was later rebuilt, in every detail, by Goodrich and her husband, doing all the work themselves on an island in Maine.…
December 13, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” These words have become as well known and as deeply embedded in American patriotic lore as those of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Gettysburg Address, or the Declaration of Independence. But few remember that these lines are excerpted from an 1883 sonnet by American poet Emma Lazarus. Though the lines were meant to interpret the Statue of Liberty, they transformed the statue’s original purpose, turning it into a welcoming symbol for wave after wave of immigrants to the United States. The poem and the statue have a tangled history, for both are contemporaneous with a virulent anti-immigration movement that started in Boston. Drawing from the Athenæum’s collections, this presentation explores resentment of immigrants in turn-of-the-century Boston, as well as poetic responses sympathetic to the immigrant cause.…
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1 David A. Hopkins, “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics” 42:30
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December 11, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. The national electoral map has split into warring regional bastions of Republican red and Democratic blue, producing a deep and enduring partisan divide in American politics. In Red Fighting Blue, David A. Hopkins places the current partisan and electoral era in historical context, explains how the increased salience of social issues since the 1980s has redefined the parties' geographic bases of support, and reveals the critical role that American political institutions play in intermediating between the behavior of citizens and the outcome of public policy-making. The widening geographic gap in voters’ partisan preferences, magnified further by winner-take-all electoral rules, has rendered most of the nation safe territory for either Democratic or Republican candidates in both presidential and congressional elections—with significant consequences for party competition, candidate strategy, and the operation of government.…
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1 Keridwen N. Luis, “Naked Among the Karma Eaters: The Body Politics of Women’s Lands” 54:04
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December 5, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. At the risk of stating the obvious: we exist in the world in bodies. How our bodies interact in cultural spaces shapes us and shapes our cultural spaces. This talk examines how the "body politics" of women's land—communal living spaces created by and for women—shape individual experiences and larger expectations about gender, race, identity, and virtue. How does nudity change how bodies are perceived and policed? What does being connected to the landscape have to do with excretion? And how do eating, food, and gender intertwine in women-only spaces? This talk will explore the complex cultural intersections of body/gender and self/community.…
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1 Maya Jasanoff, “The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World” 52:53
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December 4, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Immigration, terrorism, the dangers of nationalism, the promise and peril of technological innovation: these forces shaped the life and work of Joseph Conrad at the dawn of the twentieth century. Joseph Conrad described the beginnings of globalization as we recognize it today. As an immigrant from Poland to England, and in travels from Malaysia to Congo to the Caribbean, Conrad traced an interconnected world and described it in a literary oeuvre of prophetic power. His life and work offer a history of globalization from the inside out, and powerfully reflect the aspirations and the challenges of the modern world. Through an expert blend of history, biography, literary criticism, and travelogue, Maya Jasanoff will discuss the strands of Conrad’s experiences and the stories of his four greatest works—The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo. The Dawn Watch casts new light on Conrad’s era, and offers fresh insight into our own.…
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1 Laura Cavendish, Countess of Burlington, “House Style: Five Centuries of Fashion at Chatsworth” 50:36
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November 15, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Chatsworth has been home to the Cavendish family and the hereditary dukes of Devonshire since the original Elizabethan house was built on the site purchased by Sir William Cavendish in 1549. A famous historic house in England, Chatsworth is renowned as much for its fashionable history—its majestic dresses and tiaras, magnificent lace, and splendid uniforms—as its unrivaled collection of art, palatial gardens, and celebrated family dynasty. From the sixteenth-century Inigo Jones drawings of stage costumes to comical pieces, like the eleventh Duke’s jumper embroidered with “Never Marry a Mitford,” Lady Burlington will offer a personal perspective, as well as discuss Chatsworth’s well-known fashionable residents.…
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1 Stephen Greenblatt, “The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve” 47:19
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November 14, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. With the insight, eloquence, and erudition that have thrilled hundreds of thousands of readers of his books about Shakespearean England and the Italian Renaissance, Stephen Greenblatt breathes new life into the ancient story of Adam and Eve. He tracks the story’s origins back into humanity’s deep past and its first written form to the Hebrews’ exile in Babylon. Returning to us a precious cultural inheritance, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve is an exploration of the value of the humanities through the life of one of humankind’s greatest stories.…
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1 Liza Mundy, “Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II” 44:14
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November 7, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. In 1942, reeling from Japan’s devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States military launched a secret program to recruit young, female college graduates to act as code breakers in the newly ramped up war effort. In Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Liza Mundy reveals for the first time the revolutionary achievements and patriotic service of the remarkable young women who cracked German and Japanese military codes. As Mundy shows, their astonishing code-breaking triumphs helped secure an Allied victory before their vow of secrecy nearly erased their vital contributions from US history.…
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1 Carol Sanger, “About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First-Century America” 55:39
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November 2, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. One of the most private decisions a woman can make, abortion is also one of the most contentious topics in American civic life. Protested at rallies and politicized in party platforms, terminating pregnancy is often characterized as a selfish decision by women who put their own interests above those of the fetus. This background of stigma and hostility has stifled women’s willingness to talk about abortion, which in turn distorts public and political discussion. To pry open the silence surrounding this public issue, Sanger distinguishes between abortion privacy, a form of nondisclosure based on a woman’s desire to control personal information, and abortion secrecy, a woman’s defense against the many harms of disclosure.…
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1 Otto Penzler, “The Big Book of Rogues and Villains” 44:54
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October 31, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler's new anthology brings together the most cunning, ruthless, and brilliant criminals in mystery fiction, for the biggest compendium of villains ever assembled. Join us on Halloween for his spooky book talk. Penzler gathers the iconic traitors, thieves, con men, sociopaths, and killers who have crept through the mystery canon over the past 150 years, captivating and horrifying readers in equal measure. The 72 handpicked stories in this collection introduce us to the most depraved of psyches, from iconic antiheroes like Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin and Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu to contemporary delinquents like Lawrence Block's Ehrengraf and Donald Westlake's Dortmunder.…
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1 Helene Atwan, Ladette Randolph, Michael Reynolds, and Meghna Chakrabarti, “Editorial Perspectives” 54:40
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October 26, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. For the reader, the world of books may seem a simple one: go to the local library or bookstore, select a title that suits our taste, open, and turn the pages. The story of the editors who shape the works we cherish is rarely told. What choices and challenges do these editors face? How do they perceive themselves and their role in the world today? How does their mission drive the works they publish? Join us for this rare opportunity to spend an evening with editors from New England’s most mission-driven publishing houses and journals. The panel— composed of Michael Reynolds, Editor-in-Chief of Europa Editions (the publishing house of Elena Ferrante); Helene Atwan, Director of Beacon Press; and Ladette Randolph, Editor-in-Chief of Ploughshares—will offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the creation of books and discuss the motivations and aspirations propelling those books into the marketplace. The panel will be moderated by Mehgna Chakrabarti, host of WBUR’s RadioBoston, Modern Love: The Podcast, and frequent moderator at the Boston Book Festival.…
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1 Katherine Paterson, “My Brigadista Year” 39:56
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October 21, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. In her new historical novel, Katherine Paterson tells a moving coming-of-age story, shedding light on a little-known moment in history. Inspired by true accounts, the narrative follows a Cuban teenager as she volunteers for Fidel Castro’s national literacy campaign and travels into the impoverished countryside to teach others to read, sharing in the danger posed by counterrevolutionaries hiding in the hills nearby. The novel includes an author’s note and a timeline of Cuban history.…
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1 Kate Harding and Samhita Mukhopadhyay; Moderated by Jaclyn Friedman, “Nasty Women” 40:50
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October 18, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. The 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency was a devastating blow to the country’s marginalized populations—immigrants, Muslims, the LGBTQ community, and Black Americans, to name a few. Intersecting with each of these groups were women, who despaired as their rights as equal citizens were called into question. Women of all walks of life bore witness as one of the most qualified candidates in history, Hillary Clinton, lost to an inexperienced reality star and real estate mogul who boasted about his predatory behavior. Has the country become more misogynistic, or simply shown its true face? If 53% of white women voted for Trump and 94% of black women voted for Hillary, can women unite in America? Can we conceive of “women” as a cohesive group? In the face of overwhelming challenge, how can we work together to persist, resist, and enact lasting change? These are some of the questions addressed in Nasty Women, an anthology of original essays from leading feminist writers on protest and solidarity. Editors Kate Harding and Samhita Mukhopadhyay will address what it means to be a woman in the Trump era.…
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1 Tunney Lee, Shauna Lo, and Lisong Liu, “Boston and the Chinese Exclusion Act” 1:10:34
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October 17, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. This panel, led by Tunney Lee with Shauna Lo and Lisong Liu, will cover the changing nature of Chinese immigration to Boston from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (CEA) through its repeal in 1943 to today. Although the main driver for the CEA was West Coast conflicts between European settlers—recently arrived via transcontinental railroad—and Chinese immigrants, Boston and Massachusetts played key roles in the passage and enforcement of the law. Panelists will address Massachusetts political reactions to the CEA, Chinatown raids, East Boston’s immigration station, and more, continuing the conversation with the growth of the Chinese community in Boston and beyond following WWII. This panel considers nationals laws through a local political and cultural lens to shed light on an aspect of immigration history that continues to this day.…
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1 Donald Louria, “Systems Thinking, Extraordinary Longevity, and Pot” 55:58
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October 11, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. In his book reThink, preventive medicine and public health expert Donald Louria argues that “societally connected systems thinking” can allow us to solve problems where conventional methods have failed. By analyzing an entire issue through systems diagrams rather than its component parts, problem solvers are able to examine causes and consequences, understand patterns and themes, and identify leverage points. Societally connected systems thinking offers the perspective necessary to address the big issues of our time, such as healthcare, addiction, overpopulation, and epidemic disease. rethink examines critical public issues, offering specific, provocative recommendations for solving or mitigating issues based entirely on systems diagrams.…
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1 Henry William Brands, “The General vs. the President” 39:22
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October 10, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Harry S. Truman was one of the most unpopular presidents in American history. Heir to a struggling economy, a ruined Europe, and ever-increasing tension with the Soviet Union, on no issue was the path ahead clear and easy. General Douglas MacArthur, by contrast, was incredibly popular, as untouchable as any officer has ever been in America. The lessons he drew from World War II were absolute: appeasement leads to disaster and a showdown with the communists was inevitable. In his new book, Henry William Brands presents their contest of wills against a turbulent backdrop of terrors, both overseas and at home, to evoke the making of a new American era.…
October 5, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. In conjunction with the Boston University Center for the Humanities Fall Forum, Recording Lives: Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age, we are pleased to host a conversation on local cultural organizations’ use of digital technologies to expand access to their collections. In this program, representatives from six cultural organizations charged with the material past will give a “lightning round” of presentations on how they are embracing the digital present to plan for the future. Audience members will be invited to join the discussion.…
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1 Neil Swidey, “The Boston Roots of the Trump Anti-Immigrant Playbook” 50:12
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September 26, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. President Trump’s immigration rhetoric has elicited outrage in Massachusetts, and especially in the vicinity of Harvard Yard (where Trump won just 4% of the vote). So, in Greater Boston, it may turn more than a few faces crimson to learn that—like basketball, the microwave oven, and public education—the intellectual playbook for anti-immigration policy was drafted right here in Massachusetts, by a small group of Harvard-educated Brahmin intellectuals led by Prescott Farnsworth Hall. Their work, which began in 1894, culminated exactly 100 years ago with the passage of the federal Immigration Act of 1917, opening a new epoch of national immigration policy. In this lecture, author Neil Swidey will discuss the roots of Trump’s anti-immigration fervor and the surprisingly influential local characters behind it. He explored these connections, and their implications, in his Globe Magazine cover story earlier this year.…
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1 William Dalrymple, “Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Famous Diamond” 50:50
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September 20, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. On March 29, 1849, the ten-year-old Maharajah of the Punjab handed over to the British East India Company in a formal Act of Submission to Queen Victoria not only swathes of the richest land in India, but also arguably the single most valuable object in the subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-i-Noor diamond. Using original eyewitness accounts and chronicles never before translated into English to craft the first comprehensive and authoritative history of the object, William Dalrymple and Anita Anand trace the true history of the diamond, dispelling the myths that have long surrounded this awe-inspiring jewel.…
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1 William Kuhn, “Prince Harry Boy to Man” 44:09
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September 14, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Author and historian William Kuhn discusses his recently published satirical war novel, a lighthearted work of fiction that recounts Prince Harry’s wartime experiences in Afghanistan. A former historian in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, Kuhn will share personal anecdotes, including his impressions of a Christmas party at Buckingham Palace.…
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1 Adam Begley, “The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera” 47:34
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September 6, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. The first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist, the first person to take an aerial photograph, and the prime mover behind the first airmail service, Nadar was one of the original celebrity artist-entrepreneurs. A kind of 19th-century Andy Warhol, he knew everyone worth knowing and photographed them all, conferring on posterity psychologically compelling portraits of Manet, Sarah Bernhardt, Delacroix, Daumier and countless others—a priceless panorama of Parisian celebrity. The Great Nadar is a brilliant, lavishly illustrated biography of a larger-than-life figure, a visionary whose outsized talent and canny self-promotion put him way ahead of his time.…
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1 Geoff Wisner, “Thoreau’s Wildflowers and Animals” 50:03
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August 2, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Many of the most vivid writings in Henry David Thoreau’s journals were inspired by the plants and animals that inhabit the sprawling fields, forests, and wetlands of Concord and nearby communities. An inveterate year-round rambler and keen and thoughtful observer, Thoreau wrote frequently about these creatures, faithfully recording each sighting or encounter with the accuracy of a scientist and the deep spirituality of a transcendentalist and mystic. In this lecture, Geoff Wisner will present Thoreau’s profound spirituality and belief in the earth-human connection as revealed through his explorations of Thoreau’s best nature writings.…
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1 Susan L. Mizruchi, “Opioids: The Literary, Experiential Point of View” 45:47
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June 13, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Addiction is perhaps the most significant, prevalent, and intractable social problem of the decade, and it has hit especially hard in Massachusetts. While experts from many fields have approached the issue, we see a unique role for the humanities to play in addressing addictive behaviors. Historians have chronicled the wide-reaching histories of the U.S. opioid crisis. Philosophers have explored the ethical status of addictive states and the moral obligations of societies to addicts. Nevertheless, no field has been more directly engaged with the subject of addiction than literary studies—though this may be less than obvious to policy makers and medical practitioners. Some of the greatest Anglo-American literature, with authors ranging from Ernest Hemingway to David Foster Wallace, is fundamentally concerned with addiction and alcoholism. Humanities fields have great potential to provide major insights, both into the social stigma associated with addictive behaviors, and the subjective experience of addiction. Video: https://vimeo.com/221754272…
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1 Henry J. Duffy, “Robert Gould Shaw and the Shaw Memorial” 41:39
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June 7, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. The story of Robert Gould Shaw is one of heroism and loss. A young man's coming of age was cut short by his early death. His life, beginning in gentle ease, was entwined with the rise of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the first black regiment in the Union Army. Spurred on by Frederick Douglass, the Regiment proved itself at Fort Wagner. The monument to Colonel Shaw and his men is the work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who, like Shaw, discovered something about himself through the creation of an American masterpiece. Video: https://vimeo.com/220851445…
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1 Christopher Hamilton, "Nietzsche: Philosopher of Lightness and Dynamite" 49:33
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June 6, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Few, if any, other contemporary philosophers have achieved a level of influence to rival that of Nietzsche. Largely ignored during his lifetime, he was, as he predicted, born posthumously. In this lecture, Christopher Hamilton will trace the outlines of Nietzsche’s thought, exploring his most famous theories—eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, slave revolt in morality, and the death of God—as well as some lesser-known elements of his work, revealing a thinker of immense generosity and subtlety, full of lightness and mischief. Hamilton offers an introduction to Nietzsche’s life and work and a profound reflection on his body of thought, perfect for beginning learners as well as those already familiar with this “prophet of modernity.” Link to video: https://vimeo.com/220654650…
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1 Mimi Baird, “He Wanted the Moon: The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird...” 44:32
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May 17, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Texas-born and Harvard-educated, Dr. Perry Baird was a rising medical star in the late 1920s and 1930s. Early in his career, ahead of his time, he grew fascinated with identifying the biochemical root of manic depression, just as he began to suffer from it himself. By the time the results of his groundbreaking experiments were published, Dr. Baird had been institutionalized many times, his medical license revoked, and his wife and daughters estranged. Mimi Baird grew up never fully knowing this story, as her family went silent about the father who had been absent for most of her childhood. Decades later, a string of extraordinary coincidences led to the recovery of a manuscript which Dr. Baird had written during his brutal institutionalization, confinement, and escape. Baird set off on a quest to piece together the memoir and the man. The result of his extraordinary record and her journey to bring his name to light is He Wanted the Moon, an unforgettable testament to the reaches of the mind and the redeeming power of a determined heart. Video: https://vimeo.com/218523858…
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1 “Civic Engagement: Purposeful Contributions to a Greater Good” 55:25
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Seana Moran, Helen Haste, Scott Seider, faculty from Boston University, Clark University, and Harvard University consider the significance(s) of civic engagement at the Boston Athenæum on April 25, 2017. WGBH reporter Adam Reilly moderates the discussion. Video: https://vimeo.com/216536292
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1 Sally Bedell Smith, “Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life” 56:12
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April 26, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum, presented in conjunction with the Royal Oak Foundation. Drawing on her exclusive access to the Royal Family’s inner circle, New York Times bestselling author Sally Bedell Smith has published the first major biography of Prince Charles in more than two decades. In this illustrated lecture, Smith lays bare the contradictions of a man who is more complicated, tragic, and compelling than we knew, until now. Smith captures the essence of a man who has been described as an eighteenth-century gentleman with a twenty-first-century mission—a life filled with contradictions and convictions. This is a lecture not just about a man who would be king, but also about the duties that come with privilege. Video: https://vimeo.com/215072213…
April 12, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Andrea Cohen’s poems search the shadow regions of yearning and loss, but they take surprising, sometimes meteoric leaps, landing in a place where brightness reigns. The voice in ‘Unfathoming’ strives to upend the title: to both acknowledge mystery, and with wile and grace, comprehend it.…
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1 Stephen Kinzer, “The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire” 41:31
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March 23, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Acclaimed journalist Stephen Kinzer will discuss the domestic clamor over America’s imperial ventures at the dawn of the 20th century. After a century of continental expansion, the United States came upon an opportunity to expand overseas by capturing Spanish colonial possessions and other territories within its reach. The nation plunged into polemic debate, with political and intellectual giants contesting “the imperial idea.” Expansionists declared benevolent intent, touting the economic benefits of conquest, while anti-imperialists invoked America’s anti-colonial origins, condemning imperialist brutality. The former largely triumphed, as the United States soon controlled Cuba and annexed Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines in a swift series of conquests. Kinzer will argue that the imperial/anti-imperial dichotomy remains a dominant feature of the American psyche.…
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1 Manny Paraschos, “Boston’s Journalism Trail” 42:17
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March 13, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. American journalism was born in Boston on September 25, 1690 with the publication of the first colonial newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. Eventually, the first three (and five of the first seven) North American newspapers were published in Boston. Boston was home to America’s first foreign language newspaper, Courier de Boston, first published in 1789, as well as the first Roman Catholic, Methodist Episcopal, and Jewish English-language newspapers in America. This lecture will trace the history of significant Boston journalism “firsts.” From the Boston Gazette’s coining of the term “gerrymandering” in the early 1800s to the Boston Post’s exposure of Carlo Ponzi’s financial scheme, Boston print journalism has inspired a legacy of hard-hitting American reporting and free press.…
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1 Ann Goldstein, “The Art and Craft of Translation” 37:56
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March 8, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Join Ann Goldstein—translator of works by Elena Ferrante, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alessandro Baricco—for a lecture on the art and craft of translation, with examples from the broad range of works she has translated from Italian. Goldstein will offer audience members a peek into the complex considerations of translators with an analysis of two translated sentences from Primo Levi's The Truce.…
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1 Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston, “A Child of Books” 42:11
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February 25, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. New York Times best-selling author-illustrator Oliver Jeffers and fine artist Sam Winston will present on their collaboratively created picturebook, A Child of Books. An artistic love letter to reading and the imagination, A Child of Books combines Jeffers’s expressive images and Winston’s immersive typographical landscapes, as a girl and boy adventure through the rich terrain of stories.…
February 21, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Lincoln’s White House is the first book to capture the look, feel, and smell of the executive mansion from the time of Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861 to his assassination in 1865. During this book talk, author James Conroy will bring to life the people who knew Lincoln’s White House, from servants to cabinet secretaries and more. Conroy relies on fresh research from previously untapped primary sources and a bold character-driven narrative to offer insight on how Lincoln lived, governed, battled, and ultimately, unified the country. Join us for a behind-the-scenes glimpse of day-to-day life in the time of Lincoln and four of the most tumultuous years in American history.…
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1 The Poets’ Theatre, “Boston Poets and Their Predecessors: A Muster of Poets” 1:38:22
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January 18, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Historically, Boston has been home to numerous prominent American poets. This remains true today, making its civic moniker of “the Athens of America” as fitting now as it was in the nineteenth century. This evening’s performance, directed by Poets’ Theatre President and Artistic Director Robert Scanlan, is a gathering of Boston’s best poets, including Jennie Barber, Martha Collins, David Ferry, Regie Gibson, George Kalogeris, Marcia Karp, Fred Marchant, Jill McDonough, Lloyd Schwartz, and Meg Tyler. They will read their own works paired with the works of their nineteenth-century predecessors, invoking the ghosts of poets such as William Cullen Bryant, Lydia Maria Child, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathanial Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. The program will pay tribute to the Athenæum’s rich historical and literary roots while demonstrating how a living and contemporary literary scene continues to be nourished by this tradition.…
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1 Stephen T. Moskey, “Larz and Isabel Anderson: Wealth and Celebrity in the Gilded Age” 45:23
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February 16, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Until recently, history remembered Isabel Weld Perkins Anderson (1876-1948) as the wife of wealthy Bostonian Larz Kilgour Anderson (1866-1937). Their Brookline estate is now Larz Anderson Park. However, the public perception of Mrs. Anderson as an heiress and socialite was shattered in April 2016 with the publication of Stephen Moskey’s Larz and Isabel Anderson: Wealth and Celebrity in the Gilded Age, a new account of the couple’s extraordinary lives. Based on research conducted in libraries and archives across the US and Europe (including the Boston Athenæum), Moskey’s work has transformed Mrs. Anderson’s legacy and public image. We now know her for what she was: a prolific writer and editor of over 40 titles; a librettist and impresario of popular musicals performed during the Great Depression; and a courageous nurse serving on the battlefields of France and Belgium during WWI. Mrs. Anderson emerges from the pages of this book as an exemplary woman of the early modern era whose deeds anticipated a new role for women in culture and society. Art historian Isabel Taube calls the book “corrective to existing perceptions of Gilded Age women like Isabel Anderson.” Moskey’s lecture will focus on Mrs. Anderson’s literary and theatrical accomplishments, with a special focus on her wartime memoir Zigzagging (1918).…
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1 Laird Christensen, "How the Arts Prepare Us for Life in the Time of Climate Change" 1:02:40
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February 15, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. The warnings come one after another, from biologists, meteorologists, pathologists, and hydrologists, all offering some variation on the same story: the world we inhabit is changing rapidly—and not always for the better. Centuries of fossil fuel consumption has caused atmospheric levels of carbon to spike beyond anything our species has ever experienced. Each month brings record temperatures as clean water grows scarce. 200 million environmental refugees are expected by 2050. In a world increasingly characterized by the effects of climate disruption—political, environmental, economic, and social—it comes as no surprise that writers and artists have begun to seize and depict the personal and collective implications of climate change. Across media and genre, writers and artists convey urgency and bear witness to the ongoing destruction of our planet, while encouraging humanity to rise to the challenges ahead. This presentation will explore the ways in which American writers and artists imagine and translate the science of climate change.…
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1 Michael D. Fay and Tara Leigh Tappert, “Beyond Stereotype: War, Warriors, and the Creative Arts” 45:37
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January 30, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Join us to consider the historic and contemporary intersection of art, war, and culture. Guests Michael D. Fay, former United States Marine Corps combat artist, and Tara Leigh Tappert, cultural historian, will discuss the role and influence of wartime experiences on culture and the arts since WWI, addressing both art’s place on the battlefield and its rehabilitative qualities for veterans. They will also discuss contemporary issues surrounding art and war in a post-9/11 era, including art’s capacity to subvert stereotypes about war and the impact art made by combat artists and veterans has on the national discourse on war and the military.…
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1 Dan Souza and Molly Birnbaum - America's Test Kitchen, “Cook’s Science” 29:09
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January 26, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. For the past 25 years (and long before it became a trend), America’s Test Kitchen has used the art of science to perfect cooking. America’s Test Kitchen’s carefully crafted process guarantees success through the use of biology, chemistry, and physics to ask big questions about how and why ingredients and cooking techniques work. Cook’s Science: How to Unlock Flavor in 50 of Our Favorite Ingredients distills thousands of kitchen tests and decades of recipes into a landmark cookbook that will change the way Americans cook at home. This book talk will explore the basic science behind different cooking methods that make their ingredients taste best.…
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1 R. Marc Kantrowitz, "Old Whiskey and Young Women: American True Crime Tales..." 44:02
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January 25, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Join Marc Kantrowitz to explore some of the most notorious legal cases in American history! Hear about America’s most famous comedian being framed for murder; the country’s first capital case involving an older woman and her (much) younger lover; the fatal shooting of a renowned architect amidst a crowded party by Mad Harry Thaw; and the real-life inspiration for Norman Bates, whose gruesome crimes outmatch that of any fictional character. These cases titillated, if not repulsed, the entire nation but are now nearly forgotten. Discover these infamous characters and many more from the rich pages of history.…
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1 Robert Peck, “The Remarkable Nature of Edward Lear” 46:56
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January 19, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Edward Lear (1812-1888) is known and cherished for “The Owl and the Pussycat” and other works of literary nonsense. He was also an accomplished painter of birds, mammals, reptiles, and landscapes. Lear depicted parrots, macaws, toucans, owls, and other birds with scientific accuracy and a noteworthy sense of character, and reproduced his illustrations using the newly invented technique of lithography. An adventurous global traveler, Lear painted mammals ranging from hedgehogs and kangaroos to bats and Tasmanian devils. Although Lear’s nonsense verse has often prompted comparisons to Lewis Carroll, his private and enigmatic disposition has left him little known and less understood than his literary peer. Robert McCracken Peck, author of the new illustrated book The Natural History of Edward Lear, will discuss the remarkable life and work of this beloved children’s writer, who abruptly and mysteriously abandoned his scientific aspirations soon after achieving preeminence in the field.…
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1 Louise Miller, “A City Baker’s Guide to Country Living” 32:20
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January 11, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Join pastry chef and author Louise Miller for a discussion about her writing process and research, as well as a reading from her debut novel, A City Baker’s Guide to Country Living. When Olivia Rawlings—pastry chef extraordinaire for an exclusive Boston dinner club—sets not just her flambéed dessert but the entire building alight, she escapes to the most comforting place she can think of—the idyllic town of Guthrie, Vermont, and her best friend Hannah. But the getaway turns into something more lasting when Margaret Hurley, the cantankerous owner of the Sugar Maple Inn, offers Livvy a job. Miller and her full-hearted story about a big-city baker who discovers the true meaning of home have been praised by the New York Times Book Review: “Miller elevates the story by turning it into a Pinterest fantasy of rural American…[Her] visions of bucolic Vermont landscapes, cinnamon-scented kitchens and small-town friendliness make this reverie of country life an appealing one.”…
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1 Dr. Melinda A. Zeder and Dr. Panagiotis Karkanas, “A Look Inside the Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory” 41:37
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January 9, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. The Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory for Archaeological Science of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) is an active research department dedicated to archaeological science in Greece. The building replaces the previous lab Wiener founded in 1992, and adds cutting-edge equipment: a scanning electron microscope, a portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, and a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer. The lab provides both American and international scholars of archaeological science in the eastern Mediterranean the tools and resources to answer a variety of scientifically-based questions in the fields of bioarchaeology, geoarchaeology, archaeobotany, and zooarchaeology. Join Dr. Panagiotis Karkanas, Director of the Wiener Laboratory of the ASCSA, and Dr. Melinda A. Zeder, Curator of Old World Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, as they discuss ongoing projects at the Wiener Laboratory, including the study of more than 1,500 skeletons from one of the largest cemeteries ever unearthed in Greece: the ancient Phaleron cemetery.…
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1 Tamara Plakins Thornton, Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers 37:25
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December 15, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Tamara Plakins Thornton will present on the life and work of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), a man Thomas Jefferson once called a “meteor in the hemisphere.” A mathematician, astronomer, navigator, seafarer, business executive, and transformational Athenæum Trustee, Bowditch’s Enlightenment-inspired perspectives shaped nineteenth century capitalism while broadly transforming daily American life. Enthralled with the precision and certainty of numbers and the unerring regularity of the physical universe, Bowditch operated and represented some of New England's most powerful institutions—from financial corporations to Harvard College—as clockwork mechanisms. By examining Bowditch’s innovative approach to the administration of institutions as well as the political and social controversies this method provoked, Thornton’s biography sheds new light on the rise of capitalism, American science, and the social elite in the early Republic.…
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1 Alex Beam and Gerald Howard, “Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya” 1:01:21
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December 8, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Friendship and the Feud is playwright Terry Quinn’s artful and poignant “dramatic dialogue” based on the quarter-century-long correspondence between novelist Vladimir Nabokov and The New Yorker editor and critic Edmund Wilson. First published in the Paris Review, Quinn’s epistolary drama was performed numerous times in the US and abroad, often with William F. Buckley playing the part of Wilson, and Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, playing the part of his father.…
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1 David B. Dearinger, “Museums without Walls" 30:12
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November 29, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Greater Boston boasts a number of art museums, each of which, naturally, has galleries for the display of art. These galleries are constructed of walls and floors and ceilings. Even more naturally, however, the city has another art museum, whose floor is the earth, whose ceiling is the sky, and whose walls are the trees. This special museum has three major galleries: the Boston Common, the Boston Public Garden, and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall. These galleries display an impressive collection of public sculpture that is free and accessible 24/7, 365 days a year. In this illustrated lecture, David Dearinger, PhD will give a brief overview of Boston’s “museum without walls” and the role that sculpture plays in its history and aesthetics.…
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1 Sarah Lohman, “Black Pepper: Taste a Revolutionary Story” 33:51
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November 16, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Participants at this tasting event will learn first-hand about the history of black pepper in American cuisine and its surprising connections to the city of Boston. Historian and food blogger Sarah Lohman will expose black pepper’s role in American cuisine, a theme in her forthcoming book, Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. Guests will savor a signature cocktail created by mixologist Josey Packard, followed by three hors d'oeuvres showcasing black pepper by Chef Michael Zentner.…
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1 Peter L. Berger, “The Vicissitudes of Pluralism” 46:24
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November 15, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In his recent book, The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age, Peter Berger argues that, contrary to popular belief, we don’t live in a secular age–we live in a pluralist one. Put differently, our problem is not that God is dead, but that there are many gods. Join us for a consideration of a new paradigm for understanding religion and pluralism in an age of multiple modernities.…
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1 David B. Dearinger, “Daniel Chester French: The Female Form Revealed” 40:41
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November 10, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. During this lecture, David Dearinger, the Athenæum’s Director of Exhibitions and Susan Morse Hilles Senior Curator of Paintings & Sculpture, will speak about Daniel Chester French’s representation of the female figure. Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) was America’s foremost sculptor of public monuments from the late 1870s to the late 1920s. His masterpieces adorn civic spaces, university campuses, and urban landmarks across the United States. Many of French’s public works commemorate historical figures, such as his life-size bronze sculpture The Minute Man (1875) at Concord, MA, or the colossal marble Abraham Lincoln (1922), displayed at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. His renown for these male-oriented masterpieces is merited, but French was equally proficient at modeling the female figure. Feminine beauty in its idealized form was often at the forefront of French’s work. French’s allegorical representation of the female form seeks to fulfill a sensual, tactile, and cerebral narrative commemorating great human experiences. This aspect of his career, which has previously received little scholarly attention, is the focus of the ambitious Daniel Chester French: The Female Form Revealed and will be further examined during this lecture.…
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1 François Furstenberg,“George Washington’s Library at the Athenæum" 40:34
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November 2, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Why might an obscure pamphlet collection housed in the Boston Athenæum archives offer new insights on the abolition movement of the late eighteenth century? It’s simple: the tract collection belonged to George Washington. In this lecture, Professor of History François Furstenberg will explore the early history of abolitionist debates from the perspective of book history, using these leaflets to link Mount Vernon to a broad transatlantic conversation about slavery and freedom.…
October 20, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Women are invariably those left behind in wartime, but in World War II Paris this was particularly the case, as husbands were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories. It was women more than men who came face-to-face with the German conquerors on a daily basis as waitresses, shop assistants, prostitutes or merely on the metro where a German soldier had priority over seats. The German men were often charming and Parisian women, often, did whatever they needed to do to survive. Many of them faced life-and-death decisions every day. By looking at a wide range of individuals from collaborators to resisters, including native Parisians and those living in Paris temporarily, working women, mothers, housewives, mistresses, journalists, and spies, Anne Sebba reveals truths about basic human instincts and desires.…
October 11, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. When Mount Auburn Cemetery was founded in 1831, it revolutionized the way Americans mourned the dead by offering a peaceful space for contemplation. This cemetery, located not far from Harvard University, was also a place that reflected and instilled an imperative to preserve and protect nature in a rapidly industrializing culture—lessons that would influence the creation of Central Park, the cemetery at Gettysburg, and the National Parks system. Even today this urban wildlife habitat and nationally recognized hotspot for migratory songbirds continues to connect visitors with nature and serves as a model for sustainable landscape practices. Beyond Mount Auburn’s prescient focus on conservation, it also reflects the impact of Transcendentalism and the progressive spirit in American life seen in advances in science, art, and religion and in social reform movements. In The Lively Place, Stephen Kendrick celebrates this vital piece of our nation’s history. He tells the story of Mount Auburn’s founding, its legacy, and the many influential Americans interred there, including religious leaders, abolitionists, poets, and reformers.…
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1 Monica Pelayo, “Immigration on Display: Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty Monuments” 56:46
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September 29, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island became the quintessential monuments of the immigrant experience during the Cold War. Public historians used both sites to promote the United States as a “nation of immigrants,” utilizing the latest sociological theories of immigration assimilation to construct a narrative that placed European immigrants front and center. While both monuments stressed individuals’ rights and American exceptionalism, they took different approaches. “Immigration on Display” will delineate those approaches and examine how these monuments worked to create a narrative that unified the nation under a common shared experience.…
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1 Matthew Stewart, Between Two Revolutions: Natures God in America 1776-1865 42:59
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September 21, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Where did the ideas come from that became the cornerstone of American democracy? America’s founders intended to liberate us not just from one king but from the ghostly tyranny of supernatural religion. Drawing deeply on the study of European philosophy, Matthew Stewart will track the ancient, pagan, and continental ideas from which America’s revolutionaries drew their inspiration. In the writings of Spinoza, Lucretius, and other great philosophers, Stewart will discuss the true meanings of “Nature’s God,” “the pursuit of happiness,” and the radical political theory with which the American experiment in self-government began.…
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1 Keith N. Morgan and Mark Pasnik, “Heroism and Hubris” 46:51
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September 8, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Often problematically labeled as “Brutalist,” the concrete architecture that transformed Boston during the 1960s and 1970s was conceived with ambitious social ideals by some of the world’s most influential designers. Join author Mark Pasnik in conversation with historian Keith Morgan to examine the contentious and ambitious history of “Brutalist” architecture in Boston. At a moment when concrete buildings across the nation are in danger of demolition, the panelists will survey an earlier period of architectural history and consider its legacies—both troubled and inspired. This event is inspired by the book, Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston, which tells the story of a city, a material, and a movement, and how these intersected in the post-war era to make Boston an epicenter of concrete architecture worldwide.…
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1 Nick Bunker, “An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America” 37:08
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October 7, 2014 at the Boston Athenæum. An Empire On The Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America is a new, British account of the Boston Tea Party and the origins of the American Revolution. It shows how a lethal blend of politics, personalities, and economics led to a war that few people welcomed but nobody could prevent. In his strong but even handed narrative, Nick Bunker tells the story of three years of deepening anger that led to the outbreak of America’s war for independence at Lexington in 1775. He claims the time as a tragedy of errors, during which both sides shared responsibility for a conflict that cost the lives of at least 20,000 Britons and a still larger number of Americans. At the heart of the book lies the Boston Tea Party. Using primary sources from both sides of the Atlantic, Bunker sheds new light on the Tea Party’s origins and the process of mutual embitterment by which Britain and America pushed each other into war.…
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1 Nathaniel Philbrick, “Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution” 48:29
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Tuesday, May 20, 2014 at the Boston Athenæum. In Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Nathaniel Philbrick brings a fresh perspective to the story that ignited the American Revolution. The real central character in this story is Boston, where vigilantes fill the streets with a sinister and frightening violence even as calmer patriots struggle to see their way to rebellion. The action of the book tracks in detail the eighteen months following the Boston Tea Party (Dec. 1773), as Boston turned from the center of patriot defiance to a British-occupied city under a patriot siege. Through storied events such as the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, Philbrick builds to the extraordinary moment in American history when a group of ordinary citizens stood up to several regiments of British regulars as the Battle of Bunker Hill. This is the great tipping point, the bloodiest engagement of the Revolution when several hundred citizen soldiers had the bravery and discipline to hold their fire until the British soldiers, each one with a bayonet mounted to the barrel of his musket, marched to within fifteen yards of the patriot entrenchment. Only then, once they could see “the whites of their eyes,” did the rebels fire, ultimately killing or wounding almost half the British force. Not until the third British charge did the Americans retreat, and only then because they had run out of ammunition. With this single battle, the ultimate course of the American Revolution had been foretold.…
May 22, 2014 at the Boston Athenæum. Although historic Boston has a reputation as one of the best-preserved cities in America, it has always been a subject to the constant change of any busy commercial center. Lecturer and historian Anthony Sammarco, author of some sixty books on the history and development of Boston, will reveal sixty- eight major Boston locations that are no more, including schools, churches, theaters, grand mansions, dockyards, racetracks, parks, stores, hotels, offices, and factories. Organized chronologically, Sammarco’s lecture will features much-loved institutions that failed to stand the test of time, victims of Boston’s redevelopment era, and old-fashioned hotels and sports facilities that once seemed beyond updating or refurbishment. Vanished landmarks on this virtual tour include Franklin Place, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the Hancock House, Gleason’s Publishing Hall, Fort Hill, Franklin Street, the Boston Coliseum, Boylston Market, the Merchants Exchange, Haymarket Square, earlier homes of the Boston Public Library, Boston City Hall, Horticultural Hall, Boston Latin School, and the Museum of Fine Arts, the once celebrated Revere House hotel, Huntington Avenue Grounds, Charlestown City Hall, the Cyclorama, Readville Trotting Park and Race Track, East Boston Airport, East Boston Ferries, Braves Field, Massachusetts State Prison, the original Boston Opera House, the Boston Aquarium, the beloved Howard Athenaeum of old Scollay Square, and Dudley Street Station.…
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1 Members’ Choice – Panel, “Writers at the Exhibition” 1:01:29
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July 27, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Visual objects have often been a source of inspiration to writers. In Writers at the Exhibition, three Athenæum authors will select an object from the current exhibition, Collecting for the Boston Athenæum in the 21st Century: Prints & Photographs, and present a poem, a memoir, or a story. This event will illustrate how writers of all types are inspired by the Boston Athenæum’s special collections.…
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1 Stephen Long, “Thirty-Eight: The Hurricane That Transformed New England” 49:57
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July 21, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. The hurricane that pummeled the northeastern United States on September 21, 1938, was arguably New England’s most damaging weather event ever. Without warning, the storm plowed into Long Island and New England, killing hundreds of people and destroying roads, bridges, dams, and buildings that stood in its path. Not yet spent, the hurricane then raced inland, maintaining high winds into Vermont and New Hampshire and uprooting millions of acres of forest. In this lecture, Long will share excerpts from his book Thirty-Eight, which is the first book to investigate how the hurricane of ’38 transformed New England. Drawing on survivors’ vivid memories of the storm and its aftermath, and on his own familiarity with New England’s forests, he will share with the audience how the storm brought about social and ecological changes that can still be observed today.…
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1 Members’ Choice - Panel, “Scholars at the Exhibition” 43:24
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June 30, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. An impressive panel of Athenæum members who have used the institution’s collections in their scholarly research will each select one object on display in the current exhibition, Collecting for the Boston Athenaeum in the 21st Century: Prints & Photographs, and discuss how that object is relevant to their work. Scholars at the Exhibition will illustrate the wide variety of ways in which the Athenæum’s collections are used by academic and independent scholars.…
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1 Elizabeth E. Barker, Ph.D., “The Boston Athenæum: Past, Present, Future” 1:19:55
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May 14, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. The Boston Athenæum holds a position of undisputed importance in the history of American libraries and museums. But what lies in store? Can an illustrious institution that came of age amidst the intellectual flowering of 19th-century New England remain relevant in an age of digital devices, in a region now known for biotech? Athenæum director Elizabeth Barker will explore these and other questions in a richly illustrated lecture that ranges across the Boston Athenæum’s history and identifies several key factors likely to shape its future—a prospect, she will argue, that appears no less brilliant than its glorious past.…
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1 Derek W. Beck, “Igniting the American Revolution: 1773-1775” 49:09
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June 21, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Spanning the years 1773 to 1775, Igniting the American Revolution sweeps readers from the Boston Tea Party and the halls of Parliament, to the fateful expedition to Lexington and Concord and the shot heard round the world. Vividly detailed and meticulously researched, this captivating history reveals the events that altered the futures of not only England and America, but the whole world.…
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1 Nathaniel Philbrick, “Valiant Ambition” 47:48
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June 16, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Nathaniel Philbrick will share his surprising account of the middle years of the American Revolution, and the tragic relationship between George Washington and Benedict Arnold. He will share excerpts from his book Valiant Ambition, a complex, controversial, and dramatic portrait of a people in crisis and the war that gave birth to a nation. He will argue that after four years of war, America was forced to realize that the real threat to its liberties was not from without but from within.…
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1 Joshua C. Kendall, “First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama” 47:11
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June 16, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Every U.S. president has had some experience as a parent. Of the 43 men who have served in the nation's highest office, 38 have fathered biological children and the other five adopted children. Each president's parenting style reveals much about his beliefs as well as his psychological make-up. James Garfield enjoyed jumping on the bed with his kids. FDR's children, on the other hand, had to make appointments to talk to him. In this presentation, Kendall will discuss with the audience how the fathering experiences of American presidents have forever changed the course of the nation’s history.…
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1 Louisa Thomas, “Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams” 42:47
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June 9, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Born in London to an American father and a British mother on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Louisa Catherine Johnson was raised in a manner very different from the New England upbringing of her future husband and president John Quincy Adams. Their often tempestuous but deeply close marriage lasted half a century. They lived in Prussia, Massachusetts, Washington, Russia, and England; they lived at royal courts, on farms, in cities, and in the White House. Louisa saw more of Europe and America than nearly any other woman of her time. But wherever she lived, she was always pressing her nose against the glass, not quite sure whether she was looking in or out. The other members of the Adams family could take their identities for granted—they were Adamses; they were Americans—but she had to invent her own. The story of Louisa Catherine Adams is one of a woman who forged a sense of self. As the America found its place in the world, she found a voice. That voice resonates still. In this talk, Louisa Thomas will share excerpts from her biography of Adams, a deeply felt and intimate portrait of a remarkable woman, a complicated marriage, and a pivotal historical moment.…
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1 Eric Jay Dolin, “Brilliant Beacons: A History of the American Lighthouse” 52:36
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June 2, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In this talk, Dolin will share with the audience excerpts from Brilliant Beacons, an extraordinary work of historical detection and originality, which vividly reframes America’s history through the development of its lighthouses. Set against the backdrop of an expanding nation, Brilliant Beacons traces the evolution of America’s lighthouse system, highlighting the political, military, and technological battles fought to illuminate the nation’s hardscrabble coastlines. In rollicking detail, Dolin will introduce audiences to a memorable cast of characters including the penny-pinching Treasury official Stephen Pleasonton, and share tales both humorous and harrowing of soldiers, saboteurs, ruthless egg collectors, and most importantly, the light-keepers themselves.…
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1 Lucy Keating, “Dreamology: Publishing A Debut Novel” 24:08
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June 1, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Vibrantly offbeat and utterly original, Lucy Keating’s debut novel, Dreamology, combines the unconventional romance of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with the sweetness and heart of Jenny Han. During this lecture, Keating will discuss the process of publishing her first novel, and the implications for her contractual second novel. Writers will learn how to get published and listen to insights into the publishing industry.…
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1 Authenticity and Accessibility: Art Reproduction Today 54:05
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May 23, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Join moderator Elisabeth Nevins and panelists Hannah Goodwin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Steve Gyurina of Artopia Giclée; and Jim Olson of the Peabody Essex Museum for a discussion about the contemporary methods and ramifications of art reproduction. Discussion topics will range from the use of reproductions of artworks as points of access for museum visitors who are blind or have other disabilities, to use of 3D-printed reproductions in a museum exhibition setting, to the creation of faithful reproductions of artists’ works for sale. Our panelists will explore issues of methodology, pedagogy, access, and ethics in their presentations.…
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1 Thad Carhart, “Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France” 33:24
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May 23, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In the 1950s, soon after the end of World War II, four-year-old Thad Carhart’s family—his NATO officer father, his mother, and his four siblings—packed up their suburban life in Arlington, Virginia, and moved to Fontainebleau, France, a lively provincial town surrounding a sprawling masterpiece of French architecture, the Château of Fontainebleau. In his new memoir, Finding Fontainebleau, New York Times bestselling author Carhart intertwines stories from his family’s years living in the shadow of the Château with the stories of the palace itself, from its heyday as the preferred royal hunting retreat to today, when efforts are underway to restore it to its former splendor. Against the background of the rapid modernization of France in the 1950s stands the Château of Fontainebleau, an anchor against the seas of time. Begun in 1137, fifty years before the Louvre and more than five hundred before Versailles, the Château was a home for Marie-Antoinette, François I, and the two Napoleons, among others, all of whom added to its splendors without destroying the work of their predecessors. As a consequence, the Château is unique in France, a supreme repository of French style, taste, art, and architecture. Finding Fontainebleau tells the rich and improbable stories of these monarchs and their remarkable architectural legacy. Thoughtful, transporting, and often funny, Finding Fontainebleau is a fresh look at a lesser-known France, from the parks and museums of Paris – much less crowded in the 1950s, when you could walk through completely empty galleries in the Louvre – to the quieter joys of towns like Fontainebleau.…
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1 Mark Kurlansky, “Paper: Paging Through History” 51:04
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May 18, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Paper is one of the simplest and most essential forms of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art. It has created civilizations, fostered revolutions, and stabilized regimes. Consider, for example, history’s greatest press run, which produced 6.5 billion copies of Máo zhuxí yulu Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Zedong), or the fact that Leonardo da Vinci left behind only 15 paintings but 4,000 works on paper. Now, on the cusp of “going paperless” – and amid rampant speculation about the effects of a digitally dependent society – we’ve come to a world-historic juncture and must examine what paper means to civilization. By tracing paper’s evolution, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology’s influence, affirming that paper is here to stay.…
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1 Nancy Bilyeau, “The Tapestry: A Novel” 38:55
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May 17, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Nancy Bilyeau will share excerpts from the latest installment in her award-winning Joanna Stafford series, The Tapestry. The novel takes place in Tudor England, with Joanna, a Dominican novice, struggling to survive the turbulent reign of King Henry VIII. Set in a world of royal banquets and feasts, tournament jousts, ship voyages, and Tower Hill executions, this thrilling tale finds Joanna in her most dangerous situation yet, as she attempts to decide the life she wants to live: nun or wife, spy or subject, rebel or courtier. Bilyeau will also discuss the research she undertook into Renaissance tapestries and the art of Hans Holbein, which she did in preparation for writing the book.…
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1 Lauren Meier, “Frederick Law Olmsted's Legacy of Public Parks” 55:35
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April 27, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In this collaboration with the Emerald Necklace Conservatory, Lauren Meier will highlight the parks, parkways, park systems, and scenic reservations featured in the latest volume of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: Plans and Views of Public Parks. She will also explore the park design legacy of the Olmsted firm, which carried Olmsted’s innovation into the 20th century.…
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1 Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, “Opinel: Poems” 28:35
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April 26, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Opinel is the name of a workaday knife wielded by shepherds and farmers in the high pastures of the Alps. Like the knife, these poems cleave away the false and deceptive to reveal a startling and unifying wonder. In language radiant, lovely, and disturbing, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson explores the linkages between the uncomfortable familiar and the curiously intimate strange, making unexpected connections between phenomena. Arranged by association rather than chronology and connected by a sensual intelligence, this collection wanders from Maryland and India to Boston, France, New Hampshire and Ireland—from Ezekiel’s Flight and the Book of Kells, to tales of the Tamil goddess, Meenakshi.…
April 14, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Rosanna Warren will read poems from her most recent collection, Ghost in a Red Hat, and from a forthcoming chapbook, Graffiti. In Ghost in a Red Hat, Warren draws inspiration from her life and from the works of other artists, classical and contemporary, real and imagined. Warren explores the political and the personal through myth, history, elegy, and erotic lyric. She traces themes, both ancient and modern, in a voice compelling and deeply persuasive.…
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1 Alice Fogel (accompanied by Junhong Jiang), “Interval: Poems Based on Bach's ‘Goldberg Variations’” 42:11
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April 6, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In this series of poems responding to Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” Fogel pays homage to the 274-year-old masterpiece and renders from it a luminous new interpretation. The readings will be accompanied by Boston Conservatory student Junhong Jiang on piano.…
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1 Richard Buckley, “The King Under the Car Park: The Search for Richard III” 1:00:12
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April 12, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. For centuries, the final resting place of Richard III, England’s last Plantagenet king, remained a mystery. In 2012, a team of archaeologists from the University of Leicester set out to search for the burial site of the king, who died in 1485 in the Battle of Bosworth Field. Against all odds, the project located the site under a parking lot in central Leicester. In this lecture, Richard Buckley, the leader of the search team, will tell the remarkable story of the search and the complex process of confirming Richard’s identity. Find more information at: https://www.le.ac.uk/richardiii/…
“American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good” March 31, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. The struggle between individual rights and the good of the community as a whole has been the basis of nearly every major disagreement in America’s history, from the debates at the Constitutional Convention and the run-up to the Civil War, to the fights surrounding the agendas of the Federalists, the Progressives, the New Dealers, the civil rights movement, and the Tea Party. In American Character, Colin Woodard traces these two key strands in American politics through the two and a half centuries of the nation’s existence, from the first colonies through the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, and the present day, and he explores how different regions of the country have successfully or disastrously accommodated them.…
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1 David Derbin Nolta, “The Narrative Technique of Figural Mirroring in Renaissance and Baroque Art” 49:56
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March 21, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. This year’s John Hubbard Sturgis Eaton Endowed Lecture will present the concept of reflectivity as it recurs in Italian painting from the 15th through the 18th centuries. Focusing less on the literal presence of the mirror in art—a topic widely explored—this talk will take on the more mysterious and intriguing connotations of the repetition of figure and pose in painted narratives from Piero della Francesca to Pietro Longhi. Artists considered will also include Botticelli and Caravaggio, each an insightful and original experimenter and exploiter of the human figure as mirror, as well as the potential of figural reflectivity.…
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1 Karen Corsano and Daniel Williman, “Sargent's War” 50:15
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March 9, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. For John Singer Sargent, Corsano and Williman argue, the Great War changed everything, particularly after the death of Robert André-Michel, the husband of Sargent’s beloved niece Rose-Marie Ormond. During most of the war, Sargent busied himself with work in London and eventually went to America to escape the realities of war. When Rose-Marie herself was killed in the spring of 1918, Sargent promptly left Boston and traveled to France to paint. Corsano and Williman will discuss Sargent’s reflections on the war, which can be viewed in the murals of the Boston Public Library and Harvard’s Widener Library, among other works.…
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1 Adam Rothman, “Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery” 41:45
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February 17, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In this talk, Adam Rothman will share excerpts from Beyond Freedom’s Reach, the true story of one woman’s quest to rescue her children from bondage. In the gripping, meticulously researched account, Adam Rothman lays bare the mayhem of emancipation during and after the Civil War. After Union forces captured New Orleans in 1862, the slave-owning De Harts fled to Havana, taking Rose Herera’s three children with them. When Mary De Hart returned to New Orleans in 1865, she was surprised to find herself taken into custody as a kidnapper. As Rothman will share, the case of Rose Herera’s abducted children reveals to the reader the prospects and limits of justice that existed during Reconstruction. In his book and during the talk, Rothman will offer a poignant reflection on the tangled politics of slavery and the hazards that were faced by so many Americans on the hard road to freedom.…
February 10, 2016 at Boston Athenæum. The Illegal is the gripping story of Keita Ali, a refugee―like the many in today’s headlines―compelled to leave his homeland. All Keita has ever wanted to do is to run. Running means respect and wealth at home. His native Zantoroland, an imagined country whose tyrants are eerily familiar, turns out the fastest marathoners on earth. But after his journalist father is killed for his outspoken political views, Keita must flee to the wealthy nation of Freedom State―a fictionalized country engaged in a crackdown on all undocumented people, bearing a striking resemblance to modern America. There, Keita becomes a part of the new underground. He learns what it means to live as an illegal. This tension-filled novel casts its eye on race, human potential, and what it means to belong.…
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1 John T. Matthews, “To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman, and the ‘Discovery’ of Racism” 40:04
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February 3, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Early last summer came the surprising news that Harper Lee was about to publish a second novel, more than half a century after her iconic To Kill a Mockingbird had appeared in 1960. Mockingbird, the story of a young girl’s initiation into the reality of Southern racism, is among the most cherished coming-of-age stories in American literary culture, and its portrait of the noble Atticus Finch, a lawyer who risks everything to defend a black man falsely accused of a crime in the segregated South of the 1930s, has inspired generations of admirers. For all its defense of such fundamental democratic principles, however, Mockingbird also has been criticized for its narrowing of questions of racial justice to a drama of white conscience, of historical change to a matter of individual attitude. Harper Lee took several years to revise the original draft of the novel that eventually appeared as To Kill a Mockingbird. Her original manuscript, entitled “Go Set a Watchman,” was known to exist, but only recently did the author agree to its publication after it was rediscovered in her papers. In this lecture, John T. Matthews will discuss with audience members how this “new” work alters our understanding of what Lee wanted to say about the racial crisis in the U.S. South during the decades of the modern civil rights movement.…
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1 Erica Hirshler, “Childe Hassam: At Dusk: Boston Common at Twilight” 56:05
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January 19, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In this talk, leading American art specialist Erica E. Hirshler will share excerpts of her vivid account of one of Boston's best-loved paintings, Childe Hassam’s “At Dusk (Boston Common at Twilight)”. She will discuss with audience members the context of Childe Hassam's 1880s city scene. With its rosy rust tones, intimate familial vignette, and quiet expanse of snow-laden park, today “At Dusk” seems to encourage reflection and represent a decidedly old-fashioned city. Yet Hirshler will reveal the ways in which the painting visually signaled the emerging modern city, from subtleties about women's place in the urban landscape to the uproarious clang of the streetcars that would have been heard on the busiest block in Boston. She will discuss her carefully researched and elegantly presented book, which offers a new perspective to those already acquainted with the painting as well as an evocative look at a singular moment in Boston history.…
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1 George Hovis, “Thomas Wolfe and the Lost Generation” 59:51
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December 10, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. This lecture is sponsored by the William Orville Thomson Endowment. Despite his protests to the contrary, American novelist Thomas Wolfe, whose writings are well represented in the Athenæum’s collections, is remembered as a representative of the “Lost Generation,” a generation of artists who renounced the outmoded verities of their forebears as useless in the Modern age. With the advent of the Great Depression, Wolfe confronted widespread suffering, especially in New York City, where he was living at the time, and this newfound concern for the plight of others made him reconsider not only the solipsism that had threatened his earlier fiction but the Modernist aesthetic that had informed it. In his posthumous novel, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), Wolfe grew away from the bildungsroman to write proletarian fiction on a global scale. After exposing the unjust distribution of wealth in Manhattan and Brooklyn, he exposes the class system of England and the rise of Nazi oppression in Berlin. Just as he had earlier broken with the conventional truths of his hometown to become an artist, he now found it necessary to outgrow his own youthful assumptions and to understand more fully that his own material and spiritual health were tied up with that of his fellow man.…
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1 Ilan Stavans, “Quixote: The Novel and the World” 48:42
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December 9, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. This year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the Second Part of Miguel de Cervantes’ classic Don Quixote of La Mancha. With the exception of The Bible, no other book has been translated into English more frequently—a total of twenty-two times. Indeed, accumulatively this is the world’s most popular novel. The Boston Athenæum’s circulating and special collections reflect the cultural significance of Don Quixote over the last 200 years with scores of related volumes, including Spanish and English editions of the novel, responses and analyses of the great work, and works inspired by Cervantes’ masterpiece. What makes Don Quixote such a success? Why have readers over the centuries found in it a type of humanity seldom encountered elsewhere? Distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans brings us back to the way Cervantes conceived the work and the response he has received from the 17th century to the present across languages and geographies.…
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1 R. Nicholas Burns and John McKesson Camp II, “Conversations on Democracy” 56:33
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November 30, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. In celebration of the 135th anniversary of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, R. Nicholas Burns and John McKesson Camp II will discuss the ancient Greek roots of democracy, the current crisis in Greece, and U.S.-Greek relations. The American School of Classical Studies at Athens is a leading research and teaching institution dedicated to the advanced study of all aspects of Greek culture, from antiquity to the present. Founded in 1881, the School provides students and scholars from over 190 affiliated North American colleges and universities with the opportunity to explore the full range of scholarly resources in Greece.…
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1 Christopher Morgan "Alice in Wonderland & Lewis Carroll's Games & Puzzles:The Surprising Connection" 47:50
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November 18, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. The Athenæum is an ideal setting for the scholar in that it boasts a robust collection, reference services, and a serene environment for study. Indeed, Christopher Morgan researched the subject for his book, “Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll's Games and Puzzles: The Surprising Connection”, within our walls! 2015 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”. To celebrate the event, puzzle designer and Lewis Carroll collector Christopher Morgan will take us down the rabbit hole to discuss Carroll's little-known game and puzzle pamphlets, now gathered together for the first time in his new book, “The Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll: Games, Puzzles, and Related Pieces”. Morgan will discuss the surprising connections between Carroll's charming game and puzzle inventions and his books, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass”. Also included are Carroll’s word game columns from the British magazines Vanity Fair and The Lady, never before published and revealing his droll humor. Audience members will be able to join in the fun by trying their hands at solving some of Carroll's word games.…
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1 Jack Bishop-America's Test Kitchen "100 Recipes: The Absolute Best Ways to Make the True Essentials” 46:57
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The Athenæum holds an impressive collection of menus from Boston’s fine-dining establishments from the mid-nineteenth century, offering a glimpse into the tastes and trends of the past. Visit our Digital Collections page to view these elegant menus. Join Jack Bishop, editorial director of America’s Test Kitchen, for a discussion of the tastes and trends in food today as he talks about “100 Recipes: The Absolute Best Ways to Make the True Essentials”. If you could only have 100 recipes at your disposal, what would they be? In “100 Recipes”, the editors at America’s Test Kitchen present what they consider to be the recipes everyone should know how to make—these are the dishes that will give anyone the culinary chops they need to succeed in the kitchen. From everyday basics like tomato sauce, pork roast, and brownies to innovative classics like slow-roasted beef, poached chicken, and cheese soufflé to inspiring global dishes like Thai basil chicken, pho, and Spanish beef stew, cooks at all skill levels will find accessible recipes in this collection.…
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1 David Lough, “No More Champagne – Churchill and His Money” 52:22
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November 12, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. David Lough’s No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money contributes to the Boston Athenæum’s impressive collection of biographies, including several on Winston Churchill. The volume also deepens the Athenæum’s collection of books that offer multiple perspectives on United States and European history. The popular image of Winston Churchill is of a life of champagne and cigars but, behind the scenes, he struggled to prevent his personal financial problems from engulfing his political career. Only fragments of this story have previously emerged, but Lough has now pieced it together with the help of unprecedented access to the private records of Churchill and his associates. Lough will discuss Churchill’s personally expensive lessons on the American economy and body politic. Churchill’s American financial losses almost brought his political career to an end in Britain and required several rescues. Yet they also gave him a unique perspective on the country’s resources and resilience, which helped him shape his strategy when he was handed Britain’s wartime leadership in 1940. In one of his greatest financial successes, Churchill shielded most of his proceeds from tax authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, allowing him to fund his extravagant lifestyle and leave his heirs a valuable legacy.…
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1 Mary Beard, “S.P.Q.R.: A History of Ancient Rome” 48:48
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November 11, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Boston Athenæum began collecting Neoclassical art shortly after its establishment in 1807. At the time Neoclassicism was a hugely popular artistic movement, due in part to the romanticized view of the United States’ system of government being modeled on Greco-Roman and Enlightenment ideals. Mary Beard’s S.P.Q.R.: A History of Ancient Rome provides insight into the realities of the ancient Roman world and thereby context for understanding the 19th-century Neoclassical movement. By 63 BCE, the city of Rome was a sprawling, imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants. But how did this massive city—the seat of power for an empire that spanned from Spain to Syria—emerge from what was once an insignificant village in central Italy? In S.P.Q.R., Beard changes our historical perspective, exploring how the Romans themselves challenged the idea of imperial rule, how they responded to terrorism and revolution, and how they invented a new idea of citizenship and nation, while also keeping her eye open for those overlooked in traditional histories: women, slaves and ex-slaves, conspirators, and losers. Like the best detectives, Beard separates fact from fiction, myth and propaganda from historical record. She introduces the familiar characters of Julius Caesar, Cicero, and Nero as well as the untold, the loud women, the shrewd bakers, and the brave jokers. S.P.Q.R. promises to shape our view of Roman history for decades to come.…
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1 Michael Ferber, “Why Romanticism Was A Good Idea” 50:19
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November 4, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Shelley—to name a few—are all authors considered to have worked in the Romantic style. However, some literary scholars have connected Jane Austen, the Brontës, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allen Poe to this artistic, spiritual, and intellectual movement. Not surprisingly, all of these authors are well represented within the Athenæum’s collection. This event is an opportunity to learn about the movement that influenced so many of our most beloved writers. Though many of us admire the great works of Romantic poetry, music, and painting, the ideas of the Romantics may seem juvenile, sloppy, escapist, or even dangerous, and the very word “romantic” is often an insult. Michael Ferber will offer a brief defense of Romantic ideas and intuitions about nature, religion, politics, and the self. Romanticism is here to stay, and it’s not all bad.…
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1 Ted Stebbins, “The Art of the Gilded Age” 52:04
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November 5, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. The Athenæum’s collections offer a wonderful glimpse into the Gilded Age through paintings, drawings, and prints by John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and others, as well as through the writing of Walt Whitman, Henry James, and William Dean Howells. The Gilded Age saw the birth of modern America, and the greatest outpouring of art and architecture, as well as literature, in our history. The period began with the “Golden Spike” in 1869, which unified the nation by rail and made vast commercial expansion and the creation of great fortunes possible. Boston saw the construction of Richardson’s Romanesque Trinity Church in 1876 and McKim’s classical Boston Public Library in 1893. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. will examine the failures and successes of the greatest artists of the period as well as the often contradictory writings of Henry James and Mark Twain.…
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1 John Matteson, “The Annotated Little Women & Exhibit of Louisa May Alcott's Book Selections” 45:46
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November 2, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. It should be no surprise that Louisa May Alcott was a voracious reader—it may be a surprise that she did quite a bit of reading at the Athenæum! Caroline D. Bain Archivist and Reference Librarian Carolle Morini recently featured that Alcott was a member at the Athenæum. We not only have a record of her membership, but also of the books she checked out while she was a member. Many of these books are still in our circulating collection and are the exact copy she herself checked out so many years ago. These books will be on display in the Events Hall for this event. Since its publication in 1868–1869 Little Women, perhaps America’s most beloved children’s classic, has been handed down from generation to generation. In this lavish edition, featuring over 200 full-color illustrations, John Matteson brings unprecedented vibrancy to the book, to its characters, and to the Alcott family who inspired it all. With numerous photographs taken expressly for this edition—elder daughter Anna’s wedding dress, the Alcott sisters’ theater costumes, and Abba Alcott’s recipe book—readers discover the extraordinary links between the real and the fictional family. Matteson’s annotations bring us back in touch with the objects and culture of a distant but still-relevant time.…
October 27, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Just the smallest sampling from the Boston Athenæum’s special collections holdings provides a glimpse of the western world’s centuries-long fascination with the geography and cultures of the Pacific. The collections include: Jan Jansson’s mid 17th-century map Mar del zvr Hispanis Mare Pacificum which depicts the west coast of Central and South America to the Straits of Anian; James Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific Ocean published in 1784; Frederick William Beechey’s Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait [sic] from 1831; J.E. Partington’s Ethnographical Album of the Pacific Islands published in 1892; Will Sabin’s 1921 Hawaii U.S.A.: A Souvenir of “The Crossroads of the Pacific”; and the Book Club of California’s Pacific Adventures, “a series of six narratives of early exploration of the Pacific area, to be issued bi-monthly during 1940s.” ‘Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers’ offers the contemporary reader the fascinating story of today’s ocean through a series of journeys both in geography and in time. Pacific is a rich and sprawling account of what author Simon Winchester calls the inland sea of the world’s tomorrow. With his trademark blend of history, geography, natural science, and keen observations, Winchester offers an expansive narrative that taps the cumulative power of a lifetime’s worth of travel, research, and reportage.…
October 22, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. The United States’ Founding Fathers were deeply influenced by the Magna Carta in the formation of our country. The Athenæum’s early history reflects a deep respect of, and even involvement from, many of the Founding Fathers as evidence by the purchase and care of a significant portion of George Washington’s personal library; John Adams’ membership in the Boston Athenæum; sculptures and paintings of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington throughout the building; and countless volumes about the Founding Fathers and their achievements in the special and circulating collections. 2015 marks the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, the founding document of Western liberty that is internationally revered and has inspired the constitutions of hundreds of countries. Its language can be found in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and according to Dan Jones, 'the year 1215 has become in a sense "year zero" in the story of the struggle for freedom from tyranny.' In Magna Carta, Jones takes us back in time to this turbulent year, when the document in question was just a peace treaty between the third Plantagenet King, John, who was known for his cruelty and instability, and a small group of self-interested and violent barons. Jones brilliantly shows why this document has had such a lasting and international impact that continues to resonate today.…
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1 Kitty Eisele, Talking in Pictures:Developing a Visual Vocabulary to Show-and Tell-American's Stories 40:42
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October 21, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. The Athenæum’s collections have been used by scholars and researchers for more than 200 years. In more recent decades, filmmakers and producers have used the collections to inform their projects, such as Kitty Eisele’s The Civil War, a documentary film series directed by Ken Burns with images from the Athenæum’s Prints & Photographs collection. As Supervising Senior Editor at NPR’s Morning Edition, Kitty Eisele makes her living with words. Many years before that, she worked in pictures – as an Emmy Award-winning producer of The Civil War series with Ken Burns, and other documentaries on American history and culture. In fact, the Athenæum’s collections were used to tell the story in The Civil War–Ken Burns and his team researched the series at 10 ½ Beacon Street. Now, as digital media becomes more dominant in our everyday lives, she’s found herself asking how we communicate in this new language – a primarily visual language. What does it mean to use images as an increasingly necessary way of telling the news and our own history? How do we develop a language of images that reflects our real experiences? How can we think imaginatively and creatively about what we show and tell? How do we develop a visual vocabulary? From her past year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard she shares her lessons from looking at other forms of communication – languages including dance and architecture – to open up possibilities for talking with pictures – for doing the work of journalism and history by sharing our lives, visually.…
October 5, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Henri Cole’s bold new collection ‘Nothing to Declare’ contains poems of feral beauty and intense vulnerability. Each poem starts up from its own unique occasion and is then conducted through surprising (sometimes unnerving) and self-steadying domains. The result is a daring, delicate, unguarded, and tender collection. They combine a susceptibility to sensuousness with an awareness of desolation. Cole transforms the pain of experience into the pleasure of expressive language, with precise reliability of detail, a supple wealth of sound, and a speculative truthfulness. ‘Nothing to Declare’ is a rare work that is light in touch but with just enough weight to mark the soul.…
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1 Ken Botnick, “Diderot Project: Making the Book to Discover My Subject” 34:56
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October 1, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. The Athenæum holds one of only 70 copies printed of Diderot Project, a 150-page meditation on concepts encountered in printer and publisher Ken Botnick’s study of the plates and writings of the Encyclopédie of Diderot. Botnick will present his recent artist book and discuss its conceptual underpinnings, his research methods, and production details as components of his central thesis: when we make a book we discover the subject. Botnick will discuss his recently completed limited-edition artist book and the concepts he encountered in the Encyclopédie of Diderot: the hand and craft, tools and machines, labor and leisure, memory, sensation, and perception.…
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1 Adam Van Doren and David McCullough, “The House Tells the Story: Homes of the American Presidents” 1:13:19
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September 28, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. “The House Tells the Story: Homes of the American Presidents” is an incredible collaboration between noted artist Adam Van Doren (author/illustrator) and pre-eminent historian David McCullough (foreword) who unite for an excursion to the celebrated homes of fifteen American presidents, past and present. The text is personal and unaffected; Van Doren visited these homes to ensure that he recorded every detail accurately, often becoming acquainted with the former presidents themselves, always trying to portray them in the human environment they created for themselves.…
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1 Anthony Sammarco, "S. S. Pierce: A Boston Tradition" 47:43
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September 24, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. When Samuel Stillman Pierce (1807-1880) opened his store, S.S. Pierce, in 1831 at the corner of Tremont and Court Streets in downtown Boston, he vowed "I may not make money, but I shall make a reputation." Pierce was known as the purveyor of fancy goods and potent libations to Victorian Bostonians. He catered to the carriage trade and created a company that would involve four generations of the Pierce Family in its successful operations. With its own coat of arms adorning a distinctive red label on canned goods, and the largest line of privately packed fancy foods in the world, S.S. Pierce sold its delicacies not only through eight New England stores of its own but also through distributors across the United States and by worldwide mail order. Boston Athenæum members John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. were considered celebrity customers at S.S. Pierce.…
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1 MIT Panel, "Boston: Sink or Swim" 1:24:27
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A panel discussion at the Boston Athenæum on September 21, 2015 featuring Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty as they address the impact of climate change in Boston and the surrounding areas. The Boston Athenæum has long been a venue for intellectual discourse on leading issues of the day. Once considered purely a scientific subject, global climate change is now recognized as an issue with consequences for a variety of disciplines including law, government and public policy, economics, human rights, and culture. A survey of visual materials of the local natural and built environments in the Athenæum’s special collection shows the dramatic impacts humans have had on the landscape and environment, particularly over the last 200 years. Global climate change will certainly require further changes to our built environment. Please join us for a panel discussion featuring Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty, including Alan Berger, Kerry Emanuel, Markus Buehler, and moderator Cynthia Barnhart, as they address the impact of climate change in Boston and the surrounding areas.…
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1 Stephen Grant, Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger 35:53
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September 17, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger, founders of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. is the first book-length account of the American success story about Henry (1857–1930) and Emily (1858–1936) Folger, the reclusive Brooklyn couple who founded the Folger Shakespeare Library near the U. S. Capitol in 1932. The library houses 82 First Folios, 275,000 books, 60,000 manuscripts, artwork, and much more related to Shakespeare and his times. The private research institution welcomes 100,000 visitors a year and provides scholars, researchers, professors, and graduate students from around the world with access to the priceless collections stored in underground vaults. The Folgers met at a literary salon and were the first in their families to receive college educations. Henry rose to become president of the Standard Oil Company of New York, that later became Mobil Corporation. Emily earned a master’s degree in Shakespearean studies in 1896, when only 250 women in the country attained that level of education. It is a love story of a childless couple during the Gilded Age who were devoted to each other, in love with Shakespeare, and bitten by the collecting bug.…
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1 Karen Abbott, “Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War “ 38:57
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September 16, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. "Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War", a spellbinding work of historical restoration, recounts the courage and audacious duplicity of four remarkable women who played seminal roles in the Civil War. Two working for the Union and two for the Confederacy, these women, until now all but forgotten by history, came from varying backgrounds and regions. Yet each risked everything—money, honor, family connections, and even her life—in order to further the cause in which she adamantly believed. Abbott, who draws on a wealth of primary source material as well as interviews with the women’s descendants, illuminates these interwoven lives with the assured hand of an historian and the narrative grace of a novelist.…
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1 Neil L. Rudenstine, "Ideas of Order: A Close Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets" 42:39
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February 5, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Shakespeare’s Sonnets comprise the greatest single work of lyric poetry in English, as passionate, daring, intimate, and fiery as any love poems we may encounter. But they are often misunderstood: as W. H. Auden wrote, “more nonsense has been talked and written, more intellectual and emotional energy expended in vain, on the sonnets of Shakespeare than on any other literary work in the world.” Ideas of Order instills pleasure in this extraordinary verse, revealing an underlying narrative within the 154 poems that illuminates the work—providing a guide that inspires a new understanding of this complex masterpiece. Neil L. Rudenstine makes a compelling case for the existence of a dramatic arc within the work through an expert interpretation of the poems in relationship to each other: the jealousies, petty squabbles, reconciliations, discoveries, and longings. The sonnets show us a poet in turmoil who falls for a young man who returns his affections—and the love is utterly transformative, binding him in such an irresistible way that it survives a number of heartbreaks. This spell is only broken when a dark lady comes into the poet’s life, and he becomes enmeshed in another coupling of lust and betrayal.…
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1 Charles Spencer, "Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I" 47:56
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February 26, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Killers of the King tells the shocking stories—including the fascinating fates—of the 59 men who signed the death warrant of Charles I of England in 1649. This act not only changed British history forever, but may it very well have reverberated across the ocean to the young British colonies, which more than a hundred years later also rose up against their king to become an independent country known as the United States. When Charles I’s son, Charles II, was restored to the throne in 1660, he set about enacting a deadly wave of retribution against all those responsible for his father’s death. Some of the "regicides"—the killers of the king—pleaded for mercy, while others stoically awaited their sentences. This powerful tale of revenge from the dark heart of England’s past, a unique contribution to seventeenth-century history, Killers of the King tells the incredible story of the men who dared to assassinate a monarch.…
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1 Donald S. Frazier, "Blood on the Bayou: Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and the Trans-Mississippi" 39:55
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March 10, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Blood on the Bayou: Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and the Trans-Mississippi takes a well-known story of the struggle for control of the Mississippi River in the American Civil War, and recasts it as a contest for control of African-American populations. The Emancipation Proclamation may have freed the slaves, but the task of actually moving these liberated people within Union borders and directing their labor to the benefit of the Union fell to the Federal army and navy. This book shows how the campaign to reduce Rebel forts west of the river also involved the creation of a black army of occupation and a remaking of the social and political landscape of Louisiana and the nation. The longer the military campaigns in the Mississippi Valley dragged on, the more Federal officials could feed liberated slaves into the system. No matter the outcome of the war, the Federal government set out to break slavery—forever.…
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1 Maureen Meister, "Arts and Crafts Architecture: History and Heritage in New England" 55:17
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March 23, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Anyone who has spent time in New England will recognize the century-old buildings that Maureen Meister will discuss in a slide lecture based upon her new book—the first comprehensive study of Arts and Crafts architecture in the region. Focusing on the 1890s through the 1920s, she will explain how a group of Boston architects and craftsmen encountered English Arts and Crafts theorists, including John Ruskin and William Morris, and produced exquisite works of their own. Among the architects were Ralph Adams Cram, Lois Lilley Howe, Charles Maginnis, and R. Clipston Sturgis. They were conservative in some respects, promoting designs based on historical precedent and the region's heritage, while they also were forward-looking, blending Arts and Crafts values with Progressive Era idealism. Their legacy is apparent in landmarks honored today in cities and towns across New England.…
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1 Roseanne Montillo, "The Wilderness of Ruin" 40:45
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March 19, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. In the early 1870s, local children begin disappearing from the working class neighborhoods of Boston. Several return home bloody and bruised after being tortured, while others never came back. With the city on edge, authorities believe the abductions are the handiwork of a psychopath, until they discover that their killer—fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy—is barely older than his victims. The criminal investigation that follows sparks a debate among the world’s most revered medical minds and will have a long-lasting impact on the judicial system and medical consciousness for decades. The historical novel, The Wilderness of Ruin is a riveting tale of gruesome murder and depravity, but at its heart it depicts a great American city divided by class, a chasm that widens in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1872. Roseanne Montillo brings Gilded Age Boston to glorious life—from the genteel cobble stone streets of Beacon Hill to the squalid, overcrowded tenements of Southie—and here, too, is the writer Herman Melville, who, eager to understand both the child killer case and his own mental instability, enlists the aid of physician Oliver Wendell Holmes. With verve and historical detail, Roseanne Montillo explores this case that reverberated through all of Boston society to help us understand our modern hunger for the prurient and sensational.…
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1 Gareth Williams, "House and Hound: Dogs in the English Country House" 45:53
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April 13, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. The Boston Athenæum is beloved for its tradition of welcoming well-behaved dogs into its beautiful interiors. In this Royal Oak Society lecture, Gareth Williams will discuss the role of dogs in historic, English country houses. Whilst many people focus on humans depicted in portraits upon English country house walls, it is the four-legged canine occupants of stately homes that are considered de rigueur members of a countryside retreat. From gaunt greyhounds shown in early English tapestries to pampered pooches whose beds have the same Colefax & Fowler chintz as their mistress’ sofas, dogs in England’s country houses command a place in history themselves. Depictions of hunting dogs and family pets abound in English country house collections including sculptures, textiles, tapestries, plaster work, and on tableware or porcelain. Country house doggie accoutrements include splendidly wrought silver and gold collars, dog bowls, and kennels designed by architects, and some bereft owners immortalized their pets’ passings with modest gravestones in pet cemeteries or sculpted garden monuments. Whether focusing on country squires’ dogs at English manor houses, members of hunting packs on grand estates, or dogs from the royal households, this illustrated lecture considers the cultural influences and artistic legacy of the English country house dog.…
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1 Jeffrey Henderson, "The Loeb Classics for a Digital Age" 54:28
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May 5, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Jeffrey Henderson, in his lecture The Loeb Classics for a Digital Age, will reflect on the durability and adaptability of the works of the Loeb Classical Library. Over the millennia, these works have been adapted to new vehicles and systems of reference and organization. The new digital version is the latest of many previous forms: the Greek oral tradition was first captured in writing around the eighth century BCE, after which it was committed to handwritten scroll, handwritten codex, to printed codex, now to the computer in the twenty-first century, and surely to more media in years to come. Each new medium has resulted in unanticipated effects as writers and readers explored its capabilities and discovered its potential, and so it will be with the Loeb Classical Library in its new digital form.…
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1 Kirsten Downey, "Isabella: The Warrior Queen" 37:35
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April 30, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. In this book talk, Kirstin Downey, author of Isabella: The Warrior Queen, will speak about Isabella of Castile, the Queen of Spain who became one of the most influential female rulers in history. Just as Isabella was a queen in a world of kings, female members of the Athenæum have navigated what librarian Charles Knowles in the Athenæum Centenary called “a man’s institution” for the majority of its history. (Barbara Adams Hebard tackles this topic in her essay, "The Role of Women at the Boston Athenæum" in The Boston Athenæum Bicentennial Essays, which illuminates the hidden history of female contributions to the Athenæum since its inception.) Isabella’s life is not so hidden, sponsoring major historical events such as Christopher Columbus's journey to the New World and the Spanish Inquisition. Whether saintly or satanic, no female leader has done more to shape our modern world, in which millions of people in two hemispheres speak Spanish and practice Catholicism. Using new scholarship, Downey's luminous biography tells the story of this brilliant, fervent, forgotten woman, the faith that propelled her through life, and the land of ancient conflicts and intrigue she brought under her command.…
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1 Jean Findlay, "Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator" 41:59
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May 14, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Since 1922, English-language readers have been able to leap into the prose of Proust thanks to translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff, who wrestled with Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece—published as Remembrance of Things Past—until his death in 1930. In her book, Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator, Jean Findlay reveals aspects of Scott Moncrieff’s life which have remained hidden behind the genius of the man whose reputation he helped build. Catholic and homosexual; a partygoer who was lonely deep down; secretly a spy in Mussolini’s Italy; publicly a debonair man of letters; a war hero described as “offensively brave,” whose letters from the front are remarkably cheerful—Scott Moncrieff was a man of his moment, thriving on paradoxes and extremes. In Chasing Lost Time, Findlay gives us a vibrant, moving portrait of the brilliant Scott Moncrieff, and of the era—changing fast and forever—in which he shone.…
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1 Jonathan Schneer, "Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet" 51:42
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June 3, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Prize-winning historian Jonathan Schneer investigates Winston Churchill and the role his cabinet played during the war in his book, Ministers at War. Churchill depended on a team of powerful ministers to manage the war effort as he rallied a beleaguered nation. Selecting men from across the political spectrum—from fellow Conservative Anthony Eden to leaders of the opposing Labor Party such as Clement Atlee—Churchill assembled a War Cabinet that would balance competing interests and bolster support for his national coalition government. The group possessed a potent blend of talent, ambition, and egotism, but Churchill masterfully kept the ministers’ rivalries and political challenges in check, paving the way for Britain’s victory.…
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1 Laura Auricchio, "The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered" 50:04
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July 21, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered is an "absorbing" (The Wall Street Journal), "sharp and moving" (Kirkus, starred review) biography of the Marquis de Lafayette, French hero of the American Revolution. Laura Auricchio looks past the storybook hero who cast aside family and fortune to advance the transcendent aims of liberty and justice commemorated in America’s towns, streets, and parks that bear his name. Auricchio gives us a rich portrait of the man, from birth to death a man driven by dreams of glory and felled by tragic, human weaknesses.…
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1 Austen Barron Bailly, "Thomas Hart Benton and the Modern American Woman" 56:32
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July 13, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. In Thomas Hart Benton and the Modern American Woman, Austen Bailly will speak about how American artist Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) pictured twentieth-century female experiences in America and saw American women as a means to make the mythic modern in his art. Benton met his Italian-born wife Rita Piacenza around 1917 on the heels of his early involvement with motion pictures in Fort Lee, New Jersey—America’s “first Hollywood.” The movies inspired Benton to chart a new artistic course to compete with the drama and power of movies. Rita, imagined as a glamorous leading lady in Benton’s self-portrait from about 1924, was key to the artist’s vision for presenting himself as new American art star. Like Hollywood directors, Benton cast women as leading and supporting players in authentic American stories and recognized their roles in American myths.…
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1 Marc Shell, "Speaking from the Shore: Islands, Literature, and the Fate of Geography" 58:33
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احب58:33
June 10, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Islandology is a fast-paced, fact-filled comparative essay in critical topography and cultural geography that cuts across different cultures and argues for a world of islands. Written by Marc Shell in view of the melting of the world's great ice islands, Islandology shows not only new ways that we think about islands but also why and how we think by means of them.…
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1 Karen Corsano and Daniel Williman, "John Singer Sargent and His Muse: Painting Love and Loss" 48:10
48:10
التشغيل لاحقا
التشغيل لاحقا
قوائم
إعجاب
احب48:10
June 11, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Learn more about this American artist by joining Karen Corsano and Daniel Williman for a discussion of their book, John Singer Sargent and His Muse: Painting Love and Loss. This sensitive and compelling biography sheds new light on John Singer Sargent’s art through an intimate history of his family, especially of his niece and muse, Rose-Marie Ormond. Between 1906 and 1912, John Singer Sargent documented the idyllic teenage summers of Rose-Marie and his own deepening affection for her serene beauty and good-hearted, candid charm. When his niece died tragically in a bombed church vault, Sargent expressed his grief on canvas: he made his last murals for the Boston Public Library a cryptic memorial to Rose-Marie and her husband, Robert. The book braids together the lives and families of Rose-Marie, Robert, and John Sargent while drawing on a rich trove of letters, diaries, journals, and the Athenæum Archive.…
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1 Stephen Kinzer "The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War 40:48
40:48
التشغيل لاحقا
التشغيل لاحقا
قوائم
إعجاب
احب40:48
Stephen Kinzer discussing his work at the Boston Athenaeum on February 25, 2014.
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1 Ben Bradlee, Jr., "The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams" 34:48
34:48
التشغيل لاحقا
التشغيل لاحقا
قوائم
إعجاب
احب34:48
December 9, 2013 at the Boston Athenæum. Born in 1918 in San Diego, Ted Williams would spend most of his life disguising his Mexican heritage. During his 22 years with the Boston Red Sox, Williams electrified crowds across America—and shocked them, too: his notorious clashes with the press and fans threatened his reputation. Yet while he was a God in the batter’s box, he was profoundly human once he stepped away from the plate. Mr. Bradlee—the only biographer to have full access to Williams’s personal papers, letters, and home movies—has spent ten years gleaning new details about the athlete’s hardscrabble childhood; his spectacular baseball career; his years as a “Top Gun’’ pilot in two wars; a private life marked by affairs, explosion and dysfunction; and finally, the macabre cryonics affair that followed his death.…
مرحبًا بك في مشغل أف ام!
يقوم برنامج مشغل أف أم بمسح الويب للحصول على بودكاست عالية الجودة لتستمتع بها الآن. إنه أفضل تطبيق بودكاست ويعمل على أجهزة اندرويد والأيفون والويب. قم بالتسجيل لمزامنة الاشتراكات عبر الأجهزة.