Shows
Boston AthenæumGrace Talusan and Elif Armbruster, “The Body Papers: A Memoir”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 threa...2020-03-1741 min
Boston AthenæumHeidi Pribell and Theo Tyson, “Curator’s Choice: Art + Design”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 mem...2020-03-1730 min
Boston AthenæumEmpowerHER: Black Women in the ArtsFebruary 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...2020-02-281h 05
Boston AthenæumNancy Seasholes, “The Atlas of Boston History”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...2020-02-2843 min
Boston AthenæumRussell Maret, “The Making of Character Traits”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...2020-02-2833 min
Boston AthenæumRichard Bell, “Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home”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...2020-02-0736 min
Boston AthenæumRabbi Dan Judson, Dr. Lorna Rivera. Rajini Srikanth, and Sarah Turner, “Community Conversations”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...2020-02-0740 min
Boston AthenæumMichelle Marchetti Coughlin, “Plymouth Colony First Lady Penelope Winslow”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 h...2020-01-3145 min
Boston AthenæumKerri Greenidge, “Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter”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 acros...2020-01-3122 min
Boston AthenæumRoxana Robinson, “Dawson’s Fall”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...2020-01-3142 min
Boston AthenæumTed Reinstein, “Wicked Pissed: New England's Most Famous Feuds”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 f...2020-01-1755 min
Boston AthenæumBettina Norton, “A Foray into Forgery and the Boston Athenæum's Role in Exposing It”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 promote...2020-01-1047 min
Boston AthenæumBrent Budsberg, Ellen Kaspern, and Jeff Altepeter, “Reading Craft”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 th...2019-12-2058 min
Boston AthenæumBen Railton, “We the People: The 500-Year Battle Over Who is American”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 J...2019-12-2047 min
Boston AthenæumDavid J. Silverman, “This Land is Their Land”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 pro...2019-11-2259 min
Boston AthenæumJohn Buchtel, “All Necessary and Useful Knowledge: Thomas Bray’s Libraries for Colonial America”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 pr...2019-11-1550 min
Boston AthenæumRobert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz, “The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall”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 succi...2019-11-1541 min
Boston AthenæumKatia Lysy, “Images and Shadows”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.2019-11-1539 min
Boston AthenæumJames B. Conroy, “Jefferson’s White House: Monticello on the Potomac”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 y...2019-11-011h 03
Boston AthenæumDesiree Taylor, "The Life and Saga of Harriet Jacobs"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 ser...2019-11-011h 00
Boston AthenæumKaren Abbott, “The Ghosts of Eden Park”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...2019-10-2549 min
Boston AthenæumLiza Wieland, "Paris 7 A.M.: A Novel"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 paren...2019-08-1535 min
Boston AthenæumSonia Purnell, "A Woman of No Importance"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, y...2019-08-151h 04
Boston AthenæumAnita Diamant and Fred Sullivan, Jr., “Cymbeline: A Conversation”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 tra...2019-08-0856 min
Boston AthenæumElizabeth Cobbs, "The Tubman Command: A Novel"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, Har...2019-06-2742 min
Boston AthenæumMichael Bronski, "Why the Commonly Told Story of Stonewall Is the Least Interesting Thing About It"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 gripp...2019-06-2750 min
Boston AthenæumJenna Blum & Randy Susan Meyers, "Writers with Obsessions"Jenna Blum & Randy Susan Meyers, "Writers with Obsessions" by Boston Athenæum2019-06-2042 min
Boston AthenæumNina Campbell, "Nina Campbell Interior Decoration: Elegance and Ease"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 prestigio...2019-06-2055 min
Boston AthenæumChristian Di Spigna, “Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren”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...2019-05-3049 min
Boston AthenæumLynne Murphy, “The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English”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...2019-05-3042 min
Boston AthenæumSuzanne Preston Blier, Stephen S. Lash, Akili Tommasino, and Murray Whyte, "What's It Worth?”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 a...2019-05-3050 min
Boston AthenæumRobert W. Fieseler and Jeremy Hobson, “Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire”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 tha...2019-05-3040 min
Boston AthenæumEmily Bazelon and Adam J. Foss, “Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution”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 c...2019-05-3055 min
Boston AthenæumMary Norris and Gregory Maguire, “Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen”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 lif...2019-05-3036 min
Boston AthenæumCara Robertson, “The Trial of Lizzie Borden”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...2019-05-3042 min
Boston AthenæumKaren Corsano and Daniel Williman, “John Singer Sargent in the Circle of Annie Adams Fields”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...2019-05-1748 min
Boston AthenæumJessie Morgan-Owens, “Girl in Black and White”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 aud...2019-05-1736 min
Boston AthenæumHenry Adams and Bill Cross, “John Hubbard Sturgis Eaton Endowed Lecture: Homer at the Beach”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 ther...2019-05-1720 min
Boston AthenæumJed Willard, “Nationalism: Here, There, and Everywhere?”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...2019-05-1741 min
Boston AthenæumLindsay Leard-Coolidge, “Sublime Impressions: Prints and Printmakers of the Grand Canyon”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...2019-05-1740 min
Boston AthenæumJoshua S. Goldstein, Steffan A. Qvist, and Steven Pinker, “Bright Future"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 l...2019-05-1747 min
Boston AthenæumAnne Boyd Rioux, “Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters”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 write...2019-01-2338 min
Boston AthenæumRobert Zimmerman, Jr., “Nature’s Design: Land, Water, and Climate Change in Boston”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, So...2018-12-1443 min
Boston AthenæumNathaniel Philbrick, “In the Hurricane's Eye”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 sin...2018-12-0641 min
Boston AthenæumKendall Taylor, Ph.D, “The Gatsby Affair”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...2018-12-0544 min
Boston AthenæumDaniel Breen, "The Unkempt Bibliomaniac of Tremont Street: William Shaw and Federalist Boston"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 per...2018-12-0537 min
Boston AthenæumSusan Orlean, “The Library Book”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 s...2018-11-3043 min
Boston AthenæumSimon Winchester, “The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World”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 intro...2018-11-2751 min
Boston AthenæumErin Corrales-Diaz, “A Great National Painting: James Walker’s The Battle of Gettysburg"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...2018-07-1653 min
Boston AthenæumDr. Adam Koppel, Dr. David Meeker, Dr. Craig C. Mello, and Carl Zimmer : Biotechnology PanelMay 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 f...2018-06-251h 31
Boston AthenæumDr. John A. Buchtel, “A Picture of a Book is Not a Book”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 ath...2018-02-1550 min
Boston AthenæumGeorgia Barnhill, What Makes Fitz Henry Lane's Lithographs So Special?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 1841.2018-02-1552 min
Boston AthenæumPoets' Theatre, “The New Colossus"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...2017-12-2253 min
Boston AthenæumHelene Atwan, Ladette Randolph, Michael Reynolds, and Meghna Chakrabarti, “Editorial Perspectives”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...2017-11-1654 min
Boston AthenæumTunney Lee, Shauna Lo, and Lisong Liu, “Boston and the Chinese Exclusion Act”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...2017-10-251h 10
Boston Athenæum“Recording Lives at Lightning Speed”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.2017-10-1141 min
Boston AthenæumNeil Swidey, “The Boston Roots of the Trump Anti-Immigrant Playbook”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 epo...2017-09-2850 min
Boston Athenæum“Civic Engagement: Purposeful Contributions to a Greater Good”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/2165362922017-05-0855 min
Boston AthenæumManny Paraschos, “Boston’s Journalism Trail”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 Bost...2017-03-1642 min
Boston AthenæumThe Poets’ Theatre, “Boston Poets and Their Predecessors: A Muster of Poets”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 su...2017-02-221h 38
Boston AthenæumStephen T. Moskey, “Larz and Isabel Anderson: Wealth and Celebrity in the Gilded Age”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...2017-02-1745 min
Boston AthenæumLouise Miller, “A City Baker’s Guide to Country Living”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...2017-01-1732 min
Boston AthenæumTamara Plakins Thornton, Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of NumbersDecember 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 administra...2016-12-1937 min
Boston AthenæumDavid B. Dearinger, “Museums without Walls"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 l...2016-12-0230 min
Boston AthenæumSarah Lohman, “Black Pepper: Taste a Revolutionary Story”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.2016-11-1733 min
Boston AthenæumDavid B. Dearinger, “Daniel Chester French: The Female Form Revealed”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...2016-11-1140 min
Boston AthenæumFrançois Furstenberg,“George Washington’s Library at the Athenæum"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.2016-11-0340 min
Boston AthenæumKeith N. Morgan and Mark Pasnik, “Heroism and Hubris”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...2016-09-1246 min
Boston AthenæumNick Bunker, “An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America”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 bot...2016-09-0637 min
Boston AthenæumNathaniel Philbrick, “Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution”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 t...2016-08-2648 min
Boston AthenæumAnthony Sammarco, “Lost Boston”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 o...2016-08-2444 min
Boston AthenæumMembers’ Choice – Panel, “Writers at the Exhibition”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.2016-07-281h 01
Boston AthenæumMembers’ Choice - Panel, “Scholars at the Exhibition”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.2016-07-0743 min
Boston AthenæumElizabeth E. Barker, Ph.D., “The Boston Athenæum: Past, Present, Future”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 app...2016-06-241h 19
Boston AthenæumDerek W. Beck, “Igniting the American Revolution: 1773-1775”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.2016-06-2249 min
Boston AthenæumAuthenticity and Accessibility: Art Reproduction TodayMay 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, peda...2016-05-2654 min
Boston AthenæumRebecca Kaiser Gibson, “Opinel: Poems”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 t...2016-04-2728 min
Boston AthenæumAlice Fogel (accompanied by Junhong Jiang), “Interval: Poems Based on Bach's ‘Goldberg Variations’”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.2016-04-1542 min
Boston AthenæumKaren Corsano and Daniel Williman, “Sargent's War”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 Librar...2016-03-1050 min
Boston AthenæumErica Hirshler, “Childe Hassam: At Dusk: Boston Common at Twilight”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 urba...2016-01-2056 min
Boston AthenæumGeorge Hovis, “Thomas Wolfe and the Lost Generation”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...2015-12-1459 min
Boston AthenæumIlan Stavans, “Quixote: The Novel and the World”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...2015-12-0948 min
Boston AthenæumChristopher Morgan "Alice in Wonderland & Lewis Carroll's Games & Puzzles:The Surprising Connection"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 hi...2015-11-2347 min
Boston AthenæumDavid Lough, “No More Champagne – Churchill and His Money”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...2015-11-1652 min
Boston AthenæumMary Beard, “S.P.Q.R.: A History of Ancient Rome”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 m...2015-11-1648 min
Boston AthenæumMichael Ferber, “Why Romanticism Was A Good Idea”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, m...2015-11-0950 min
Boston AthenæumTed Stebbins, “The Art of the Gilded Age”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 construc...2015-11-0652 min
Boston AthenæumJohn Matteson, “The Annotated Little Women & Exhibit of Louisa May Alcott's Book Selections”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...2015-11-0445 min
Boston AthenæumSimon Winchester, “Pacific"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 I...2015-10-2948 min
Boston AthenæumDan Jones, “Magna Carta”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...2015-10-2357 min
Boston AthenæumKitty Eisele, Talking in Pictures:Developing a Visual Vocabulary to Show-and Tell-American's StoriesOctober 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 doc...2015-10-2240 min
Boston AthenæumKen Botnick, “Diderot Project: Making the Book to Discover My Subject”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...2015-10-0134 min
Boston AthenæumAnthony Sammarco, "S. S. Pierce: A Boston Tradition"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 p...2015-09-2847 min
Boston AthenæumMIT Panel, "Boston: Sink or Swim"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 colle...2015-09-231h 24
Boston AthenæumMaureen Meister, "Arts and Crafts Architecture: History and Heritage in New England"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 con...2015-08-1755 min
Boston AthenæumRoseanne Montillo, "The Wilderness of Ruin"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 Wildern...2015-08-1740 min
Boston AthenæumGareth Williams, "House and Hound: Dogs in the English Country House"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 Engl...2015-08-1745 min
Boston AthenæumKirsten Downey, "Isabella: The Warrior Queen"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 Bicenten...2015-08-1037 min
Boston AthenæumKaren Corsano and Daniel Williman, "John Singer Sargent and His Muse: Painting Love and Loss"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 exp...2015-07-3148 min
Boston AthenæumBen Bradlee, Jr., "The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams"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 h...2014-04-0834 min