Boston Athenæum
219 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 2 years ago - ★★★★ - 11 ratingsThe 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.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Lisa Napoli, Ellen Clegg, & Margaret Low, "Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Founding Mothers of NPR"
November 22, 2021 13:31 - 56 minutes - 39 MBIn 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 ...
Peter S. Canellos and Farah Stockman, "The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan"
November 22, 2021 13:31 - 56 minutes - 39 MBThey 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 Bl...
Louis Menand and Maya Jasanoff, "The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War"
November 22, 2021 13:30 - 55 minutes - 37.9 MBThe 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 a...
Ben Railton, "Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism"
July 09, 2021 12:23 - 56 minutes - 38.7 MBWhen 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 fal...
Akhil Reed Amar, "The Words that Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840"
July 02, 2021 14:58 - 56 minutes - 38.6 MBWhen 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? Wh...
Martha S. Jones and Karen Holmes Ward, "Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers"
June 18, 2021 14:27 - 57 minutes - 39.7 MBIn 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 ...
Robert Mrazek, "The Indomitable Florence Finch: The Story of a War Widow Turned Resistance Fighter"
June 18, 2021 14:25 - 57 minutes - 39.3 MBWhen 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 journal...
Diana Greenwald, "Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art"
June 18, 2021 14:22 - 58 minutes - 40.4 MBPainting 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 qu...
Don Hagist, "Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution"
May 21, 2021 15:07 - 1 hour - 45.8 MBRedcoats. 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 lif...
Boston Art Song Society, "Art Songs of Black American Composers"
May 21, 2021 14:05 - 1 hour - 59.7 MBGuest 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.
Emma Smith and Stephen Greenblatt, "This is Shakespeare"
May 21, 2021 13:01 - 58 minutes - 40.4 MBA 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 copy...
Ralph Keyes, "The Hidden History of Coined Words"
May 21, 2021 12:42 - 55 minutes - 37.9 MBSuccessful 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...
Annalee Newitz and Sarah Parcak, "Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age"
May 21, 2021 12:24 - 58 minutes - 40.4 MBIn 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 indi...
Jamal Greene and Randall Kennedy, "How Rights Went Wrong"
April 16, 2021 15:20 - 56 minutes - 39 MBRights 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...
Janice P. Nimura, "The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women"
April 16, 2021 15:11 - 55 minutes - 38.1 MBElizabeth 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. Exp...
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America"
April 09, 2021 14:31 - 56 minutes - 39 MBWinner 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 ...
John Matteson and Amy Cherry, "A Worse Place Than Hell: How Fredericksburg Changed a Nation"
March 12, 2021 15:23 - 57 minutes - 39.2 MBDecember 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 m...
Bettye Kearse, "The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President’s Black Family"
March 12, 2021 15:10 - 57 minutes - 39.8 MBFor 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...
Robert Darnton and John Buchtel, "Pirating and Publishing"
March 12, 2021 14:32 - 1 hour - 45.2 MBIn 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 R...
Alice Baumgartner, "South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War"
March 12, 2021 14:16 - 1 hour - 41.5 MBThe 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. Souther...
Justyne Fischer, "The Implications of Blackness in Birth of a Nation"
March 12, 2021 14:03 - 1 hour - 41.8 MBD.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 co...
Jo Marchant, "The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars"
March 12, 2021 13:49 - 1 hour - 41.3 MBFor 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 hum...
Theo Tyson, "The Harriet Hayden Albums: A History of Photography, Agency & Identity in Boston"
March 12, 2021 13:29 - 59 minutes - 40.7 MBJoin 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...
Peniel E. Joseph and David Waters, "The Sword and the Shield"
March 12, 2021 13:11 - 54 minutes - 37.7 MBTo 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 portra...
Grace Talusan and Elif Armbruster, “The Body Papers: A Memoir”
March 17, 2020 16:23 - 41 minutes - 28.7 MBMarch 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 fam...
Heidi Pribell and Theo Tyson, “Curator’s Choice: Art + Design”
March 17, 2020 16:23 - 30 minutes - 21.2 MBMarch 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 portrait...
EmpowerHER: Black Women in the Arts
February 28, 2020 20:45 - 1 hour - 44.8 MBFebruary 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 t...
Nancy Seasholes, “The Atlas of Boston History”
February 28, 2020 20:39 - 43 minutes - 29.7 MBFebruary 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 ...
Russell Maret, “The Making of Character Traits”
February 28, 2020 20:37 - 33 minutes - 22.8 MBFebruary 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 dif...
Richard Bell, “Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home”
February 07, 2020 20:27 - 36 minutes - 24.8 MBFebruary 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 f...
Rabbi Dan Judson, Dr. Lorna Rivera. Rajini Srikanth, and Sarah Turner, “Community Conversations”
February 07, 2020 20:26 - 40 minutes - 27.9 MBFebruary 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 di...
Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, “Plymouth Colony First Lady Penelope Winslow”
January 31, 2020 19:54 - 45 minutes - 30.9 MBJanuary 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 sto...
Kerri Greenidge, “Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter”
January 31, 2020 19:51 - 22 minutes - 15.3 MBJanuary 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 pow...
Roxana Robinson, “Dawson’s Fall”
January 31, 2020 18:20 - 42 minutes - 29 MBJanuary 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 op...
Ted Reinstein, “Wicked Pissed: New England's Most Famous Feuds”
January 17, 2020 19:44 - 55 minutes - 38.1 MBJanuary 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 Ne...
Bettina Norton, “A Foray into Forgery and the Boston Athenæum's Role in Exposing It”
January 10, 2020 18:57 - 47 minutes - 32.3 MBJanuary 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 Massach...
Brent Budsberg, Ellen Kaspern, and Jeff Altepeter, “Reading Craft”
December 20, 2019 20:10 - 58 minutes - 40.4 MBDecember 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...
Ben Railton, “We the People: The 500-Year Battle Over Who is American”
December 20, 2019 20:07 - 47 minutes - 32.5 MBDecember 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 Revoluti...
David J. Silverman, “This Land is Their Land”
November 22, 2019 18:57 - 59 minutes - 41.1 MBNovember 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 ...
John Buchtel, “All Necessary and Useful Knowledge: Thomas Bray’s Libraries for Colonial America”
November 15, 2019 20:42 - 50 minutes - 34.6 MBNovember 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 effecti...
Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz, “The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall”
November 15, 2019 20:41 - 41 minutes - 28.8 MBNovember 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 an...
Katia Lysy, “Images and Shadows”
November 15, 2019 20:39 - 39 minutes - 27 MBOctober 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.
James B. Conroy, “Jefferson’s White House: Monticello on the Potomac”
November 01, 2019 18:44 - 1 hour - 43.8 MBOctober 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...
Desiree Taylor, "The Life and Saga of Harriet Jacobs"
November 01, 2019 18:42 - 1 hour - 41.2 MBOctober 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 ...
Karen Abbott, “The Ghosts of Eden Park”
October 25, 2019 18:52 - 49 minutes - 33.7 MBOctober 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...
Evan Thomas and Oscie Thomas, “First: Sandra Day O’Connor”
October 18, 2019 17:55 - 43 minutes - 30.1 MBSandra 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 firs...
KL Pereira, “A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality”
October 18, 2019 17:52 - 50 minutes - 34.9 MBA 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...
Avis Berman, “Missionaries of Impressionism: The American Collectors of Renoir”
October 18, 2019 17:49 - 49 minutes - 34.2 MBCommemorating 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 guaran...
Liza Wieland, "Paris 7 A.M.: A Novel"
August 15, 2019 17:25 - 35 minutes - 24.5 MBJuly 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 res...
Sonia Purnell, "A Woman of No Importance"
August 15, 2019 17:20 - 1 hour - 44.1 MBApril 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 w...