Boston Athenæum

November 13, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. This free-for-members event is made possible with support from the William Orville Thomson Endowment, which is generously funded by Athenæum Proprietor Peter Thomson. In 1697, Thomas Bray, a priest in the Church of England, published a detailed report (Bibliotheca Parochialis) in which he outlined all the “necessary and useful” books that he thought would constitute the essential knowledge needed to equip Anglican church leaders to minister effectively in the English colonies in North America. At the same time, Bray began fundraising to assemble libraries based on his published plan. By the time he turned his project over to his successors in 1704, Bray’s remarkable enterprise resulted in more than 40 collections of books being sent to various locations in the American colonies. One of those libraries, the collection sent to King’s Chapel in Boston in 1698, survives intact as part of the collections of the Boston Athenæum. This talk will explore Bray’s expressed p

November 7, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. Despair, mania, rage, guilt, derangement, fantasy: poetry is our most intimate, personal source for the urgency of these experiences. Poems get under our skin; they engage with the balm, and the sting, of understanding. In The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall—its title inspired by a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins—acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky gives us more than 130 poems that explore emotion at its most expansive, distinct, and profound. For this event, poet and professor Maggie Dietz will engage Pinsky in conversation on this remarkable anthology of poems. With seven illuminating chapters and succinct headnotes for each poem, Pinsky leads us through the book’s sweeping historical range. Each chapter, with contents chronologically presented from Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes, Dante to Patricia Lockwood, shows the persistence and variation in our states of mind. “The Sleep of Reason” explores sanity and the imagination, moving from William Cowper’s “Lines Written During a Time

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.

October 31, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. As the first president to occupy the White House for an entire term, Thomas Jefferson shaped the president’s residence, literally and figuratively, more than any of its other occupants. Remarkably enough, however, though many books have immortalized Jefferson’s Monticello, none has been devoted to the vibrant look, feel, and energy of his still more famous and consequential home from 1801 to 1809. In Monticello on the Potomac, James B. Conroy, author of the award-winning Lincoln’s White House offers a vivid, highly readable account of how life was lived in Jefferson’s White House and the young nation’s rustic capital.

October 29, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. Harriet Jacobs lived in the United States at a time fraught with political unrest. She was born into slavery in 1813 and spent her life striving to make a fulfilling life for herself and her family in a country that defined her as less than. To history she left a scandalous autobiography chronicling her life as a fugitive slave, and through it exposed the ugly reality of life for female slaves. However, in the twentieth century, scholars considered Jacobs’s story to be a work of fiction written by a white female abolitionist in the service of the abolitionist cause. At the end of the twentieth century a feminist scholar laid to rest any doubt that Jacobs existed and was in fact the author of her autobiography. Join researcher and storyteller Desiree Taylor for a presentation of the life and the saga of Harriet Jacobs.

October 24, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. In the early days of Prohibition, long before Al Capone became a household name, a German immigrant named George Remus quit practicing law and started trafficking whiskey. Within two years he was a multi-millionaire. The press called him “King of the Bootleggers,” writing breathless stories about the Gatsby-esque events he and his glamorous second wife, Imogene, hosted at their Cincinnati mansion, with party favors ranging from diamond jewelry for the men to brand-new Pontiacs for the women. By the summer of 1921, Remus owns 35 percent of all the liquor in the United States. Pioneering prosecutor Mabel Walker Willebrandt was determined to bring him down. Willebrandt’s bosses at the Justice Department hired her right out of law school, assuming she would pose no real threat to the cozy relationship they maintained with Remus. Eager to prove them wrong, she dispatched her best investigator, Franklin Dodge, to look into his empire. It was a decision with deadly conseque

Sandra Day O’Connor was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she applied and was accepted into Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her law school class in 1952, no firm would interview her--but Sandra Day O’Connor’s story is that of a woman who repeatedly shattered glass ceilings, and did so with a blend of grace, wisdom, humor, understatement, and cowgirl toughness. After becoming the first ever female majority leader of a state senate, and then judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals, she arrived at the United States Supreme Court in 1981, appointed by President Ronald Reagan. Her quarter-century tenure on the Court ultimately shaped American law. Diagnosed with cancer at fifty-eight, and caring for a husband with Alzheimer’s, O’Connor endured every difficulty with grit and poise.

A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality is both literary and speculative, both magically real and viscerally strange, and in the tradition of writers like Angela Carter, Karen Russell, and Jorge Luis Borges. Within the collection of short stories, Pereira uses elements of fairy tales, folk tales, and myths to highlight the lives of women, children, and immigrants. Lucid prose underscores the tenacity of those who are the most vulnerable, who live on the edges, between neat and clear definitions of who they are and who they want to be. Pereira explores rebirth amid darkness, free of normative ideas of gender, class, race, and sexuality.

Commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of the great French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, writer and historian Avis Berman will examine the artist’s legacy from the perspective of the pioneering Americans who embraced and supported his work well before French collectors or officials did so. Berman will chronicle Renoir's career, beginning in the 1880s when Renoir and the other Impressionists were first exhibited in the U.S.--and with their acceptance by no means guaranteed--and concluding in the mid-1930s, when Renoir had become an essential purchase for museums, moguls, and movie stars. Join us to learn more about the provocative artists, dealers, and collectors from this time period and to discover some of the most sumptuous and significant Renoirs in America, in addition to the portraits and photographs of the people who collected them.

July 16, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. The acclaimed, award-winning author Liza Wieland of A Watch of Nightingales imagines in a sweeping and stunning novel what happened to the poet Elizabeth Bishop during three life-changing weeks she spent in Paris in 1937--the only year Elizabeth, a meticulous keeper of journals, didn't fully chronicle. Amidst the imminent threat of World War II, the novel brings us in vivid detail from Paris to Normandy where Elizabeth becomes involved with a group rescuing Jewish “orphans” and delivering them to convents where they will be baptized as Catholics and saved from the impending horror their parents will face. Poignant and captivating, Liza Wieland’s Paris, 7 A.M. is a beautifully rendered take on the formative years of one of America’s most celebrated—and mythologized—female poets.

April 11, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. This lecture is in conjunction with the Royal Oak Foundation. In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent command: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young socialite from Baltimore, who, after being rejected from the Foreign Service because of her gender and prosthetic leg, talked her way into the SOE, the WWII British spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly warfare." Hall, known as the "Madonna of the Resistance," was one of the greatest spies in American and English history, yet her full story remains untold. At a time when sending female secret agents into enemy territory was still strictly forbidden, Hall coordinated a network of spies to report on German troop movements, arranged equipment parachute drops for Resistance fighters, and recruited and trained guerrilla units to ambush enemy convoys and blow up bridges and railroads. Even as her face covered WANTED posters th

July 27, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. The Boston Athenæum and the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (CSC) have partnered together to bring you two fantastic events in one night that interrogate and celebrate Shakespeare's Cymbeline, a mystical dramedy full of intrigue, mistaken identities, and romance. The production of Cymbeline marks CSC's 24th season of Free Shakespeare on the Common (July 17 through August 4, 2019). The evening begins at the Boston Athenæum at 6:00pm with a conversation between Anita Diamant, best selling author, and Fred Sullivan Jr., director of CSC's Cymbeline. They will discuss the themes of integrity and forgiveness running throughout this tragicomic romance and fairy tale plot. In particular, they will explore the trials of the heroine, Imogen, an isolated and wronged young woman facing down threats in a violent world--and how she persists.

June 19, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. In celebration of Juneteenth. By the bestselling author of The Hamilton Affair, The Tubman Command is an impeccably researched historical novel that brings to light the bravery and brilliance of American icon Harriet Tubman. It’s May 1863. Outgeneraled and outgunned, a demoralized Union Army has pulled back with massive losses at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Fort Sumter, hated symbol of the Rebellion, taunts the American navy with its artillery and underwater mines. In Beaufort, South Carolina, one very special woman, code named Moses, is hatching a spectacular plan. Hunted by Confederates, revered by slaves, Harriet Tubman plots an expedition behind enemy lines to liberate hundreds of bondsmen and recruit them as soldiers. A bounty on her head, she has given up husband and home for the noblest cause: a nation of, by, and for the people. The Tubman Command tells the story of Tubman at the height of her powers, when she devises the largest plantation raid of the C

June 11, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. In the early morning of June 28th 1969, lesbians, gay men, drag queens, street hustlers, and transgender people fought the police and rioted for three nights on Christopher Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. The Stonewall Riot, as it came to be called, was the birth of the modern day Gay Liberation and Gay Rights movements. This was a momentous historical moment. It is also, possibly, the least interesting part of the story. Stonewall is the founding myth of today LGBTQ movements – but it is also the story of a moment in history that gripped the imagination of the nation crossing racial, gender, political, and social divides. It is a tale of riots, rebellion, revolt, freedom, and not least of all, drugs, sex and rock and roll.

Jenna Blum & Randy Susan Meyers, "Writers with Obsessions" by Boston Athenæum

May 30, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. Nina Campbell’s almost fifty-year career exemplifies the best of English interior design. Campbell imparts her design wisdom through a biography of her career and recent decorating projects, sharing tips and secrets of the trade. A selection of the designer’s own London residences outlines her experimentations and passions—from pared-back grandeur to bold plays of scale and modern use of texture and color. A survey of Nina’s high-profile commissions completed in the last five years demonstrates how she employs the key principles of her design aesthetic in a variety of contexts, from prestigious addresses in London and New York, a pied-à-terre in Rome, and a retreat in the English countryside to a historic German hotel, a viewing pavilion at the Ascot, and a Los Angeles bedroom suite. The running theme is how Campbell has taken the tenets of classic English style and uses them to create a style germane to the twenty-first century. This eponymous book masterfully illustrat

May 28, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. A rich and illuminating biography of America’s forgotten Founding Father, the patriot physician and major general who fomented rebellion and died heroically at the battle of Bunker Hill on the brink of revolution. Little has been known of one of the most important figures in early American history, Dr. Joseph Warren, an architect of the colonial rebellion, and a man who might have led the country as Washington or Jefferson did had he not been martyred at Bunker Hill in 1775. Warren was involved in almost every major insurrectionary act in the Boston area for a decade, from the Stamp Act protests to the Boston Massacre to the Boston Tea Party, and his incendiary writings included the famous Suffolk Resolves, which helped unite the colonies against Britain and inspired the Declaration of Independence. Yet after his death, his life and legend faded, leaving his contemporaries to rise to fame in his place and obscuring his essential role in bringing America to independence.

May 13, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. In conjunction with The English-Speaking Union “English accents are the sexiest.” “Americans have ruined the English language.” Such claims about the English language are often repeated but rarely examined. Professor Lynne Murphy is on the linguistic front line. In The Prodigal Tongue she explores the fiction and reality of the special relationship between British and American English. By examining the causes and symptoms of American Verbal Inferiority Complex and its flipside, British Verbal Superiority Complex, Murphy unravels the prejudices, stereotypes and insecurities that shape our attitudes to our own language. With great humo(u)r and new insights, Lynne Murphy looks at the social, political and linguistic forces that have driven American and British English in different directions: how Americans got from centre to center, why British accents are growing away from American ones, and what different things we mean when we say estate, frown, or middle class. Is

May 9, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. For many, art has an essential worth independent of commercial value. It exists in its own priceless realm of cultural heritage and personal meaning. And yet, artworks are also subject to commodifying forces that often take them away from the public eye or the peoples who created them. For instance, at auction houses private collectors pay stunning sums for artworks that are then whisked behind closed doors. Meanwhile, museum curators must negotiate the value of artworks according to a unique set of acquisition practices and parameters quite different from private collectors. And then some artists’ works--however brilliant--never gain recognition while others’ become virtually priceless. Join us for an evening with four experts who will examine the “value” of art in its myriad forms.

May 2, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. An essential work of American civil rights history, Tinderbox mesmerizingly reconstructs the 1973 fire that devastated New Orleans’ subterranean gay community. Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016. Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue-collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community. The aftermath was no less traumatic—families ashamed to claim loved ones, the Catholic Church refusing proper burial rights, the city impervious to the survivors’ needs—revealing a world of toxic prejudice that thrived well past Stonewall. Yet the impassioned ac