Boston Athenæum

January 19, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Edward Lear (1812-1888) is known and cherished for “The Owl and the Pussycat” and other works of literary nonsense. He was also an accomplished painter of birds, mammals, reptiles, and landscapes. Lear depicted parrots, macaws, toucans, owls, and other birds with scientific accuracy and a noteworthy sense of character, and reproduced his illustrations using the newly invented technique of lithography. An adventurous global traveler, Lear painted mammals ranging from hedgehogs and kangaroos to bats and Tasmanian devils. Although Lear’s nonsense verse has often prompted comparisons to Lewis Carroll, his private and enigmatic disposition has left him little known and less understood than his literary peer. Robert McCracken Peck, author of the new illustrated book The Natural History of Edward Lear, will discuss the remarkable life and work of this beloved children’s writer, who abruptly and mysteriously abandoned his scientific aspirations soon after achieving preeminenc

January 11, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Join pastry chef and author Louise Miller for a discussion about her writing process and research, as well as a reading from her debut novel, A City Baker’s Guide to Country Living. When Olivia Rawlings—pastry chef extraordinaire for an exclusive Boston dinner club—sets not just her flambéed dessert but the entire building alight, she escapes to the most comforting place she can think of—the idyllic town of Guthrie, Vermont, and her best friend Hannah. But the getaway turns into something more lasting when Margaret Hurley, the cantankerous owner of the Sugar Maple Inn, offers Livvy a job. Miller and her full-hearted story about a big-city baker who discovers the true meaning of home have been praised by the New York Times Book Review: “Miller elevates the story by turning it into a Pinterest fantasy of rural American…[Her] visions of bucolic Vermont landscapes, cinnamon-scented kitchens and small-town friendliness make this reverie of country life an appealing one.”

January 9, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. The Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory for Archaeological Science of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) is an active research department dedicated to archaeological science in Greece. The building replaces the previous lab Wiener founded in 1992, and adds cutting-edge equipment: a scanning electron microscope, a portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, and a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer. The lab provides both American and international scholars of archaeological science in the eastern Mediterranean the tools and resources to answer a variety of scientifically-based questions in the fields of bioarchaeology, geoarchaeology, archaeobotany, and zooarchaeology. Join Dr. Panagiotis Karkanas, Director of the Wiener Laboratory of the ASCSA, and Dr. Melinda A. Zeder, Curator of Old World Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, as they discuss ongoing projects at the Wiener Laboratory, i

December 15, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Tamara Plakins Thornton will present on the life and work of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), a man Thomas Jefferson once called a “meteor in the hemisphere.” A mathematician, astronomer, navigator, seafarer, business executive, and transformational Athenæum Trustee, Bowditch’s Enlightenment-inspired perspectives shaped nineteenth century capitalism while broadly transforming daily American life. Enthralled with the precision and certainty of numbers and the unerring regularity of the physical universe, Bowditch operated and represented some of New England's most powerful institutions—from financial corporations to Harvard College—as clockwork mechanisms. By examining Bowditch’s innovative approach to the administration of institutions as well as the political and social controversies this method provoked, Thornton’s biography sheds new light on the rise of capitalism, American science, and the social elite in the early Republic.

December 8, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Friendship and the Feud is playwright Terry Quinn’s artful and poignant “dramatic dialogue” based on the quarter-century-long correspondence between novelist Vladimir Nabokov and The New Yorker editor and critic Edmund Wilson. First published in the Paris Review, Quinn’s epistolary drama was performed numerous times in the US and abroad, often with William F. Buckley playing the part of Wilson, and Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, playing the part of his father.

November 29, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Greater Boston boasts a number of art museums, each of which, naturally, has galleries for the display of art. These galleries are constructed of walls and floors and ceilings. Even more naturally, however, the city has another art museum, whose floor is the earth, whose ceiling is the sky, and whose walls are the trees. This special museum has three major galleries: the Boston Common, the Boston Public Garden, and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall. These galleries display an impressive collection of public sculpture that is free and accessible 24/7, 365 days a year. In this illustrated lecture, David Dearinger, PhD will give a brief overview of Boston’s “museum without walls” and the role that sculpture plays in its history and aesthetics.

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.

November 15, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In his recent book, The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age, Peter Berger argues that, contrary to popular belief, we don’t live in a secular age–we live in a pluralist one. Put differently, our problem is not that God is dead, but that there are many gods. Join us for a consideration of a new paradigm for understanding religion and pluralism in an age of multiple modernities.

November 10, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. During this lecture, David Dearinger, the Athenæum’s Director of Exhibitions and Susan Morse Hilles Senior Curator of Paintings & Sculpture, will speak about Daniel Chester French’s representation of the female figure. Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) was America’s foremost sculptor of public monuments from the late 1870s to the late 1920s. His masterpieces adorn civic spaces, university campuses, and urban landmarks across the United States. Many of French’s public works commemorate historical figures, such as his life-size bronze sculpture The Minute Man (1875) at Concord, MA, or the colossal marble Abraham Lincoln (1922), displayed at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. His renown for these male-oriented masterpieces is merited, but French was equally proficient at modeling the female figure. Feminine beauty in its idealized form was often at the forefront of French’s work. French’s allegorical representation of the female form seeks to fulfill a sensual, tac

November 2, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Why might an obscure pamphlet collection housed in the Boston Athenæum archives offer new insights on the abolition movement of the late eighteenth century? It’s simple: the tract collection belonged to George Washington. In this lecture, Professor of History François Furstenberg will explore the early history of abolitionist debates from the perspective of book history, using these leaflets to link Mount Vernon to a broad transatlantic conversation about slavery and freedom.

October 20, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Women are invariably those left behind in wartime, but in World War II Paris this was particularly the case, as husbands were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories. It was women more than men who came face-to-face with the German conquerors on a daily basis as waitresses, shop assistants, prostitutes or merely on the metro where a German soldier had priority over seats. The German men were often charming and Parisian women, often, did whatever they needed to do to survive. Many of them faced life-and-death decisions every day. By looking at a wide range of individuals from collaborators to resisters, including native Parisians and those living in Paris temporarily, working women, mothers, housewives, mistresses, journalists, and spies, Anne Sebba reveals truths about basic human instincts and desires.

October 11, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. When Mount Auburn Cemetery was founded in 1831, it revolutionized the way Americans mourned the dead by offering a peaceful space for contemplation. This cemetery, located not far from Harvard University, was also a place that reflected and instilled an imperative to preserve and protect nature in a rapidly industrializing culture—lessons that would influence the creation of Central Park, the cemetery at Gettysburg, and the National Parks system. Even today this urban wildlife habitat and nationally recognized hotspot for migratory songbirds continues to connect visitors with nature and serves as a model for sustainable landscape practices. Beyond Mount Auburn’s prescient focus on conservation, it also reflects the impact of Transcendentalism and the progressive spirit in American life seen in advances in science, art, and religion and in social reform movements. In The Lively Place, Stephen Kendrick celebrates this vital piece of our nation’s history. He tells the st

September 29, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island became the quintessential monuments of the immigrant experience during the Cold War. Public historians used both sites to promote the United States as a “nation of immigrants,” utilizing the latest sociological theories of immigration assimilation to construct a narrative that placed European immigrants front and center. While both monuments stressed individuals’ rights and American exceptionalism, they took different approaches. “Immigration on Display” will delineate those approaches and examine how these monuments worked to create a narrative that unified the nation under a common shared experience.

September 21, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Where did the ideas come from that became the cornerstone of American democracy? America’s founders intended to liberate us not just from one king but from the ghostly tyranny of supernatural religion. Drawing deeply on the study of European philosophy, Matthew Stewart will track the ancient, pagan, and continental ideas from which America’s revolutionaries drew their inspiration. In the writings of Spinoza, Lucretius, and other great philosophers, Stewart will discuss the true meanings of “Nature’s God,” “the pursuit of happiness,” and the radical political theory with which the American experiment in self-government began.

September 8, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Often problematically labeled as “Brutalist,” the concrete architecture that transformed Boston during the 1960s and 1970s was conceived with ambitious social ideals by some of the world’s most influential designers. Join author Mark Pasnik in conversation with historian Keith Morgan to examine the contentious and ambitious history of “Brutalist” architecture in Boston. At a moment when concrete buildings across the nation are in danger of demolition, the panelists will survey an earlier period of architectural history and consider its legacies—both troubled and inspired. This event is inspired by the book, Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston, which tells the story of a city, a material, and a movement, and how these intersected in the post-war era to make Boston an epicenter of concrete architecture worldwide.

October 7, 2014 at the Boston Athenæum. An Empire On The Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America is a new, British account of the Boston Tea Party and the origins of the American Revolution. It shows how a lethal blend of politics, personalities, and economics led to a war that few people welcomed but nobody could prevent. In his strong but even handed narrative, Nick Bunker tells the story of three years of deepening anger that led to the outbreak of America’s war for independence at Lexington in 1775. He claims the time as a tragedy of errors, during which both sides shared responsibility for a conflict that cost the lives of at least 20,000 Britons and a still larger number of Americans. At the heart of the book lies the Boston Tea Party. Using primary sources from both sides of the Atlantic, Bunker sheds new light on the Tea Party’s origins and the process of mutual embitterment by which Britain and America pushed each other into war.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014 at the Boston Athenæum. In Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Nathaniel Philbrick brings a fresh perspective to the story that ignited the American Revolution. The real central character in this story is Boston, where vigilantes fill the streets with a sinister and frightening violence even as calmer patriots struggle to see their way to rebellion. The action of the book tracks in detail the eighteen months following the Boston Tea Party (Dec. 1773), as Boston turned from the center of patriot defiance to a British-occupied city under a patriot siege. Through storied events such as the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, Philbrick builds to the extraordinary moment in American history when a group of ordinary citizens stood up to several regiments of British regulars as the Battle of Bunker Hill. This is the great tipping point, the bloodiest engagement of the Revolution when several hundred citizen soldiers had the bravery and discipline to hold their fire until the British

May 22, 2014 at the Boston Athenæum. Although historic Boston has a reputation as one of the best-preserved cities in America, it has always been a subject to the constant change of any busy commercial center. Lecturer and historian Anthony Sammarco, author of some sixty books on the history and development of Boston, will reveal sixty- eight major Boston locations that are no more, including schools, churches, theaters, grand mansions, dockyards, racetracks, parks, stores, hotels, offices, and factories. Organized chronologically, Sammarco’s lecture will features much-loved institutions that failed to stand the test of time, victims of Boston’s redevelopment era, and old-fashioned hotels and sports facilities that once seemed beyond updating or refurbishment. Vanished landmarks on this virtual tour include Franklin Place, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the Hancock House, Gleason’s Publishing Hall, Fort Hill, Franklin Street, the Boston Coliseum, Boylston Market, the Merchants Exchange, Haymarket Square,

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.

July 21, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. The hurricane that pummeled the northeastern United States on September 21, 1938, was arguably New England’s most damaging weather event ever. Without warning, the storm plowed into Long Island and New England, killing hundreds of people and destroying roads, bridges, dams, and buildings that stood in its path. Not yet spent, the hurricane then raced inland, maintaining high winds into Vermont and New Hampshire and uprooting millions of acres of forest. In this lecture, Long will share excerpts from his book Thirty-Eight, which is the first book to investigate how the hurricane of ’38 transformed New England. Drawing on survivors’ vivid memories of the storm and its aftermath, and on his own familiarity with New England’s forests, he will share with the audience how the storm brought about social and ecological changes that can still be observed today.