Boston Athenæum

February 17, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In this talk, Adam Rothman will share excerpts from Beyond Freedom’s Reach, the true story of one woman’s quest to rescue her children from bondage. In the gripping, meticulously researched account, Adam Rothman lays bare the mayhem of emancipation during and after the Civil War. After Union forces captured New Orleans in 1862, the slave-owning De Harts fled to Havana, taking Rose Herera’s three children with them. When Mary De Hart returned to New Orleans in 1865, she was surprised to find herself taken into custody as a kidnapper. As Rothman will share, the case of Rose Herera’s abducted children reveals to the reader the prospects and limits of justice that existed during Reconstruction. In his book and during the talk, Rothman will offer a poignant reflection on the tangled politics of slavery and the hazards that were faced by so many Americans on the hard road to freedom.

February 10, 2016 at Boston Athenæum. The Illegal is the gripping story of Keita Ali, a refugee―like the many in today’s headlines―compelled to leave his homeland. All Keita has ever wanted to do is to run. Running means respect and wealth at home. His native Zantoroland, an imagined country whose tyrants are eerily familiar, turns out the fastest marathoners on earth. But after his journalist father is killed for his outspoken political views, Keita must flee to the wealthy nation of Freedom State―a fictionalized country engaged in a crackdown on all undocumented people, bearing a striking resemblance to modern America. There, Keita becomes a part of the new underground. He learns what it means to live as an illegal. This tension-filled novel casts its eye on race, human potential, and what it means to belong.

February 3, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Early last summer came the surprising news that Harper Lee was about to publish a second novel, more than half a century after her iconic To Kill a Mockingbird had appeared in 1960. Mockingbird, the story of a young girl’s initiation into the reality of Southern racism, is among the most cherished coming-of-age stories in American literary culture, and its portrait of the noble Atticus Finch, a lawyer who risks everything to defend a black man falsely accused of a crime in the segregated South of the 1930s, has inspired generations of admirers. For all its defense of such fundamental democratic principles, however, Mockingbird also has been criticized for its narrowing of questions of racial justice to a drama of white conscience, of historical change to a matter of individual attitude. Harper Lee took several years to revise the original draft of the novel that eventually appeared as To Kill a Mockingbird. Her original manuscript, entitled “Go Set a Watchman,” was k

January 19, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In this talk, leading American art specialist Erica E. Hirshler will share excerpts of her vivid account of one of Boston's best-loved paintings, Childe Hassam’s “At Dusk (Boston Common at Twilight)”. She will discuss with audience members the context of Childe Hassam's 1880s city scene. With its rosy rust tones, intimate familial vignette, and quiet expanse of snow-laden park, today “At Dusk” seems to encourage reflection and represent a decidedly old-fashioned city. Yet Hirshler will reveal the ways in which the painting visually signaled the emerging modern city, from subtleties about women's place in the urban landscape to the uproarious clang of the streetcars that would have been heard on the busiest block in Boston. She will discuss her carefully researched and elegantly presented book, which offers a new perspective to those already acquainted with the painting as well as an evocative look at a singular moment in Boston history.

December 10, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. This lecture is sponsored by the William Orville Thomson Endowment. Despite his protests to the contrary, American novelist Thomas Wolfe, whose writings are well represented in the Athenæum’s collections, is remembered as a representative of the “Lost Generation,” a generation of artists who renounced the outmoded verities of their forebears as useless in the Modern age. With the advent of the Great Depression, Wolfe confronted widespread suffering, especially in New York City, where he was living at the time, and this newfound concern for the plight of others made him reconsider not only the solipsism that had threatened his earlier fiction but the Modernist aesthetic that had informed it. In his posthumous novel, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), Wolfe grew away from the bildungsroman to write proletarian fiction on a global scale. After exposing the unjust distribution of wealth in Manhattan and Brooklyn, he exposes the class system of England and the rise of Naz

December 9, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. This year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the Second Part of Miguel de Cervantes’ classic Don Quixote of La Mancha. With the exception of The Bible, no other book has been translated into English more frequently—a total of twenty-two times. Indeed, accumulatively this is the world’s most popular novel. The Boston Athenæum’s circulating and special collections reflect the cultural significance of Don Quixote over the last 200 years with scores of related volumes, including Spanish and English editions of the novel, responses and analyses of the great work, and works inspired by Cervantes’ masterpiece. What makes Don Quixote such a success? Why have readers over the centuries found in it a type of humanity seldom encountered elsewhere? Distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans brings us back to the way Cervantes conceived the work and the response he has received from the 17th century to the present across languages and geographies.

November 30, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. In celebration of the 135th anniversary of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, R. Nicholas Burns and John McKesson Camp II will discuss the ancient Greek roots of democracy, the current crisis in Greece, and U.S.-Greek relations. The American School of Classical Studies at Athens is a leading research and teaching institution dedicated to the advanced study of all aspects of Greek culture, from antiquity to the present. Founded in 1881, the School provides students and scholars from over 190 affiliated North American colleges and universities with the opportunity to explore the full range of scholarly resources in Greece.

November 18, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. The Athenæum is an ideal setting for the scholar in that it boasts a robust collection, reference services, and a serene environment for study. Indeed, Christopher Morgan researched the subject for his book, “Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll's Games and Puzzles: The Surprising Connection”, within our walls! 2015 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”. To celebrate the event, puzzle designer and Lewis Carroll collector Christopher Morgan will take us down the rabbit hole to discuss Carroll's little-known game and puzzle pamphlets, now gathered together for the first time in his new book, “The Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll: Games, Puzzles, and Related Pieces”. Morgan will discuss the surprising connections between Carroll's charming game and puzzle inventions and his books, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass”. Also included are Carroll’s word game columns from the British magazines Vanity

The Athenæum holds an impressive collection of menus from Boston’s fine-dining establishments from the mid-nineteenth century, offering a glimpse into the tastes and trends of the past. Visit our Digital Collections page to view these elegant menus. Join Jack Bishop, editorial director of America’s Test Kitchen, for a discussion of the tastes and trends in food today as he talks about “100 Recipes: The Absolute Best Ways to Make the True Essentials”. If you could only have 100 recipes at your disposal, what would they be? In “100 Recipes”, the editors at America’s Test Kitchen present what they consider to be the recipes everyone should know how to make—these are the dishes that will give anyone the culinary chops they need to succeed in the kitchen. From everyday basics like tomato sauce, pork roast, and brownies to innovative classics like slow-roasted beef, poached chicken, and cheese soufflé to inspiring global dishes like Thai basil chicken, pho, and Spanish beef stew, cooks at all skill levels will fi

November 12, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. David Lough’s No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money contributes to the Boston Athenæum’s impressive collection of biographies, including several on Winston Churchill. The volume also deepens the Athenæum’s collection of books that offer multiple perspectives on United States and European history. The popular image of Winston Churchill is of a life of champagne and cigars but, behind the scenes, he struggled to prevent his personal financial problems from engulfing his political career. Only fragments of this story have previously emerged, but Lough has now pieced it together with the help of unprecedented access to the private records of Churchill and his associates. Lough will discuss Churchill’s personally expensive lessons on the American economy and body politic. Churchill’s American financial losses almost brought his political career to an end in Britain and required several rescues. Yet they also gave him a unique perspective on the country’s resources

November 11, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Boston Athenæum began collecting Neoclassical art shortly after its establishment in 1807. At the time Neoclassicism was a hugely popular artistic movement, due in part to the romanticized view of the United States’ system of government being modeled on Greco-Roman and Enlightenment ideals. Mary Beard’s S.P.Q.R.: A History of Ancient Rome provides insight into the realities of the ancient Roman world and thereby context for understanding the 19th-century Neoclassical movement. By 63 BCE, the city of Rome was a sprawling, imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants. But how did this massive city—the seat of power for an empire that spanned from Spain to Syria—emerge from what was once an insignificant village in central Italy? In S.P.Q.R., Beard changes our historical perspective, exploring how the Romans themselves challenged the idea of imperial rule, how they responded to terrorism and revolution, and how they invented a new idea of citizenship and nati

November 4, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Shelley—to name a few—are all authors considered to have worked in the Romantic style. However, some literary scholars have connected Jane Austen, the Brontës, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allen Poe to this artistic, spiritual, and intellectual movement. Not surprisingly, all of these authors are well represented within the Athenæum’s collection. This event is an opportunity to learn about the movement that influenced so many of our most beloved writers. Though many of us admire the great works of Romantic poetry, music, and painting, the ideas of the Romantics may seem juvenile, sloppy, escapist, or even dangerous, and the very word “romantic” is often an insult. Michael Ferber will offer a brief defense of Romantic ideas and intuitions about nature, religion, politics, and the self. Romanticism is here to stay, and it’s not all bad.

November 5, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. The Athenæum’s collections offer a wonderful glimpse into the Gilded Age through paintings, drawings, and prints by John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and others, as well as through the writing of Walt Whitman, Henry James, and William Dean Howells. The Gilded Age saw the birth of modern America, and the greatest outpouring of art and architecture, as well as literature, in our history. The period began with the “Golden Spike” in 1869, which unified the nation by rail and made vast commercial expansion and the creation of great fortunes possible. Boston saw the construction of Richardson’s Romanesque Trinity Church in 1876 and McKim’s classical Boston Public Library in 1893. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. will examine the failures and successes of the greatest artists of the period as well as the often contradictory writings of Henry James and Mark Twain.

November 2, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. It should be no surprise that Louisa May Alcott was a voracious reader—it may be a surprise that she did quite a bit of reading at the Athenæum! Caroline D. Bain Archivist and Reference Librarian Carolle Morini recently featured that Alcott was a member at the Athenæum. We not only have a record of her membership, but also of the books she checked out while she was a member. Many of these books are still in our circulating collection and are the exact copy she herself checked out so many years ago. These books will be on display in the Events Hall for this event. Since its publication in 1868–1869 Little Women, perhaps America’s most beloved children’s classic, has been handed down from generation to generation. In this lavish edition, featuring over 200 full-color illustrations, John Matteson brings unprecedented vibrancy to the book, to its characters, and to the Alcott family who inspired it all. With numerous photographs taken expressly for this edition—elder da

October 27, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Just the smallest sampling from the Boston Athenæum’s special collections holdings provides a glimpse of the western world’s centuries-long fascination with the geography and cultures of the Pacific. The collections include: Jan Jansson’s mid 17th-century map Mar del zvr Hispanis Mare Pacificum which depicts the west coast of Central and South America to the Straits of Anian; James Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific Ocean published in 1784; Frederick William Beechey’s Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait [sic] from 1831; J.E. Partington’s Ethnographical Album of the Pacific Islands published in 1892; Will Sabin’s 1921 Hawaii U.S.A.: A Souvenir of “The Crossroads of the Pacific”; and the Book Club of California’s Pacific Adventures, “a series of six narratives of early exploration of the Pacific area, to be issued bi-monthly during 1940s.” ‘Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Com

October 22, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. The United States’ Founding Fathers were deeply influenced by the Magna Carta in the formation of our country. The Athenæum’s early history reflects a deep respect of, and even involvement from, many of the Founding Fathers as evidence by the purchase and care of a significant portion of George Washington’s personal library; John Adams’ membership in the Boston Athenæum; sculptures and paintings of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington throughout the building; and countless volumes about the Founding Fathers and their achievements in the special and circulating collections. 2015 marks the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, the founding document of Western liberty that is internationally revered and has inspired the constitutions of hundreds of countries. Its language can be found in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and according to Dan Jones, 'the year 1215 has become in a sense "year zero" in

October 21, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. The Athenæum’s collections have been used by scholars and researchers for more than 200 years. In more recent decades, filmmakers and producers have used the collections to inform their projects, such as Kitty Eisele’s The Civil War, a documentary film series directed by Ken Burns with images from the Athenæum’s Prints & Photographs collection. As Supervising Senior Editor at NPR’s Morning Edition, Kitty Eisele makes her living with words. Many years before that, she worked in pictures – as an Emmy Award-winning producer of The Civil War series with Ken Burns, and other documentaries on American history and culture. In fact, the Athenæum’s collections were used to tell the story in The Civil War–Ken Burns and his team researched the series at 10 ½ Beacon Street. Now, as digital media becomes more dominant in our everyday lives, she’s found herself asking how we communicate in this new language – a primarily visual language. What does it mean to use images as an incre

October 5, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Henri Cole’s bold new collection ‘Nothing to Declare’ contains poems of feral beauty and intense vulnerability. Each poem starts up from its own unique occasion and is then conducted through surprising (sometimes unnerving) and self-steadying domains. The result is a daring, delicate, unguarded, and tender collection. They combine a susceptibility to sensuousness with an awareness of desolation. Cole transforms the pain of experience into the pleasure of expressive language, with precise reliability of detail, a supple wealth of sound, and a speculative truthfulness. ‘Nothing to Declare’ is a rare work that is light in touch but with just enough weight to mark the soul.

October 1, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. The Athenæum holds one of only 70 copies printed of Diderot Project, a 150-page meditation on concepts encountered in printer and publisher Ken Botnick’s study of the plates and writings of the Encyclopédie of Diderot. Botnick will present his recent artist book and discuss its conceptual underpinnings, his research methods, and production details as components of his central thesis: when we make a book we discover the subject. Botnick will discuss his recently completed limited-edition artist book and the concepts he encountered in the Encyclopédie of Diderot: the hand and craft, tools and machines, labor and leisure, memory, sensation, and perception.

September 28, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. “The House Tells the Story: Homes of the American Presidents” is an incredible collaboration between noted artist Adam Van Doren (author/illustrator) and pre-eminent historian David McCullough (foreword) who unite for an excursion to the celebrated homes of fifteen American presidents, past and present. The text is personal and unaffected; Van Doren visited these homes to ensure that he recorded every detail accurately, often becoming acquainted with the former presidents themselves, always trying to portray them in the human environment they created for themselves.