This Week @ MHS

As we enter September and a new academic year, we see a bit of an increase in programming here at the Society. This is what is in store in the week ahead:

The Society is CLOSED on Monday, 3 September, for Labor Day. New normal hours pick up on Tuesday, 4 September.

- Wednesday, 5 September, 12:00PM : Stop in at midday for a Brown Bag lunch talk titled "Garrisonian Rhode Island: Reassessing Abolitionism's Radicals." In this talk, Kevin Vrevich of Ohio State University explores the place of Rhode Island, a center of William Lloyd Garrison’s “radical” abolitionism, in the larger antislavery network. As historians of abolitionism increasingly focus on continuities within the movement, Rhode Island offers an opportunity to reassess the place of the Garrisonians and to reconsider their contributions.

This talk is free and open to the public.

- Thursday, 6 September, 6:00PM : "100 Years of Education Henry Adams" is a public conversation with Natalie Dykstra of Hope College, William Decker of Oklahoma State University, and Natalie Tayor of Skidmore College. Henry Adams offers an account of his life and commentary on political and cultural events during the mid and late 19th century in the Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography The Education of Henry Adams. Join us to mark the centenary of both Adams’s death and the Education’s publication with a critical conversation on Adams and his best known work.

This talk is open to the public, registration required with a fee of $10 (no charge for MHS Members and Fellows or EBT cardholders). There is a reception that begins at 5:30PM, followed by the program at 6:00PM.

- Friday, 7 September, 12:00PM : "American Silver, Chinese Silverwares, and the Global Circulation of Value" is the title of the second Brown Bag this week which is presented by Susan Eberhard of University of California, Berkeley. Silver coin was the primary commodity shipped to China from the United States in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of which was reworked into silverwares by Chinese craftsmen for British and American buyers. This talk explores the different silver conduits of the American trade relationship with China. Far from a neutral medium, how were understandings of its materiality mobilized in cross-cultural transactions?

As ever, this lunchtime talk is free and open to the public.

- Saturday, 8 September, 10:00AM : The History and Collections of the MHS is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825. There is only one more week for this exhibition which closes on 14 September. Be sure to see it before it's gone!

This Week @ MHS

Welcome back to our weekly round-up of programs taking place in the coming days. Once again, this week is characterized by Brown Bag lunch talks, of which we have two for you. Here are the details:

- Monday, 27 August, 12:00PM : Thomas Whittaker of Harvard University starts the week with "The Missionary Republic: American Evangelicals and the Birth of Modern Missions." The turn of the nineteenth century was a time of missionary mobilization for evangelicals in Britain, the United States, and continental Europe. This talk explains why Americans bought into the missions movement and how they domesticated it within a republican vision of civilization building on the frontier.

This talk is free and open to the public.

- Friday, 31 August, 12:00PM : Hannah Tucker of University of Virginia closes the week with "Masters of the Market: Ship Captaincy in the Colonial British Atlantic." During the colonial period, captains acted as powerful auxiliaries for their vessel owners in markets far from the owners’ direct oversight. This talk explores why the economic services ship captains provided transformed as the Atlantic trading economy became more complex, capital intensive, and informed in the eighteenth century.

Once again, this talk is free and open to the public.

Don't forget to come in and see our current exhibition, The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815-1825, on view until 14 September.

The Society is CLOSED on Saturday, 1September, and Monday, 3 September, for Labor Day. Normal hours resume on Tuesday, 4 September

Also, a reminder that beginning in September we are resuming evening library hours on Tuesdays. Every week on Tuesday, the library is open 9:00AM-7:45PM.

This Week @ MHS

After a very quiet week with naught on the schedule but a Saturday tour, we are back this week with a couple more programs happening in the days ahead. Specifically, we have pair of Brown Bag lunch talks as well as our Saturday building tour. Here are the details:

- Wednesday, 22 August, 12:00PM : Sunmin Kim of Dartmourth College leads the first Brown Bag this week. The talk, titled "Re-categorizing Americans: Difference, Distinction, and Belonging in the Dillingham Commission (1907-1911)," traces how the federal government surveyed immigrants in the early-20^th century and how such attempts helped solidify the racial boundary-making for the nation. By dissecting the tenuous connections between racist ideology, state power, and social science knowledge, this talk provides an empirical account of how categories such as race and ethnicity emerge from confusion and contradiction in knowledge production.

This talk is free and open to the public. Pack a lunch and come on in!

- Friday, 25 August, 12:00PM : The second Brown Bag talk this week is "'A Brazen Wall to Keep the Scriptures Certainty': European Biblical Scholarship in Early America," with Kirsten Macfarlane of University of Cambridge. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European scholars made significant advances in the historical and critical study of the Bible, often with highly controversial and factious results. This talk will examine how such exciting but potentially subversive European scholarship was received and transformed by its early American readers, through a close study of the books owned and annotated by seventeenth-century readers in New England and elsewhere.

This talk is free and open to the public.

- Saturday, 26 August, 10:00AM : The History and Collections of the MHS is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825.

N. B. - The teacher workshop scheduled for this 23-24 August, "Education: Equality and Access" is POSTPONED. Further information will be posted here when it is rescheduled.

This Week @ MHS

- Monday, 30 July, 12:00PM : Diego Pirillo of University of California, Berkeley, closes out the month with a Brown Bag talk. "The Heterdox Atlantic: Italian Heretics in Early America" presents the initial findings of a new project on religious radicalism in early America, which aims at recovering the transatlantic legacy of Italian Protestantism. Focusing on 17th- and 18th-century New England, the talk examines discussions on religious migration and liberty of conscience.

This talk is free and open to the public.

- Wednesday, 1 August, 12:00PM : The second Brown Bag talk of the week features Christopher Minty of the Adams Papers Editorial Project here at the MHS. Minty's talk is titled "'The Sons of Britain': Partisanship & the Origins of the American Revolution in New York City." In 1775, New York City merchant Frederick Rhinelander told a friend, “if this province ever fights, it will be for the King.” Yet Rhinelander’s reasons were not based on New Yorkers’ blind loyalty to George III or Great Britain. Instead, for him and many of his friends, loyalism was a tool to challenge political opponents.

This talk is free and open to the public.

- Saturday, 4 August, 10:00AM : The History and Collections of the MHS is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825.