This Week @ MHS

- Wednesday, 18 July : People did not become loyalists; it was the patriots who first began to craft an identity different from that of a loyal British subject.  In the struggle over identity and ideology, families were torn apart, friendships were broken, and lifelong residents of Massachusetts were forced to surrender their homes and possessions. Through letters, diaries, newspapers, propaganda, and historical sites, "Loyalism in the Era of the American Revolution," a multi-day teacher wokshop, will introduce teachers to some of the people and places implicated in debates over loyalism between 1770 and 1785.

This program is open to all K-12 educators, registration required with a fee of $50 per person. If you have any questions, please contact Kate Melchior at kmelchior@masshist.org or 617-646-0588.

- Thursday, 19 July, 6:00PM : Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood is not just a quintessential Victorian neighborhood of the 19th century but one that was infilled and planned as the premier residential and institutional development. In Back Bay Through Time, a photographic history of the Back Bay of Boston, Anthony M. Sammarco, with the contemporary photographs of Peter B. Kingman, has created a fascinating book that chronicles the neighborhood from the late 19th century through to today. Join us as Mr. Sammarco discusses his work.

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

- Saturday, 21 July, 10:00AM : The History and Collections of the MHS tour 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.

- Saturday, 21 July, 2:00PM : To gain some insight into our current exhibition, join us for a special Gallery Talk. Guest curator and American furniture specialist Clark Pearce will lead visitors through the exhibition’s highlights while giving deeper context to the life and work of two extraordinary Massachusetts craftsmen, Isaac Vose and Thomas Seymour.

This event is open to the public free of charge.

This Week @ MHS

The week ahead is a busy one, loaded with public programs. Here is the round-up for the week:

The library closes early on Monday, 18 June, at 4:00PM.

- Monday, 18 June, 6:00PM : Join us for our first Juneteenth Open House, with a one-day display celebrating milestones on the road to the end of slavery. Featured items explore the 1783 abolition of slavery in Massachusetts; celebrations within the African American community in Boston of the ending of slavery in the British West Indies in 1833; Garrisonian protest banners; and a look at the evolution of depictions of Crispus Attucks’s death in the Boston Massacre as a symbol of black abolitionism before and during the Civil War.

This talk is free and open to the public, though registration is required.

- Wednesday, 20 June, 12:00PM : Matthew Fernandez of Columbia University leads the first Brown Bag talk of the week, titled "Picturing Modernism in the Work and Archive of Henry Adams." This talk examines three interrelated elements of Henry Adams’s literary output: his transnational focus, his reconsideration of subject/object relations, and his interest in the visual arts. While travelling during the 1890s, Adams took a break from writing to immerse himself in painting and sketching—after which he produced acclaimed works like Chartres and The Education. His time abroad represents an important transitional moment between the Romanticism of the nineteenth century and the Modernism of the twentieth century.

This talk is free and open to the public.

- Thursday, 21 June, 6:00PM : Chateau Higginson: Social Life in Boston's Back Bay, 1870-1920 is a recent work published by Margo Miller, Boston Globe (retired), and the title of this author talk. Miller's work is a vivid and absorbing account of one man’s efforts to construct a building that would create “a new way for Bostonians—and Americans—to live.” Henry Lee Higginson is best known for founding the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but exploring his housing gamble helps bring him to life, as well as a whole social class in 19th-century urban America.

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

- Friday, 22 June, 12:00PM : The second Brown Bag talk this week is with Joshua Morrison of University of Virginia, and is called "Cut from the Same Cloth: Salem, Zanzibar, and the Consolidation of the Indo-Atlantic World, 1820-1870." This talk explores the economic and cultural exchange between New England and Zanzibar, the premier entrepôt of the Western Indian Ocean. This trade network linked the cotton magnates of Massachusetts with the Omani elite, Indian merchants, and Swahili slaves of Zanzibar. As the trade expanded, each close-knit community found themselves increasingly dependent on an incredibly foreign counterpart for survival. This project maps the many compromises, adaptations, and concessions made in the name of profit.

This talk is free and open to the public.

- Saturday, 23 June, 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.

The library closes early on Saturday, 23 June, at 3:00PM.

- Saturday, 23 June, 4:00PM : Join us for a special Saturday program to celebrate "The All-American Girls: Women in Professional Baseball." Baseball is not just a beloved pastime for American boys and men. From 19th-century college teams formed at Vassar and Smith and the nationally celebrated Boston Bloomer Girls to the formation of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League when major male talent faced the WWII draft, women players have increasingly found ways to make their mark on the game. Today, more women than ever before are playing baseball at a world-class level, staking a claim on the most nostalgic and patriotic of American sports. This event features a panel discussion moderated by Red Sox historian Gordon Edes, and panelists Maybelle Blair and Shirley Burkovich (All American Girls Professional Baseball League); Donna Mills (Women's World Cup of Baseball MVP); Marti Sementelli (U.S. Women's National Baseball Team); and Dr. Kat Williams (Women's Sports historian at Marshall University). Also, through a partnership with the Red Sox, MHS is offering a limited quanity of tickets for audience members who want to follow the afternoon panel discussion with a 7:15 Red Sox game against the Seattle Mariners. Tickets are available for purchase through our program registration link.

This program is open to the public, registration required with a fee of $20 (no charge for MHS Members and Fellows or EBT cardholders). Reception begins at 3:30PM followed by the panel discussion at 4:00PM.

This Week @ MHS

It is a bit of an odd week ahead with a couple of early library closures. Still, there are plenty of programs to take in here at the Society. This is what's on tap:

- Monday, 11 June, 12:00PM : Starting the week is a Brown Bag lunch talk with Andrew Rutledge of University of Michigan. "'We have no need for Virginia Trade': New England Tobacco in the Atlantic World" examines tobacco's role in the agriculture, commerce, and political economy of New England. By the 18th century, tobacco figured prominently in the region, and was exported in large quantities to Dutch Suriname and to West African slave traders. Tobacco was a true "Atlantic Commodity," and, just as in the southern colonies, it drew New England farmers in the to the world of Atlantic slavery. 

This talk is free and open to the public. 

The library closes at 1:30PM on Wednesday, 13 June, to make way for the MHS Fellows Annual Meeting.

- Thursday, 14 June, 6:00PM : Authors Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald will be on-hand to discuss their recent work United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook. Amelia Simmons' American Cookery (1796) is known as the “first American cookbook”and has attracted an enthusiastic modern audience of historians, food journalists, and general readers. Yet until now American Cookery has not received the sustained scholarly attention it deserves. Stavely and Fitzgerald’s United Tastes fills this gap by providing a detailed examination of the social circumstances and culinary tradition that produced this American classic.

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

- Friday, 15 June, 12:00PM : The second Brown Bag talk to round out the week is with Adam Mestyan of Duke University, and is titled "U. S. Monarchism in the Middle East?: Orientalism, American Travelers, and Arab Rulers." The origins of the United States are often framed as anti-monarchist, yet Americans entertain a fascination with monarchs and royalty. Is it possible to create a taxonomy of popular Orientalist images of modern Muslim and Arab rulership in the United States? Next to foreign policy considerations and economic interests, this talk searches for the private views of American travelers about modern Muslim and Arab rulers in the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This talk is free and open to the public. 

The library closes at 3:00PM on Friday, 15 June, for a staff event.

- Saturday, 16 June, 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.

- Saturday, 16 June, 2:00PM : Come in for a special Gallery Talk related to our current exhibition, Entrpreneurship & Classical Design in Boston's South End. Guest curator and furniture conservator Robert Mussey will lead visitors through the exhibition’s highlights while giving deeper context to the life and work of two extraordinary Massachusetts craftsmen, Isaac Vose and Thomas Seymour.

This Week @ MHS

It's a Brown Bag Lunch kind of month at the Society in the weeks ahead, with eight noon-time talks on the calendar, two of which take place this week. Here are the details for the goings-on at the MHS in the week ahead:

- Monday, 4 June, 12:00PM : The first Brown Bag talk this week is with research fellow Ittai Orr of Yale University, whose talk is titled "Genres of Mind: 19th-Century American Literature and the Idea of Intelligence." While the measurement of human intelligence is now fully in the purview of science, antebellum novelists and poets engaged in public debate over its meaning. Key to recovering this contentious field are the student essays of Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and Henry David Thoreau for Harvard professor Edward Channing in 1836.

This talk is free and open to the public.

- Wednesday, 6 June, 12:00PM : Also presenting a Brown Bag talk this week is Alexandra Montgomery of the University of Pennsylvania with "Projecting Power in the Dawnland: Empires, Native Americans, & Settlement Schemes in the Gulf of Maine, 1710-1800." In the eighteenth century, the far northeastern coast of North America had more in common with the trans-Appalachian west than the white settler colonial east. This talk examines the British and French efforts to import white settlers in an attempt to change these demographic and political realities. These state projects offer a different view of the role of settlement in 18th-century North American empires.

This talk is free and open to the public.

- Wednesday, 6 June, 6:00PM : "Massachusetts Leadership in the Woman Suffrage Movement" is an author talk with Barbara Berenson. Few are familiar with Massachusetts’s role at the center of the national struggle for woman suffrage. Lucy Stone and other Massachusetts abolitionists were some of the first figures who vocally opposed women’s exclusion from political life. Demanding the vote and other reforms, they launched the organized women’s movement at the first National Woman’s Rights Convention, held in Worcester in 1850. Berenson gives Massachusetts suffragists the attention they deserve in this engaging story and discusses the battle over historical memory that long obscured the state’s leading role.

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

- Saturday, 9 June, 10:00AM : The History and Collections of the MHS Tour 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.