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.