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.