Boston Athenæum

May 14, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. The Boston Athenæum holds a position of undisputed importance in the history of American libraries and museums. But what lies in store? Can an illustrious institution that came of age amidst the intellectual flowering of 19th-century New England remain relevant in an age of digital devices, in a region now known for biotech? Athenæum director Elizabeth Barker will explore these and other questions in a richly illustrated lecture that ranges across the Boston Athenæum’s history and identifies several key factors likely to shape its future—a prospect, she will argue, that appears no less brilliant than its glorious past.

June 21, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Spanning the years 1773 to 1775, Igniting the American Revolution sweeps readers from the Boston Tea Party and the halls of Parliament, to the fateful expedition to Lexington and Concord and the shot heard round the world. Vividly detailed and meticulously researched, this captivating history reveals the events that altered the futures of not only England and America, but the whole world.

June 16, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Nathaniel Philbrick will share his surprising account of the middle years of the American Revolution, and the tragic relationship between George Washington and Benedict Arnold. He will share excerpts from his book Valiant Ambition, a complex, controversial, and dramatic portrait of a people in crisis and the war that gave birth to a nation. He will argue that after four years of war, America was forced to realize that the real threat to its liberties was not from without but from within.

June 16, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Every U.S. president has had some experience as a parent. Of the 43 men who have served in the nation's highest office, 38 have fathered biological children and the other five adopted children. Each president's parenting style reveals much about his beliefs as well as his psychological make-up. James Garfield enjoyed jumping on the bed with his kids. FDR's children, on the other hand, had to make appointments to talk to him. In this presentation, Kendall will discuss with the audience how the fathering experiences of American presidents have forever changed the course of the nation’s history.

June 9, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Born in London to an American father and a British mother on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Louisa Catherine Johnson was raised in a manner very different from the New England upbringing of her future husband and president John Quincy Adams. Their often tempestuous but deeply close marriage lasted half a century. They lived in Prussia, Massachusetts, Washington, Russia, and England; they lived at royal courts, on farms, in cities, and in the White House. Louisa saw more of Europe and America than nearly any other woman of her time. But wherever she lived, she was always pressing her nose against the glass, not quite sure whether she was looking in or out. The other members of the Adams family could take their identities for granted—they were Adamses; they were Americans—but she had to invent her own. The story of Louisa Catherine Adams is one of a woman who forged a sense of self. As the America found its place in the world, she found a voice. That voice resonates sti

June 2, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In this talk, Dolin will share with the audience excerpts from Brilliant Beacons, an extraordinary work of historical detection and originality, which vividly reframes America’s history through the development of its lighthouses. Set against the backdrop of an expanding nation, Brilliant Beacons traces the evolution of America’s lighthouse system, highlighting the political, military, and technological battles fought to illuminate the nation’s hardscrabble coastlines. In rollicking detail, Dolin will introduce audiences to a memorable cast of characters including the penny-pinching Treasury official Stephen Pleasonton, and share tales both humorous and harrowing of soldiers, saboteurs, ruthless egg collectors, and most importantly, the light-keepers themselves.

June 1, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Vibrantly offbeat and utterly original, Lucy Keating’s debut novel, Dreamology, combines the unconventional romance of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with the sweetness and heart of Jenny Han. During this lecture, Keating will discuss the process of publishing her first novel, and the implications for her contractual second novel. Writers will learn how to get published and listen to insights into the publishing industry.

May 23, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Join moderator Elisabeth Nevins and panelists Hannah Goodwin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Steve Gyurina of Artopia Giclée; and Jim Olson of the Peabody Essex Museum for a discussion about the contemporary methods and ramifications of art reproduction. Discussion topics will range from the use of reproductions of artworks as points of access for museum visitors who are blind or have other disabilities, to use of 3D-printed reproductions in a museum exhibition setting, to the creation of faithful reproductions of artists’ works for sale. Our panelists will explore issues of methodology, pedagogy, access, and ethics in their presentations.

May 23, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In the 1950s, soon after the end of World War II, four-year-old Thad Carhart’s family—his NATO officer father, his mother, and his four siblings—packed up their suburban life in Arlington, Virginia, and moved to Fontainebleau, France, a lively provincial town surrounding a sprawling masterpiece of French architecture, the Château of Fontainebleau. In his new memoir, Finding Fontainebleau, New York Times bestselling author Carhart intertwines stories from his family’s years living in the shadow of the Château with the stories of the palace itself, from its heyday as the preferred royal hunting retreat to today, when efforts are underway to restore it to its former splendor. Against the background of the rapid modernization of France in the 1950s stands the Château of Fontainebleau, an anchor against the seas of time. Begun in 1137, fifty years before the Louvre and more than five hundred before Versailles, the Château was a home for Marie-Antoinette, François I, and the t

May 18, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Paper is one of the simplest and most essential forms of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art. It has created civilizations, fostered revolutions, and stabilized regimes. Consider, for example, history’s greatest press run, which produced 6.5 billion copies of Máo zhuxí yulu Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Zedong), or the fact that Leonardo da Vinci left behind only 15 paintings but 4,000 works on paper. Now, on the cusp of “going paperless” – and amid rampant speculation about the effects of a digitally dependent society – we’ve come to a world-historic juncture and must examine what paper means to civilization. By tracing paper’s evolution, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology’s influence, affirming that paper is here to stay.

May 17, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Nancy Bilyeau will share excerpts from the latest installment in her award-winning Joanna Stafford series, The Tapestry. The novel takes place in Tudor England, with Joanna, a Dominican novice, struggling to survive the turbulent reign of King Henry VIII. Set in a world of royal banquets and feasts, tournament jousts, ship voyages, and Tower Hill executions, this thrilling tale finds Joanna in her most dangerous situation yet, as she attempts to decide the life she wants to live: nun or wife, spy or subject, rebel or courtier. Bilyeau will also discuss the research she undertook into Renaissance tapestries and the art of Hans Holbein, which she did in preparation for writing the book.

April 27, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In this collaboration with the Emerald Necklace Conservatory, Lauren Meier will highlight the parks, parkways, park systems, and scenic reservations featured in the latest volume of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: Plans and Views of Public Parks. She will also explore the park design legacy of the Olmsted firm, which carried Olmsted’s innovation into the 20th century.

April 26, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Opinel is the name of a workaday knife wielded by shepherds and farmers in the high pastures of the Alps. Like the knife, these poems cleave away the false and deceptive to reveal a startling and unifying wonder. In language radiant, lovely, and disturbing, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson explores the linkages between the uncomfortable familiar and the curiously intimate strange, making unexpected connections between phenomena. Arranged by association rather than chronology and connected by a sensual intelligence, this collection wanders from Maryland and India to Boston, France, New Hampshire and Ireland—from Ezekiel’s Flight and the Book of Kells, to tales of the Tamil goddess, Meenakshi.

April 14, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Rosanna Warren will read poems from her most recent collection, Ghost in a Red Hat, and from a forthcoming chapbook, Graffiti. In Ghost in a Red Hat, Warren draws inspiration from her life and from the works of other artists, classical and contemporary, real and imagined. Warren explores the political and the personal through myth, history, elegy, and erotic lyric. She traces themes, both ancient and modern, in a voice compelling and deeply persuasive.

April 6, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In this series of poems responding to Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” Fogel pays homage to the 274-year-old masterpiece and renders from it a luminous new interpretation. The readings will be accompanied by Boston Conservatory student Junhong Jiang on piano.

April 12, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. For centuries, the final resting place of Richard III, England’s last Plantagenet king, remained a mystery. In 2012, a team of archaeologists from the University of Leicester set out to search for the burial site of the king, who died in 1485 in the Battle of Bosworth Field. Against all odds, the project located the site under a parking lot in central Leicester. In this lecture, Richard Buckley, the leader of the search team, will tell the remarkable story of the search and the complex process of confirming Richard’s identity. Find more information at: https://www.le.ac.uk/richardiii/

“American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good” March 31, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. The struggle between individual rights and the good of the community as a whole has been the basis of nearly every major disagreement in America’s history, from the debates at the Constitutional Convention and the run-up to the Civil War, to the fights surrounding the agendas of the Federalists, the Progressives, the New Dealers, the civil rights movement, and the Tea Party. In American Character, Colin Woodard traces these two key strands in American politics through the two and a half centuries of the nation’s existence, from the first colonies through the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, and the present day, and he explores how different regions of the country have successfully or disastrously accommodated them.

March 21, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. This year’s John Hubbard Sturgis Eaton Endowed Lecture will present the concept of reflectivity as it recurs in Italian painting from the 15th through the 18th centuries. Focusing less on the literal presence of the mirror in art—a topic widely explored—this talk will take on the more mysterious and intriguing connotations of the repetition of figure and pose in painted narratives from Piero della Francesca to Pietro Longhi. Artists considered will also include Botticelli and Caravaggio, each an insightful and original experimenter and exploiter of the human figure as mirror, as well as the potential of figural reflectivity.

March 9, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. For John Singer Sargent, Corsano and Williman argue, the Great War changed everything, particularly after the death of Robert André-Michel, the husband of Sargent’s beloved niece Rose-Marie Ormond. During most of the war, Sargent busied himself with work in London and eventually went to America to escape the realities of war. When Rose-Marie herself was killed in the spring of 1918, Sargent promptly left Boston and traveled to France to paint. Corsano and Williman will discuss Sargent’s reflections on the war, which can be viewed in the murals of the Boston Public Library and Harvard’s Widener Library, among other works.

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.