Boston Athenaeum

Boston Athenaeum

By Boston AthenaeumSociety & Culture
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Boston Athenaeum episodes

  • Poets' Theatre, “The New Colossus"
    December 13, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum.
    “Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
    These words have become as well known and as deeply embedded in American patriotic lore as those of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Gettysburg Address, or the Declaration of Independence. But few remember that these lines are excerpted from an 1883 sonnet by American poet Emma Lazarus. Though the lines were meant to interpret the Statue of Liberty, they transformed the statue’s original purpose, turning it into a welcoming symbol for wave after wave of immigrants to the United States. The poem and the statue have a tangled history, for both are contemporaneous with a virulent anti-immigration movement that started in Boston. Drawing from the Athenæum’s collections, this presentation explores resentment of immigrants in turn-of-the-century Boston, as well as poetic responses sympathetic to the immigrant cause.
    54 min
  • David A. Hopkins, “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics”
    December 11, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum.
    The national electoral map has split into warring regional bastions of Republican red and Democratic blue, producing a deep and enduring partisan divide in American politics. In Red Fighting Blue, David A. Hopkins places the current partisan and electoral era in historical context, explains how the increased salience of social issues since the 1980s has redefined the parties' geographic bases of support, and reveals the critical role that American political institutions play in intermediating between the behavior of citizens and the outcome of public policy-making. The widening geographic gap in voters’ partisan preferences, magnified further by winner-take-all electoral rules, has rendered most of the nation safe territory for either Democratic or Republican candidates in both presidential and congressional elections—with significant consequences for party competition, candidate strategy, and the operation of government.
    43 min
  • Keridwen N. Luis, “Naked Among the Karma Eaters: The Body Politics of Women’s Lands”
    December 5, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum.
    At the risk of stating the obvious: we exist in the world in bodies. How our bodies interact in cultural spaces shapes us and shapes our cultural spaces. This talk examines how the "body politics" of women's land—communal living spaces created by and for women—shape individual experiences and larger expectations about gender, race, identity, and virtue. How does nudity change how bodies are perceived and policed? What does being connected to the landscape have to do with excretion? And how do eating, food, and gender intertwine in women-only spaces? This talk will explore the complex cultural intersections of body/gender and self/community.
    55 min
  • Maya Jasanoff, “The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World”
    December 4, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Immigration, terrorism, the dangers of nationalism, the promise and peril of technological innovation: these forces shaped the life and work of Joseph Conrad at the dawn of the twentieth century. Joseph Conrad described the beginnings of globalization as we recognize it today. As an immigrant from Poland to England, and in travels from Malaysia to Congo to the Caribbean, Conrad traced an interconnected world and described it in a literary oeuvre of prophetic power. His life and work offer a history of globalization from the inside out, and powerfully reflect the aspirations and the challenges of the modern world.
    Through an expert blend of history, biography, literary criticism, and travelogue, Maya Jasanoff will discuss the strands of Conrad’s experiences and the stories of his four greatest works—The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo. The Dawn Watch casts new light on Conrad’s era, and offers fresh insight into our own.
    53 min
  • Laura Cavendish, Countess of Burlington, “House Style: Five Centuries of Fashion at Chatsworth”
    November 15, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Chatsworth has been home to the Cavendish family and the hereditary dukes of Devonshire since the original Elizabethan house was built on the site purchased by Sir William Cavendish in 1549. A famous historic house in England, Chatsworth is renowned as much for its fashionable history—its majestic dresses and tiaras, magnificent lace, and splendid uniforms—as its unrivaled collection of art, palatial gardens, and celebrated family dynasty. From the sixteenth-century Inigo Jones drawings of stage costumes to comical pieces, like the eleventh Duke’s jumper embroidered with “Never Marry a Mitford,” Lady Burlington will offer a personal perspective, as well as discuss Chatsworth’s well-known fashionable residents.
    51 min
  • Stephen Greenblatt, “The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve”
    November 14, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum.
    With the insight, eloquence, and erudition that have thrilled hundreds of thousands of readers of his books about Shakespearean England and the Italian Renaissance, Stephen Greenblatt breathes new life into the ancient story of Adam and Eve. He tracks the story’s origins back into humanity’s deep past and its first written form to the Hebrews’ exile in Babylon. Returning to us a precious cultural inheritance, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve is an exploration of the value of the humanities through the life of one of humankind’s greatest stories.
    48 min
  • Liza Mundy, “Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II”
    November 7, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum.
    In 1942, reeling from Japan’s devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States military launched a secret program to recruit young, female college graduates to act as code breakers in the newly ramped up war effort. In Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Liza Mundy reveals for the first time the revolutionary achievements and patriotic service of the remarkable young women who cracked German and Japanese military codes. As Mundy shows, their astonishing code-breaking triumphs helped secure an Allied victory before their vow of secrecy nearly erased their vital contributions from US history.
    45 min
  • Carol Sanger, “About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First-Century America”
    November 2, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum.
    One of the most private decisions a woman can make, abortion is also one of the most contentious topics in American civic life. Protested at rallies and politicized in party platforms, terminating pregnancy is often characterized as a selfish decision by women who put their own interests above those of the fetus. This background of stigma and hostility has stifled women’s willingness to talk about abortion, which in turn distorts public and political discussion. To pry open the silence surrounding this public issue, Sanger distinguishes between abortion privacy, a form of nondisclosure based on a woman’s desire to control personal information, and abortion secrecy, a woman’s defense against the many harms of disclosure.
    56 min
  • Otto Penzler, “The Big Book of Rogues and Villains”
    October 31, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler's new anthology brings together the most cunning, ruthless, and brilliant criminals in mystery fiction, for the biggest compendium of villains ever assembled. Join us on Halloween for his spooky book talk.
    Penzler gathers the iconic traitors, thieves, con men, sociopaths, and killers who have crept through the mystery canon over the past 150 years, captivating and horrifying readers in equal measure. The 72 handpicked stories in this collection introduce us to the most depraved of psyches, from iconic antiheroes like Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin and Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu to contemporary delinquents like Lawrence Block's Ehrengraf and Donald Westlake's Dortmunder.
    45 min
  • Helene Atwan, Ladette Randolph, Michael Reynolds, and Meghna Chakrabarti, “Editorial Perspectives”
    October 26, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum.
    For the reader, the world of books may seem a simple one: go to the local library or bookstore, select a title that suits our taste, open, and turn the pages. The story of the editors who shape the works we cherish is rarely told. What choices and challenges do these editors face? How do they perceive themselves and their role in the world today? How does their mission drive the works they publish? Join us for this rare opportunity to spend an evening with editors from New England’s most mission-driven publishing houses and journals. The panel— composed of Michael Reynolds, Editor-in-Chief of Europa Editions (the publishing house of Elena Ferrante); Helene Atwan, Director of Beacon Press; and Ladette Randolph, Editor-in-Chief of Ploughshares—will offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the creation of books and discuss the motivations and aspirations propelling those books into the marketplace. The panel will be moderated by Mehgna Chakrabarti, host of WBUR’s RadioBoston, Modern Love: The Podcast, and frequent moderator at the Boston Book Festival.
    55 min

About Boston Athenaeum

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The Boston Athenaeum, a membership library, first opened its doors in 1807, and its rich history as a library and cultural institution has been well documented in the annals of Boston’s cultural life.…