Boston Athenaeum

Boston Athenaeum

By Boston AthenaeumSociety & Culture
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Boston Athenaeum episodes

  • Louise Miller, “A City Baker’s Guide to Country Living”
    January 11, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Join pastry chef and author Louise Miller for a discussion about her writing process and research, as well as a reading from her debut novel, A City Baker’s Guide to Country Living. When Olivia Rawlings—pastry chef extraordinaire for an exclusive Boston dinner club—sets not just her flambéed dessert but the entire building alight, she escapes to the most comforting place she can think of—the idyllic town of Guthrie, Vermont, and her best friend Hannah. But the getaway turns into something more lasting when Margaret Hurley, the cantankerous owner of the Sugar Maple Inn, offers Livvy a job. Miller and her full-hearted story about a big-city baker who discovers the true meaning of home have been praised by the New York Times Book Review: “Miller elevates the story by turning it into a Pinterest fantasy of rural American…[Her] visions of bucolic Vermont landscapes, cinnamon-scented kitchens and small-town friendliness make this reverie of country life an appealing one.”
    33 min
  • Dr. Melinda A. Zeder and Dr. Panagiotis Karkanas, “A Look Inside the Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory”
    January 9, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum.
    The Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory for Archaeological Science of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) is an active research department dedicated to archaeological science in Greece. The building replaces the previous lab Wiener founded in 1992, and adds cutting-edge equipment: a scanning electron microscope, a portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, and a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer. The lab provides both American and international scholars of archaeological science in the eastern Mediterranean the tools and resources to answer a variety of scientifically-based questions in the fields of bioarchaeology, geoarchaeology, archaeobotany, and zooarchaeology.
    Join Dr. Panagiotis Karkanas, Director of the Wiener Laboratory of the ASCSA, and Dr. Melinda A. Zeder, Curator of Old World Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, as they discuss ongoing projects at the Wiener Laboratory, including the study of more than 1,500 skeletons from one of the largest cemeteries ever unearthed in Greece: the ancient Phaleron cemetery.
    42 min
  • Tamara Plakins Thornton, “Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers”
    December 15, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Tamara Plakins Thornton will present on the life and work of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), a man Thomas Jefferson once called a “meteor in the hemisphere.” A mathematician, astronomer, navigator, seafarer, business executive, and transformational Athenæum Trustee, Bowditch’s Enlightenment-inspired perspectives shaped nineteenth century capitalism while broadly transforming daily American life. Enthralled with the precision and certainty of numbers and the unerring regularity of the physical universe, Bowditch operated and represented some of New England's most powerful institutions—from financial corporations to Harvard College—as clockwork mechanisms. By examining Bowditch’s innovative approach to the administration of institutions as well as the political and social controversies this method provoked, Thornton’s biography sheds new light on the rise of capitalism, American science, and the social elite in the early Republic.
    38 min
  • Alex Beam and Gerald Howard, “Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya”
    December 8, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Friendship and the Feud is playwright Terry Quinn’s artful and poignant “dramatic dialogue” based on the quarter-century-long correspondence between novelist Vladimir Nabokov and The New Yorker editor and critic Edmund Wilson. First published in the Paris Review, Quinn’s epistolary drama was performed numerous times in the US and abroad, often with William F. Buckley playing the part of Wilson, and Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, playing the part of his father.
    1 hr 2 min
  • David B. Dearinger, “Museums without Walls"
    November 29, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Greater Boston boasts a number of art museums, each of which, naturally, has galleries for the display of art. These galleries are constructed of walls and floors and ceilings. Even more naturally, however, the city has another art museum, whose floor is the earth, whose ceiling is the sky, and whose walls are the trees. This special museum has three major galleries: the Boston Common, the Boston Public Garden, and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall. These galleries display an impressive collection of public sculpture that is free and accessible 24/7, 365 days a year. In this illustrated lecture, David Dearinger, PhD will give a brief overview of Boston’s “museum without walls” and the role that sculpture plays in its history and aesthetics.
    31 min
  • Sarah Lohman, “Black Pepper: Taste a Revolutionary Story”
    November 16, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Participants at this tasting event will learn first-hand about the history of black pepper in American cuisine and its surprising connections to the city of Boston. Historian and food blogger Sarah Lohman will expose black pepper’s role in American cuisine, a theme in her forthcoming book, Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. Guests will savor a signature cocktail created by mixologist Josey Packard, followed by three hors d'oeuvres showcasing black pepper by Chef Michael Zentner.
    34 min
  • Peter L. Berger, “The Vicissitudes of Pluralism”
    November 15, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    In his recent book, The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age, Peter Berger argues that, contrary to popular belief, we don’t live in a secular age–we live in a pluralist one. Put differently, our problem is not that God is dead, but that there are many gods. Join us for a consideration of a new paradigm for understanding religion and pluralism in an age of multiple modernities.
    47 min
  • David B. Dearinger, “Daniel Chester French: The Female Form Revealed”
    November 10, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    During this lecture, David Dearinger, the Athenæum’s Director of Exhibitions and Susan Morse Hilles Senior Curator of Paintings & Sculpture, will speak about Daniel Chester French’s representation of the female figure. Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) was America’s foremost sculptor of public monuments from the late 1870s to the late 1920s. His masterpieces adorn civic spaces, university campuses, and urban landmarks across the United States. Many of French’s public works commemorate historical figures, such as his life-size bronze sculpture The Minute Man (1875) at Concord, MA, or the colossal marble Abraham Lincoln (1922), displayed at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. His renown for these male-oriented masterpieces is merited, but French was equally proficient at modeling the female figure. Feminine beauty in its idealized form was often at the forefront of French’s work. French’s allegorical representation of the female form seeks to fulfill a sensual, tactile, and cerebral narrative commemorating great human experiences. This aspect of his career, which has previously received little scholarly attention, is the focus of the ambitious Daniel Chester French: The Female Form Revealed and will be further examined during this lecture.
    41 min
  • François Furstenberg,“George Washington’s Library at the Athenæum"
    November 2, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Why might an obscure pamphlet collection housed in the Boston Athenæum archives offer new insights on the abolition movement of the late eighteenth century? It’s simple: the tract collection belonged to George Washington. In this lecture, Professor of History François Furstenberg will explore the early history of abolitionist debates from the perspective of book history, using these leaflets to link Mount Vernon to a broad transatlantic conversation about slavery and freedom.
    41 min
  • Anne Sebba, “Les Parisiennes”
    October 20, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Women are invariably those left behind in wartime, but in World War II Paris this was particularly the case, as husbands were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories. It was women more than men who came face-to-face with the German conquerors on a daily basis as waitresses, shop assistants, prostitutes or merely on the metro where a German soldier had priority over seats. The German men were often charming and Parisian women, often, did whatever they needed to do to survive. Many of them faced life-and-death decisions every day. By looking at a wide range of individuals from collaborators to resisters, including native Parisians and those living in Paris temporarily, working women, mothers, housewives, mistresses, journalists, and spies, Anne Sebba reveals truths about basic human instincts and desires.
    1 hr 12 min

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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.…