Boston Athenaeum

Boston Athenaeum

By Boston AthenaeumSociety & Culture
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Boston Athenaeum episodes

  • Stephen Kendrick, “The Lively Place”
    October 11, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    When Mount Auburn Cemetery was founded in 1831, it revolutionized the way Americans mourned the dead by offering a peaceful space for contemplation. This cemetery, located not far from Harvard University, was also a place that reflected and instilled an imperative to preserve and protect nature in a rapidly industrializing culture—lessons that would influence the creation of Central Park, the cemetery at Gettysburg, and the National Parks system. Even today this urban wildlife habitat and nationally recognized hotspot for migratory songbirds continues to connect visitors with nature and serves as a model for sustainable landscape practices. Beyond Mount Auburn’s prescient focus on conservation, it also reflects the impact of Transcendentalism and the progressive spirit in American life seen in advances in science, art, and religion and in social reform movements. In The Lively Place, Stephen Kendrick celebrates this vital piece of our nation’s history. He tells the story of Mount Auburn’s founding, its legacy, and the many influential Americans interred there, including religious leaders, abolitionists, poets, and reformers.
    33 min
  • Monica Pelayo, “Immigration on Display: Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty Monuments”
    September 29, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island became the quintessential monuments of the immigrant experience during the Cold War. Public historians used both sites to promote the United States as a “nation of immigrants,” utilizing the latest sociological theories of immigration assimilation to construct a narrative that placed European immigrants front and center. While both monuments stressed individuals’ rights and American exceptionalism, they took different approaches. “Immigration on Display” will delineate those approaches and examine how these monuments worked to create a narrative that unified the nation under a common shared experience.
    57 min
  • Matthew Stewart, “Between Two Revolutions: Nature’s God in America 1776-1865”
    September 21, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Where did the ideas come from that became the cornerstone of American democracy? America’s founders intended to liberate us not just from one king but from the ghostly tyranny of supernatural religion. Drawing deeply on the study of European philosophy, Matthew Stewart will track the ancient, pagan, and continental ideas from which America’s revolutionaries drew their inspiration. In the writings of Spinoza, Lucretius, and other great philosophers, Stewart will discuss the true meanings of “Nature’s God,” “the pursuit of happiness,” and the radical political theory with which the American experiment in self-government began.
    43 min
  • Keith N. Morgan and Mark Pasnik, “Heroism and Hubris”
    September 8, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Often problematically labeled as “Brutalist,” the concrete architecture that transformed Boston during the 1960s and 1970s was conceived with ambitious social ideals by some of the world’s most influential designers. Join author Mark Pasnik in conversation with historian Keith Morgan to examine the contentious and ambitious history of “Brutalist” architecture in Boston. At a moment when concrete buildings across the nation are in danger of demolition, the panelists will survey an earlier period of architectural history and consider its legacies—both troubled and inspired. This event is inspired by the book, Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston, which tells the story of a city, a material, and a movement, and how these intersected in the post-war era to make Boston an epicenter of concrete architecture worldwide.
    47 min
  • Nick Bunker, “An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America”
    October 7, 2014 at the Boston Athenæum.
    An Empire On The Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America is a new, British account of the Boston Tea Party and the origins of the American Revolution. It shows how a lethal blend of politics, personalities, and economics led to a war that few people welcomed but nobody could prevent.
    In his strong but even handed narrative, Nick Bunker tells the story of three years of deepening anger that led to the outbreak of America’s war for independence at Lexington in 1775. He claims the time as a tragedy of errors, during which both sides shared responsibility for a conflict that cost the lives of at least 20,000 Britons and a still larger number of Americans.
    At the heart of the book lies the Boston Tea Party. Using primary sources from both sides of the Atlantic, Bunker sheds new light on the Tea Party’s origins and the process of mutual embitterment by which Britain and America pushed each other into war.
    38 min
  • Nathaniel Philbrick, “Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution”
    Tuesday, May 20, 2014 at the Boston Athenæum.
    In Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Nathaniel Philbrick brings a fresh perspective to the story that ignited the American Revolution. The real central character in this story is Boston, where vigilantes fill the streets with a sinister and frightening violence even as calmer patriots struggle to see their way to rebellion. The action of the book tracks in detail the eighteen months following the Boston Tea Party (Dec. 1773), as Boston turned from the center of patriot defiance to a British-occupied city under a patriot siege.
    Through storied events such as the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, Philbrick builds to the extraordinary moment in American history when a group of ordinary citizens stood up to several regiments of British regulars as the Battle of Bunker Hill. This is the great tipping point, the bloodiest engagement of the Revolution when several hundred citizen soldiers had the bravery and discipline to hold their fire until the British soldiers, each one with a bayonet mounted to the barrel of his musket, marched to within fifteen yards of the patriot entrenchment. Only then, once they could see “the whites of their eyes,” did the rebels fire, ultimately killing or wounding almost half the British force. Not until the third British charge did the Americans retreat, and only then because they had run out of ammunition. With this single battle, the ultimate course of the American Revolution had been foretold.
    49 min
  • Anthony Sammarco, “Lost Boston”
    May 22, 2014 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Although historic Boston has a reputation as one of the best-preserved cities in America, it has always been a subject to the constant change of any busy commercial center. Lecturer and historian Anthony Sammarco, author of some sixty books on the history and development of Boston, will reveal sixty- eight major Boston locations that are no more, including schools, churches, theaters, grand mansions, dockyards, racetracks, parks, stores, hotels, offices, and factories.
    Organized chronologically, Sammarco’s lecture will features much-loved institutions that failed to stand the test of time, victims of Boston’s redevelopment era, and old-fashioned hotels and sports facilities that once seemed beyond updating or refurbishment.
    Vanished landmarks on this virtual tour include Franklin Place, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the Hancock House, Gleason’s Publishing Hall, Fort Hill, Franklin Street, the Boston Coliseum, Boylston Market, the Merchants Exchange, Haymarket Square, earlier homes of the Boston Public Library, Boston City Hall, Horticultural Hall, Boston Latin School, and the Museum of Fine Arts, the once celebrated Revere House hotel, Huntington Avenue Grounds, Charlestown City Hall, the Cyclorama, Readville Trotting Park and Race Track, East Boston Airport, East Boston Ferries, Braves Field, Massachusetts State Prison, the original Boston Opera House, the Boston Aquarium, the beloved Howard Athenaeum of old Scollay Square, and Dudley Street Station.
    45 min
  • Members’ Choice – Panel, “Writers at the Exhibition”
    July 27, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Visual objects have often been a source of inspiration to writers. In Writers at the Exhibition, three Athenæum authors will select an object from the current exhibition, Collecting for the Boston Athenæum in the 21st Century: Prints & Photographs, and present a poem, a memoir, or a story. This event will illustrate how writers of all types are inspired by the Boston Athenæum’s special collections.
    1 hr 2 min
  • Stephen Long, “Thirty-Eight: The Hurricane That Transformed New England”
    July 21, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    The hurricane that pummeled the northeastern United States on September 21, 1938, was arguably New England’s most damaging weather event ever. Without warning, the storm plowed into Long Island and New England, killing hundreds of people and destroying roads, bridges, dams, and buildings that stood in its path. Not yet spent, the hurricane then raced inland, maintaining high winds into Vermont and New Hampshire and uprooting millions of acres of forest.
    In this lecture, Long will share excerpts from his book Thirty-Eight, which is the first book to investigate how the hurricane of ’38 transformed New England. Drawing on survivors’ vivid memories of the storm and its aftermath, and on his own familiarity with New England’s forests, he will share with the audience how the storm brought about social and ecological changes that can still be observed today.
    50 min
  • Members’ Choice - Panel, “Scholars at the Exhibition”
    June 30, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum.
    An impressive panel of Athenæum members who have used the institution’s collections in their scholarly research will each select one object on display in the current exhibition, Collecting for the Boston Athenaeum in the 21st Century: Prints & Photographs, and discuss how that object is relevant to their work. Scholars at the Exhibition will illustrate the wide variety of ways in which the Athenæum’s collections are used by academic and independent scholars.
    44 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.…