Boston Athenaeum

Boston Athenaeum

By Boston AthenaeumSociety & Culture
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Boston Athenaeum episodes

  • Michael Ferber, “Why Romanticism Was A Good Idea”
    November 4, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.
    William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Shelley—to name a few—are all authors considered to have worked in the Romantic style. However, some literary scholars have connected Jane Austen, the Brontës, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allen Poe to this artistic, spiritual, and intellectual movement. Not surprisingly, all of these authors are well represented within the Athenæum’s collection. This event is an opportunity to learn about the movement that influenced so many of our most beloved writers.
    Though many of us admire the great works of Romantic poetry, music, and painting, the ideas of the Romantics may seem juvenile, sloppy, escapist, or even dangerous, and the very word “romantic” is often an insult. Michael Ferber will offer a brief defense of Romantic ideas and intuitions about nature, religion, politics, and the self. Romanticism is here to stay, and it’s not all bad.
    51 min
  • Ted Stebbins, “The Art of the Gilded Age”
    November 5, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.
    The Athenæum’s collections offer a wonderful glimpse into the Gilded Age through paintings, drawings, and prints by John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and others, as well as through the writing of Walt Whitman, Henry James, and William Dean Howells. The Gilded Age saw the birth of modern America, and the greatest outpouring of art and architecture, as well as literature, in our history. The period began with the “Golden Spike” in 1869, which unified the nation by rail and made vast commercial expansion and the creation of great fortunes possible. Boston saw the construction of Richardson’s Romanesque Trinity Church in 1876 and McKim’s classical Boston Public Library in 1893. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. will examine the failures and successes of the greatest artists of the period as well as the often contradictory writings of Henry James and Mark Twain.
    53 min
  • John Matteson, “The Annotated Little Women & Exhibit of Louisa May Alcott's Book Selections”
    November 2, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.
    It should be no surprise that Louisa May Alcott was a voracious reader—it may be a surprise that she did quite a bit of reading at the Athenæum! Caroline D. Bain Archivist and Reference Librarian Carolle Morini recently featured that Alcott was a member at the Athenæum. We not only have a record of her membership, but also of the books she checked out while she was a member. Many of these books are still in our circulating collection and are the exact copy she herself checked out so many years ago. These books will be on display in the Events Hall for this event.
    Since its publication in 1868–1869 Little Women, perhaps America’s most beloved children’s classic, has been handed down from generation to generation. In this lavish edition, featuring over 200 full-color illustrations, John Matteson brings unprecedented vibrancy to the book, to its characters, and to the Alcott family who inspired it all. With numerous photographs taken expressly for this edition—elder daughter Anna’s wedding dress, the Alcott sisters’ theater costumes, and Abba Alcott’s recipe book—readers discover the extraordinary links between the real and the fictional family. Matteson’s annotations bring us back in touch with the objects and culture of a distant but still-relevant time.
    46 min
  • Simon Winchester, “Pacific"
    October 27, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Just the smallest sampling from the Boston Athenæum’s special collections holdings provides a glimpse of the western world’s centuries-long fascination with the geography and cultures of the Pacific. The collections include: Jan Jansson’s mid 17th-century map Mar del zvr Hispanis Mare Pacificum which depicts the west coast of Central and South America to the Straits of Anian; James Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific Ocean published in 1784; Frederick William Beechey’s Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait [sic] from 1831; J.E. Partington’s Ethnographical Album of the Pacific Islands published in 1892; Will Sabin’s 1921 Hawaii U.S.A.: A Souvenir of “The Crossroads of the Pacific”; and the Book Club of California’s Pacific Adventures, “a series of six narratives of early exploration of the Pacific area, to be issued bi-monthly during 1940s.”
    ‘Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers’ offers the contemporary reader the fascinating story of today’s ocean through a series of journeys both in geography and in time. Pacific is a rich and sprawling account of what author Simon Winchester calls the inland sea of the world’s tomorrow. With his trademark blend of history, geography, natural science, and keen observations, Winchester offers an expansive narrative that taps the cumulative power of a lifetime’s worth of travel, research, and reportage.
    49 min
  • Dan Jones, “Magna Carta”
    October 22, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.
    The United States’ Founding Fathers were deeply influenced by the Magna Carta in the formation of our country. The Athenæum’s early history reflects a deep respect of, and even involvement from, many of the Founding Fathers as evidence by the purchase and care of a significant portion of George Washington’s personal library; John Adams’ membership in the Boston Athenæum; sculptures and paintings of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington throughout the building; and countless volumes about the Founding Fathers and their achievements in the special and circulating collections.
    2015 marks the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, the founding document of Western liberty that is internationally revered and has inspired the constitutions of hundreds of countries. Its language can be found in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and according to Dan Jones, 'the year 1215 has become in a sense "year zero" in the story of the struggle for freedom from tyranny.' In Magna Carta, Jones takes us back in time to this turbulent year, when the document in question was just a peace treaty between the third Plantagenet King, John, who was known for his cruelty and instability, and a small group of self-interested and violent barons. Jones brilliantly shows why this document has had such a lasting and international impact that continues to resonate today.
    58 min
  • Kitty Eisele, Talking in Pictures:Developing a Visual Vocabulary to Show-and Tell-American's Stories
    October 21, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.
    The Athenæum’s collections have been used by scholars and researchers for more than 200 years. In more recent decades, filmmakers and producers have used the collections to inform their projects, such as Kitty Eisele’s The Civil War, a documentary film series directed by Ken Burns with images from the Athenæum’s Prints & Photographs collection.
    As Supervising Senior Editor at NPR’s Morning Edition, Kitty Eisele makes her living with words. Many years before that, she worked in pictures – as an Emmy Award-winning producer of The Civil War series with Ken Burns, and other documentaries on American history and culture. In fact, the Athenæum’s collections were used to tell the story in The Civil War–Ken Burns and his team researched the series at 10 ½ Beacon Street. Now, as digital media becomes more dominant in our everyday lives, she’s found herself asking how we communicate in this new language – a primarily visual language. What does it mean to use images as an increasingly necessary way of telling the news and our own history? How do we develop a language of images that reflects our real experiences? How can we think imaginatively and creatively about what we show and tell? How do we develop a visual vocabulary? From her past year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard she shares her lessons from looking at other forms of communication – languages including dance and architecture – to open up possibilities for talking with pictures – for doing the work of journalism and history by sharing our lives, visually.
    41 min
  • Henri Cole, "New Poems"
    October 5, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Henri Cole’s bold new collection ‘Nothing to Declare’ contains poems of feral beauty and intense vulnerability. Each poem starts up from its own unique occasion and is then conducted through surprising (sometimes unnerving) and self-steadying domains. The result is a daring, delicate, unguarded, and tender collection. They combine a susceptibility to sensuousness with an awareness of desolation. Cole transforms the pain of experience into the pleasure of expressive language, with precise reliability of detail, a supple wealth of sound, and a speculative truthfulness. ‘Nothing to Declare’ is a rare work that is light in touch but with just enough weight to mark the soul.
    30 min
  • Ken Botnick, “Diderot Project: Making the Book to Discover My Subject”
    October 1, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.
    The Athenæum holds one of only 70 copies printed of Diderot Project, a 150-page meditation on concepts encountered in printer and publisher Ken Botnick’s study of the plates and writings of the Encyclopédie of Diderot.
    Botnick will present his recent artist book and discuss its conceptual underpinnings, his research methods, and production details as components of his central thesis: when we make a book we discover the subject. Botnick will discuss his recently completed limited-edition artist book and the concepts he encountered in the Encyclopédie of Diderot: the hand and craft, tools and machines, labor and leisure, memory, sensation, and perception.
    35 min
  • Adam Van Doren and David McCullough, “The House Tells the Story: Homes of the American Presidents”
    September 28, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.
    “The House Tells the Story: Homes of the American Presidents” is an incredible collaboration between noted artist Adam Van Doren (author/illustrator) and pre-eminent historian David McCullough (foreword) who unite for an excursion to the celebrated homes of fifteen American presidents, past and present. The text is personal and unaffected; Van Doren visited these homes to ensure that he recorded every detail accurately, often becoming acquainted with the former presidents themselves, always trying to portray them in the human environment they created for themselves.
    1 hr 14 min
  • Anthony Sammarco, "S. S. Pierce: A Boston Tradition"
    September 24, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.
    When Samuel Stillman Pierce (1807-1880) opened his store, S.S. Pierce, in 1831 at the corner of Tremont and Court Streets in downtown Boston, he vowed "I may not make money, but I shall make a reputation." Pierce was known as the purveyor of fancy goods and potent libations to Victorian Bostonians. He catered to the carriage trade and created a company that would involve four generations of the Pierce Family in its successful operations. With its own coat of arms adorning a distinctive red label on canned goods, and the largest line of privately packed fancy foods in the world, S.S. Pierce sold its delicacies not only through eight New England stores of its own but also through distributors across the United States and by worldwide mail order. Boston Athenæum members John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. were considered celebrity customers at S.S. Pierce.
    48 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.…