Boston Athenaeum

A panel discussion at the Boston Athenæum on September 21, 2015 featuring Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty as they address the impact of climate change in Boston and the surrounding areas.

The Boston Athenæum has long been a venue for intellectual discourse on leading issues of the day. Once considered purely a scientific subject, global climate change is now recognized as an issue with consequences for a variety of disciplines including law, government and public policy, economics, human rights, and culture. A survey of visual materials of the local natural and built environments in the Athenæum’s special collection shows the dramatic impacts humans have had on the landscape and environment, particularly over the last 200 years. Global climate change will certainly require further changes to our built environment. Please join us for a panel discussion featuring Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty, including Alan Berger, Kerry Emanuel, Markus Buehler, and moderator Cynthia Barnhart, as they address the impact of climate change in Boston and the surrounding areas.

September 17, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.

Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger, founders of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. is the first book-length account of the American success story about Henry (1857–1930) and Emily (1858–1936) Folger, the reclusive Brooklyn couple who founded the Folger Shakespeare Library near the U. S. Capitol in 1932. The library houses 82 First Folios, 275,000 books, 60,000 manuscripts, artwork, and much more related to Shakespeare and his times. The private research institution welcomes 100,000 visitors a year and provides scholars, researchers, professors, and graduate students from around the world with access to the priceless collections stored in underground vaults.

The Folgers met at a literary salon and were the first in their families to receive college educations. Henry rose to become president of the Standard Oil Company of New York, that later became Mobil Corporation. Emily earned a master’s degree in Shakespearean studies in 1896, when only 250 women in the country attained that level of education. It is a love story of a childless couple during the Gilded Age who were devoted to each other, in love with Shakespeare, and bitten by the collecting bug.

September 16, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.

"Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War", a spellbinding work of historical restoration, recounts the courage and audacious duplicity of four remarkable women who played seminal roles in the Civil War. Two working for the Union and two for the Confederacy, these women, until now all but forgotten by history, came from varying backgrounds and regions. Yet each risked everything—money, honor, family connections, and even her life—in order to further the cause in which she adamantly believed. Abbott, who draws on a wealth of primary source material as well as interviews with the women’s descendants, illuminates these interwoven lives with the assured hand of an historian and the narrative grace of a novelist.

February 5, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets comprise the greatest single work of lyric poetry in English, as passionate, daring, intimate, and fiery as any love poems we may encounter. But they are often misunderstood: as W. H. Auden wrote, “more nonsense has been talked and written, more intellectual and emotional energy expended in vain, on the sonnets of Shakespeare than on any other literary work in the world.” Ideas of Order instills pleasure in this extraordinary verse, revealing an underlying narrative within the 154 poems that illuminates the work—providing a guide that inspires a new understanding of this complex masterpiece. Neil L. Rudenstine makes a compelling case for the existence of a dramatic arc within the work through an expert interpretation of the poems in relationship to each other: the jealousies, petty squabbles, reconciliations, discoveries, and longings. The sonnets show us a poet in turmoil who falls for a young man who returns his affections—and the love is utterly transformative, binding him in such an irresistible way that it survives a number of heartbreaks. This spell is only broken when a dark lady comes into the poet’s life, and he becomes enmeshed in another coupling of lust and betrayal.

February 26, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.

Killers of the King tells the shocking stories—including the fascinating fates—of the 59 men who signed the death warrant of Charles I of England in 1649. This act not only changed British history forever, but may it very well have reverberated across the ocean to the young British colonies, which more than a hundred years later also rose up against their king to become an independent country known as the United States. When Charles I’s son, Charles II, was restored to the throne in 1660, he set about enacting a deadly wave of retribution against all those responsible for his father’s death. Some of the "regicides"—the killers of the king—pleaded for mercy, while others stoically awaited their sentences. This powerful tale of revenge from the dark heart of England’s past, a unique contribution to seventeenth-century history, Killers of the King tells the incredible story of the men who dared to assassinate a monarch.

March 10, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.

Blood on the Bayou: Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and the Trans-Mississippi takes a well-known story of the struggle for control of the Mississippi River in the American Civil War, and recasts it as a contest for control of African-American populations. The Emancipation Proclamation may have freed the slaves, but the task of actually moving these liberated people within Union borders and directing their labor to the benefit of the Union fell to the Federal army and navy. This book shows how the campaign to reduce Rebel forts west of the river also involved the creation of a black army of occupation and a remaking of the social and political landscape of Louisiana and the nation. The longer the military campaigns in the Mississippi Valley dragged on, the more Federal officials could feed liberated slaves into the system. No matter the outcome of the war, the Federal government set out to break slavery—forever.

March 23, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.

Anyone who has spent time in New England will recognize the century-old buildings that Maureen Meister will discuss in a slide lecture based upon her new book—the first comprehensive study of Arts and Crafts architecture in the region. Focusing on the 1890s through the 1920s, she will explain how a group of Boston architects and craftsmen encountered English Arts and Crafts theorists, including John Ruskin and William Morris, and produced exquisite works of their own. Among the architects were Ralph Adams Cram, Lois Lilley Howe, Charles Maginnis, and R. Clipston Sturgis. They were conservative in some respects, promoting designs based on historical precedent and the region's heritage, while they also were forward-looking, blending Arts and Crafts values with Progressive Era idealism. Their legacy is apparent in landmarks honored today in cities and towns across New England.

March 19, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.

In the early 1870s, local children begin disappearing from the working class neighborhoods of Boston. Several return home bloody and bruised after being tortured, while others never came back. With the city on edge, authorities believe the abductions are the handiwork of a psychopath, until they discover that their killer—fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy—is barely older than his victims. The criminal investigation that follows sparks a debate among the world’s most revered medical minds and will have a long-lasting impact on the judicial system and medical consciousness for decades. The historical novel, The Wilderness of Ruin is a riveting tale of gruesome murder and depravity, but at its heart it depicts a great American city divided by class, a chasm that widens in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1872. Roseanne Montillo brings Gilded Age Boston to glorious life—from the genteel cobble stone streets of Beacon Hill to the squalid, overcrowded tenements of Southie—and here, too, is the writer Herman Melville, who, eager to understand both the child killer case and his own mental instability, enlists the aid of physician Oliver Wendell Holmes. With verve and historical detail, Roseanne Montillo explores this case that reverberated through all of Boston society to help us understand our modern hunger for the prurient and sensational.

April 13, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.

The Boston Athenæum is beloved for its tradition of welcoming well-behaved dogs into its beautiful interiors. In this Royal Oak Society lecture, Gareth Williams will discuss the role of dogs in historic, English country houses.

Whilst many people focus on humans depicted in portraits upon English country house walls, it is the four-legged canine occupants of stately homes that are considered de rigueur members of a countryside retreat. From gaunt greyhounds shown in early English tapestries to pampered pooches whose beds have the same Colefax & Fowler chintz as their mistress’ sofas, dogs in England’s country houses command a place in history themselves. Depictions of hunting dogs and family pets abound in English country house collections including sculptures, textiles, tapestries, plaster work, and on tableware or porcelain. Country house doggie accoutrements include splendidly wrought silver and gold collars, dog bowls, and kennels designed by architects, and some bereft owners immortalized their pets’ passings with modest gravestones in pet cemeteries or sculpted garden monuments. Whether focusing on country squires’ dogs at English manor houses, members of hunting packs on grand estates, or dogs from the royal households, this illustrated lecture considers the cultural influences and artistic legacy of the English country house dog.

May 5, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum.

Jeffrey Henderson, in his lecture The Loeb Classics for a Digital Age, will reflect on the durability and adaptability of the works of the Loeb Classical Library. Over the millennia, these works have been adapted to new vehicles and systems of reference and organization. The new digital version is the latest of many previous forms: the Greek oral tradition was first captured in writing around the eighth century BCE, after which it was committed to handwritten scroll, handwritten codex, to printed codex, now to the computer in the twenty-first century, and surely to more media in years to come. Each new medium has resulted in unanticipated effects as writers and readers explored its capabilities and discovered its potential, and so it will be with the Loeb Classical Library in its new digital form.