Boston Athenaeum

Boston Athenaeum

By Boston AthenaeumSociety & Culture
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Boston Athenaeum episodes

  • Richard Bell, “Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home”
    February 6, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum.
    A gripping and true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South—and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice. Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home.
    Their ordeal—an odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward still—shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War. Impeccably researched and breathlessly paced, STOLEN tells the story of five boys whose courage forever changed the fight against slavery in America.
    37 min
  • Rabbi Dan Judson, Dr. Lorna Rivera. Rajini Srikanth, and Sarah Turner, “Community Conversations”
    February 5, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum.
    To demonstrate the variety and richness of “essential knowledge” and the ways it can be defined, the cabinet in “Required Reading: Reimagining a Colonial Library” is filled with titles selected by ten community partners.
    Join Rabbi Dan Judson, Dean of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College; Lorna Rivera, Director of the Gaston Institute for Latino Public Policy at UMass Boston; and Sarah Turner, President of North Bennet Street School for a panel discussion moderated by Rajini Srikanth, Dean of the Honors College at UMass Boston, centered on the question, "What qualifies as knowledge and how is it transmitted?"
    41 min
  • Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, “Plymouth Colony First Lady Penelope Winslow”
    January 28, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Penelope Pelham Winslow was a member of the English gentry (her third great-grandmother was Anne Boleyn's sister Mary) who was married to Plymouth Colony Governor Josiah Winslow. Although she was one of the most powerful women in Plymouth's history, she, like most of her female contemporaries, has been largely forgotten. Penelope authored or is mentioned in just a few surviving documents; however, a wealth of physical evidence survives to tell her story, ranging from surviving homes and possessions to archaeological artifacts. These items also offer insight into the world of Plymouth Colony's women.
    In her new book, Penelope Winslow, Plymouth Colony First Lady: Re-Imagining a Life, Michelle Marchetti Coughlin discovers that blending historical records with material culture provides the keys to re-imagining Winslow's world in all its rich complexity.
    46 min
  • Kerri Greenidge, “Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter”
    January 20, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum.
    This long-overdue biography reestablishes William Monroe Trotter’s essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and King in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes.
    William Monroe Trotter (1872– 1934), though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post- Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of black liberation that prefigured leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Synthesizing years of archival research, historian Kerri Greenidge renders the drama of turn- of- the- century America and reclaims Trotter as a seminal figure, whose prophetic, yet ultimately tragic, life offers a link between the vision of Frederick Douglass and black radicalism in the modern era.
    23 min
  • Roxana Robinson, “Dawson’s Fall”
    January 14, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum.
    In Dawson’s Fall, a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson’s great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson’s tale weaves her family’s journal entries and letters with a novelist’s narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the country’s new political, social, and moral landscape.
    Dawson, a man of fierce opinions, came to this country as a young Englishman to fight for the Confederacy in a war he understood as a conflict over states’ rights. He later became the editor of the Charleston News and Courier, finding a platform of real influence in the editorial column and emerging as a voice of the New South. With his wife and two children, he tried to lead a life that adhered to his staunch principles: equal rights, rule of law, and nonviolence, unswayed by the caprices of popular opinion. But he couldn’t control the political whims of his readers. As he wrangled diligently in his columns with questions of citizenship, equality, justice, and slavery, his newspaper rapidly lost readership, and he was plagued by financial worries. Nor could Dawson control the whims of the heart: his Swiss governess became embroiled in a tense affair with a drunkard doctor, which threatened to stain his family’s reputation. In the end, Dawson―a man in many ways representative of the country at this time―was felled by the very violence he vehemently opposed.
    43 min
  • Ted Reinstein, “Wicked Pissed: New England's Most Famous Feuds”
    January 16, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum.
    From sports to politics, food to finance, aviation to engineering, to bitter disputes over simple boundaries themselves, New England’s feuds have peppered the region’s life for centuries. They’ve been raw and rowdy, sometimes high minded and humorous, and in a place renowned for its deep sense of history, often long-running and legendary. There are even some that will undoubtedly outlast the region’s ancient low stonewalls. Ted Reinstein, a native New Englander and local writer, offers us fascinating stories, some known, others not so much, from the history of New England in this fun, accessible book. Bringing to life many of the fights, spats, and arguments that have, in many ways, shaped the area itself, Reinstein demonstrates what it really means to be “Wicked Pissed.”
    56 min
  • Bettina Norton, “A Foray into Forgery and the Boston Athenæum's Role in Exposing It”
    January 9, 2020 at the Boston Athenæum.
    An over-zealous Boston art dealer in the early years of the 20th century made knowingly false attributions of 18th-century portraits from the Salem-Boston area. The attributions were promulgated by colleagues and later by art scholars until disproved by two other historians. The saga is a sub-chapter in Norton’s upcoming book on the Salem 18th-century portrait artist, Benjamin Blyth. Sometimes mistaken for Copleys, Blyth’s portraits include the Massachusetts Historical Society’s iconic images of the newly married John and Abigail Adams, the Providence man who started the US postal system, the clergyman who promoted settlement of the Northwest Territory, and numerous figures of the American Revolution and their families. The upcoming book by Norton doubles the attributions for pastels and oils and, for the first time, lists miniatures.
    48 min
  • Brent Budsberg, Ellen Kaspern, and Jeff Altepeter, “Reading Craft”
    December 16, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Panelists from Current Projects and North Bennet Street School—representing the worlds of traditional woodworking and craft bookbinding—explore the significance of their work for the Required Reading exhibition: a full-scale replica of a unique Colonial Revival bookcase; a faithful copy of a seventeenth-century “bookpress;” and leather-bound books emulating those in the historic King’s Chapel Library. By reproducing historic objects, we reach a level of intimate dialogue between past and present difficult to achieve through other means. What new questions emerge when we move beyond merely examining a piece to actively remaking it? How does the process of reproducing an object serve as a form of research, lending insight into past practices, tools, materials—and even the object’s social functions?
    59 min
  • Ben Railton, “We the People: The 500-Year Battle Over Who is American”
    December 12, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.
    "We the People." The Constitution begins with those deceptively simple words, but how do Americans define that "We"? In his new book We the People, Ben Railton argues that throughout our history two competing yet interconnected concepts have battled to define our national identity and community: exclusionary and inclusive visions of who gets to be an American. From the earliest moments of European contact with indigenous peoples, through the Revolutionary period's debates on African American slavery, 19th century conflicts over Indian Removal, Mexican landowners, and Chinese immigrants, 20th century controversies around Filipino Americans and Japanese internment, and 21st century fears of Muslim Americans, time and again this defining battle has shaped our society and culture. Carefully exploring and critically examining those histories, and the key stories and figures they feature, is vital to understanding America, especially when the battle over who is an American can be found in every significant debate and moment.
    48 min
  • David J. Silverman, “This Land is Their Land”
    November 19, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, historian David J. Silverman offers a transformative new look at the Plymouth colony’s founding events, told for the first time with the Wampanoag people at the heart of the story, in This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. Silverman is a professor of Native and Colonial American history at George Washington University and has worked with modern-day Wampanoag people for more than twenty years. Through their stories, other primary sources, and historical analysis, Silverman sheds profound new light on the events that led to the creation, and bloody dissolution, of the alliance between the Wampanoag tribe and the Plymouth settlers. The result complicates and deepens our current narrative of the first Thanksgiving, presenting us with a new narrative of our country’s origins for the twenty-first century.
    1 hr

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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.…