Boston Athenaeum

Boston Athenaeum

By Boston AthenaeumSociety & Culture
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Boston Athenaeum episodes

  • John Buchtel, “All Necessary and Useful Knowledge: Thomas Bray’s Libraries for Colonial America”
    November 13, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.
    This free-for-members event is made possible with support from the William Orville Thomson Endowment, which is generously funded by Athenæum Proprietor Peter Thomson.
    In 1697, Thomas Bray, a priest in the Church of England, published a detailed report (Bibliotheca Parochialis) in which he outlined all the “necessary and useful” books that he thought would constitute the essential knowledge needed to equip Anglican church leaders to minister effectively in the English colonies in North America. At the same time, Bray began fundraising to assemble libraries based on his published plan. By the time he turned his project over to his successors in 1704, Bray’s remarkable enterprise resulted in more than 40 collections of books being sent to various locations in the American colonies.
    One of those libraries, the collection sent to King’s Chapel in Boston in 1698, survives intact as part of the collections of the Boston Athenæum. This talk will explore Bray’s expressed purposes behind his selections for his libraries, as well as telling the story of the King’s Chapel collection, including its remarkable survival during the American war for independence. The talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Required Reading: Reimagining a Colonial Library,” on view at the Athenæum from September 17, 2019 through March 14, 2020.
    51 min
  • Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz, “The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall”
    November 7, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Despair, mania, rage, guilt, derangement, fantasy: poetry is our most intimate, personal source for the urgency of these experiences. Poems get under our skin; they engage with the balm, and the sting, of understanding. In The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall—its title inspired by a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins—acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky gives us more than 130 poems that explore emotion at its most expansive, distinct, and profound. For this event, poet and professor Maggie Dietz will engage Pinsky in conversation on this remarkable anthology of poems.
    With seven illuminating chapters and succinct headnotes for each poem, Pinsky leads us through the book’s sweeping historical range. Each chapter, with contents chronologically presented from Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes, Dante to Patricia Lockwood, shows the persistence and variation in our states of mind. “The Sleep of Reason” explores sanity and the imagination, moving from William Cowper’s “Lines Written During a Time of Insanity” to Nicole Sealey’s “a violence.” “Grief” includes Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” and Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” and “Manic Laughter” highlights both Lewis Carroll and Martín Espada. Each poem reveals something new about the vastness of human emotion; taken together they offer a sweeping ode to the power of poetry.
    Guided by “our finest living example of [the American civic poet]” (New York Times), The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall demonstrates how extreme feelings can be complementary and contradicting, and how poetry is not just an expression of emotion, but emotion itself.
    42 min
  • Katia Lysy, “Images and Shadows”
    October 30, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Biographer and historian Iris Origo, the internationally famous biographer and historian, dazzled readers and critics with her writings, ranging from depictions of the Irish countryside to an account of her heroic attempt to save 28 refugee children from German soldiers during World War II. Katia Lysy, Origo’s granddaughter, will discuss her legacy and the journey of bringing these elegant works to American audiences.
    40 min
  • James B. Conroy, “Jefferson’s White House: Monticello on the Potomac”
    October 31, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.
    As the first president to occupy the White House for an entire term, Thomas Jefferson shaped the president’s residence, literally and figuratively, more than any of its other occupants. Remarkably enough, however, though many books have immortalized Jefferson’s Monticello, none has been devoted to the vibrant look, feel, and energy of his still more famous and consequential home from 1801 to 1809. In Monticello on the Potomac, James B. Conroy, author of the award-winning Lincoln’s White House offers a vivid, highly readable account of how life was lived in Jefferson’s White House and the young nation’s rustic capital.
    1 hr 4 min
  • Desiree Taylor, "The Life and Saga of Harriet Jacobs"
    October 29, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.
    Harriet Jacobs lived in the United States at a time fraught with political unrest. She was born into slavery in 1813 and spent her life striving to make a fulfilling life for herself and her family in a country that defined her as less than. To history she left a scandalous autobiography chronicling her life as a fugitive slave, and through it exposed the ugly reality of life for female slaves. However, in the twentieth century, scholars considered Jacobs’s story to be a work of fiction written by a white female abolitionist in the service of the abolitionist cause. At the end of the twentieth century a feminist scholar laid to rest any doubt that Jacobs existed and was in fact the author of her autobiography. Join researcher and storyteller Desiree Taylor for a presentation of the life and the saga of Harriet Jacobs.
    1 hr 1 min
  • Karen Abbott, “The Ghosts of Eden Park”
    October 24, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.
    In the early days of Prohibition, long before Al Capone became a household name, a German immigrant named George Remus quit practicing law and started trafficking whiskey. Within two years he was a multi-millionaire. The press called him “King of the Bootleggers,” writing breathless stories about the Gatsby-esque events he and his glamorous second wife, Imogene, hosted at their Cincinnati mansion, with party favors ranging from diamond jewelry for the men to brand-new Pontiacs for the women. By the summer of 1921, Remus owns 35 percent of all the liquor in the United States.
    Pioneering prosecutor Mabel Walker Willebrandt was determined to bring him down. Willebrandt’s bosses at the Justice Department hired her right out of law school, assuming she would pose no real threat to the cozy relationship they maintained with Remus. Eager to prove them wrong, she dispatched her best investigator, Franklin Dodge, to look into his empire. It was a decision with deadly consequences. With the fledgling FBI on the case, Remus was quickly imprisoned for violating the Volstead Act. With her husband behind bars, Imogene began an affair with investigator Dodge. Together, they plotted to ruin Remus, which sparked a bitter feud that soon reached the highest levels of government–and ended in murder.
    Combining deep historical research with novelistic flair, The Ghosts of Eden Park is the unforgettable, stranger-than-fiction story of a rags-to-riches entrepreneur and a long-forgotten heroine, of the excesses and absurdities of the Jazz Age, and of the infinite human capacity to deceive.
    50 min
  • Evan Thomas and Oscie Thomas, “First: Sandra Day O’Connor”
    Sandra Day O’Connor was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she applied and was accepted into Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her law school class in 1952, no firm would interview her--but Sandra Day O’Connor’s story is that of a woman who repeatedly shattered glass ceilings, and did so with a blend of grace, wisdom, humor, understatement, and cowgirl toughness.
    After becoming the first ever female majority leader of a state senate, and then judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals, she arrived at the United States Supreme Court in 1981, appointed by President Ronald Reagan. Her quarter-century tenure on the Court ultimately shaped American law. Diagnosed with cancer at fifty-eight, and caring for a husband with Alzheimer’s, O’Connor endured every difficulty with grit and poise.
    44 min
  • KL Pereira, “A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality”
    A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality is both literary and speculative, both magically real and viscerally strange, and in the tradition of writers like Angela Carter, Karen Russell, and Jorge Luis Borges. Within the collection of short stories, Pereira uses elements of fairy tales, folk tales, and myths to highlight the lives of women, children, and immigrants. Lucid prose underscores the tenacity of those who are the most vulnerable, who live on the edges, between neat and clear definitions of who they are and who they want to be. Pereira explores rebirth amid darkness, free of normative ideas of gender, class, race, and sexuality.
    51 min
  • Avis Berman, “Missionaries of Impressionism: The American Collectors of Renoir”
    Commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of the great French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, writer and historian Avis Berman will examine the artist’s legacy from the perspective of the pioneering Americans who embraced and supported his work well before French collectors or officials did so. Berman will chronicle Renoir's career, beginning in the 1880s when Renoir and the other Impressionists were first exhibited in the U.S.--and with their acceptance by no means guaranteed--and concluding in the mid-1930s, when Renoir had become an essential purchase for museums, moguls, and movie stars. Join us to learn more about the provocative artists, dealers, and collectors from this time period and to discover some of the most sumptuous and significant Renoirs in America, in addition to the portraits and photographs of the people who collected them.
    50 min
  • Liza Wieland, "Paris 7 A.M.: A Novel"
    July 16, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.
    The acclaimed, award-winning author Liza Wieland of A Watch of Nightingales imagines in a sweeping and stunning novel what happened to the poet Elizabeth Bishop during three life-changing weeks she spent in Paris in 1937--the only year Elizabeth, a meticulous keeper of journals, didn't fully chronicle. Amidst the imminent threat of World War II, the novel brings us in vivid detail from Paris to Normandy where Elizabeth becomes involved with a group rescuing Jewish “orphans” and delivering them to convents where they will be baptized as Catholics and saved from the impending horror their parents will face.
    Poignant and captivating, Liza Wieland’s Paris, 7 A.M. is a beautifully rendered take on the formative years of one of America’s most celebrated—and mythologized—female poets.
    36 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.…