Boston Athenaeum

April 29, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.

Join us for a conversation with two leading voices in the movement to bring about criminal justice reform, New York Times Magazine journalist Emily Bazelon and Boston-based advocate and former prosecutor Adam Foss. In their respective fields, both grapple with the fact that the image of the American criminal justice system as a contest between the prosecution and the defense with judges ensuring a fair fight does not, in fact, match the reality. Much of the time, it is prosecutors more than judges who control the outcome of a case, and oftentimes with devastating consequences. Emily Bazelon’s new book entitled Charged examines this heretofore unchecked power of prosecutors and how this power undermines the American criminal justice system. She exposes the damage overzealous prosecutors can inflict alongside those—like Adam Foss—who seek to reform the system. Adam Foss, who formerly served as Assistant District Attorney in the Juvenile Division of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, has firsthand insight into the connection between prosecution and mass incarceration. Since his viral Ted Talk on prosecution in February in 2016, Adam Foss has gone on to found Prosecutor Impact, a non-profit developing training and curriculum for prosecutors to reframe their role in the criminal justice system. With participants uniquely suited to speaking on the present issues afflicting the justice system, this event will shine a light on the little known cause for enormous injustice, while also offering a vision for a better future.

April 23, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.

In her New York Times best-selling Between You & Me, Mary Norris delighted readers with her irreverent tales of pencils, punctuation, and punctiliousness over three decades in The New Yorker’s celebrated copy department. In Greek to Me, she delivers another wise and witty paean to the art of expressing oneself clearly and convincingly, this time filtered through her greatest passion: all things Greek.

From convincing her New Yorker bosses to pay for Ancient Greek studies to traveling the sacred way in search of Persephone, Greek to Me is an unforgettable account of both her lifelong love affair with words and her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, and reveals the surprising ways Greek helped form English. Filled with Norris’s memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek gods, Greek wine—and more than a few Greek waiters—Greek to Me is the Comma Queen’s fresh take on Greece and the exotic yet strangely familiar language that so deeply influences our own.

March 28, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.

The Trial of Lizzie Borden tells the true story of one of the most sensational murder trials in American history. When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Reporters flocked to the scene. Well-known columnists took up conspicuous seats in the courtroom. The defendant was relentlessly scrutinized for signs of guilt or innocence. Everyone—rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and laypeople—had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence. Was she a cold-blooded murderess or an unjustly persecuted lady? Did she or didn’t she?

The popular fascination with the Borden murders and its central enigmatic character has endured for more than one hundred years. Immortalized in rhyme, told and retold in every conceivable genre, the murders have secured a place in the American pantheon of mythic horror, but one typically wrenched from its historical moment. In contrast, Cara Robertson explores the stories Lizzie Borden’s culture wanted and expected to hear and how those stories influenced the debate inside and outside of the courtroom. Based on transcripts of the Borden legal proceedings, contemporary newspaper accounts, unpublished local accounts, and recently unearthed letters from Lizzie herself, The Trial of Lizzie Borden offers a window onto America in the Gilded Age, showcasing its most deeply held convictions and its most troubling social anxieties.

April 18, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.

This event was held in collaboration with the Somerset Club.

John Singer Sargent, the most sought-after portraitist of his age, painted hundreds of women, the rich and famous, noble and artistic. Perhaps the most interesting woman he ever painted was the social reformer, women's-rights advocate, hostess, author and Athenæum member Annie Adams Fields. He painted her in 1890, his crucial American year. Both before and after that, during Sargent’s stays in Boston and Annie’s trips to London, the two fostered a mutual admiration within their overlapping circles of friends. Annie’s portrait has just come home from a big Sargent show in Stockholm. We want to welcome her back by exploring the backstory of this Athenæum treasure.

March 22, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.

When a decades-long court battle resulted in her family’s freedom in 1855, seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams unexpectedly became the face of American slavery. Famous abolitionists Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Albion Andrew would help Mary and her family in freedom, but Senator Charles Sumner saw a monumental political opportunity. Due to generations of sexual violence, Mary’s skin was so light that she “passed” as white, and this fact would make her the key to his white audience’s sympathy. During his sold-out abolitionist lecture series, Sumner paraded Mary in front of rapt audiences as evidence that slavery was not bounded by race.

Weaving together long-overlooked primary sources and arresting images, including the daguerreotype that turned Mary into the poster child of a movement, Jessie Morgan-Owens investigates tangled generations of sexual enslavement and the fraught politics that led Mary to Sumner. She follows Mary’s story through the lives of her determined mother and grandmother to her own adulthood, parallel to the story of the antislavery movement and the eventual signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Girl in Black and White restores Mary to her rightful place in history and uncovers a dramatic narrative of travels along the Underground Railroad, relationships tested by oppression, and the struggles of life after emancipation. The result is an exposé of the thorny racial politics of the abolitionist movement and the pervasive colorism that dictated where white sympathy lay―one that sheds light on a shameful legacy that still affects us profoundly today.

March 21, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.

In the late 1860s, an ambitious New York illustrator – not yet recognized as an artist – made his first picture of the sea. Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was 33 years old, freshly back from France, and finding his way. Over the next 11 years Homer’s journey would take him to a variety of marine destinations, from New Jersey to Maine, but especially – and repeatedly – to Gloucester and other parts of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. It was on Cape Ann that Homer made his first watercolors, and where he learned his great calling: to be a marine artist. And it was there, in Gloucester in 1880, at the end of these 11 years, that he enjoyed the most productive season of his life, composing more than 100 watercolors of astonishing beauty. In August, 40 public and private collections will share some of Homer’s finest marine works at the Cape Ann Museum, in the heart of Gloucester, for the first close examination of the making of this great marine artist. Homer’s journey forever changed his life, and the art of his country. This exhibition – running concurrently with a complementary Homer exhibition at Harvard – will reveal new aspects of Winslow Homer, for the first time placing these paintings, drawings and even ceramic work in their rich geographic, cultural and historical settings. Hear the two curators of Homer at the Beach preview the exhibition on March 21st.

March 13, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.

Join us for an evening with one of the nation’s leading experts on global engagement, Jed Willard, who will give a lecture and lead a neutral discussion on the rise of global nationalism. This event is held in collaboration with Civic Series--an organization that designs non-partisan events to explore complex issues in a non-confrontational way. An extended Q&A and discussion will follow a 30 minute overview.

For the last two decades, the focus of cooperation and globalization has helped grow economies and bring prosperity to most, but clearly not all. The President of the United States declared himself a nationalist and joined an increasing number of far-right leaders in Russia, Germany, Brazil, and Turkey. As countries start to build diplomatic barriers against each other, decades-old global relationships are dissolving and across the world power is shifting toward isolationism and new allegiances are being formed. Questions such as the following will be addressed: what happens when America withdraws from treaties and United Nations activities? how are neighboring countries affected by the election of far-right candidates? and is protectionism the best way forward for emerging economies?

March 3, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.

Topographers, illustrators, and painter-printmakers explored and created images of the Grand Canyon, and the evolution of these genres parallels the history of American printmaking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with geological studies and including prints for tourists and collectors, printmakers have approached the Canyon from the vantage point of line, tone, and pattern. In so doing, they made significant contributions to imaging one of the United States’ most renowned geological monuments, yet their works have not been extensively studied like those of painters and photographers. Sublime Impressions: Prints and Printmakers of the Grand Canyon traces the history of printmaking in the Grand Canyon from the topographical images of the first explorers to the abstracted works of twentieth-century modernists to show how a medium changed the way the Grand Canyon was represented and, thus, the public’s perception of it.

January 10, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum.

As climate change nears potentially disastrous tipping points, a solution is hiding in plain sight. Several countries have successfully replaced fossil fuels with low-carbon energy sources by combining renewable energy with a quick buildout of nuclear power. By following their example, the world could dramatically cut fossil fuel use by midcentury, even as energy consumption continues to rise.

Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Qvist explain how clean energy rapidly replaced fossil fuels in such places as Sweden, France, South Korea, and Ontario, Canada, while enhancing both prosperity and the natural environment. They encourage a fresh look at the assumptions that have long shaped the climate change debate. The event will be moderated by Harvard Professor and acclaimed scientist Steven Pinker.

September 12, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum.

On its 150th anniversary, discover the story of the beloved classic that has captured the imaginations of generations. Soon after publication on September 30, 1868, Little Women became an enormous bestseller and one of America’s favorite novels. Its popularity quickly spread throughout the world, and the book has become an international classic. Alcott’s novel has moved generations of women, many of them writers; Simone de Beauvoir, J. K. Rowling, bell hooks, Cynthia Ozick, Jane Smiley, Margo Jefferson, and Ursula K. Le Guin were inspired by Little Women, particularly its portrait of the iconoclastic young writer, Jo.

In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Rioux recounts how Louisa May Alcott came to write Little Women, drawing inspiration for it from her own life. Rioux also examines why this tale of family and community ties, set while the Civil War tore America apart, has resonated through later wars, the Depression, and times of changing opportunities for women. In gauging its current status, Rioux shows why Little Women remains a book with such power that people carry its characters and spirit throughout their lives.