Event is Free. No Registration Required. 

Camille Owens, Yale University

This talk studies Phillis Wheatley’s significance to the history of black prodigy, focusing on Wheatley’s education as an enslaved child. It reconstructs Wheatley’s education in relation to early American philosophy and pedagogy of childhood, looking to primers, tract literature, and the influence of Locke. From there, it examines the often-cited (and likely fictionalized) “trials” of Phillis Wheatley—and to Jefferson’s Notes on Wheatley—to show...

Event is Free. No Registration Required. 

Gretchen Murphy, University of Texas at Austin

This talk examines the religious expressions of 18^th- and 19^th-century female Federalist writers, specifically Catharine Sedgwick, in the context of the Federalist commitment to public religion. Sedgwick’s 1824 novel Redwood looks to the French Revolution as a site of U.S. debate about role of religion in a republic, signaling her interest in her father’s earlier Federalism while staking her position in the...

There is a $10 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders).

Register on their website. 

As a doctoral student at Boston University’s School of Theology, Martin Luther King, Jr., spent some of his formative years walking the streets of Boston and living in the South End. His life in Boston was King’s first immersive experience outside of the segregated South and while he experienced the de facto racism of the North...

Event is Free. No Registration Required. 

Judith Harford, University College Dublin

Focusing on the period 1880‒1920, the peak of Irish emigration to the United States, this talk examines the education, professional training and wider public activism of first-generation Irish American women teachers.

There will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30

Stephen Bush, Brown University

There is a $10 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders).

Register on their website.

William James advocated a philosophy of democracy and pluralism that emphasizes individual and collective responsibility for our social arrangements, our morality, and our religion. In James’s view, democracy resides first...

This talk will examine the emerging legal category of the “disabled” American at the end of the nineteenth century in relation to the construction of disability in Civil War literature, broadly conceived. In texts ranging from hospital newspaper poetry to mendicant narratives sold for veterans’ financial support, representations of Civil War injury engaged shifting understandings of disability: from individual condition to evolving social class.

There will be a pre-talk reception at 3:30

Kat Williams, Maybelle Blair, Shirley Burkovich, Donna Mills, Marti Sementelli, moderated by Red Sox historian Gordon Edes

There is a $20 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders).

...

Event is Free. No Registration Required.

Joshua Morrison, University of Virginia

This talk explores the economic and cultural exchange between New England and Zanzibar, the premier entrepôt of the Western Indian Ocean. This trade network linked the cotton magnates of Massachusetts with the Omani elite, Indian merchants, and Swahili slaves of Zanzibar. As the trade expanded, each close-knit community found themselves increasingly dependent on an incredibly foreign counterpart for survival. This project maps the many compromises, adaptations...

There will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30

Margo Miller, Boston Globe (retired)

There is a $10 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders).

...

This talk examines three interrelated elements of Henry Adams’s literary output: his transnational focus, his reconsideration of subject/object relations, and his interest in the visual arts. While travelling during the 1890s, Adams took a break from writing to immerse himself in painting and sketching—after which he produced acclaimed works like Chartres and The Education. His time abroad represents an important transitional moment between the Romanticism of the nineteenth century and the Modernism of...

Please register on their website (the event is free but registration is required)

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There will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30

Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald

There is a $10 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders).

American Cookery (1796) by Amelia Simmons is known as the “first American cookbook”and...

FREE ADMISSION BEGINS AT 4 PM - Tickets

On the evening of June 20, join the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for Juneteenth—the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration...

More information please visit: https://www.sapartners.org/mandela-centenary.

ORGANIZER: South Africa Partners

YO AKIYAMA, ceramist; professor, Kyoto City University of Arts

Widely recognized as one of Japan’s preeminent sculptors, Akiyama Yo has devoted his career to exploring the dynamics of the ceramic process. Each of his powerful objects explores the tensions of binary relationships such as solid-void, gravity-antigravity, formation-destruction, and examines the compression of time. Akiyama discusses the encounter between the artist’s creative vision and the physical properties of the material with which he works.

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