There is a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm

Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard Law School and Peter Onuf, University of Virginia

Registration required. See the MHS website.

Thomas Jefferson is still presented today as a hopelessly enigmatic figure, despite being written about more than any other Founding Father. Lauded as the...

Anne Bentley, Curator of Art and Artifacts, Massachusetts Historical Society

Handling the papers of the founding fathers requires an unflinching confidence in your technical ability. Anne Bentley, MHS's curator, will discuss her conservation work on one of the canonical texts of America, Jefferson’s only book, The Notes on the State of Virginia.

For more information, see the MHS website. 

Jennifer Thomson, Bucknell University
Comment: Chad Montrie, University of Massachusetts—Lowell

How did environmental politics survive the de-regulation, economic crisis, and nativism of the 1970s? What compromises did environmental activists make? This paper engages with these questions through the fractious history of the environmental organization Friends of the Earth (FOE). Founded in 1969, FOE’s first decade illuminates how the political and economic changes of the 1970s impacted, limited, and ultimately gave shape to the parameters of...

There is a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm

Louisa Thomas, Author

Born in London to an American father and a British mother on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Louisa Catherine Johnson was raised in circumstances very different from the New England upbringing of the future president John Quincy Adams. And yet John Quincy fell in love with her, almost despite himself. They lived in Prussia, Massachusetts, Washington, Russia, and England. Louisa saw more of Europe and America than nearly any other woman...

Westenley Alcenat, Columbia University and MIT

This project explores the experience and radicalism of the African-American settlers who emigrated to Haiti throughout the nineteenth century. It focuses on how this migration movement influenced African-American and Haitian political thought and the transnational struggle for Black citizenship before and during the American Civil War.

Jared Hardesty, Western Washington UniversityComment: Eliga H. Gould, University of New Hampshire

This seminar will examine the tumultuous construction of Castle William, a fort meant to protect Boston Harbor. Begun in 1701, this five-year project was fraught with corruption, labor strife, supply shortages, ineptitude, and tension between colonial desires and imperial ambition. Hardesty will explore the fort as a microcosm of imperial reform and as a lens into post-Glorious Revolution attempts to build empire in...

Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence, yet he also owned people as slaves. His experimental farm and garden and his architectural tests were made possible through the uncompensated labor of hundreds. While Jefferson and slavery is not the primary focus of our exhibition, it is present in every room. The curator of the show ,Peter Drummey, will explore this subject.

There is a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm

Andrew Lipman, Barnard College

Andrew Lipman explores the previously untold story of how the ocean became a “frontier” between colonists and Indians. When the English and Dutch empires both tried to claim the same patch of coast between the Hudson River and Cape Cod, the sea itself became the arena of contact and conflict. During the violent European invasions, the region’s Algonquian-speaking Natives...

Andrew Robichaud, Boston UniversityComment: Harriet Ritvo, MIT

For much of the nineteenth century American cities were alive with a wide variety of animal life. This paper examines some of the challenges of urban animal life (and death) in cities, while tracing the evolution of animal regulations in San Francisco between 1850 and 1870, a period of notable change. Through the creation of new livestock and slaughterhouse regulations, the city of San Francisco remade laws, space, and the environment, which...

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition.

Registration required. See the MHS website.

AUTHOR TALK, PUBLIC PROGRAM

There is a pre-talk reception at 5:30


David Greenberg of Rutgers University interviewed by Robin Young Co-host of Here & Now on WBUR and NPR

...

Part of the 2015–2016 Fellows' Presentation Series

Lecture by Kris Manjapra RI '16

While at the Institute, Manjapra is working on his next book project: a global study of the plantation complex from its modern inception in the Americas in the 17th century to its apotheosis in the Indian Ocean during the 19th and 20th centuries. The work is an intellectual history of how a new way of incorporating land, labor, law, and capital in the Global...

Harvard University students and staff host an annual pow wow. This year's event takes place at Radcliffe Yard.

The event is free and open to the public.

For updates and additional information, see Harvard University Native American Program website.

*Please note, our initial events email had the incorrect date. The date for this event is April 30th, not March 30th.

Katherine Marino, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Comment: Kirsten Weld, Harvard University

In June 1945, at the conference in San Francisco that created the United Nations, a group of Latin American feminists pushed “women’s rights” into the category of international human rights in the founding documents of the UN and proposed what became the UN Commission on the Status of Women. The Brazilian delegate and feminist Bertha Lutz called their work a “Latin American contribution to the constitution of the world.” This paper examines what...