By Jeremy Dibbell

I’ve recently been reading former MHS director Louis Leonard Tucker’s 1995 book The Massachusetts Historical Society: A Bicentennial History, 1791-1991. The book, written for the Society’s two-hundredth anniversary, offers the only in-depth narrative survey of the MHS’ history, and I’ve found it a most useful way to learn more about the changes and continuities that this organization has experienced over the course of its long existence. It has also provided me with some good ideas for future blog posts (stay tuned for an account of the only four members ever expelled from the MHS, for example, and to find out what items from our collections were evacuated from Boston during WWII just in case the bombs began to fall).

Perhaps the most notable thing about Tucker’s book and about the Society’s story is best summed up by a quote made by our eighth president, Charles Francis Adams. He wrote of the Society in 1898 “There’s lot of human nature in it.” He was right – there was, and here’s hoping there always will be.