By Jeremy Dibbell

We hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving holiday! Now, back to business. We have two brown-bag lunches and a seminar this week at the Historical Society. First, the lunch events:

On Wednesday, 2 December, Dean Grodzins will give a brown-bag lunch talk, “A Civil War in Boston: Benjamin Robbins Curtis, Theodore Parker, and the Fugitive Slave Crisis, 1850-1855.”

On Friday, 4 December, Library Assistant Heather Merrill and Tod Forman will speak on “Legacies in Stone: Some Statues of Boston.”

The brown-bag lunches will begin at 12 noon.

And for the seminar: on Thursday, 3 December, as part of the Boston Early American History seminar series, Elaine Forman Crane of Fordham University will present a talk, “Cold Comfort: Rape and Race in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island.” Gerald F. Leonard of Boston University Law School will deliver a comment. Please read the Seminars @ MHS blog post for more information on attending seminars, including how to make reservations and receive the papers in advance. The seminar will begin at 5:15 p.m.