By Jeremy Dibbell

We hope you’ll join us at 1154 Boylston for this week’s public programs:

On Tuesday, 8 June, Leo Damrosch, the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, will speak on his new book Tocqueville’s Discovery of America, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Refreshments will be served at 5:30 p.m., and the talk will begin at 6 p.m. Reservations for this event are requested; please go here for more information and to sign up.

On Wednesday, 9 June, we’ll have a brown-bag lunch with Jim Downs of Connecticut College. His talk is titled “Sick from Freedom: The Unintended Consequences of the Civil War.” The discussion will begin at 12 noon. More info here.

And on Friday, 11 June, also beginning at noon, there will be another brown-bag lunch, this one with Jan Cigliano of Brown University. Jan will speak on “John Hay, Genius of Diplomacy (1838-1905).”

By Jeremy Dibbell

Just one event on the calendar this week, but we hope you’ll join us at 12 noon on Wednesday, 2 June for a brown-bag lunch with Erik Chaput of Syracuse University. Erik will speak on “Thomas Wilson Dorr and the Rhode Island Question.” The effects of the 1842 Dorr Rebellion – a movement in Rhode Island to expand suffrage beyond landowners that culminated in a People’s Convention, armed confrontation, and the extension of voting rights – reverberated throughout the North. In Massachusetts, the Rebellion influenced the results of the 1842 gubernatorial race between Democrat Marcus Morton and Whig John Davis.