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It is a quiet week ahead at the Society as we lead into a long weekend. Here are the programs on the schedule for coming week:

– Tuesday, 10 April, 5:15PM : This week’s seminar is part of the Environmental History series and features Andrew Robichaud of Boston University, with David Spanagel of Worcester Polytechnic Institute providing comment. “The Ice Trade: Frederic Tudor’s ‘Slippery Speculation’” reexamines the emergence and development of the ice trade in Boston and North America, described in 1806 by the Boston Gazette as a “slippery speculation.” What can the ice trade tell us about environmental, economic, political, and spatial change in nineteenth-century Boston and North America?

Seminars are free and open to the public; RSVP required. Subscribe to receive advance copies of the seminar papers. To RSVP: email seminars@masshist.org or call (617) 646-0579.

– Wednesday, 11 April, 12:00PM : Stop by at noon on Wednesday for a Brown Bag lunch talk with Kimberly Blockett of Pennsylvania State University at Brandywine, whose talk is titled “#sayhername: Recovering the Itinerant Ministry of Zilpha Elaw, 1820-1873.” During the Second Great Awakening, almost all denominations discouraged female preachers. Of course, some women did it anyway. Elaw ignored her husband and clergy, faced significant danger, and preached from Maine to Virginia. Then famous, now Elaw and her published Memoirs are mostly unknown. Blockett will discuss the silences of race and gender in the archive. This talk is free and open to the public.

The exhibition Yankees in the West is now CLOSED. The exhibition galleries remain closed through the month of April as we prepare for our next exhibit, Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815-1825, which opens to the public on Friday, 11 May.

Please note that the Society is CLOSED on Monday, 16 April, in observance of Patriots’ Day.