Here is a look at what is going on at the MHS this week:

– Monday, 8 October, 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM: MHS Open House in conjunction with Opening Our Doors celebration in the Fenway Cultural District. Please note that the library will be closed for the day.

– Tuesday, 9 October, 5:15 PM: Panel: Native American Environmental History with Lisa Brooks, Amherst College; Strother Roberts, Bowdoin College; Ashley Smith, Hampshire College; Thomas Wickman, Trinity College, and moderator Cedric Woods, University of Massachusetts–Boston. This panel will explore the intersections of environmental history and indigenous studies—the questions that each field engenders in the other, as well as the perspectives that native and non-native scholars bring to their research as they traverse both fields. Questions of race, gender, geography, and sources enliven this growing body of scholarship. This is part of the Boston Seminar on Environmental History series. Seminars are free and open to the public. 

– Thursday, 11 October, 6:00 PM: Writing Presidential Biographies with Evan Thomas. The author of 9 books and a former writer and editor for Time and Newsweek, Evan Thomas is the first speaker in our new MHS Speaker Fund annual lecture series. Having published books on Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon, Clinton, and Obama, he will offer his insight into writing presidential biographies. A pre-talk reception begins at 5:30 PM; the speaking program begins at 6:00 PM. There is a $20 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders).

– Saturday, 13 October, 10:00 AM: The History & Collections of the MHS. Join us for a 90-minute docent-led tour of 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.

Stop by to see our new exhibition Fashioning the New England Family.  

There is a lot going on at the MHS this week including the opening of our next exhibition Fashioning the New England Family on Friday, 5 October.

– Tuesday, 2 October, 5:15 PM: The Protestant Cult of the Dead in New England, 1800-1848 with Erik Seeman, State University of New York at Buffalo, and comment by Kenneth Minkema, Yale University. Many 19th-century Protestants in New England held religious ceremonies venerating deceased family and friends, in addition to their orthodox worship of God. This paper examines women’s desires to connect with their deceased loved ones, and argues that this drove important developments in Protestant belief and practice. It shows how pious Protestants maintaining connections with the dead made séance Spiritualism a transatlantic sensation in 1848. This is part of the Boston Area Seminar on Early American History series. Seminars are free and open to the public.

– Wednesday, 3 October, 12:00 PM: Native Citizens: Race, Culture, & the Politics of Belonging, 1884-1924 with Lila Teeters, University of New Hampshire. As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, Native activists played an essential—yet overlooked—role in shaping constructions of American citizenship. Some pushed to harden the political boundaries separating Native nations from their American foil, while others sought to remove those boundaries completely. Still others sought a more permeable relationship. This talk traces those debates from the 1884 Elk v. Wilkins decision through the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. 

 – Wednesday, 3 October, 6:00 PM: American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era with Craig Bruce Smith, William Woods University. The American Revolution was not only a revolution for liberty and freedom; it was also a revolution of ethics, reshaping what colonial Americans understood as “honor” and “virtue.” As Craig Bruce Smith demonstrates, these concepts were crucial aspects of Revolutionary Americans’ ideological break from Europe, shared by all ranks of society. Focusing his study primarily on prominent Americans who came of age before and during the Revolution, Smith shows how a colonial ethical transformation caused and became inseparable from the American Revolution, creating an ethical ideology that still remains. A pre-talk reception begins at 5:30 PM; the speaking program begins at 6:00 PM. There is a $10 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders).

– Thursday, 4 October, 6:00 PM: Fashioning the New England Family: Sneak Preview Reception. MHS Fellows and Members are invited to the the opening of Fashioning the New England Family. The exhibition uncovers stories as told by various samples of clothing, fabric, accoutrements, and associated manuscripts—many shown for the first time. Join us and explore several family narratives as well as the cultural, social, and economic history of Massachusetts through the lens of fashion. This event is open only to MHS Members and Fellows.

– Friday, 5 October, 10:00 AM: Fashioning the New England Family opens to the public. The exhibition explores the ways in which the multiple meanings of fashion and fashionable goods are reflected in patterns of consumption and refashioning, recycling, and retaining favorite family pieces. Many of the items that will be featured have been out of sight, having never been exhibited for the public or seen in living memory. The exhibition is organized as part of MASS Fashion, a consortium of cultural institutions set up to explore and celebrate the many facets of the culture of fashion in Massachusetts. 

– Friday, 5 October, 12:00 PM: Liverpool, Slavery, & the Atlantic Cotton Frontier c. 1763-1833 with Alexey Krichtal, Johns Hopkins University. This talk follows the enslaved peoples who toiled on cotton estates in the Caribbean, Northeast Brazil and the American South, the planters who owned cotton plantations, the mariners who crossed the Atlantic basin shipping the fiber to Europe, and the merchants who linked enslaved producers to the Manchester manufacturers and fashion-orientated consumers in the Americas on a scale never see before, helping to usher in the first Industrial Revolution.

– Saturday, 6 October, 10:00 AM: The History & Collections of the MHS. Join us for a 90-minute docent-led tour of 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.

– Saturday, 6 October and Sunday, 7 October: Boston Occupied: The British Are Coming . . . Again! Join us as British Redcoats will land from tall ships at Long Wharf and march up State Street with drums beating and flags flying to “occupy” Boston as they did 250 years ago. Visit www.revolution250.org for more information.

Please note that the Library is closed on Monday, 8 October but the galleries are open from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM. Stop by our Open House in conjunction with Opening Our Doors celebration in the Fenway Cultural District,

Join us for a program at the MHS. Here is a look at what is going on this week.

– Monday, 24 September, 6:00 PM: Under the Starry Flag: How a Band of Irish Americans Joined the Fenian Revolt & Sparked a Crisis over Citizenship with Lucy Salyer, University of New Hampshire. In 1867, 40 Irish-American freedom fighters, outfitted with guns and ammunition, sailed to Ireland to join the effort to end British rule. Yet they never got a chance to fight. British authorities arrested them for treason as soon as they landed, sparking an international conflict that dragged the United States and Britain to the brink of war. Under the Starry Flag recounts this gripping legal saga, a prelude to today’s immigration battles. A pre-talk reception begins at 5:30 PM; the speaking program begins at 6:00 PM. There is a $10 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders). 

– Tuesday, 25 September, 5:15 PM: Radical Nonviolence & Interracial Utopias in the Early Civil Rights Movement with Victoria Wolcott, State University of New York at Buffalo and comment by Jason Sokol, University of New Hampshire.This paper examines how radical pacifists refined nonviolent direct action to challenge racial segregation and inequality in the United States. These activists adopted the methods of earlier utopian communities by living communally and practicing a prefigurative politics that called for immediate change. This seminar is part of the Boston Seminar on Modern American Society and Culture series. Seminars are free and open to the public.

– Thursday, 27 September, 6:00 PM: Race Over Party: Black Politics & Partisanship in Late 19th-Century Boston with Millington Bergeson-Lockwood. In late 19th-century Boston, battles over black party loyalty were fights over the place of African Americans in the post–Civil War nation. Party politics became the terrain upon which black Bostonians tested the promise of equality in America’s democracy. Most African Americans remained loyal Republicans, but a determined cadre argued that the GOP took black votes for granted and offered little meaningful reward for black support. These activists branded themselves “independents,” forging new alliances and advocating support of whichever candidate would support black freedom regardless of party. A pre-talk reception begins at 5:30 PM; the speaking program begins at 6:00 PM. There is a $10 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders). 

The Library is CLOSED on Wednesday, 26 September, for for a staff development event.

Visit www.masshist.org/events for upcoming programs.

This week at the MHS we have an author talk, our annual graduate student reception, and a discussion among hisotrians about the musical Hamilton. Details below:

– Tuesday, 18 September, 6:00 PM: If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection with Celeste-Marie Bernier of the University of Edinburgh. Bringing to light previously unpublished manuscript letters, essays, speeches, and photographs from Frederick Douglass and his sons, Charles Remond, Frederick Jr., and Lewis Henry Douglass, If I Survive casts Douglass in the role of dedicated family man and inspirational figure to his five children. This family biography as accompanied by these personal documents comprises the first extensive study of Frederick Douglass and his family’s fight for the cause of liberty during the Civil War and in the post-emancipation era.

A pre-talk reception begins at 5:30 PM; the speaking program begins at 6:00 PM. There is a $10 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders). 

– Thursday, 20 September, 6:00 PM: Graduate Student Reception. Calling all graduate students and faculty in history, American Studies, or any related field! Enjoy drinks and hors d’oeuvres as you meet students and professors from other universities working in your fields. Take a behind-the-scenes tour to learn more about the Society’s collections as well as the resources available to support your scholarship, from research fellowships to our six different seminar series.

The reception is free, but we ask that you RSVP by 19 September by e-mailing seminars@masshist.org or calling (617) 646-0579.

– Saturday, 22 September, 4:00 PM: Historians on Hamilton with Catherine Allgor, MHS; Lyra D. Monteiro, Rutgers University-Newark; Joseph M. Adelman, Framingham State University. The musical Hamilton has catapulted a founding father to the heights of popular culture. Three historians will explore this creative approach to discussing the stories of America’s founding, the conversations that have been created by this phenomenon, and how the excitement can be used to inspire the public to look at American history in greater depth.

A pre-talk reception bins at 3:30 PM; the speaking program begins at 4:00 PM. There is a $10 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders). 

Visit www.masshist.org/events for upcoming programs including Under the Starry Flag: How a Band of Irish Americans Joined the Fenian Revolt & Sparked a Crisis over Citizenship, an author talk on Monday, 24 September, and Radical Nonviolence & Interracial Utopias in the Early Civil Rights Movement, a seminar on Tuesday, 25 September.

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This week we have a pair of Brown Bag talks, an author talk, and the end of an exhibition. Details below:

– Wednesday, 12 September, 12:00PM : The first lunch talk this week is with C. Ian Stevenson of Boston University, and is titled “‘This Summer-Home of the Survivors’: The Civil War Vacation in Architecture & Landscape, 1878-1910.” In the decades after the Civil War, its veterans built communal summer cottages in waterfront locations to merge memory and leisure among their comrades and families. Through interdisciplinary lenses, this talk considers the ways veterans used architecture and landscape to heal their wartime trauma and preserve their scripted legacy.

This talk is free and open to the public.

– Wedensday, 12 September, 6:00PM : On the night of March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd gathered in front of Boston’s Custom House, killing five people. Denounced as an act of unprovoked violence and villainy, the Boston Massacre became one of the most familiar incidents in American history, yet one of the least understood. In “Boston’s Massacre,” Eric Hinderaker of the University of Utah revisits this dramatic episode, examining in forensic detail the facts of that fateful night, the competing narratives that molded public perceptions at the time, and the long campaign to transform the tragedy into a touchstone of American identity.

This talk is open to the public and registration is required with a fee of $10 (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders). Pre-talk reception begins at 5:30PM, followed by the speaking program at 6:00PM.

– Friday, 14 September, 12:00PM : “A Possible Connection between a Scandal and Susanna Rowson’s Last Novel” is the second Brown Bag of the week, this time presented by Steven Epley of Samford University. The talk will describe evidence in letters and public records suggesting that best-selling author Susanna Rowson may have based her last novel, Lucy Temple, at least in part on a scandal in which she was innocently but indirectly involved in Medford, Mass., in 1799.

As ever, this lunchtime talk is open to the public free of charge.

This is your last chance to view the current exhibition, Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825, which ends on 14 September.

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As we enter September and a new academic year, we see a bit of an increase in programming here at the Society. This is what is in store in the week ahead:

The Society is CLOSED on Monday, 3 September, for Labor Day. New normal hours pick up on Tuesday, 4 September.

– Wednesday, 5 September, 12:00PM : Stop in at midday for a Brown Bag lunch talk titled “Garrisonian Rhode Island: Reassessing Abolitionism’s Radicals.” In this talk, Kevin Vrevich of Ohio State University explores the place of Rhode Island, a center of William Lloyd Garrison’s “radical” abolitionism, in the larger antislavery network. As historians of abolitionism increasingly focus on continuities within the movement, Rhode Island offers an opportunity to reassess the place of the Garrisonians and to reconsider their contributions.

This talk is free and open to the public.

– Thursday, 6 September, 6:00PM : “100 Years of Education Henry Adams” is a public conversation with Natalie Dykstra of Hope College, William Decker of Oklahoma State University, and Natalie Tayor of Skidmore College. Henry Adams offers an account of his life and commentary on political and cultural events during the mid and late 19th century in the Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography The Education of Henry Adams. Join us to mark the centenary of both Adams’s death and the Education’s publication with a critical conversation on Adams and his best known work.

This talk is open to the public, registration required with a fee of $10 (no charge for MHS Members and Fellows or EBT cardholders). There is a reception that begins at 5:30PM, followed by the program at 6:00PM.

– Friday, 7 September, 12:00PM : “American Silver, Chinese Silverwares, and the Global Circulation of Value” is the title of the second Brown Bag this week which is presented by Susan Eberhard of University of California, Berkeley. Silver coin was the primary commodity shipped to China from the United States in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of which was reworked into silverwares by Chinese craftsmen for British and American buyers. This talk explores the different silver conduits of the American trade relationship with China. Far from a neutral medium, how were understandings of its materiality mobilized in cross-cultural transactions?

As ever, this lunchtime talk is free and open to the public.

– Saturday, 8 September, 10:00AM : The History and Collections of the MHS is a 90-minute 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: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825. There is only one more week for this exhibition which closes on 14 September. Be sure to see it before it’s gone!

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Welcome back to our weekly round-up of programs taking place in the coming days. Once again, this week is characterized by Brown Bag lunch talks, of which we have two for you. Here are the details:

– Monday, 27 August, 12:00PM : Thomas Whittaker of Harvard University starts the week with “The Missionary Republic: American Evangelicals and the Birth of Modern Missions.” The turn of the nineteenth century was a time of missionary mobilization for evangelicals in Britain, the United States, and continental Europe. This talk explains why Americans bought into the missions movement and how they domesticated it within a republican vision of civilization building on the frontier.

This talk is free and open to the public.

– Friday, 31 August, 12:00PM : Hannah Tucker of University of Virginia closes the week with “Masters of the Market: Ship Captaincy in the Colonial British Atlantic.” During the colonial period, captains acted as powerful auxiliaries for their vessel owners in markets far from the owners’ direct oversight. This talk explores why the economic services ship captains provided transformed as the Atlantic trading economy became more complex, capital intensive, and informed in the eighteenth century.

Once again, this talk is free and open to the public.

Don’t forget to come in and see our current exhibition, The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815-1825, on view until 14 September.

The Society is CLOSED on Saturday, 1September, and Monday, 3 September, for Labor Day. Normal hours resume on Tuesday, 4 September

Also, a reminder that beginning in September we are resuming evening library hours on Tuesdays. Every week on Tuesday, the library is open 9:00AM-7:45PM.

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After a very quiet week with naught on the schedule but a Saturday tour, we are back this week with a couple more programs happening in the days ahead. Specifically, we have pair of Brown Bag lunch talks as well as our Saturday building tour. Here are the details:

– Wednesday, 22 August, 12:00PM : Sunmin Kim of Dartmourth College leads the first Brown Bag this week. The talk, titled “Re-categorizing Americans: Difference, Distinction, and Belonging in the Dillingham Commission (1907-1911),” traces how the federal government surveyed immigrants in the early-20^th century and how such attempts helped solidify the racial boundary-making for the nation. By dissecting the tenuous connections between racist ideology, state power, and social science knowledge, this talk provides an empirical account of how categories such as race and ethnicity emerge from confusion and contradiction in knowledge production.

This talk is free and open to the public. Pack a lunch and come on in!

– Friday, 25 August, 12:00PM : The second Brown Bag talk this week is “‘A Brazen Wall to Keep the Scriptures Certainty’: European Biblical Scholarship in Early America,” with Kirsten Macfarlane of University of Cambridge. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European scholars made significant advances in the historical and critical study of the Bible, often with highly controversial and factious results. This talk will examine how such exciting but potentially subversive European scholarship was received and transformed by its early American readers, through a close study of the books owned and annotated by seventeenth-century readers in New England and elsewhere.

This talk is free and open to the public.

– Saturday, 26 August, 10:00AM : The History and Collections of the MHS is a 90-minute 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: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825.

N. B. – The teacher workshop scheduled for this 23-24 August, “Education: Equality and Access” is POSTPONED. Further information will be posted here when it is rescheduled.

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– Monday, 30 July, 12:00PM : Diego Pirillo of University of California, Berkeley, closes out the month with a Brown Bag talk. “The Heterdox Atlantic: Italian Heretics in Early America” presents the initial findings of a new project on religious radicalism in early America, which aims at recovering the transatlantic legacy of Italian Protestantism. Focusing on 17th- and 18th-century New England, the talk examines discussions on religious migration and liberty of conscience.

This talk is free and open to the public.

– Wednesday, 1 August, 12:00PM : The second Brown Bag talk of the week features Christopher Minty of the Adams Papers Editorial Project here at the MHS. Minty’s talk is titled “‘The Sons of Britain’: Partisanship & the Origins of the American Revolution in New York City.” In 1775, New York City merchant Frederick Rhinelander told a friend, “if this province ever fights, it will be for the King.” Yet Rhinelander’s reasons were not based on New Yorkers’ blind loyalty to George III or Great Britain. Instead, for him and many of his friends, loyalism was a tool to challenge political opponents.

This talk is free and open to the public.

– Saturday, 4 August, 10:00AM : The History and Collections of the MHS is a 90-minute 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: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825.

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– Wednesday, 25 July, 12:00PM : “The End of War: The Wabanaki Struggle with New England, 1722-1727” is a Brown Bag talk with Ian Saxine of Alfred University. This talk examines the Anglo-Wabanaki War of 1722-1727 in the American Northeast. It situates the conflict as the final resolution of a half-century of imperial crisis in the region. The talk argues the limits of indigenous, colonial, and imperial power influenced the war’s outbreak, the fighting, and its resolution.

This talk is free and open to the public.

– Wednesday, 25 July, 6:00PM : On November 23, 1849, in the heart of Boston, one of the city’s richest men, Dr. George Parkman, vanished. What resulted was a baffling case of red herrings, grave robbery, and dismemberment on the grounds of Harvard Medical School. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. John White Webster pioneered the use of medical forensics and the meaning of reasonable doubt. In “Bloody & Ivy: The 1849 Murder That Scandalized Harvard,” Paul Collins of Portland State University brings 19th-century Boston back to life in vivid detail, weaving together accounts of one of America’s greatest murder mysteries.

This talk is open to the public, registration required with a fee of $10 (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members or EBT cardholders). Pre-talk reception begins at 5:30PM, followed by the speaking program at 6:00PM.

– Thursday, 26 July : The teacher workshop “Immigration Policy in American History” has been POSTPONED. Please check back for further information about rescheduling.

– Friday, 27 July, 12:00PM : The second Brown Bag talk this week is with Katherine McIntyre of Columbia University. “Maroon Ecologies: Albery Allson Whitman and the Place of Poetry” follows the intertwining of race and ecology in Albery Allson Whitman’s 1884 The Rape of Florida through an analysis of colonial cartographic practices. Using maps to examine the cartographic representation of swamps and other wetlands that permeate the boundary between land and water, this talk opens questions about the porous ecologies of maroon communities and the poetics that follow from such ecologies.

This talk is free and open to the public.

– Saturday, 28 July, 10:00AM : The History and Collections of the MHS tour is a 90-minute 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: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825.