Calendar of Events

The first use of anesthesia. The first phone call. The first venture capital firm. The first same sex marriage. Massachusetts is home to more world changing innovations than almost anywhere else on the planet. Why has Boston been the key center of social and technological innovations? Can it maintain this momentum? What can community and business leaders and local governments do to nurture the factors that promote innovation? Local innovators, investors and influencers share their insights and perspectives on the history and future of innovation in this region.

This program will explore a recently published work of historical fiction set in Rome in the early 1860s, when the great fight to unify Italy into a country was raging. The protagonist, from Bangor, Maine, joins republicans bent on liberating Italians from absolute Vatican rule. There was also a group of Boston expatriates living there at the time, including a notable salon of sculptors.

“Developing Women” is a chapter of a book-in-progress on U.S. involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. This chapter focuses on the  “women in development” movement of the 1970s. It shows how indigent women came to be seen as potential “income generators” who were central to anti-poverty programs.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 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: Turning Points in American History.

When we think of love and passion, New England Puritans rarely come to mind. But that’s not what their writings reveal – on the contrary. “Love was their banqueting house, love was their wine,” John Winthrop wrote to his wife Margaret. Join us in a discussion of Puritan writings to discover just how fervently they loved in marriage and in faith. 

John Quincy Adams was the last of his kind—a Puritan from the age of the Founders who despised party and compromise, yet dedicated himself to politics and government. He was a brilliant ambassador and secretary of state, a frustrated president at a historic turning point in American politics, and a dedicated congressman who literally died in office—at the age of 80, in the House of Representatives, in the midst of an impassioned political debate. Adams’ numerous achievements—and equally numerous failures—stand as testaments to his unwavering moral convictions. John Quincy Adams tells the story of this brilliant, flinty, and unyielding man whose life exemplified political courage.

The consensus among historians has largely been that Massachusetts was unexceptional in its attitudes towards slavery; recent scholarship contends that the colony laid a foundation for enslavement and perpetuated its practices elsewhere. However, this paper emphasizes that there was considerable resistance to ideas of forced labor embedded within Puritan ideology as it offers a nuanced reading of the Massachusetts policy debates of the 1640s during the critical first period of slavery in the colonies.

This project sets the experiences of fashion, consumerism, and consumption within a cosmopolitan Atlantic world that carried the elegant fancies of fashionable London to the gentility of provincial British America. The garments and textiles housed at the MHS offer insights into the ongoing debate over the process of Anglicization in pre-Revolutionary America. Particular attention will be paid to the textiles associated with the Byles and Hancock families in Boston.

In the decades before the Civil War, opera in the United States became a major financial and infrastructural undertaking that generated enormous attention from fans and investors alike. As a result, opera generated intense conflict about the manner in which this entirely new scale of entertainment would be produced. This presentation traces how “a muss among the flunkies”--the haphazard strikes of anonymous choristers and instrumentalists--grew into the nation's first performers' unions and protective associations, which in turn continue to shape our contemporary ideas and practices of creative work.

Kyle Jenks, a James Madison reenactor, will discuss Elbridge Gerry’s criticism of the Constitution.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 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: Turning Points in American History.

In 1861, the transcontinental telegraph was completed, allowing signals to be transmitted through wires from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This system, often overshadowed by the transcontinental railroad, advanced three great projects of American history: expanding capitalism, building the state, and conquering nature with technology. This essay focuses on the models of capital accumulation employed in building the telegraph and on the financial models and environments that made regional telegraph networks with different features.

Senator, statesman, presidential advisor, and presidential candidate by popular demand, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and his national political career that stretched from the 1930s to the 1970s have up to now escaped biographical treatment. During the height of the Cold War, Lodge was consistently at the epicenter of power, whether in the Senate, Saigon, or his bipartisan roles serving four successive presidents from Kennedy to Nixon.

Boston has been ambitious and innovative in thinking about transportation, we were the first American city to build a subway and the Big Dig was the largest urban infrastructure project in American history. Today, the metro area boasts one of the highest percentages of commuters that use public transit in the nation and the population is growing. However, despite this groundbreaking history and widespread use, public transportation in Boston is facing serious challenges. Brian Shortsleeve, the Chief Administrator for the MBTA, will discuss the steps the T is taking to control expenses while providing improved service. He will be joined by James Rooney and Chris Osgood for a discussion of the history of the MBTA, how the current situation came to be, and what we can expect in the future.

The use of ether as an anesthetic may have been the greatest innovation American has given the world, its first use in surgery and the revolution it produced will be explained by Peter Drummey.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 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: Turning Points in American History.

As we approach an election that promises far reaching ramifications, we will look back at previous periods of tumult in American democracy. We find ourselves in a volatile moment in which globalization and the rise of the information economy have created great wealth but have also swept out the financial underpinnings of working class communities. A portion of the population feels unmoored and this coupled with a rise of nativist sentiment, violence between police and the public, and inflammatory political rhetoric has been testing our democracy.

Following a reception, a panel discussion will explore the legacies of four previous presidential elections and the question of what this history suggests for our country’s current trajectory. Our panelists, led by Ted Widmer, will discuss the election of 1860, which took place as the country approached disunion; the election of 1928 on the heels of the first Red Scare; the election of 1952 in the midst of McCarthyism; and the election of 1968, which was marred by assassinations, protests, and war.

Panelists:

• Carol Bundy, author
• Michael A. Cohen, Boston Globe columnist and author
• Lisa McGirr, Professor of History, Harvard University
• James T. Patterson, Ford Foundation Professor of History emeritus, Brown University
• Ted Widmer, Senior Fellow, Watson Institute, Brown University

There is a pre-talk reception at 5:30 pm. The panel discussion will begin at 6:00 pm.

The rapid rise of industrialization and immigration during the 19th century greatly affected American society, especially in major cities such as Boston. Faced with the prospect of an unskilled or semi-skilled work force, many reform leaders sought out ways to provide the craft training that could benefit the well-being of the individual and society at large. In the 1870s, after 200 years of academic instruction, the Trustees of the Eliot School decided to explore more experimental modes of education to meet the new needs of its community. The School provided manual arts training for students of many backgrounds—from young boys and girls, to upper and middle class hobbyists, to immigrants seeking vocational education. Gadsden will place the efforts of the Eliot School in a larger context, exploring how the School related to rise of manual arts training and the advent of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Borne by the same ideas that founded Spiritualism in the nineteenth century, spirit photographs are joint-portraits achieved posthumously, without use of a corpse, wherein the bereaved are visually united with the deceased. These enchanted mementos are said to have been ‘invented’ in 1861, in Boston, Massachusetts, by William H. Mumler. Spirit photographers typically worked with individuals who claimed mediumistic qualities in order to enable the appearance of the magical ‘extras’ of the deceased. The majority of mediums were women and the contributions of women to the production of spirit photography have been often limited to such enabling activities. Felicity Hamer argues for a more foundational placement of women within the narrative of personal mourning rituals.

Photo: Mrs. Helen F. Stuart, Woman at Table with Male Spirit, c. 1865. William L.Clements Library, University of Michigan 

Are you a teacher who is tired of assigning the same old history paper year after year? By applying National History Day methodologies in the classroom, you can transform the “dreaded” history project into an imaginative, engaging, and meaningful history experience. Using the broad theme of “Taking a Stand in History” as a springboard, you’ll explore how to approach primary source research in special libraries and archives through a range of historical documents, including letters, diaries, songs, petitions, and government records.

This program is open to Educators and students in grades 5-12. Teachers can earn 10 PDPs.

Date: October 22, 2016

Time: 9:00am - 4:00pm

Fee: $10 for teachers; FREE for students

To Register: Complete this registration form or contact the MHS education department: dbeardsley@masshist.org; 617-646-0570.

Program Highlights

• Explore letters, diaries, and images from the Society's collection and participate in a hands-on activity that will engage your detective skills.
• Lean more about Massachusetts History Day and how to participate in the program.
• Take a behind-the-scenes tour of MHS and our current exhibition Turning Points in American History.

This chapter is drawn from Professor Capó’s forthcoming book, Welcome to Fairyland, which chronicles the transnational forces that helped shape Miami's queer world from 1890 to 1940. In this chapter, Capó traces how urban authorities policed the perceived "suspect" sexualities of Miami's temporary and permanent settlers from the Bahamas and how their increased migration similarly informed gender and sexual norms on the archipelago.

 America's First Ladies are iconic examples of such indispensable leadership qualities as resilience, courage, focus, and agility. Author, historian, and national speaker Jacqueline Berger goes behind the scenes with pictures and stories that bring history to life and uncover this remarkable "sorority of women." Discover the real lives of ordinary women—wives, mothers, and daughters—who lived extraordinary lives both inside the White House and out. 

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 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: Turning Points in American History.

In New York City in 1793 Henry Bedlow was tried for, but not convicted of, the rape of Lanah Sawyer. This paper questions the success of the civil lawsuit for seduction that Sawyer’s step-father, John Callanan, brought one year later. The case offers a window into the use of civil law in sexual assault cases and prompts readers to consider how women struggling for recourse can become pawns in battles between men over money and masculine honor.

How did northern investors, financial markets, land speculation, and the law shape the dynamics of Indian dispossession, territorial expansion, and slavery in the Deep South during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? This research uses the Yazoo land sales to explore these questions. By providing a deep history of the Yazoo sales that focuses on the motives, strategies, and networks of speculators in Yazoo lands, as well as the particular political and economic context from which the sales emerged and in which their legal afterlife unfolded, this project offers new insights into the transformation of the Southeastern borderlands and emergence of the Cotton Kingdom.

Every four years, millions of Americans find themselves asking why they choose their presidents through the peculiar mechanism called the Electoral College―an arcane institution that narrows election campaigns to swing states and can permit the loser of the popular vote to become president. The Electoral College has had critics since the early nineteenth century, and over the years Congress has considered hundreds of constitutional amendments aimed at transforming the electoral system. Alex Keyssar traces the origins of the Electoral College as a much wrangled-over compromise among delegates to the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention who had no previous experience with electing a chief executive.

Explore presidential campaign propaganda from our nation’s first election to twentieth-century battles for the White House. Participants will examine documents and artifacts and discuss different strategies used to appeal to voters during specific campaigns. Using documents from three different centuries, we can investigate the issues that have resonated with Americans over time, and discuss how and why some of these subjects continue to serve as topics of debate in the 2016 election cycle

This program is open to educators of all grade levels. Teachers can earn 22.5 PDPs and/or one graduate credit (for an additional fee).

Dates: November 5, 2016

Time: 9:00am - 4:00pm

Fee: $25 per person (to cover materials and lunch)

To Register: Complete this registration form or contact the MHS education department: dbeardsley@masshist.org; 617-646-0570.

Maypoles and mayhem marked the unruly reign of Thomas Morton, the obstreperous neighbor of the Puritan New England colonies.  Led by E.J. Barnes, this discussion will explore her comic story of Morton’s conflict with Massachusetts and Plimoth in Colonial Comics: New England, 1620-1750.  We will also read and discuss Morton’s own witty and perceptive account of life in early New England, New English Canaan.

Carol Bundy (The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835-64) will moderate this discussion with Fredrik Logevall, the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Professor of History at Harvard University. His book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History. Logevall will discuss his current book project, a biography of John F. Kennedy.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 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: Turning Points in American History.

Wendy Warren’s New England Bound reclaims the lives of long-forgotten enslaved Africans and Native Americans in the seventeenth century. Based on new evidence, Warren links the growth of the northern colonies to the Atlantic slave trade, demonstrating how New England’s economy derived its vitality from the profusion of slave-trading ships coursing through its ports. Warren documents how Indians were systematically sold into slavery in the West Indies and reveals how colonial families like the Winthrop’s were motivated not only by religious freedom but also by their slave-trading investments.

In 1808, John Palmer Parker inaugurated rapid changes to Hawaii’s economy by building a beef and hide industry that would facilitate the U.S. annexation of the archipelago. Lacher’s essay, “The Paniolos of Parker Ranch: Cattle Ranching on the Slopes of Mauna Kea,”  examines this site of environmental transformation and cultural exchange. Roberts’s paper, “A Dog’s History of Early New England: Indigenous Dogs in the Societies and Ecology of the Northeast,” argues that dogs should be considered as Native American livestock that were raised to fulfill a wide variety of tasks including serving as hunting partners and sources of meat. The essay further considers the mutal influences of European contact, the dog population, other wildlife, and human disease.

Of all the founding fathers, Ryerson argues, John Adams may have worried the most about the problem of social jealousy and political conflict in the new republic. Ryerson explains how these concerns, coupled with Adams’s concept of executive authority and his fear of aristocracy, deeply influenced his political mindset. How, Adams asked, could a self-governing country counter the natural power and influence of wealthy elites and their friends in government? Ryerson argues that he came to believe a strong executive could hold at bay the aristocratic forces that posed the most serious dangers to a republican society.

Join us for a fun and festive fundraising event that will feature portraits of founding fathers and other luminaries who shaped American’s Revolutionary period from the collections of the MHS. Enjoy a reception, peruse fabulous works of art, and learn about the artists and the people they portrayed. 

Tickets are $125 per person.

The Newburg Address as a turning point in American history is discussed, ensuring civilian control of the government.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 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: Turning Points in American History.

Most American universities that were founded before the Civil War profited from slavery. Some schools endowments were started with the help of family fortunes made from the slave economy while other colleges owned and sold people to bolster their financial position. Both before and after the Civil War, defenders of slavery and advocates of the inferiority of non-white peoples made their intellectual homes in American universities, even as they used these same sites to develop important arguments about the blessings of democracy. These complicated legacies are being critically reviewed and debated at institutions of higher education across the country. As Brown University's Committee on Slavery and Justice put it, "How do we reconcile those elements of our past that are gracious and honorable with those that provoke grief and horror?" And, critically, what role can a deeper understanding of history play in informing these conversations? Our program will explore these questions with two people actively engaged in the dialog.

Roughly 900,000 French Canadians left their homes in search of better opportunities in the U.S. between 1837 and 1929. Most of them settled in New England, where their ideas about nationalism and the doctrine of ultramontanism rocked the Catholic establishment in the last two decades of the 19th century. This paper explores the influence of immigration on larger debates over North American Catholicism. It examines the response of the New England episcopacy, whose Americanism helped to preserve the structure and ideas of the Irish-American religious establishment.

John Kaag--a disillusioned philosopher at sea in his marriage and career--stumbles upon a treasure trove of rare books on an old estate in the hinterlands of New Hampshire that once belonged to the Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. The library includes notes from Whitman, inscriptions from Frost, and first editions of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant. As he begins to catalog and preserve these priceless books, Kaag rediscovers the very tenets of American philosophy--self-reliance, pragmatism, the transcendent--and sees them in a twenty-first-century context.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 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: Turning Points in American History.

“The Country heer is plentiful,” Thomas Gorges wrote home to England from Maine, where he had been sent in 1641 to establish a government and legal system. Gorges’ forthright, vivid, and dynamic letters provide us with a unique window onto colonial New England just at a time when England was moving into civil war. Join Abby Chandler in exploring these rare first-hand accounts. 

This bold new history recovers an unknown American Revolution as seen through the eyes of Boston-born painter John Singleton Copley. Jane Kamensky masterfully untangles the web of principles and interests that shaped the age of America’s revolution. Copley’s prodigious talent earned him the patronage of Boston’s patriot leaders, including Samuel Adams and Paul Revere. But the artist did not share their politics, and painting portraits failed to satisfy his lofty artistic goals. An ambitious British subject who lamented America’s provincialism, Copley looked longingly across the Atlantic. When resistance escalated into all-out war, Copley was in London. The magisterial canvases he created there made him one of the towering figures of the British art scene: a painter of America’s revolution as Britain’s American War.

Riordan’s essay, “Revisiting Thomas Hutchinson: The Strengths and Weaknesses of Loyalist Biography” argues that loyalism’s deep colonial roots, wartime travails, and British Atlantic diaspora are its most important qualities. Hutchinson’s place at the center of our understanding of the subject causes us to lose critical aspects of the loyalist experience. Carrick’s essay, “‘The earlier we form good Connections the better’: David Greene's Loyalist Merchant Network in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” explores how some Loyalist refugees, like Greene, found ways to develop new prospects and connections while in exile. After returning to Boston in 1785 Greene used his social and commercial connections to the wartime enemy to make himself appealing in the new Republic.

This talk will examine how Radical Republicans such as Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens helped convert a radical social movement into a program for political change. It will illustrate how state formation and progressive constitutionalism during Radical Reconstruction were inspired by the abolitionist vision of an interracial democracy.

MHS Fellows and Members are invited to celebrate the season at the Society’s annual holiday party. Enjoy an evening of holiday cheer along with the annual tradition of reading the anti-Christmas laws. 

A conversation about black feminisms that will encompass issues of identity, class, and culture and pay tribute to the scholarship of Leslie Brown of Williams College. Ford is the author of Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. Hamlin is the author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II, while Lindsey’s forthcoming book is Colored No More: New Negro Womanhood in the Nation’s Capital.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 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: Turning Points in American History.

Old Cambridge is the traditional name of the early settlement of Newtowne, which served briefly as the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and then became the site of Harvard College. Building Old Cambridge traces the development of the neighborhood as it became a suburban community and bustling intersection of town and gown. The authors explore Old Cambridge’s architecture and development in the context of its social and economic history; the development of Harvard Square as a commercial center and regional mass transit hub; the creation of parks and open spaces; and the formation of a thriving nineteenth-century community of booksellers, authors, printers, and publishers that made Cambridge a national center of the book industry. Finally, they examine Harvard’s relationship with Cambridge and the community's often impassioned response to the expansive policies of successive Harvard administrations.

Devienne’s essay, “Shifting Sands: A Social and Environmental History of Los Angeles’s Beaches, 1920s-1970s” examines the beaches as urban spaces whose modernization had profound consequences for the working-class. The beach clean-up and enlargement turned a popular shoreline into a semi-privatized playground for the white middle class. Nelson’s essay, “Assembling the Metropolis, Arresting the Metropolis: Competing Unit Geographies of Boston and Its Region, 1890-1930,” approaches parks as landscapes that express attitudes toward community, polity, and territory. By examining Sylvester Baxter’s metropolitan parks and Benton MacKaye’s Bay Circuit, it explores the intellectual tensions between Progressivism and the radical cultural regionalism that followed.

Tamara Plakins Thornton delves into the life and work of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), a man Thomas Jefferson once called a “meteor in the hemisphere.” Bowditch was a mathematician, astronomer, navigator, seafarer, and business executive whose Enlightenment-inspired perspectives shaped nineteenth-century capitalism while transforming American life more broadly. Fleshing out the multiple careers of Nathaniel Bowditch, this book is at once a lively biography, a window into the birth of bureaucracy, and a portrait of patrician life, giving us a broader, more-nuanced understanding of how powerful capitalists operated during this era and how the emerging quantitative sciences shaped the modern experience.

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 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: Turning Points in American History.