Massachusetts Historical Society

The MHS is closed Saturday, 21 December 2024, through Wednesday, 1 January 2025.

Events

The MHS offers an engaging roster of programming to foster historical knowledge and we welcome everyone to attend, question, and contribute. We provide a forum for debate; host a variety of events that delve into the complexities of history; and encourage people to share their observations, interpretations, and ideas. 

Upcoming Events

“Justice for Myself and Children:” Navigating Child Support Cases between Freedwomen and Former Enslavers in the Post-Emancipation South
“Justice for Myself and Children:” Navigating Child Support Cases between Freedwomen and Former Enslavers in the Post-Emancipation South
Hybrid
Tuesday, January 14, 2025 10:00 PM - 11:15 PM EST
We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
At MHS
Monday, February 3, 2025 11:00 PM - 12:00 AM EST

This is a hybrid event. FREE for MHS Members. $10 per person fee (in person). No charge for virtual attendees or Card to Culture participants (EBT, WIC, and ConnectorCare). The in-person reception starts at 5:30 and the program will begin at 6:00.

Register to attend in person

Register to attend online

In her book We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson examines the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women.  Force—from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt—has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people since the days of the American and Haitian Revolutions. In conversation with Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, Carter Jackson will discuss force alongside other vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away. 
 

This program is part of the annual MHS Speakers Fund lecture series. The MHS Speakers Fund supports talks with leading scholars of American history who advance the mission of the Society by nationally contributing to a deeper public understanding of the American experience. The MHS Speakers Fund was started by the generous gifts of Charlie and Kitty Ames. 

An Evening with David Rubenstein: John B. Paine, Jr. Annual Lecture on the History of Business & Innovation
An Evening with David Rubenstein: John B. Paine, Jr. Annual Lecture on the History of Business & Innovation
Hybrid
Tuesday, February 11, 2025 11:00 PM - 12:00 AM EST

This is a hybrid event. FREE. The in-person reception starts at 5:00 and the program will begin at 6:00.

Register to attend in person

Register to attend online

Join us for the inaugural John B. Paine, Jr. Annual Lecture on the History of Business and Innovation with a very special guest. David Rubenstein is the Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of the Board of Carlyle Group Inc., a global investment firm and leader in private equity. Rubenstein will be in conversation with Dr. Lizabeth Cohen, the Howard Mumford Jones Research Professor of American Studies at Harvard University. Together, they will discuss Rubenstein’s New York Times bestseller How to Invest: Masters on the Craft.

David Rubenstein is one of the most trusted voices in the investment world. He is the CEO of the Major League Baseball team the Baltimore Orioles and the Chairman of the Boards of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Gallery of Art, the Economic Club of Washington, and the University of Chicago, among other philanthropic endeavors. In How to Invest: Masters on the Craft, Rubenstein interviews the biggest names in finance to discover the time-tested principles, hard-earned wisdom, and indispensable tools that guide their practice.​

Dr. Lizabeth Cohen is a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History at Harvard. From 2011–18 she was the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Among many awards and honors, Cohen has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

John B. Paine, Jr. (1901-1976) was an investment advisor and attorney, and served as a Trustee of the Massachusetts Historical Society, where he was the Treasurer from 1957 to 1970. His papers are held at the MHS.

Boston to Guangzhou & Back: Perspectives & Legacy of the U.S.-China Trade, 1790-1850s
Boston to Guangzhou & Back: Perspectives & Legacy of the U.S.-China Trade, 1790-1850s
In Person (not at MHS)
Tuesday, February 18, 2025 2:00 PM - 9:00 PM EST

This is an in-person event at the Forbes House Museum, Milton, Massachusetts. The cost to attend is $25 and includes breakfast and lunch.

Register to attend in person

The newly independent United States began trade with China in 1784. U.S. consumers craved Chinese products such as tea, porcelain, and silk. To meet high demand, merchants in Boston and Salem traded silver, ginseng, and furs. Later, they illegally brought opium into China.

Join us to explore the history of China-U.S. trade through a local lens, starting with the Early U.S. Republic and running through the Opium Wars. We will tour the Forbes House Museum and model their place-based school programming for grade 5-12 students. We will explore primary source sets with documents, artifacts, and illustrations that explore multiple Chinese and U.S. perspectives on the benefits of trade and its ramifications. Finally, we will discuss the impact and legacy of the opium trade: for Chinese society, for China-US relations, and for the Boston merchants who profited from it.

This workshop is presented by the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Forbes House Museum, and the Five College Center for East Asian Studies. The first 20 teachers to register will receive a rebate to cover the $25 workshop cost on the condition that the registrant attends the workshop. The rebates will be given out after the workshop and are provided by the Five College Center for East Asian Studies.

If you have any questions, please email us at education@masshist.org. 

Reproductive Healthcare and Conceptions of Childbirth in Early America - A Panel Discussion
Reproductive Healthcare and Conceptions of Childbirth in Early America - A Panel Discussion
Online
Thursday, February 27, 2025 10:00 PM - 11:15 PM EST

This is an online event.

This panel brings together two projects on reproductive healthcare and childbirth in early America. As Nora Doyle’s work shows, scholars of early American and Atlantic World history have shown particular interest in the link between perceptions of childbirth pain and the nascent concept of race. Yet by focusing primarily on racial ideology formation, historians have missed opportunities to understand the rich medical cultures in which these women were participants and practitioners. Doyle’s paper focuses on the medical cultures of Native women in early North America to show that these women were concerned about painful and difficult deliveries and therefore availed themselves of a variety of medical techniques and practitioners to manage their birth experiences. Jennifer Reiss’s paper places early American medical and social approaches to impregnation, gestation, parturition, and mothering in the context of early American disability history. It argues that both the male dominated, professionalizing, medical community and women themselves understood the female body and its reproductive labor as disabled and disabling, respectively. While providing a deep history for the current crisis in reproductive healthcare, the paper also suggests that thinking about reproduction as disablement should give additional meaning and nuance to how historians assess the concept of disability before the antebellum era.

Join the conversation at the History of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Seminar. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.

Purchasing the $25 seminar subscription gives you advance access to the seminar papers of all seven seminar series for the current academic year. Subscribe at www.masshist.org/research/seminars. Subscribers for the current year may login to view currently available essays.

 

Register to attend online

 Project-Based Learning in the Social Studies Classroom: An Introduction to National History Day in Massachusetts
Project-Based Learning in the Social Studies Classroom: An Introduction to National History Day in Massachusetts
Online
Thursday, February 27, 2025 11:00 PM - 1:00 AM EST

Online teacher workshop. $120, FREE for Boston Public School teachers, email psampson@masshist.org for the waiver. 

Locations, Dates & Times: 

1.      Virtual Sessions: Thursdays, February 27, March 13, March 20, March 27, and April 3, 6:00- 8:00 PM

2.      In-Person Session: Participants will choose one session to attend:

  • Saturday, March 8, 2025, 7:45-3:00 PM Leicester Middle School

  • Saturday, March 8, 2025, 7:45-3:00 PM Stoneham Central Middle School

  • Sunday, March 16, 2025, 7:45-3:00 PM Foxborough Middle School

3.      All Assignments due EOD Friday, May 2, 2025

Register to attend online

Project- based learning (PBL) builds student engagement, fosters effective communication and collaboration, and allows students to wrestle with complex questions.  The National History Day (NHD) model guides students in grades 6–12 through a semester of historical research and inquiry, interpretation, and creative expression. Harnessing the effectiveness of student-centered, project-based learning, NHD asks students to conduct primary and secondary source research on a historical topic and present their work as a documentary film, website, performance, paper, or exhibit.

During this course participants will explore the NHD program from the inside out and learn to use the tools of NHD to build and scaffold all of the skills-based content standards for History and Social Science Content in MA, including:

  • supporting independent student research

  • thesis development

  • primary and secondary source analysis

  • analyzing multiple historical perspectives

  • source citation

Participants will also learn firsthand, from students and teachers, how participation in History Day promotes student engagement, builds confidence, and encourages autonomy. Finally, participants will develop a manageable and realistic instruction plan to bring the power of History Day and PBL to their students.

The Legacy of Loyalism and Resistance in the North Atlantic - A Panel Discussion
The Legacy of Loyalism and Resistance in the North Atlantic - A Panel Discussion
Hybrid
Tuesday, March 4, 2025 10:00 PM - 11:15 PM EST

This is a hybrid event. The in-person reception will begin at 4:30 PM.

This panel examines the presence of loyalism in the North Atlantic following the American Revolution. Alexandra Mairs-Kessler’s work demonstrates how Bermuda, a colony whose population remained loyal to the Crown while simultaneously providing economic support to the rebellion, became home to loyalist refugees seeking to rebuild. Refugees William Browne and Bridger Goodrich highlight the tension between pragmatism and vengeance that was part of the loyalist diaspora. These two refugees from Massachusetts and Virginia took different paths during the war, and both their passive and active choices shaped their lasting attitudes regarding the post-war Atlantic World. This study explores how wartime experiences of violence and loss shaped the relationship between these two men and their new colonial home. Ross Nedervelt’s paper discusses how British officials and loyalists turned neighboring border-sea territories—specifically the Bahamas—into sites where imperial forces challenged the United States and its citizens’ sovereignty through resistance and subversive activities. Bahamian colonists, Seminoles, and Black maroons became strategic players in Britain’s counterrevolutionary operations during and immediately after the War of 1812, and an active threat to the United States’ westward expansion. The Bahamian, Seminole, and maroon groups’ armed resistance resulted in General Andrew Jackson and the U.S. army invading Spanish Florida, solidified the U.S.-British Empire border, and began the development of an American foreign policy intended to resist European interference in the western hemisphere.

Join the conversation at the Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.

Purchasing the $25 seminar subscription gives you advance access to the seminar papers of all seven seminar series for the current academic year. Subscribe at www.masshist.org/research/seminars. Subscribers for the current year may login to view currently available essays.

 

Register to attend in person

Register to attend online

“Conduct very bad”: The Agency and Resistance of Black Indentured Children within New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum
“Conduct very bad”: The Agency and Resistance of Black Indentured Children within New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum
Online
Thursday, March 6, 2025 10:00 PM - 11:15 PM EST
Making History Gala 2025
Making History Gala 2025
In Person (not at MHS)
Tuesday, March 11, 2025 10:00 PM - 1:00 AM EST

Join the MHS at the 2025 Making History Gala featuring National Book Award-winning author Nathaniel Philbrick. Tickets are now on sale for this event at the Fairmont Copley Plaza, 138 St. James Ave. Boston. 

Tickets

Nathaniel Philbrick is a New York Times bestselling author of American history. He won the National Book Award for In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. His books on the Revolutionary War have received national recognition. These titles include Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution; Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution; and In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown. His writing on the American Revolution presents fresh perspectives and fascinating character studies that shed light on key figures and moments, allowing us to consider anew this critical juncture in our nation’s past.

Proceeds from the Making History Gala support programming for K-12 students and teachers, collections preservation, free access to our library and exhibitions, and other resources.

After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart
After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart
Hybrid
Thursday, March 20, 2025 9:00 PM - 10:15 PM EST
From the “People’s University” to the “Mall for the Mind”: Public Libraries, Contingent Labor, and the New Economy
From the “People’s University” to the “Mall for the Mind”: Public Libraries, Contingent Labor, and the New Economy
Hybrid
Tuesday, March 25, 2025 9:00 PM - 10:15 PM EST
Social Reform and Identity Formation in the 17th Century - A Panel Discussion
Social Reform and Identity Formation in the 17th Century - A Panel Discussion
Hybrid
Tuesday, April 1, 2025 9:00 PM - 10:15 PM EST

This is a hybrid event. The in-person reception will begin at 4:30 PM.

This panel investigates forms of social control in 17th century New England. Arthur George Kamya’s paper examines the regulation of distilled liquor in 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony, exploring how authorities navigated competing moral, economic, and security imperatives. Initially targeting a cross-section of colonists, liquor laws evolved to focus on servants, Native Americans, and eventually African Americans. The colony's approach shifted from moral censure to pragmatic revenue generation, with officials using fines and licenses to fund government operations. Kamya’s study illuminates how alcohol regulation became a tool of social control, state-building, and the construction of racial hierarchies in colonial New England, offering insights into the complex interplay between commerce, governance, and identity formation in early America. As discussed in Alice King’s work, Connecticut adopted a notable strategy towards certain Indigenous populations during the initial decades of settlement, attempting to control and exploit Native communities by turning them into colonial tributaries who would provide essential supplies, wampum, and military aid. King’s paper considers the evolution of tributary politics at the end of the seventeenth century after the Dominion of New England and Glorious Revolution had destabilized colonial authority and left colonists vulnerable to attack by French and Native forces, including the Wabanaki Confederacy during King William’s War, 1689-1697, when Connecticut leaders sought to raise soldiers for New England’s defense from these historic tributary communities.

Join the conversation at the Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.

Purchasing the $25 seminar subscription gives you advance access to the seminar papers of all seven seminar series for the current academic year. Subscribe at www.masshist.org/research/seminars. Subscribers for the current year may login to view currently available essays.

 

Register to attend in person

Register to attend online

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We are pleased to participate in the Card to Culture program, a collaboration between Mass Cultural Council and the Department of Transitional Assistance, Massachusetts Health Connector, and Women, Infants & Children (WIC) Nutrition Program by extending discounts to EBT, WIC, and ConnectorCare cardholders. Cardholders are eligible for free or discounted entry at our public program events, including both virtual and in-person programs. There are no restrictions on the number of times an individual can present a card for admission and no restrictions on the number of tickets held per event (except for fundraising and cultivation events). See the full list of participating organizations offering EBT, WIC, and ConnectorCare discounts.

Our programs take place in person as well as virtually via Zoom or YouTube. All online programs are in English and have closed captioning enabled through Zoom or YouTube. If you would like to attend a program in person and are in need of accommodations, please register early and note your accessibility needs so we can make attendance feasible.  If you need ASL interpretation, please register at least two weeks in advance, to ensure time to secure an interpreter.

Donor And Member Events

The MHS hosts events throughout the year to thank our various donor groups. Members receive special invitations to exclusive events.

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Author Talks

The MHS keeps abreast of emerging trends in American history. Throughout the year, we host authors to speak on a variety of topics related to American and Massachusetts history. (Past event recordings available.)

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Panel Discussions & Special Events

The MHS offers a range of programs including lectures, panel discussions, gallery tours, and special events led by notable speakers, public figures, and scholars.

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Seminars

The MHS organizes seven seminar series that bring together a diverse group of scholars and members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated academic paper.

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Brown Bags

The MHS offers more than two dozen brown-bag lunch programs each year. These programs are free of charge and open to all.

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Workshops

The MHS develops and implements educator workshops on a variety of American history topics. 

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