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Watch the recording of this event, embedded below:
Watergate was a sea change in American politics. But even as a presidential scandal gripped the nation, there were remarkable displays of political courage, as Republicans and Democrats found ways to work together for the good of the nation, and wrote new rules to ensure transparency and integrity. What can we learn from Watergate? Specifically, what can we learn from the people who stood up, stepped forward and spoke out against wrongs that they saw within their own party and among their friends? How can this help us understand the role of collaborationists in the past and today and the need for political courage. Join us for a conversation between John Dean, former White House Counsel to President Richard Nixon who was implicated in the Watergate scandal but later testified against Nixon; William Weld, former Massachusetts Governor and US presidential candidate, who began his legal career as a counsel on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry staff for the impeachment process against Richard Nixon in 1974; and historian Edward Widmer.
Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.
Image: Leffler, Warren K, photographer. House Banking Committee hearing on Watergate Incident / WKL. Washington D.C, 1972. [10/12/72 12 Oct] Photograph (www.loc.gov/item/2020631032/).
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John Adams consumed a lot of Chinese tea. He especially appreciated the medical benefits associated with the hot beverage. In a 1757 diary entry, he wrote that "nothing but large potions of tea" could extinguish his heartburn. How did Adams know that Chinese tea cured heartburn? Why did he believe that nothing else was as effective? This talk examines the ways medical ideas transferred across the world during the eighteenth century.
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Watch the recording of this event, embedded below:
Image courtesy of the Boston Red Sox
In this 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, join Boston Red Sox historian Gordon Edes and a panel of distinguished authors to discuss the role of Major League Baseball players from Boston in the conduct of that historic conflict. The story touches upon Ted Williams, a Naval flight instructor who would later fly combat missions for the Marines in the Korean War, but also tells of compelling acts of sacrifice and bravery performed by other big-leaguers from Boston, including Si Rosenthal and Earl Johnson of the Red Sox and Warren Spahn of the Braves.
Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.
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Political cartoons have long served to provoke public debate, illustrating opinions of the day for the masses. From early in the 19th century, arguments over voting rights—who votes and who counts the votes—have been depicted in cartoons, especially with the rise of illustrated newspapers and magazines with a national circulation before the Civil War.
Featuring examples of published cartoons from the MHS collections as well as other libraries and foundations, this exhibition illustrates how cartoonists helped to tell the story of voting rights in the United States. In addition to many drawings by Thomas Nast, the most influential American political cartoonist in the decades following the Civil War, this exhibition features modern reinterpretations of these topics by editorial cartoonists, including Herblock (Herbert Block), Tom Toles, Bill Mauldin, and the work of current Boston-area artists.
Explore the online exhibition at www.masshist.org/whocounts.
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The Plimoth colonists were a diverse group of Separatists and Anglicans, English and Dutch, some religious and some not! They brought with them varied music experiences, and Plimoth Colony heard not only psalms but also catches, ballads, and dance tunes. We'll follow the settlers from England to religious refuge in the Netherlands and onward to the early years of Plimoth. You'll hear music of the Elizabethan tavern and theater, spirited drinking songs, Dutch love songs, psalms from Sternhold & Hopkins’ Whole Booke of Psalmes, and traditional English country dance tunes.
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Calling all graduate students and faculty! Please join us at our eleventh annual Graduate Student Reception for students in history, American Studies, and related fields. This year we invite you to join a virtual gathering to learn about the resources the MHS offers to support your scholarship, from research fellowships to our seminar series.
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A key figure in American foreign policy for three decades, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts, a well-heeled Eastern Establishment Republican, put duty over partisanship to serve as advisor to five presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford and as United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Vietnam, West Germany, and the Vatican. Historian Luke A. Nichter gives us a compelling narrative of Lodge’s extraordinary and consequential life and his immense political influence.
Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.
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The American Revolution was waged not only on the battlefield, but in the realm of culture. American homes and the wartime violence within them—particularly directed against women—were prominent subjects in novels and historical paintings. Reimagining women’s interactions with British soldiers solely as relationships of violence and deception, not volition, these narratives promoted a gendered vision of wartime domestic invasion and violation that would, in memory, come to define the war’s devastation and contribute to emergent ideas about the meaning of independence.
The Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.
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Daniel Chester French is America's best-known sculptor of public monuments, having created the statue for the Lincoln Memorial, the John Harvard statue, and The Minute Man in Concord. This new biography combines rich personal details from French's life with a nuanced study of his artistic evolution. It explores French’s diligent dedication to perfecting his craft with beautiful archival photographs of his life and work.
Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.
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In the years before the Civil War, Boston was at the forefront of numerous American radical and reform movements. At the same time, the city was also a site of contestation over which reforms should take priority. Although these tensions could at times grow heated, this talk examines the ways that the relationship between the abolitionist and the early labor (or “social reform”) movements in Boston was marked by conversation and cooperation as much as competition, revealing an overlap of personnel and ideas that in many ways grew stronger as the country headed towards an irrepressible conflict over slavery.”
Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.
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Crowd control technologies—turnstiles, bleachers, stanchions, and seats—channel bodies through the spaces of cultural performance: theater, music, and sport. The increasing rationalization and standardization of crowd control in the early 20th century corresponds with a critical and popular understanding of crowds as dangerous and destabilizing. This paper mines archival evidence to show how industrial-age crowd control was framed as technology that ordered masses (into lines or rows), thereby rendering masses orderly (cooperative, docile, and non-threatening).
The Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture Seminar invites you to come join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.
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The rise of the Religious Right has coincided with the privatization movement in public schools. While some may feel that this is coincidental, there is reason to believe there is a directly causal relationship between these two factors. Two scholars, from different disciplines, will discuss how their work comes together to help explain the history and current state of efforts to diminish, if not dismantle, the American public education system. Katherine Stewart has written on the rise and increasing power of the Religious Right in her book The Power Worshipers. She will be joined by Diane Ravitch who has written extensively on education and, in her recent book Slaying Goliath, explores the history of the school privatization movement and the efforts to oppose it.
Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.
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