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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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Thomas Nast defined American political cartoons in the decades following the Civil War. His illustrations popularized icons such as the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, and even the modern image of Santa Claus. This exhibition highlights Thomas Nast’s remarkable impact through a cartoon biography created by local artists.
Explore the online exhibition at www.masshist.org/thomasnast.
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This panel discussion brings together the histories of health, disease, and the environment to cast new light on key sites of Colonial American history. Molly Nebiolo’s research highlights how health and medical knowledge impacted the creation of early Atlantic cities. By examining the colonial history of promotional narratives, both written and spatial, her paper argues that health and well-being were fundamental ideas for the settlement of Philadelphia and Charleston. Camden Elliott’s paper recasts the history of the Stono Slave Rebellion through the lens of environmental history. Placing mosquitoes (and their pathogens) in a supporting role to a slave war in South Carolina, he investigates how yellow fever helped set the stage for resistance and malaria shielded maroons in the rebellion’s aftermath.
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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When James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as Mr. O, counting the nation's leading politicians and intellectuals among his admirers. And then, like so many meteoric American luminaries afterward, he fell from grace. Ogilvie's career featured many of the hallmarks of celebrity we recognize from later eras: glamorous friends, eccentric clothing, scandalous religious views, narcissism, and even an alarming drug habit. Author Caroyln Eastman, along with Sara Georgini, will discuss Ogilvie’s history, which is at once a biography of a remarkable performer and a story of the United States during the founding era.
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This paper considers Atlanta mayor Andrew Young’s shifting ideas about job creation and economic opportunity to investigate how Democrats abandoned their 1970s goal of full employment in favor of policies that promoted private sector job creation via economic growth in the 1980s. By conflating growth with opportunity, Andrew Young sought to stake a middle path between development interests and anti-poverty coalitions, between white and black voters, and between civil rights liberalism and supply-side liberalism. However, economic growth and its promise of opportunity proved to be an inadequate solution for the range of issues its proponents intended it to address.
The African 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.
As we begin to consider climate as an everyday problem, it's valuable to see how people did that in the past. With support from the Guggenheim Foundation, Joyce Chaplin is compiling and analyzing a database of manuscript notes about weather in early American almanacs,1646-1821, out of 10,578 almanacs from nine different archives or libraries. Her talk focuses on how people recorded the weather in numbers (including degrees Fahrenheit) and in words, ranging from “dull” to “elegant!” These notations are significant as records of a period of climate change, the Little Ice Age, also as records of how people made sense of and coped with that climatic disruption.
The Environmental History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. **This session does not have a pre-circulated paper.
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 2015, the Boston Federal Reserve found the median net worth for Black families in Boston was $8, in stark contrast to $250,000 for white families. This discrepancy is largely driven by the gap in home ownership. Join community activists and urban planners as they discuss Boston’s history of redlining and discriminatory housing policies, the complicity of the banks and the real estate industry, and the consequent legacy of segregation and racial wealth disparity. We will also identify some specific actions we can take to address the inequities in home ownership.
Moderator:
Adrian Walker, Columnist, The Boston Globe
Speakers:
Lewis Finfer, Co-Director, Massachusetts Communities Action Network; Stephen Gray, Associate Professor of Urban Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Image courtesy of "Mapping Inequality":
Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed January 14, 2021, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/
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Nathan Raab describes his years as the Sherlock Holmes of historical artifacts and he shows us what the past can tell us about the present. Raab shares some fascinating stories: spotting a letter from British officials that secured the Rosetta Stone; discovering a piece of the first electric cable laid by Edison; restoring a fragmented letter from Andrew Jackson that led to the infamous Trail of Tears; and locating copies of missing audio that had been recorded on Air Force One as the plane brought JFK’s body back to Washington. Every document and artifact uncovers a story—and offers new insights into a life we thought we knew.
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Non-conformist resistance to the Stuart Restoration is often told as the history of ministers, regicides, and other men who actively preserved their loyalty to political and religious ideals of the 1640s and 1650s. However, many of the ongoing activities necessary to preserve the movement were carried out by women. This paper explores women’s roles in the transatlantic kinship, religious, and veterans’ networks which enabled nonconformists to sustain themselves in the face of defeat and repression.
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.
Please join us to celebrate the Founding Members of the MHS Visionary Circle planned giving program. We will hear about core planned gift options from representatives at Cornerstone Advisors and offer an opportunity for attendees to ask questions.
Any guests who declare their intent to make a planned gift will be recognized as a Founding Member and receive a special welcome gift.
Please contact VP of Development, Maureen Nguyen with any questions at mnguyen@masshist.org or 617-549-6318.
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The most exciting find in the records of puritan minister Thomas Shepard (Cambridge, 1638-1649) are the voices of the women who came to tell him their stories of spiritual seeking. Serving women, elderly widows, young wives and mothers, daughters of powerful men—all told stories of heroic seeking that feature their independent labor in reading, praying, listening, asking questions, and making meaning in a world narrowed down to just the seeker and her God. Heroic Souls, by Lori Rogers-Stokes, brings you these women’s stories—their lives and passions, and the super-charged energy for change, discovery, and meaning that they embrace.
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Dr. Robert Krim, author of Boston Made: From Revolution to Robotics-Innovations that Changed the World, presents a fascinating journey through Boston’s innovation history. Looking at the range of Boston-born innovations that, over its 400-year history, have made Boston one of the world’s leading cities in innovation, Dr. Krim answers the question of why the city has remained innovative through its long history. He will describe in colorful detail the struggles the city—and its innovators—faced on their road to innovations which changed the nation or the world and will discuss how this unfettered innovative culture has helped the city reinvent itself after four devastating economic collapses.
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Caroline Healey Dall (1822-1912) and Charles Henry Appleton Dall (1816-1886) met in Boston where, as a teenager in Margaret Fuller’s Conversations, Caroline learned to ask “all the great questions of life.” The handsome but sickly Charles graduated from Harvard with Henry Thoreau and was influenced by Joseph Tuckerman’s ministry to the poor. Marrying in 1844, the couple struggled to find their footing as Charles took a series of ministerial jobs, each punctuated by a period of illness. When Charles left Caroline and their two children in 1855 to establish a Unitarian mission in Calcutta, drawn to the Brahmo Samaj and the Indian nationalist cause, his health improved. “Separated by half the earth,” historian Spencer Lavan writes, “their careers began to blossom.” Caroline emerged as a vehement writer and lecturer on abolition, women’s rights, and social science. Bose and Deese will effect a 21st-century reconciliation, putting into conversation a couple whose divergence led to lives of distinctive activism, documented in Caroline’s extensive journals held at the MHS.
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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During the late 19th century, the upstart sheet music firms known as Tin Pan Alley developed a revolutionary approach to publishing, constructing a system able to sell songs at a previously unimaginable scale and rate. Relying on New York’s central role in national performance networks to disseminate their compositions, this industry was defined by the tension between publishers’ attempts to create mass-marketing commodities, and the fast-moving, alcohol-drenched urban environments in which their products were required to thrive.
The Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture 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.