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Watch the recording of this event, embedded below:
Explore 175 years of the Irish in Boston from the founding of the Charitable Irish Society in 1737, through famine relief efforts led by Capt. Robert Bennet Forbes at the helm of the Jamestown, to a mass migration movement, decades of community and institutional building, and a rise in political power. The exhibition is co-sponsored by the MHS and the Forbes House Museum.
See the exhibit’s companion website for an overview, timeline, and more videos about the Irish in Boston.
Watch this video for an overview of the exhibit by guest curator William M. Fowler, Distinguished Professor of History at Northeastern University.
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Registration is now closed. If you would like to make a donation in support of the event and the Center for the Teaching of History, please click on the registration link above.
Feast, sip, and celebrate history at the seventh Cocktails with Clio!
Thursday, 1 June 2017
6:00 PM
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
Columbia Point
Boston, Massachusetts
Tickets are $300 per person
We invite you to join us for a festive evening in support of the Center for the Teaching of History at the MHS featuring Jill Lepore in conversation with Robin Young. The evening will begin with cocktails in the pavilion space overlooking the harbor. A seated dinner will follow.
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of books including The Secret History of Wonder Woman and Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin. Robin Young is the co-host of Here & Now on 90.9 WBUR and NPR.
Become a sponsor of Cocktails with Clio
Our sponsors are crucial to the success of the event. As a result of their generosity, the Society’s educational and outreach efforts continue to expand. The additional funding provided by Clio enables the Center for the Teaching of History to offer a wide array of educational services including engaging workshops and hands-on student programs; online classroom tools; lesson plans and curricular resources; fellowships for students and teachers; and community partnerships. The Society also reaches out to students and teachers in its role as state sponsor of National History Day in Massachusetts. Become a sponsor and join with other history enthusiasts in demonstrating your commitment to promoting the study of American history and deepening our nation’s understanding of the diverse stories that define our past.
For more information, visit www.masshist.org/clio/sponsor or e-mail cknauff@masshist.org.
closeThe library closes at 2:30PM in preparation for the annual Strawberry Festival.
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New York City’s Central Park receives millions of visitors every year. A Description of the New York Central Park by Clarence C. Cook, published in 1869, is recognized as the most important book about the park to appear during its early years. This work has been republished with a new introduction by Maureen Meister that reveals Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s roles in the creation of the book, which served in part to champion their vision.
closeThe 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: The Irish Atlantic: A Story of Famine Migration and Opportunity.
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"They being stolne": Conflicting Views of Slavery and Governance in Early Massachusetts and Across the Empire
Holly Brewer of the University of Maryland leads a discussion of primary documents revealing Massachusetts’s contradictory views and practice on slavery. Compared to other British colonies, where elements of slavery were justified with broad and near-feudal rationales, she argues, Puritan Massachusetts resisted the right of kings and broadened the idea of consent. These ideas helped restrict slavery, even in the face of royal approval and promotion of slavery during the later 17th century and into the eighteenth century.
Holly Brewer is Burke Chair of American History and associate professor at the University of Maryland. She is currently finishing a book that situates the origins of American slavery in the ideas and legal practices associated with the divine right of kings, provisionally entitled Inheritable Blood: Slavery and Sovereignty in Early America and the British Empire. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for this research. Her first book, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority, won three national prizes.
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Watch the recording of this event, embedded below:
Cooking Boston: Ice Kings
Panelists Gus Rancatore, Jeri Quinzio, and Judy Herrell
Moderated by Kathleen Fitzgerald
Samples of ice cream from Toscanini's and Herrell's was available at the reception
From the ice harvesting business and Victorian ice cream parlors like Bailey’s to innovators like Steve’s, the Boston area has an unusual obsession with ice cream. Transplants from warmer parts of the country are often surprised to see ice cream shops still open— and full—on a frigid January night. Why is this area so devoted to ice cream and how have these institutions changed the country’s taste for frozen treats?
Cooking Boston: How the Hub Shaped the American Diet
This six program series will explore the culinary history of Boston and the impact the city has had on the American diet. In the first half of the 19th century, Boston had a reputation as the center for European taste and refinement. By the end of the 19th century, the Colonial Revival movement nationally popularized foods like Boston baked beans and Yankee pot-roast shifting Boston's image from refined to rustic. In the 20th century, Boston clung to two identities: that of thrifty Puritans and of cosmopolitanism through education. This created some remarkably bland food but also made the city fertile ground for a culinary revolution. In the 1960's, chefs like Julia Child and Joyce Chen brought the flavors of the world to America through Boston.
This series ran from March through June of 2017.
closeDuring the Civil War, all commercial relations between North and South were ruptured and declared treasonous. Nonetheless, a vigorous cotton trade between both sides re-emerged through the neutral port of Matamoros, Mexico. The politics of war were seemingly trumped by the “invisible hand” of the market. Professor Montejano approaches this conundrum by following the cotton stream from Texas to Massachusetts and making visible the many hands involved in this suspect wartime commerce.
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Edward Everett had a distinguished career at every level of American politics from the 1820s through the Civil War. His career reveals a complex man whose shifting political opinions, especially on the topic of slavery, illuminate the nuances of Northern Unionism. Everett’s political and cultural efforts to preserve the Union, and the response to his work from citizens and politicians, help us see the complexity of the coming of the Civil War.
closeThe 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: The Irish Atlantic: A Story of Famine Migration and Opportunity.
Cooking Boston: Final Courses
Join Mount Auburn docents for a walking tour of the cemetery to visit the graves of notable chefs, inventors, and confectioners. Mount Auburn is the final resting place of 19th-century cookbook author Fanny Farmer, chefs Joyce Chen and Gian Franco Romagnoli, chocolate makers Walter Baker and William Schrafft, hotel impresario Harvey Parker of Boston’s famed Parker House, and many more.
Cooking Boston: How the Hub Shaped the American Diet
This six program series will explore the culinary history of Boston and the impact the city has had on the American diet. In the first half of the 19th century, Boston had a reputation as the center for European taste and refinement. By the end of the 19th century, the Colonial Revival movement nationally popularized foods like Boston baked beans and Yankee pot-roast shifting Boston's image from refined to rustic. In the 20th century, Boston clung to two identities: that of thrifty Puritans and of cosmopolitanism through education. This created some remarkably bland food but also made the city fertile ground for a culinary revolution. In the 1960's, chefs like Julia Child and Joyce Chen brought the flavors of the world to America through Boston.
The series will run from March through June of 2017.
closeThe 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: The Irish Atlantic: A Story of Famine Migration and Opportunity.
On April 4, 1768, in the largest student strike at any colonial college, well over half the student body of Harvard College left school and went home in protest against new rules about class preparation. Many contemporaries found the cause trivial, but in the undergraduates’ own minds it was the culmination of months of tensions with the faculty. Through the lens of the daily journal entries of Stephen Peabody, the best surviving account of colonial college life, Conrad E. Wright will guide us through the relationships among students, faculty members, and administrators.
closeThe library closes early at 3:45PM in preparation for the annual meeting.
closeMHS Fellows are invited to the Society's annual business meeting. RSVP by e-mailing wlindsey@masshist.org or calling 617-646-0572.
closeThis project examines the transformation of southern political economy during the era of the American Civil War and African American emancipation, exploring how crisis and transition exposed weaknesses in slavery’s cruel paternalist bargain. Spanning the crisis from South Carolina’s secession in 1860 to the rise of Radical Reconstruction in 1867, it focuses on two central questions: how did white and black southerners recreate and transform relations of power in the chaos of civil war and emancipation? And how did the political economy of “getting by” in wartime shape the way old ties were exploded and new ways negotiated?
closeThe library closes at 3:00PM in preparation for an afternoon event.
closeThe 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: The Irish Atlantic: A Story of Famine Migration and Opportunity.
In the spring of 1967, the Boston Red Sox were coming off a season in which they had lost 90 games, and seemingly were locked in a state of mediocrity. Owner Tom Yawkey was discussing the need for a new ballpark and even hinted he might sell the club. Boston was in the midst of one of its worst economic downturns and fan interest had tapered off, with attendance barely half of what it had been in the 1940s. That all changed when a 100 to 1 longshot ballclub led by a rookie manager, Dick Williams, and a superstar left fielder, Carl Yastrzemski, won the American League pennant on the final day of the season after one of the closest races in history. “The Impossible Dream Red Sox” transformed the franchise forever.
View a temporary exhibition. View rare photos of the 1967 season taken by retired Boston Globe photographer Frank O’Brien, a collection of 1967 artifacts including Carl Yastrzemski’s jersey. The exhibition will be up from June 24 through July 8th - but as a special feature of our June 24th event, we will also have the 2004 World Series trophy for that day only! (Note this is a revision, we had previously expected to have three trophies but there has been a scheduling conflict)
Attend a panel discussion. Moderated by Red Sox historian Gordon Edes, panelists include authors Herb Crehan (The Impossible Dream 1967 Red Sox: Birth of Red Sox Nation), Bill Nowlin (The 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox: Pandemonium on the Field), and Tom Whalen (The Spirit of ’67: Cardiac Kids, El Birdos, and the World Series That Captivated America).
Image courtesy of Frank O'Brien
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In life and in death, slaves were commodities. Their monetary value was assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh explores the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives, including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, senior years, and death. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments and how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives.
closeThe origins and development of copyright practices in the eighteenth century were at once a local, national, and imperial project. While literary property itself was limited to English soil — and English citizens — across the Atlantic a group of colonial and Indigenous Americans sought to establish an alternative legal regime with substantial political ramifications, ramifications that reverberated in the debates over intellectual property in the early national and antebellum periods.
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Born and raised in a New England garrison town, Esther Wheelwright (1696–1780) was captured by Wabanaki Indians at age seven. Among them, she became a Catholic and lived like any other young girl in the tribe. At age twelve, she was enrolled at a French-Canadian Ursuline convent, where she would spend the rest of her life, eventually becoming the order’s only foreign-born mother superior. Among these three major cultures of colonial North America, Wheelwright’s life was exceptional: border-crossing, multilingual, and multicultural. Ann Little leads us through her life and the communities of girls and women around her.
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