People did not become loyalists; it was the patriots who first began to craft an identity different from that of a loyal British subject.  In the struggle over identity and ideology, families were torn apart, friendships were broken, and lifelong residents of Massachusetts were forced to surrender their homes and possessions. Through letters, diaries, newspapers, propaganda, and historical sites, our workshop will introduce teachers to some of the people and places implicated in debates over loyalism between 1770 and 1785. 

This program is open to all K-12 educators.  Teachers can earn 45 Professional Development Points or 1 graduate credit (for an additional fee).

If you have any questions, please contact Kate Melchior at kmelchior@masshist.org or 617-646-0588.

Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood is not just a quintessential Victorian neighborhood of the 19th century but one that was infilled and planned as the premier residential and institutional development. in this photographic history of the Back Bay of Boston, Anthony M. Sammarco, with the contemporary photographs of Peter B. Kingman, has created a fascinating book that chronicles the neighborhood from the late 19th century through to today.

Guest curator and American furniture specialist Clark Pearce will lead visitors through the exhibition’s highlights while giving deeper context to the life and work of two extraordinary Massachusetts craftsmen, Isaac Vose and Thomas Seymour.

On November 23, 1849, in the heart of Boston, one of the city’s richest men, Dr. George Parkman, vanished. What resulted was a baffling case of red herrings, grave robbery, and dismemberment on the grounds of Harvard Medical School. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. John White Webster pioneered the use of medical forensics and the meaning of reasonable doubt. Paul Collins brings 19th-century Boston back to life in vivid detail, weaving together accounts of one of America’s greatest murder mysteries.

In 1775, New York City merchant Frederick Rhinelander told a friend, “if this province ever fights, it will be for the King.” Yet Rhinelander’s reasons were not based on New Yorkers’ blind loyalty to George III or Great Britain. Instead, for him and many of his friends, loyalism was a tool to challenge political opponents.

This workshop will explore the era and legacy of Reconstruction in American history and society, from the aftermath of the war to the role it plays in current issues today.  We will discuss the effects of Reconstruction on African American and Native American communities, its civic and legal legacies, memory of the period and of the violence that followed, and local heroes who fought for civil rights in the wake of the Civil War.

This program is open to all K-12 educators.  Teachers can earn 45 Professional Development Points or 1 graduate credit (for an additional fee).

If you have any questions, please contact Kate Melchior at kmelchior@masshist.org or 617-646-0588.

This talk focuses on the commercial and cultural connections between New Englanders and Parsis in Bombay from the 1770s to the 1850s. Commercially, the Parsis began to act as agent-brokers for Massachusetts merchants in the late 1780s. But Parsi Zoroastrian religious ideas and rituals were already known to at least a few readers in New England by spring of 1772, when the first European translations of Zoroastrian texts were sent, at Benjamin Franklin’s recommendation, to the Redwood Athenaeum’s librarian.

In 2003, the pivotal case of Lawrence v. Texas overturned the Texas Homosexuality Conduct Law, decriminalizing “homosexuality” and paving the way for marriage equality.  During the case, lawyers and justices of the United States Supreme Court relied heavily on historical precedent, referencing everything from colonial sodomy laws to interracial marriage in their exploration of fundamental rights. Working with partners at History UnErased, we will examine the road to Lawrence v. Texas and its legacy in American society. 

This program is open to all K-12 educators.  Teachers can earn 45 Professional Development Points or 1 graduate credit (for an additional fee).

If you have any questions, please contact Kate Melchior at kmelchior@masshist.org or 617-646-0588.

With the 1954 U.S. government-backed overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz, scholars have focused on ties between the State Department, the CIA, and el pulpo, the octopus, the United Fruit Company. This talk reveals how the Company's influence reached further to Boston-based congresspersons, Caribbean Basin dictators, and Guatemalan exiles.

This talk traces how the federal government surveyed immigrants in the early-20^th century and how such attempts helped solidify the racial boundary-making for the nation. By dissecting the tenuous connections between racist ideology, state power, and social science knowledge, this talk provides an empirical account of how categories such as race and ethnicity emerge from confusion and contradiction in knowledge production.

Virtually forgotten for 200 years, Isaac Vose and his brilliant furniture are revealed in a new exhibition and accompanying volume. Beginning with a modest pair of collection boxes he made for his localBoston church in 1788, Vose went on to build a substantial business empire and to make furniture for the most prominent Boston families. The exhibition and catalog restore Vose from relative obscurity to his rightful position as one of Boston’s most important craftsmen. Opening at the MHS on May 11, the exhibition will be on view through September 14.

The complementary book, Rather Elegant Than Showy (May 2018), by Robert Mussey and Clark Pearce, will be available for sale at the MHS.

Image: Couch, Isaac Vose & Son, with Thomas Wightman, carver, Boston, 1824. Historic New England, Gift of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1923.507); photograph by David Bohl.

Fashioning the New England Family explores the ways in which the multiple meanings of fashion and fashionable goods are reflected in patterns of consumption and refashioning, recycling, and retaining favorite family pieces. Many of the items that will be featured have been out of sight, having never been exhibited for the public or seen in living memory. The exhibition will give scholars, students, and professionals in fields such as fashion, material culture, and history the chance to see these items for the first time; encourage research; and, provide the possibility for new discoveries. For the public, it is an opportunity to view in detail painstaking craftsmanship, discover how examples of material culture relate to significant moments in our history, and learn how garments were used as political statements, projecting an individual’s religion, loyalties, and social status. It may allow some to recognize and appreciate family keepsakes but it will certainly help us all to better understand the messages we may have previously missed in American art and literature. 

The exhibition is organized as part of MASS Fashion, a consortium of eight cultural institutions set up to explore and celebrate the many facets of the culture of fashion in Massachusetts.