Join the Adams Presidential Center in partnership with Revolutionary Spaces for an engaging conversation exploring the remarkable leadership and enduring contributions of John and Abigail Adams and their relevance to America today. Renowned historians and civic education leaders Colleen Shogan, PhD, and Kurt Graham, PhD, will come together at Boston’s historic Old South Meeting House for an insightful discussion of the Adams family’s leadership, civic values, and lasting impact on our constitutional democracy.

Dr. Shogan will also introduce In Pursuit: Lessons of American Leadership, an America 250 project featuring essays on leadership lessons from presidents and first ladies, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Pulitzer Prize-winning historians, military leaders, and other iconic Americans. She will share highlights from the essays focused on the extraordinary leadership of John and Abigail Adams, as well as John Quincy Adams and Louisa Catherine Adams, offering fresh perspectives on how their experiences and leadership lessons continue to resonate today.

Two groups arrive on the North American coast to begin new lives: the Puritans and the Cavaliers, names and ideologies born in the bloodshed of the English Civil War. Ryan J. Woods sits down with historian David Reynolds to explore these ships’ dueling images and their legacies, also this acclaimed author’s processes for research and writing about America’s history.

Join us for a conversation with author of Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, Sam Dalrymple. The discussion will explore the history and consequences of five pivotal partitions in modern Asia, examining how the division of territories and communities shaped the region’s political landscape, identities, and enduring conflicts.

The Boston Public Library welcomes award-winning author Ann Patchett to speak at the 2026 Maury A. Bromsen Lecture. Patchett is joined in conversation by her friend and fellow author, Katrina Kenison.

Dr. Jonathan Golden is Senior Educator at OpenDor Media. He teaches at Hebrew College and is the founder of HeartStance Education Consulting.

Nathaniel Philbrick, author of "In the Heart of the Sea" and "Mayflower" turns his storytelling lens West to follow the gold as it moves from riverbed to countinghouse to halls of power, revealing how the pursuit of gold shaped the development of the United States,

D. Stephen Long is Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University. He works in the intersection between theology and ethics and has published over fifty essays and twenty books.

He joins Boston University School of Theology to deliver a Lowell Lecture titled "The Crises of Liberal Democracy and the Response of Theopolitical Visions." His lecture will first examine if liberalism is the cause or the remedy to the democratic crises we face. In other words, Is liberal democracy the problem or the solution to our crises? Has liberalism contributed to it, or have the crises arisen because we failed to uphold liberalism?

Second, if liberalism is the cause then being postliberal, possibly by drawing upon a theopolitical vision, might be a remedy. Some theologians, philosophers, and politicians answer that because liberalism is the problem, its collapse with the rise of Brexit, MAGA, and Trumpism augurs an “interregnum” that will lead to a different form of political society, a postliberal one. Should that be a source of hope for people of faith or is such a vision too dangerous and even more reason to do all we can to uphold liberalism?

Emily Knox, expert on information access and intellectual freedom and censorship, joins Boston College to discuss book banning in public schools and libraries.

Emerson Professor Dr. Mneesha Gellman, artist Cedric Douglas, and Boston’s Chief of Arts and Culture Joseph Henry will consider how communities remember, revisit, and reimagine the stories that define them; and the roles that memory, art, and civic life play in shaping our understanding of the past and the future.

Dr. Mneesha Gellman is professor of political science in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts at Emerson College. She is a scholar of democratization and violence, and the author of numerous books and articles on human rights, memory politics, and education politics. She serves as an expert witness on Mexico and El Salvador in immigration courts. Dr. Gellman is the founder and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative, which brings a BA pathway to people incarcerated in Massachusetts.