Past Events

In his talk, Michael Meeropol, son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg will be in conversation with Paul Solman, PBS NewsHour correspondent. They will examine the striking parallels—and crucial differences—between the Red Scare and the Trump era.

Join GBH Education for an inspiring evening that celebrates the transformative power of media in social studies education. This gathering will feature two panels that will both highlight the process GBH Education uses when making free educational resources and spotlight resources from PBS LearningMedia that help educators bring depth, diversity, and civic relevance to their classrooms. Come and enjoy free refreshments while you connect with the team from GBH!

Panel 1: The Power of Perspective: Transforming Social Studies Through Untold Narratives. Discover the award-winning U.S. History and Civics Collections on PBS LearningMedia, designed to illuminate America’s past while cultivating civic knowledge and responsibility. This session will showcase how these classroom-ready tools—developed in collaboration with historians, educators, and students—bring overlooked stories to the forefront and enrich traditional curricula.

Panel 2: Special Presentation and Screening: American Muslims: A History Revealed. Explore the newest additions to PBS LearningMedia through a special screening and discussion of American Muslims: A History Revealed. This powerful documentary series uncovers the rich, often untold histories of Muslims in the United States. Executive Producer Zaheer Ali will share insights into the creative process and how the series was crafted to resonate with today’s diverse learners.

Whether you're a classroom teacher, curriculum specialist, or education leader, this event offers fresh perspectives, practical tools, and meaningful dialogue to help you reimagine how history is taught—and who gets to be part of the story.

Stories from the Stage invites you to our Brighton studio for an evening inspired by the spooky season. You know that feeling — a noise you can’t explain, your heart starts to race, your stomach drops, and suddenly you’re covered in goosebumps. Some of these stories involve ghosts… others are simply strange, eerie, or delightfully unsettling — but all of them are true. Come be part of our live audience. You’ll laugh, gasp, and hear stories that just might make you wonder.

At Stories from the Stage, produced by GBH WORLD, ordinary people share extraordinary experiences that you will not soon forget. In each taping, we get up-close and personal with storytellers about what inspires them and the craft of storytelling. Join us!

6:30pm Doors open to GBH's Atrium
7:00pm Doors open to GBH's Calderwood Studio for seating

This event is presented with support from our sponsors MBTA Commuter Rail and Umass Amherst

Join us at the GBH Studios at the Boston Public Library for a night of NOVA science trivia! Get ready for creative categories and exciting prizes as we test your knowledge, from the depths of the universe to the history of science.

This month, in honor of Halloween, we will be visiting some spooky science.

Registration is encouraged for this free event.

The Boston College Poetry Days Series and The Lowell Humanities Series welcomed Philip Metres to campus in October, 2025. Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, magnetically original.” He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. He is the author of twelve books, including, "Fugitive/Refuge, Shrapnel Maps," "The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance," "Sand Opera," and "I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky."

Metres work—poetry, translation, essays, fiction, criticism, and scholarship—has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Watson Foundation. He is the recipient of the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize.

The event was sponsored by the Lowell Institute, Boston College's Institute for the Liberal Arts, and the Provost's Office.

Tune in here for our live stream on Tuesday at 6:30 pm.

Join GBH at the 2025 Open Streets event series, where neighborhood streets are closed to vehicular traffic to create room for community and play. The events allow local businesses to expand into the street and to safely make space for music, games, bicycling, community tabling, and more. On October 18, come say hi to us in Mattapan on Blue Hill Avenue from River Street to Babson Street.

GBH Amplifies is a community conversation series focused on expanding the reach of local voices from Greater Boston and beyond. The series features community leaders hosting public conversations in the GBH Studio at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square, providing a platform for inclusive perspectives on the issues that matter most to New England communities. GBH Amplifies happens weekly on Thursdays from 12:30-1:30pm at the GBH BPL Studio. This event is free and open to the public.

The monthly schedule is:
First Thursday of the Month: James ‘Jimmy’ Hills, Host of Java with Jimmy
Second Thursday of the Month: Ron Mitchell, Publisher and Editor of The Bay State Banner
Third Thursday of the Month: Alberto Vasallo III, President and CEO of El Mundo Boston
GBH Amplifies is also being supported by the Barr Foundation.

The Cambridge Forum holds a discussion on America’s cultural identity becoming inextricably linked to the automobile, examining how what began as a convenient, and often essential, mode of transportation has morphed for many into a tyrannical obsession symbolizing success and power.

In the past twenty years, cars have grown larger, heavier and more intimidating. Mimicking the appearance of military vehicles with names to match, massive SUVs dominate the landscape and the statistics are not pretty. Globally, cars directly take the lives of more than a million people annually. They also harm others through air pollution and environmental hazards, and increasingly they have the potential to be used as attack weapons.

Our growing dependency on cars is draining the earth’s natural resources, their carbon emissions drive climate change and they create unsafe streets and congestion, making the planet unlivable. We know this, yet we continue to ignore the negative consequences of our indulgent behavior and worship at the altar of the auto. Cars dominate our lives and we just love the personal comfort and distraction afforded by the gadgets behind the wheel.

The question for this panel: How long can we ignore the true costs of our driving habits on others and the planet, without paying the price?

GBH hosted its first Ralph Lowell Annual Lecture, honoring the legacy of GBH founder Ralph Lowell, whose life’s work was devoted to educate and inform the public, inspiring in each of us a life of service for the common good.

Harvard University scholar and political philosopher Michael Sandel delivers the inaugural Ralph Lowell Lecture. Extending his 1996 work "Democracy's Discontent," celebrated by Alan Brinkley when first published as, “...a remarkable fusion of philosophical and historical scholarship,” Sandel will offer a long view of America’s civic struggles, from the 1990s to the present, recalling moments in the American past when the country found ways to hold economic power to democratic account.

From a 2025 vantage point, he will discuss how Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a version of finance-driven globalization that created a society of winners and losers and fueled the toxic politics of our time—and why the American people must reconfigure the economy and empower our citizens as participants in a shared public life.

This program is presented in partnership with the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

About Ralph Lowell
For the launch of this lecture series, GBH Archives curated a special exhibit looking back at the 20th century developments spearheaded by Ralph Lowell that established a coalition of support for educational broadcasting in the U.S. and ultimately led to the founding of WGBH in 1951. From support for public lectures, to radio and television programming and digital streaming, the Lowells have continued Ralph’s original mission to support the free dissemination of knowledge as an important foundation for an informed and free democratic citizenry. Visit our Historypage for more.

About our Event Partner
The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation is the non-profit partner to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, providing financial support, staffing, and creative resources. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is a presidential library administered by the National Archives and Records Administration. The Library and the Foundation seek to promote, through educational and community programs, a greater appreciation and understanding of American politics, history, culture, the process of governing and the importance of public service.