Past Events

Join American Ancestors for a shimmering discussion about artists and their summer communities, the “utopias” they created for their friends, families, and students during the first half of the twentieth century on Cape Ann and Cape Cod.

Their names are iconic: Edward Hopper, Charles Hawthorne, Hans Hoffman, Willem de Kooning, Josef and Anni Albers, and Walter Gropius. The artist residents of summertime seashore communities hold a special place in America’s history. To this day, in private collections, museums, and galleries, they portray our country in transition in the last century, its welcoming light and obscuring shadows, burgeoning with industrial and political power.

Join John Taylor “Ike” Williams and Elliot Bostwick Davis for a discussion of their new books looking at the vision and ascendancy of several celebrated artists associated with summer colonies and communities. Our presenters will spotlight individual paintings and measure the cultural impact and their creators who, imbued with summertime spirit and sensitivity, became our country’s cultural luminaries. Don’t miss these authors’ insights on Cape Ann and Cape Cod as it was experienced and represented by its artists, and the lasting impact of their work.

Join us for a shimmering discussion about artists and their summer communities, the “utopias” they created for their friends, families, and students during the first half of the twentieth century on Cape Ann and Cape Cod.

Presented by the American Inspiration series from American Ancestors/NEHGS in partnership with the Cape Ann Museum and Provincetown Arts Association and Museum.

Dr. Ousmane Pame is founder of REDES Ecovillages based in Senegal. He talka about ecovillage communities in the Sahel region of Africa. and their global and regional contexts. The Sahel region includes Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger and the Gambia. REDES is the leading, nonprofit, community-led regenerative organization in the fight against desertification and its negative socioeconomic impacts in the Senegal River Valley. REDES is catalyzing efforts and initiatives on both sides of River Senegal, which is the border between Senegal and Mauritania, to regenerate the ecosystems and improve community life in the region. There are now 100 ecovillages in the area. Dr Pame ia joined by Dr. Marie Nazon, Academic Programs Coordinator for REDES International Service Learning Program and Katrina Jeffries, International relations coordinator. Dr. Dave Damm Luhr moderates the conversation.

Dr. Livio explains how developments in astronomy have altered our sense of human uniqueness. He describes the “Copernican Principle” that suggests that we humans are not especially unique. And scientific discoveries, including evolution, other planets and galaxies, have led to the expectation of other intelligent life in the universe –and indeed, even the notion of multiple universes. But scientists have also discovered that the conditions necessary for complex life may be rare. Here, we learn what we might expect.

A clear explanation of how conventional agriculture damages soil and reduces the nutritional value of crops. David Montgomery and Anne Biklé discuss how regenerative agriculture restores the soil, improves food nutrition, and ultimately health. What Your Food Ate is an essential resource for all those who care about the well-being of humans and environment.

Likely the last in her family line to qualify for tribal citizenship with the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, Leah Myers elegantly blends Native folklore, personal history, and the search for identity in this highly anticipated memoir, Thinning Blood.

Because of her tribe’s strict blood quantum laws, Leah Myers may be the last of her family to be formally recognized as a member of her tribe. For her, this realization carries with it a responsibility to preserve her heritage and her ancestors’ memory. Thinning Blood is Myers’s attempt to capture a record of her family’s history, presenting the stories of four generations of women. Beginning with her great-grandmother, the last full-blooded Native member in their lineage, she connects each woman with her totem to construct her family’s totem pole: protective Bear, defiant Salmon, compassionate Hummingbird, and perched on top, Raven. Myers weaves together tribal folktales, the history of the Native genocide, and Native mythology. With fresh perspectives and profound insight, she offers crisp and powerful vignettes of her own life between White and Native worlds. Thinning Blood is at once a bold reclamation of her female identity and a searingly honest meditation on heritage, family, and what it means to belong.

Leah Myers is in conversation with Kaitlin Curtice, also author, poet-storyteller and member of the Potawatomi nation.

This talk explores a key chapter in trans-Atlantic, U.S., and African American history. The title is from a quote from Malachi Postlethwayt, a British mercantilist theorist in 1745. The book on which this talk is based chronicles contributions made by millions of African peoples and their descendants to the vast “wealth of nations” that financed the economic and social progress of modern Western civilization called the “industrial revolution.” The same global process has been identified as one cause of the “underdevelopment” in Africa and other parts of the world. The phenomenal contribution resulted from the uncompensated labor of enslaved Black peoples across several centuries and on several continents. Prof. Bailey has coined the term “slave(ry) trade”™ to encompass an array of activities generally considered as separate developments. This includes the trade in Africans as commodities; commerce in slave-produced goods, especially sugar and cotton; trade among slave-based economies; production of manufactured goods from slave-produced raw materials; and related financial and commercial activities. The story is narrated in three “acts” focused the slave(ry) trade’s pivotal role in three key periods of global history. Act I is a chronicle of Europe’s journey—especially Portugal and Spain—out of its “Dark” Middle Ages beginning in the 9th century and into a new global system centered around the Atlantic Ocean. With a focus on Great Britain, Act II begins in a world of expanding commerce—the “Age of Reconnaissance” or “Age of Discovery” in the 1500s—the period of mercantilism and the “Triangular Trade” when the colonization of the Americas and other parts of the globe was completed. Great Britain emerges as the first global industrial power in the 18th century. Act III explores the American Revolution and focuses on the role of the slave(ry) trade and the global cotton kingdom in transforming colonial America into a world power as the independent United States, a process that continues with the Civil War in the 1860s.

The long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, with a new generation of scholars insisting that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late 20th-century. He argues that European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success; Native nations helped shape England’s crisis of empire; the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior; California’s Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War; the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West; and 20th-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. Blackhawk’s retelling of US history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.

64 Americans die by firearm suicide daily — that is one death every 22 minutes - this tragic statistic segues to the subject of Cambridge Forum's final talk of the current series ,"GUNFIGHT: is healthy gun ownership ever possible?"

Join Ryan Busse, former executive at Kimber America, a major gun manufacturer and author of the book "Gunfight" on Tuesday, June 27.Busse will talk about his battle with the gun industry which he says, has radicalized America. He is a senior adviser for Giffords, a gun violence prevention group led by Gabby Giffords, former Arizona congresswoman who was a victim of a mass shooting in 2011.

Ryan Busse is joined by Dr. Mark I. Langdorf, Professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine. He sees emergency patients at the Level I Trauma center at the University of California, Irvine, Medical Center. Langdorf speaks, consults, and teaches locally, nationally, and worldwide on optimum care of emergency patients.

### Resources
Study on the energy of riffle bullets - The Bullets He Carried https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7j5344pt
NewYork Times Articles on why people buy guns -(paywall) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/health/gun-violence-psychology.html?campaign_id=0&emc=confirmation_hh&instance_id=0&nl=system®i_id=189155058®i_id=189155058&segment_id=0&user_id=d6a49fd801884db732db1af29358c222

King mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge a deeper understanding of “the leader, the preacher, the orator, the husband, the father, the martyr, the human being…in all his heroic, tragic Glory. Hallelujah!" (Ken Burns) King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. Bestselling biographer Jonathan Eig gives us an intimate view, casting fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. In this remarkable account of our only modern-day founding father, we gain an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements. Join us for Eig’s presentation and discussion with Peniel Joseph, Professor and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, The University of Texas at Austin, one day after the Juneteenth holiday. This talk is brought to you by American Ancestors New England Historical and Genealogical Society (NEHGS), the Boston Public Library and the Museum of African American History.

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Suicide rates are rising at an alarming rate in America and the populations most at risk are no longer white middle-aged men, they are increasingly young people and minorities; sadly this phenonenon is not just confined to the United States. **Cambridge Forum** considers what societal ills might be fueling this and whether we can do more to recognize and remedy this tragic trend. **Clancy Martin** is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. He is also a happily married father of five children. His latest book, “How Not to Kill Yourself” is a portrait of the suicidal mind - his own - and in it he provides both a personal account of the multiple attempts he had made to end his life but also the positive strategies he has devised to safeguard his own future and that of others. ** Professor Rory O'Connor** is Professor of Health Psychology at the University of Glasgow, Scotland and **President of the International Association for Suicide Prevention. **