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Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

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Boston Athenaeum

The Boston Athenaeum , one of the oldest and most distinguished independent libraries in the United States, was founded in 1807 by members of the Anthology Society, a group of fourteen Boston gentlemen who had joined together in 1805 to edit The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review. Their purpose was to form "an establishment similar to that of the Athenaeum and Lyceum of Liverpool in Great Britain; combining the advantages of a public library [and] containing the great works of learning and science in all languages." The library and Art Gallery, established in 1827, were soon flourishing, and grew rapidly, both by purchase of books and art and by frequent gifts. For nearly half a century the Athenaeum was the unchallenged center of intellectual life in Boston, and by 1851 had become one of the five largest libraries in the United States. Today its collections comprise over half a million volumes, with particular strengths in Boston history, New England state and local history, biography, English and American literature, and the fine and decorative arts. The Athenaeum supports a dynamic art gallery, and sponsors a lively variety of events such as lectures and concerts. It also serves as a stimulating center for discussions among scholars, bibliophiles, and a variety of community interest groups.break

http://www.bostonathenaeum.org

  • Mount Auburn Cemetery's 175th Anniversary: William Clendaniel Opens the Ceremony

    Tue, Apr 11, 2006
    William Clendaniel, president of Mount Auburn Cemetary, lectures on the history of Mount Auburn in celebration if its 175th anniversary. Clendaniel shares this remarkable institution's history, its ties to the Boston Athenaeum, what it is today, and how it continues to evolve and remain a relevant and important part of Boston's cultural fabric. One of Boston's oldest nonprofit institutions, Mount Auburn Cemetery is a National Historic Landmark and a beloved historic landscape that continues as an active cemetery today. Mount Auburn is also an important cultural resource for the community with a nationally known collection of plants and important collections of architecture, sculpture, paintings, paper and photographic archives, and decorative arts from three centuries.
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  • This Land: Development in America

    Thu, May 4, 2006
    Anthony Flint argues that, despite a modest revival in city living, Americans are spreading out more than ever into "exurbs" and "boomburbs" miles from anywhere, in big houses in big subdivisions. They cling to the notion of safer neighborhoods and better schools, but what they get is long commutes, crushing gas prices and higher taxes, and a landscape of strip malls and office parks badly in need of a makeover. *This Land* tells the untold story of development in America: how the landscape is shaped by a clash of political, economic, and cultural forces. It is the story of a burgeoning anti-sprawl movement, a 1960s-style revolution of New Urbanism, smart growth, and green building. And it is the story of landowners fighting back on the basis of property rights, with free-market libertarians, homebuilders, road pavers, financial institutions, and even the lawn-care industry right alongside them. The subdivisions and extra-wide roadways are encroaching into the wetlands of Florida, ranchlands in Texas, and the desert outside Phoenix and Las Vegas. But with 120 million more people in the country by 2050, will the spread-out pattern cave in on itself? Could Americans embrace a new approach to development if it made sense for them?
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  • Bess Hardwick: First Lady of Chatsworth

    Thu, May 11, 2006
    Mary S. Lovell explores the life of Bess Hardwick, an ambitious figure who became the matriarch of one of the most powerful family dynasties in England and died one of the wealthiest in England's history. Bess Hardwick, the fifth of six daughters of an impoverished English nobleman, did not have a particularly auspicious start in life. Born in 1527 into the most brutal and turbulent period of England's history, she was widowed for the first time at sixteen, married three more times, and outlived four monarchs. By the time Bess's first child, Frances, was six years old, three of her illustrious godparents had been beheaded. She survived through England's violent political and social upheaval, bore eight children, and built an extraordinary empire that included the great houses of Chatsworth and Hardwick. Through journals, letters, court reports, inventories and account books, Lovell charts the rise of an astonishingly tenacious woman, one who loved extravagant furnishings and fine clothes and who inspired passionate uxoriousness in her husbands; a woman who was generous, hardheaded and brave. What is revealed is not simply an intimate portrait of one woman but also of all Tudor society.
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  • Hip-Hop Culture, Politics, and Identities

    Tue, Mar 28, 2006
    Moderated by Isaiah Jackson, various panelists come together to discuss the politics, identities and cultures that have been emerging from the hip-hop movement. In its varied aspects, hip-hop embraces music, art, and dance. Emerging in the early 1970s from the African American and Latino communities of the Bronx, hip-hop culture has evolved into a creative force drawing an economically and culturally diverse international audience. Defying controversies and negative labels associated with hip-hop, artists and activists are increasingly collaborating to move hip-hop in the direction of greater political engagement and social responsibility. Today, hip-hop has the potential to serve as a positive agent for change at the community and national levels. Cosponsored by the Boston Athenaeum and The Partnership.
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  • Rough Crossings: Blacks and the Revolutionary War

    Thu, May 11, 2006
    Simon Schama discusses his book Rough Crossings, which turns on a single huge question: if you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? Tens of thousands gave their answer, voting with their feet for Britain and King George. In response to a declaration by the Governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves, Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom, escaped from farms, plantations, and cities to try to reach the British camp. This mass movement lasted as long as the war did, and a military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed the greatest uprising in American history. Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, into inhospitable Nova Scotia, where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed, and, in a little-known hegira of the slave epic, shipped across the broad, stormy ocean to Sierra Leone.
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  • Banjo-Wielding Women in Art

    Tue, Sep 19, 2006
    Anglo-female banjoists appear in myriad American paintings, photographs, illustrations, and advertisements from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Their presence is equally apparent, and yet more charged, in twentieth-century visual culture. The earlier artists often aligned the banjo with female achievement and enlightenment, yet the instrument was at best an ambiguous emblem of early twentieth-century New Womanhood, with any hint of feminist reform tempered by the literary, visual, and commercial contexts in which a bevy of increasingly coquettish banjo-wielding women appear. This talk traces that evolution, from Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, and Frances Benjamin Johnston to the contemporary muralist Margaret Kilgallen and the singing group Dixie Chicks where the instrument challenges male hegemonies in art and music. Leo G. Mazow is curator of American art at the Palmer Museum of Art at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is also affiliate associate professor of art history. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His essays and reviews have appeared in *American Art*, *Southern Cultures*, and *Railroad Heritage*. He has also written and edited several exhibition catalogues, including *Picturing the Banjo*, *Arneson and the Object*, and *George Inness: The 1880s and 1890s*.
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  • Colm Toibin on Mothers and Sons

    Thu, Mar 20, 2008
    Colm Toibin reads from his new collection of short stories, *Mothers and Sons*. Professor James Smith of Boston College introduces the author. **Colm Toibin** was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of five novels, including the Booker shortlisted *The Blackwater Lightship* and *The Master*, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He has been a Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University and a visiting writer at the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Dublin.
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  • Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825

    Thu, May 14, 2009
    Translator Alan Hoffman discusses Auguste Levasseur's book *Lafayette in America*, which recounts how the 67-year-old hero of the American Revolution and apostle of liberty in Europe was welcomed in an adoring frenzy by the American people. With its panoramic view of the young country, its burgeoning cities and towns, its technological innovations like the Erie Canal, and its industrious people, this book captures America on the cusp of its jubilee year. A decade before Tocqueville, Auguste Levasseur, private secretary to the Marquis de Lafayette, observed and reported on the state of the American Republic as he accompanied General Lafayette on his Farewell Tour of all 24 United States. Levasseur's journal describes the Americans' enormous pride in the republican institutions created by the revolutionary generation and the ensuing growth and prosperity. He recounts their intense feelings of gratitude towards those who had won the republic, among whom Lafayette was the sole surviving major general of the Continental Army. Levasseur also chronicles Lafayette's affectionate visits with his old friends John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams, and his encounter with Senator Andrew Jackson. A keen observer, Levasseur gives us a sense of the characters of these men who, with Lafayette's paternal friend George Washington, led the United States through its first six decades.
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  • Mameve Medwed: Of Men and Their Mothers

    Tue, Jun 10, 2008
    Mameve Medwed reads from her latest novel Of Men and Their Mothers, an exploration of class difference, notions of men and women, and being a wife, a friend, and a nonjudgmental mother. When Maisie Grey finally gets rid of her mama's-boy husband and happily settles down with her teenage son, Tommy, she's still stuck with an irascible mother-in-law. Maisie vows that when Tommy brings someone home, she will be empathetic and supportive, and envelop the young woman in a loving embrace. But along comes September Silva, with her piercings, short skirts, black nail polish, and stay-out-all-night attitude. Eventually Maisie is forced to take a clear-eyed look at class differences, preconceived notions of men and women, and what it means to be a wife, a friend, and a nonjudgmental mother. When do you let go? And how do you let go if you're sure your son is making a very big mistake?
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  • Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London

    Tue, Mar 9, 2004
    Lisa Jardine draws a portrait of the gifted but cranky English scientist Robert Hooke, known to history as much for losing quarrels with more prominent scientists as for his achievements. He was one of the founding fathers of the Royal Society and teamed with Christopher Wren in rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666. Hooke is perhaps best, and certainly unjustly, remembered for losing to Newton in a challenge for credit as discoverer of the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction.
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