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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

Birth of the Modern Arms Race

Tue, Apr 18, 2006

Priscilla McMillan discusses the content of her newest book, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer: And the Birth of the Modern Arms Race. In a groundbreaking book that recasts the history of the Cold War, bestselling author Priscilla McMillan exposes, for the first time, the truth behind J. Robert Oppenheimer's 1954 trial on charges of violating national security. Drawing from newly declassified papers and extensive interviews, McMillan places Oppenheimer's opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb at the heart of the story. His opposition made him the victim of government officials who, conspiring with rival scientist Edward Teller, deceived President Eisenhower and trapped the enigmatic genius who had done more than anyone to build the atomic bomb. A chilling expose of the McCarthy-era conspiracy that helped propel the East-West arms race, this is a spellbinding work of history. **Priscilla McMillan** is an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of the bestseller Marina and Lee. Among other places, her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, Harpers Magazine, Scientific American, and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, where she is a member of the editorial board.

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Boston in 2030

Thu, Apr 20, 2006

Marc D. Draisen of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council asks what metro Boston will look like in 2030 if we continue to grow at our current rate. The MAPC's MetroFuture project, an initiative to develop a plan for metro Boston's growth and development through 2030, has involved more than 2,000 people, including municipal officials, residents, workers, community groups, and legislators. The MetroFuture team has integrated findings about the region into "Scenario 1: Current Trends Extended to 2030," which presents a likely picture of the region if current conditions persist. This has served as a starting point for discussions across metro Boston about such details as: where and how our population will live and work; how prepared they will be for the jobs of the future; the growing stress on our water resources; impacts on municipal budgets; and the dramatic increase in the elderly population in the region.

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Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature

Thu, Oct 13, 2005

Lewis Dabney lectures on his new book, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature. From the Jazz Age through the McCarthy Era, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. In his own youth a crucial champion of the young Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson went on to write three classics of literary and intellectual history (Axel's Castle, To the Finland Station, and Patriotic Gore), searching reportage, and criticism that has outlasted many of its subjects. Wilson documented his unruly private life, a formative love affair with Edna St Vincent Millay, a tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and volatile friendships with Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, among others, in fiction and journals, but Lewis Dabney is the first writer to integrate the life and the work.

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New York World: Graphic Art on Sunday (1898-1911)

Tue, Dec 6, 2005

Before the age of electronic media, Saturday morning television, and weekend getaways, there was Joseph Pulitzer's *New York World* newspaper. The Sunday edition in particular was a visual feast of color caricatures, full-page cartoons, disaster drawings, fictional illustrations, hand-lettered typography, weird science, halftone photographs, maps and more amidst the graphic, often muckraking news. For *The World on Sunday*, Baker and his coauthor and wife, Margaret Brentano, have selected 144 of the finest examples of period reporting, bold and playful graphic design, comic strips, and society pieces. Baker's introductory essay argues for the significance and beauty of Pulitzer's paper, and Brentano's detailed captions and notes accompany the colorful reproductions throughout the volume. Athenæum member Nicholson Baker has published seven novels and three works of nonfiction, including *Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper*, which won the National Book critics Circle Award for nonfiction in 2001. He is a regular contributor to *The New Yorker* and the *New York Review of Books*.

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Peabody Sisters: Igniting American Romanticism

Tue, May 17, 2005

Megan Marshall lectures on Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody, the subjects of her 20 years in the making biography, The Peabody Sisters. Marshall focuses on the period during which the Peabody sisters made their indelible mark on history. Her unprecedented research into these lives uncovered hundreds of previously unread letters, as well as other previously unmined original sources. The Peabody Sisters casts new light on a legendary American era. **Megan Marshall**'s work on The Peabody Sisters has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has published numerous articles on women's history and New England history.

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Crack in the Edge of the World: The 1906 CA Earthquake

Thu, Nov 3, 2005

Simon Winchester discusses the Great California Earthquake of 1906, which he has written about extensively in his new book, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. Simon Winchester, who has brought the unlikely subject of geology to the literary forefront in his national bestsellers Krakatoa and The Map That Changed the World, now shines his literary light on the most dramatic natural calamity in US history in A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. Using the devastating 7.9 quake that struck the bustling city of San Francisco as a narrative springboard, Winchester offers a panoramic blend of history and science that captures the "savage interruption" and its destructive aftermath with gripping immediacy. Winchester explores the global geology that jolted the Earth awake on the fateful day and suggests why it certainly will happen again.

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How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

Thu, Apr 27, 2006

Mameve Medwed discusses her new novel, a witty tale about love, loss, friendship, and self-discovery set in the appealingly absurd world of antiques and the people who buy, sell, and covet them. Thirty-three-year-old Abigail Randolph is having a tough time. Her beloved mother has recently died in an earthquake, the man she loves has left her for another woman, and the antiques business she started with her now ex-boyfriend is not doing so well. A Harvard dropout who has good-naturedly suffered through a lot of disappointments, Abby decides to put her trust in things that can't let her down: old books, chipped china, moth-eaten tablecloths, and the discarded and dented bits of other people's lives. But other people's lives, and not just their stuff, manage to intrude on her own life in surprising ways. Medwed briskly depicts the odd world of flea markets and tag sales, and makes of Abby's arduous liberation (not unlike the invalid Browning's), an adventure to which Jane Austen might have raised a celebratory glass of port.

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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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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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