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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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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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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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Siegfried Sassoon: A Poet's Life

Thu, May 25, 2006

Max Egremont tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon, one of the most famous famous young writers of the 1910's, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and an inspiration to Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in Kent, and began writing verses as a boy. As a brave young officer, he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility. He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster while trying to grow as a poet in peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the aristocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into the group of "bright young things" who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. At the demise of his passionate but fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty in 1933 and retreated to a quiet country life until their eventual estrangement and Sassoon's subsequent conversion to Catholicism. From his famous war poems to the gentler vision of his prose, Sassoon wrote masterfully of war and lost idylls, and this work and its complex author are brilliantly illuminated in Max Egremont's definitive biography, which draws from unprecedented access to Sassoon's complete papers.

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Tremont Row: Artists' Daguerreotype Rooms

Tue, Feb 28, 2006

Grant Romer, curator of the Addison Gallery of American Art's "Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes" exhibition, shows how new research has revealed that the architecture of the renowned Tremont Row studio played a highly significant role in the development of the distinctive style of the partnership. With ample illustrations, he recounts how this understanding of the physical space was reconstructed and demonstrates how much it has added to appreciating the artistry of these acknowledged masters of early photography. Romer's acclaimed exhibition "Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes" offers an unparalleled opportunity to view 150 perfectly illuminated daguerreotypes created by the famous Boston partnership of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes. Through their lens we come face to face with great statesman, intellectuals, and celebrities, glimpse intimate family portraits, and examine the very bricks and clouds of the mid-19th century.

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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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