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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

  • Emma at Home: Lady Hamilton and Her "Attitudes"

    Thu, Mar 31, 2005
    John Wilton-Ely lectures on the effervescent and much celebrated performance artist, Lady Emma Hamilton, whose "attitudes" made her a phenomenon all across 18th century Europe. This lecture is presented in conjunction with the Royal Oak Foundation.
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  • Stewart O'Nan's The Good Wife

    Thu, Apr 7, 2005
    Stewart O'Nan, author of The Speed Queen and A Prayer for the Dying, discusses his newest novel, The Good Wife. On a clear winter night in upstate New York, two young men break into a house believing it is empty. It isn't, and within minutes an old woman is dead and the house is in flames. Soon after, the men are caught by the police. Across the county, a phone rings in a darkened bedroom, waking a pregnant woman. It is her husband. He wants her to know that he and his friend have gotten themselves into a little trouble. So Patty Dickerson's old life ends and a strange new one begins. At once a love story and a portrait of a woman discovering her own strength, The Good Wife follows Patty through the twenty-eight years of her husband's incarceration as she raises her son, navigates a system that has no place for her, and braves the scorn of her community. Compassionate and unflinching, The Good Wife illuminates a marriage and a family tested to the limits of endurance.
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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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