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Boston Public Library

Boston Public Library (BPL) was the first large free municipal library in the United States. The present Copley Square location has been home to the Library since 1895, when architect Charles Follen McKim completed his "palace for the people." Between 1870 and 1900, twenty-two additional Branches began serving communities throughout Boston's diverse neighborhoods. In 1972 the Library expanded its Copley Square location with the opening of an addition designed by Philip Johnson. Today, the McKim building houses the BPL's vast research collection and the Johnson building holds the circulating collection of the general library and serves as headquarters for the Boston Public Library's 26 branch libraries. In addition to its 6.1 million books, the library boasts over 1.2 million rare books and manuscripts, a wealth of maps, musical scores and prints. Among its large collections, the BPL holds several first edition folios by William Shakespeare, original music scores from Mozart to Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf;" and, in its rare book collection, the personal library of John Adams. Over 2.2 million patrons visit the BPL each year, many in pursuit of research material, others looking for an afternoon's reading, still others for the magnificent and unique art and architecture.break

http://www.bpl.org/

Alexandra Cousteau - You Are Here - BPL Lowell Lecture Series

Tue, Apr 4, 2023

Ocean conservationist and environmental advocate Alexandra Cousteau converses with Boston Public Library President David Leonard as part of our 2023 Lowell Lecture Series You are Here: Climate Change and What’s Next. Alexandra Cousteau builds upon the more than 60 years of global name recognition to engage people who expect to hear credible environmental information from the third generation of this pioneering family of explorers. Born into the family business, Alexandra joined her parents in Easter Island on her first expedition at just four months old. By the age of three, she had toured Africa, exploring Egypt, Tunisia, Uganda, and Kenya in the arms of her father. While many of those memories are now out of reach, the experience of those expeditions with her father’s crew has shaped her sense of purpose, her connection to the ocean, and her love of adventure. She could swim before she could walk and was one of the few who learned to dive with SCUBA from Captain Cousteau himself at the tender age of seven. Her childhood friends were the sea creatures that inhabit the rocky shorelines of the south of France. The ocean has been her guide ever since.

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Gina McCarthy: You Are Here

Thu, Mar 16, 2023

First-ever White House National Climate Advisor, former EPA Administrator, Harvard professor, and environmental thought leader Gina McCarthy will converse with Boston Public Library President David Leonard as part of the Boston Public Library's 2023 Lowell Lecture Series, titled You are Here: Climate Change and What’s Next. McCarthy is a respected voice on climate change, the environment, and public health. As head of the Climate Policy Office under President Biden, McCarthy’s leadership led to the most aggressive action on climate in U.S. history, creating new jobs and unprecedented clean energy innovation and investments across the country. Her commitment to bold action across the Biden administration, supported by the climate and clean energy provisions in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, restored U.S. climate leadership on a global stage and put a new U.S. national target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50-52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 within reach.

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Dr. Carolyn Finney : Black Faces, White Spaces

Sat, Dec 3, 2022

Storyteller, cultural geographer, and accidental environmentalist Carolyn Finney, PhD and Boston Public Library President David Leonard will discuss Dr. Finney's book Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (2014). Garrett Dash Nelson, President & Head Curator of the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, will provide opening remarks. After the conversation, there will be time for audience Q&A, and following that, there will be a chance for in-person attendees to purchase books from a soon to be determined local independent bookstore. Patrons who wish to purchase copies online may do so at the following link. ### About the book Why are African Americans so underrepresented when it comes to interest in nature, outdoor recreation, and environmentalism? In this thought-provoking study, Carolyn Finney looks beyond the discourse of the environmental justice movement to examine how the natural environment has been understood, commodified, and represented by both white and black Americans. Bridging the fields of environmental history, cultural studies, critical race studies, and geography, Finney argues that the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial violence have shaped cultural understandings of the “great outdoors” and determined who should and can have access to natural spaces. Drawing on a variety of sources from film, literature, and popular culture, and analyzing different historical moments, including the establishment of the Wilderness Act in 1964 and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Finney reveals the perceived and real ways in which nature and the environment are racialized in America. Looking toward the future, she also highlights the work of African Americans who are opening doors to greater participation in environmental and conservation concerns.

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Neal Gabler — Against the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Rise of Conservatism, 1976-2009

Wed, Nov 30, 2022

Author of Catching the Wind Neal Gabler and Boston Public Library President David Leonard have a conversation about this second volume of the definitive biography of Ted Kennedy and a history of modern American liberalism. About the book: “Magisterial . . . an intricate, astute study of political power brokering comparable to Robert A. Caro’s profile of Lyndon Johnson in Master of the Senate.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) Against the Wind completes Neal Gabler’s magisterial biography of Ted Kennedy, but it also unfolds the epic, tragic story of the fall of liberalism and the destruction of political morality in America. With Richard Nixon having stilled the liberal wind that once propelled Kennedy’s—and his fallen brothers’—political crusades, Ted Kennedy faced a lonely battle. As Republicans pressed Reaganite dogmas of individual freedom and responsibility and Democratic centrists fell into line, Kennedy was left as the most powerful voice legislating on behalf of those society would neglect or punish: the poor, the working class, and African Americans. Gabler shows how the fault lines that cracked open in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam were intentionally widened by Kennedy’s Republican rivals to create a moral vision of America that stood in direct opposition to once broadly shared commitments to racial justice and economic equality. Yet even as he fought this shift, Ted Kennedy’s personal moral failures in this era—the endless rumors of his womanizing and public drunkenness and his bizarre behavior during the events that led to rape accusations against his nephew William Kennedy Smith—would be used again and again to weaken his voice and undercut his claims to political morality. Tracing Kennedy’s life from the wilderness of the Reagan years through the compromises of the Clinton era, from his rage against the craven cruelty of George W. Bush to his hope that Obama would deliver on a lifetime of effort on behalf of universal health care, Gabler unfolds Kennedy’s heroic legislative work against the backdrop of a nation grown lost and fractured. In this outstanding conclusion to the saga that began with Catching the Wind, Neal Gabler offers his inimitable insight into a man who fought to keep liberalism alive when so many were determined to extinguish it. Against the Wind sheds new light both on a revered figure in the American Century and on America’s current existential crisis.

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Ground Truth: Shaping Narratives of Environmental Justice

Wed, Sep 28, 2022

The Leventhal Map and Education Center hosts a panel of invited guests for a roundtable discussion on narratives of environmental justice. The roundtable will discuss how investigating historical and present-day patterns of urban inequality, and documenting these patterns through narrative and visual works, bring an important perspective to bear on efforts for climate justice organizing.

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Robin DiAngelo, Ph.D — Nice Racism & White Fragility

Mon, Oct 17, 2022

Author of New York Times (NYT) Bestseller White Fragility joins Boston Public Library President for fireside-style chat. In this talk, Robin DiAngelo explains how racism is at play in white people and how to bring awareness on our condition, own racism to make change and stop living a segregated life. ### About Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm Based on her second NYT Bestselling book, Dr. DiAngelo identifies many common white racial patterns and breaks down how well-intentioned white people unawarely perpetuate racial harm. These patterns include rushing to prove that we are “not racist,” downplaying white advantage, romanticizing Black, Indigenous and other peoples of color (BIPOC), pretending white segregation “just happens,” expecting BIPOC people to teach us about racism, carefulness, guilt and shame. She offers a series of reflection questions, an assessment tool, and a list of the skills and perspectives that can counter “nice” racism. ### About White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism White people in the U.S. live in a racially insular social environment. This insulation builds our expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering our stamina for enduring racial stress. I term this lack of racial stamina “White Fragility.” White Fragility is a state in which even a minimal challenge to the white position becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves including: argumentation, invalidation, silence, withdrawal and claims of being attacked and misunderstood.

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Boston Public Library Lowell Lecture - Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr.

Wed, Jun 8, 2022

New York Times Bestselling Author and Princeton professor Dr. Glaude in conversation with Boston Public Library President David Leonard will confront our nation’s history, shedding new light on the complexities of race and democracy. One of the nation’s most prominent scholars, Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr. is an author, political commentator, public intellectual and passionate educator who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. His writings, including Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, and his most recent, the New York Times bestseller, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own, takes a wide look at Black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States and the challenges we face as a democracy. In his writing and speaking, Glaude is an American critic in the tradition of James Baldwin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, confronting history and bringing our nation’s complexities, vulnerabilities and hope into full view. Hope that is, in one of his favorite quotes from W.E.B. Du Bois, "not hopeless, but a bit unhopeful."

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Boston Public Library Lowell Lecture - John Jacobs

Mon, May 2, 2022

Life Is Good Co-Founder John Jacobs in conversation with Boston Public Library President David Leonard will instruct on the power of optimism, sharing how a Boston-based family business grew into a million-dollar lifestyle brand that changes lives through its charitable foundation and simple wisdom. An audience Q&A session will follow the discussion. When John and his brother Bert started the now $100 million company in 1994, they had $78 in their pockets, lived out of their van, and sold t-shirts on the streets of Boston. Was this their way of avoiding the “real world”? You betcha. Did it turn into something much bigger? Absolutely. It has been 25 years since they sold their first t-shirt, but John and Bert champion the same mission: to spread the power of optimism. On their journey, they’ve been inspired by a vibrant community of resilient optimists — people from all walks of life who identify deeply with the brand and who constantly demonstrate the depth and meaning behind the three simple words “Life is Good.”

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Boston Public Library Lowell Lecture - Angela E. Oh

Mon, Mar 21, 2022

A nationally recognized expert on race relations, Zen Buddhist priest, and high-profile attorney who served on President Clinton’s One America Initiative Advisory Board, Angela E. Oh in conversation with Boston Public Library President David Leonard will reveal how communities in crisis can turn tragedy into opportunities for healing. An audience Q&A session will follow the discussion. Angela E. Oh came to prominence in 1992 after the civil unrest that followed the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers charged with the beating of Rodney King. As a second generation Korean American born in Los Angeles, trained as a criminal defense lawyer, active in civil rights and civil liberties organizing, Oh found that her experiences gave insight into the causes of what was recorded as the worst civil disaster of the century. In speaking out, her clarity about the political, economic, social, and institutional failures that contributed to the implosion of 1992 resonated with communities across the region. Over 2000 small family owned businesses owned by ethnic Koreans were destroyed and Oh challenged the mainstream media narrative that the crisis in Los Angeles was due to Korean and African American conflict.

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Boston Public Library Lowell Lecture - Dr. Christine Carter

Mon, Mar 7, 2022

Sociologist, author, and happiness expert, Dr. Carter in conversation with Boston Public Library President David Leonard will reveal how three surprising, science-based strategies can help us lead to our most joyful, productive, and meaningful lives. An audience Q&A session will follow the discussion. An engaging and sought-after speaker, Dr. Christine Carter loves to share her work. Combining scientific research and practical application, she offers audiences not only a way to cope with modern pressures, but tactics to truly thrive. Christine Carter, Ph.D., is author of The New Adolescence (2020), The Sweet Spot: How to Achieve More by Doing Less (2017) and Raising Happiness (2011). She regularly keynotes at large conferences and fundraisers and is a popular commencement speaker. She is a frequent contributor to executive, general-interest, and parenting programs with other leading scholars and teachers.

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