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Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

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Revolutionary Spaces

**Revolutionary Spaces ** connects people to the history and continuing practice of democracy through the intertwined stories of two of the nation’s most iconic sites—Boston’s Old South Meeting House and Old State House. We foster a free and open exchange of ideas, explore history, create gathering places, and preserve and steward historic buildings.

https://www.bostonhistory.org

  • Nina Silber, associate professor of History at Boston University, traces the emergence of a new sense of self and citizenship among the women left behind by Union Soldiers. Using the diaries and letters of these women, Silber shows the women of the North discovering their patriotism and acting with greater independence in running their households and in expressing their political views. Women serve as fundraisers, post mistresses, suppliers, nurses, government workers and teachers. With a greater public role, women find "their personal, intimate relationships subjected to intense... scrutiny, not only from neighbors and kin but also from state and federal officials." Those who work as nurses are "required to be plain looking women." The result, Silber argues, was a change in the way that the regulatory function of marriage worked within society in ways that continue to reverberate through homes and jobs.
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    Revolutionary Spaces
  • Mitchell Zuckoff discusses Charles Ponzi's mercurial rise and fall as he conjured up one get-rich-quick scheme after another. Zuckoff reveals how The Boston Post uncovered this "robbing Peter to pay Paul" system (as it was then known), and how Ponzi's life unraveled. Before Charles Ponzi (1882-1949) sailed from Italy to the shores of America in 1903, his father assured him that the streets were really paved with gold and that Ponzi would be able to get a piece. Ponzi learned as soon as he disembarked that though the streets were often cobblestone, he could still make a fortune in a culture caught in the throes of the Gilded Age.
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    Revolutionary Spaces
  • Michaela Neiro assistant conservator for the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA), explains how the creative use of materials, such as clay and beeswax, as well as computer technology, help conservators save cherished objects. SPNEA has the largest assemblage of New England art and artifacts in its collection, a total of nearly 100,000 items. The care and conservation of these objects is an astonishingly meticulous and important job.
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    Revolutionary Spaces
  • Jan Turnquist, executive director of Orchard House, discusses the daily activities and pursuits of the Alcotts, a trailblazing family of reformers.
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    Revolutionary Spaces
  • James Green, professor of history at UMASS Boston and Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States discuss the exhilarating rise of a visionary union movement and its downfall in the wake of the Haymarket tragedy. In May of 1886 Americans awoke to the news that a bomb had exploded a Chicago labor rally, killing several policemen. Coming in the midst of the largest national strike Americans had ever seen, the bombing, the mass hysteria it created, and the sensational trial and executions that followed, made headlines across the country. National sentiment turned against the burgeoning labor movement, ending a moment of hope for the nation's working class.
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    Revolutionary Spaces
  • Professional photographer and writer Susan Wilson brings Boston's Freedom Trail to life with highlights from the newly revised edition of her beloved guidebook. No city in America can match the literary heritage of Boston. Just as the city has a Freedom Trail connecting its Revolutionary sites, it also has a literary trail connecting the homes, workplaces, and final resting places of its great writers.
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    Revolutionary Spaces
  • William Fowler, director of the Massachusetts Historical Society, describes the epic struggle between the world's two great super powers, France and England, in a war fought to determine the fate of North America.
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    Revolutionary Spaces
  • As a young author, James Fenimore Cooper set out to write a series of Revolutionary War era novels, but abruptly changed his plans after his first visit in 1825 to several classic French and Indian War sites in northern New York. Professor Wayne Franklin of Northeastern University explains how *The Last of the Mohicans* the first of Cooper's many "colonial" novels, helped to create a popular understanding of the discontinuities and radical disruptions of this country's first 150 years.
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    Revolutionary Spaces
  • Historian Robert Allison tells the story of Stephen Decatur's eventful life at a time when the young republic was developing its own identity. Born to a prominent Philadelphia family in 1779, Decatur became the youngest man ever to serve as a captain in the US Navy at age 25.
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    Revolutionary Spaces
  • Alan Rogers sheds light on one of Boston's most terrifying crime sprees, one that remains unsolved to this day. Between June 14, 1962 and January 4, 1964, Boston was terrorized by a serial killer who murdered 13 women. Rogers presents a historical context to the grisly case and details the crimes, the investigation, and the arrest, conviction and sentencing of Albert DeSalvo.
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    Revolutionary Spaces