Julie Satow is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Plaza, a New York Times’ Editor’s Choice and NPR Favorite Book of 2019. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times.

On June 1, 1774, British officials shut down the port of Boston as punishment for the dumping of East India Company tea six months earlier. Overnight, ship traffic stopped and the wharves fell silent.

In this lecture, Joseph M. Adelman discusses how Bostonians lost access to goods and work that they relied on and explore how working people coped with the economic fallout.

Joseph M. Adelman is an associate professor of history at Framingham State University and an associate editor of The New England Quarterly. He is the author of Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789.

Join Biodiversity For A Livable Climate to learn how one furry critter can help us restore wetlands, protect biodiversity and deal with both floods and fires.

The February 26th fire in Texas was the largest in their history. In Canada, the fire season never really ended, as zombie fires smoldered under cover over winter and started up again come spring. Policy makers seem to be at a loss with some efforts at burning the forest on purpose, or logging huge swaths to create fire breaks. Is our only option for preventing forest fires to destroy the forests? Maybe not.

Ten percent of North America was once covered in wetlands, most of which were created and maintained by beavers! About 200 million beavers. What would it take to shift our relationship with beavers from considering them pests to partnering with them to restore the vast swaths of aquatic habitat that once kept the continent wet, cool and full of biodiversity?

For 20 years, Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist, WATER Institute Co-Directors from the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) have been working to provide education and advocacy for a healthy watershed. It turns out that beavers can play a big role in that. Dolman & Lundquist will share with us how they moved from community action to recently supporting the creation of a state-led Beaver Restoration Program in California, and the joy of seeing beavers released in the wild in CA for the first time in nearly 75 years in collaboration with tribal partners from the Maidu Summit Consortium.
Moderated by Beck Mordini, Biodiversity For A Livable Climate Executive Director.

Kate Lundquist co-directs the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s WATER Institute and the Bring Back the Beaver Campaign. Kate collaborates with landowners, communities, tribes, conservation organizations and resource agencies across the arid west to uncover obstacles and identify strategic solutions to conserve watersheds, recover listed species, increase water security and build resilience to the impacts of climate change.

Brock Dolman is a co-founder of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (www.oaec.org), where he co-directs the Permaculture Program, Wildlands Program and the WATER Institute in Sonoma County, California. He is a wildlife biologist, permaculture designer and watershed ecologist and has been active in promoting the idea of Bringing Back the Beaver in California since the late 1990’s.

Researchers are learning more and more about the detrimental effects of too much screentime on our mental health, and especially our children's. At the same time, we are gaining a deeper understanding of the importance of playtime for all animals, including humans.

Join Cambridge Forum as we bat around the most recent research including the upside of boredom for kids: guests are Dr Michael Rich, director of the Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders at Boston Children's Hospital and Professor David Toomey from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst who has just written a new book on why animals play.

Cynthia Evans is Research Director of American Ancestors’ 10 Million Names project, a collaborative project dedicated to recovering the names of the estimated 10 million men, women, and children of African descent who were enslaved in pre- and post-colonial American. She is a researcher, historian, and genealogist with more than ten years of experience in African American history and research and five years of experience managing a genealogy center in Austin, TX..

Drawn from never-before-published records and letters, this heralded work of history offers an intimate account of the horrors witnessed and endured during the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. Join us to hear more from the award-winning author Matthew Davenport about his research, see rare photographs, and listen to tragic tales of loss and survivors’ experiences on the morning of April 18, 1906. 

More than 118 years ago, San Francisco, the largest city in the Western U.S. shook, crumbled, burned, and was completely devastated in an incomprehensible show of force by nature. In less than a minute, shockwaves shook the city, buckled its streets, shattered water mains, collapsed buildings on slumbering residents, and crushed hundreds. Then came the devastating fires, a second round of destruction that lasted weeks. From archival sources and hundreds of previously unpublished letters, many from private family collections; Matthew J. Davenport weaves a harrowing tale of the fateful day. Meticulously researched and gracefully written, The Longest Minute is both a harrowing chronicle of devastation, and a portrait of a city’s resilience in the burning aftermath of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906.

Matthew J. Davenport is the author of First Over There, a finalist for the 2015 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, was acclaimed as “a brilliant work for every library” by Library Journal and was heralded by Pulitzer Prize winning historian James McPherson as “military history at its best.”