“You don’t ever have to tweak the algorithm if you set it running,” says Joel Christian Gill. “You never have to. If you want it to continue to work, you just leave it alone.”

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.

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 From archival sources and hundreds of previously unpublished letters, many from private family collections; Matthew J. Davenport weaves a harrowing tale of the fateful day.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.

Moulton and a group of bipartisan veterans washed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial ahead of Monday's ceremonies.

“There were a lot of people who wanted to marry each other, wanted to define themselves by this commitment, and yet were blocked from doing so and there was no real alternative,” said Mary Bonauto, who represented the plaintiffs before the Supreme Judicial Court.

The landmark Supreme Court decision ended the "separate but equal" doctrine in American schools in 1954. We analyze Brown v. Board of Education's legacy in Boston and nationwide.

American Experience presents a virtual PAST FORWARD conversation exploring the harmful chemicals in the food, clothes, and other goods that Americans buy and use every day. This conversation is inspired in part by our new streaming film Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal .

Panelists will examine how American consumer culture acts in conjunction with corporate negligence and government laxity to expose the public to chemical hazards. They will also explore how wealth can determine one's level of exposure, and the government’s regulatory approach to consumer protection over time. They will look forward by asking what actions consumers can take to protect themselves.

Panelists:
Dr. Jennifer Thomson is an associate professor of history at Bucknell University. Her current book project examines the effect of the Environmental Protection Agency's sewer grant construction program on racial residential segregation. Her first book, The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health, explored the various discourses of health that environmentalists deployed in the late twentieth century.

Dr. Bhavna Shamasunder is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Urban & Environmental Policy at Occidental College. She teaches and conducts research at the intersection of environmental health & justice, with a focus on inequalities in chemical exposures faced by low-income communities and communities of color who live and work in urban and/or industrial environments.

This conversation will be moderated by Tim Bartley. Tim teaches in the Department of Sociology and the Earth Commons Institute at Georgetown University. His work focuses on sustainability standards, environmental justice movements, and the regulation of global industries. More broadly, he is interested in political, organizational, and economic processes that shape environments, workplaces, and the expression of rights around the world.

This event will be livestreamed on our YouTube and Facebook pages.

Historic preservationist and Civil War reenactor Joseph McGill Jr. has logged more than 200 nights sleeping in slave dwellings at historic sites in twenty-five states and the District of Columbia. In this enlightening personal account, he tells the story of his groundbreaking Slave Dwelling project. His quest to share the experience of the enslaved took him throughout the South, but also the North and the West, where people are often surprised to learn that such structures exist.

With journalist Herb Frazier, McGill reveals the fascinating history behind these sites and sheds light on larger issues of race in America.

The fall of Saigon, 49 years ago, marked the end of the Vietnam War.

Delve into one of the darkest chapters in human history as Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum provides historical facts and answers your questions about Auschwitz, the largest and most lethal Nazi concentration and death camp. More than 1,100,000 people were killed behind its barbed wire fences.

Michael Berenbaum is the Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust, and a Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at the American Jewish University. The author and editor of 24 books, he was also the Executive Editor of the Second Edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica. He was Project Director overseeing the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the first Director of its Research Institute, and later served as President and CEO of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which took the testimony of 52,000 Holocaust survivors in 32 languages and 57 countries. His work in film has won Emmy Awards and Academy Awards. He has developed and curated museum exhibits in the United States, Mexico, North Macedonia, and Poland; and his award-winning exhibition Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away. has been seen in Madrid, Spain, Malmo, Sweden, New York, Kansas City, the Ronald Regan Library in California, and is now on view in Boston.


This event is presented in partnership with the Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. exhibit on view now at The Castle at Park Plaza in Boston.

Photos: (from top left clockwise to bottom left)
-A transport of Jews from Hungary arrives at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Poland, May 1944
-Main entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. This photograph was taken some time after the liberation of the camp in January 1945. Poland, date uncertain.
-View of a section of the barbed-wire fence and barracks at Auschwitz at the time of the liberation of the camp. Auschwitz, Poland, January 1945.
-A transport of Hungarian Jews lines up on the ramp for selection at the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in German-occupied Poland. May 1944.
Images provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum