This Month at the MHS

The striking photographs of Clover Adams, wife of historian and writer Henry Adams, capture iconic moments of Gilded Age Boston and Washington, D.C., while also opening pathways to her long-concealed inner life. Her photographs tell a story—her story. This exhibition features many of Clover's images, some of which have not been shown publicly, along with her letters, the notebook she used to record the technical aspects of her photographs, Henry's letters, and other family materials.

At the heart of Clover’s story is a mystery: just when she found a powerful way through photography to document her life, it started to unravel. On a gloomy Sunday morning in December 1885, Clover committed suicide by drinking from a vial of potassium cyanide, a chemical used to develop photographs. Henry Adams commissioned a bronze statue by Augustus Saint-Gaudens to mark his wife’s grave in Washington’s Rock Creek Cemetery. But he rarely spoke of her and never mentioned her in his Pulitzer prize-winning The Education of Henry Adams.

What got lost—until now—was the remarkable story of how Clover, in the last years of her life, discovered with her camera an eloquent means with which to express herself.

In 1794, the first public theater in Boston opened on Federal Street despite strong legal and public opposition. The First Seasons of the Federal Street Theatre, 1794-1798 documents the battle over the Federal Street Theatre through playbills from early performances as well as the letters and publications of supporters and opponents of public theater in Boston. The MHS show is a satellite display of an exhibition titled Forgotten Chapters of Boston's Literary History on display at the Boston Public Library (BPL). Created by Professor Paul Lewis of the Boston College English Department and his students, the exhibition tells stories about Boston's literary history through letters, manuscripts, and early editions from the collections of the MHS, the BPL, the American Antiquarian Society, and Boston College. Divided into six “chapters,”  the exhibition follows the rise and fall of reputations, recovers out-of-print materials, and walks the streets of Boston in its literary heyday. The materials at the MHS will be on view 28 March through 30 July.

Months after the French capitulation at the end of the French and Indian War, a young Massachusetts man, Joshua Barnes, was discovered still in the company of his Wabenaki captors. He had been taken more than four years earlier while on patrol along Lake George. Now, Barnes was arrested and faced trial for treason before a British army court-martial. Was he, as the court insisted, a renegade who had willingly adopted Native life and taken up arms against his king? The testimony of both Barnes and the witnesses against him suggest something different: that hostage stress response, known today as Stockholm Syndrome, may better explain the behavior that led to his arrest.  

This paper, digested from a draft chapter for a proposed book, will be a departure from familiar "fate of the captive" narratives, which generally assume a storyline of assimilation into Native societies, "failure" to assimilate, or redemption. The story of Barnes's captivity demonstrates that assimilation-or-ransom was not always the goal of Native American captors, and suggests that white captives frequently, even normally, adopted survival strategies that would be familiar to psychologists and law-enforcement agencies today.

Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. Hyde's most recent book, Common as Air, is a spirited defense of our "cultural commons," that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich in the present.

A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a Faculty Associate at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Considering the Common Good: What We Give Up/What We Gain

In this conversation series, facilitated by Professor Stephen Marini of Wellesley College, guests will address issues of self-interest and shared sacrifice, private concerns and community benefits, and the intersection of individual and collective goals. Using historical and contemporary examples, each guest will illustrate approaches, promises, successes and failures. In the ensuing conversations, guests and audience members will explore the challenges and choices involved in defining and balancing individual freedom and the common good.

Reservations requested: Please call 617-646-0560 or click on the ticket icon above to register online.

Professor Robert Turner, author and editor of a commissioned review of the evidence in this case, will discuss the process of his team’s inquiry, and conclusions drawn from that investigation. Professor Turner is Associate Director of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia Law School.

In 1872, when Clover Hooper married Henry Adams, she became a partner in a remarkable marriage, and a member of an illustrious, close-knit, and cantankerous clan. In this talk we will "meet the in-laws" through Clover Adams' photographs of members of her husband's family.

In 1876, Julius Wolff arrived in Eastport, Maine, to try his hand at producing a domestic sardine that could compete with the European imports. He successfully canned 600 cases of sardines, which quickly sold in the New York market for up to $12.00 a case. Although Wolff tried to keep his new business venture a secret the profits were undeniable and new sardine factories quickly sprung up in Eastport, Lubec, and Robbinston, Maine. By 1899 sixty-eight plants in Maine produced 1,170,568 cases of sardines. The sardine factories were in such fierce competition with one another in acquiring herring fish from the local weir fishermen that they were forced to pay extremely high prices for their catches. Weir fishermen maintained high prices for their catches by selling them via an auction system that directly pitted competing canneries against one another. Because weir fishermen controlled the access to the base material of production, juvenile herring fish, independent of the canneries' management they could exercise a considerable degree of economic power. Although not formally organized into a cooperative or union, these weir fishermen in Downeast Maine still yielded a similar style of control as those formal organizational structures in such a way as to protect their shared interest and to ensure continued local profitability.

"She thought she could find a better market" explores white southern women's economic roles in antebellum New Orleans slave markets and slave trading communities. It demonstrates that, in spite of formidable social, legal, and economic constraints, single, married and widowed women entered slave markets, attended slave auctions, bought, sold and hired enslaved people, participated in their families' slave trading businesses, and supported the market in slaves by offering their goods and services to New Orleans slave yard operators, traders, brokers, and dealers. Taken together, these women's slave market activities encourage us to reconsider the ways that gender shaped economies and communities woven together by the institution of slavery in the antebellum South.

Join Massachusetts Historical Librarian Peter Drummey and Concord Museum Curator David Wood for an exploration of the subtle and surprising relationships between objects and documents in the collaborative exhibition The Object of History: Colonial Treasures from the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Reservations required: 978-369-9763. Admission to the Museum and the talk is free to MHS Members and Fellows on this day, and $2 off regular Museum admission for the duration of the exhibition: April 13 – June 17, 2012.

This program examines the treatment of British, Loyalist, and German Prisoners of War during the American War for Independence as a window on the development of revolutionary America’s military culture. What can their treatment tell us about revolutionary American values and assumptions about war and warfare? Jones posits that in depriving these men of their liberty, American revolutionaries affirmed their independence not only from political subordination to the British Crown and Parliament, but also from the dominant culture of war in Europe.

George H. Gordon, a resident of Framingham, and active member of the Boston community in the mid 1800's, played a prominent role in the Civil War. Until now, however, his contributions had been largely overlooked by historians. The book traces his life from early childhood in Framingham to West Point, through the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. It then follows him through a transition to civilian life as an attorney in Boston, and finally through the tumultuous years of the Civil War. Over 6,000 documents from Gordon's personal papers (letters, diaries, journals, military records), housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society,  were an invaluable resource to the author.

In 1793, in the face of strong legal and public opposition, the first public theater in Boston opened on Federal Street. An exhibition at MHS, mounted in coordination with the "Forgotten Chapters in Boston's Literary History" exhibition at the Boston Public Library, documents the battle over the Federal Street Theatre through the letters and publications of supporters and opponents of the theater, together with playbills from early performances.

Registration requested: please call 617-646-0560 or click on the ticket icon above to register online.

When the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion opened in December 1964, it solidified the image of Los Angeles as a first class city of growing national importance. The Pavilion was the first of a three-building theater and music complex constructed in the heart of downtown Los Angeles atop Bunker Hill and anchoring the city’s reconstructed Civic Center Mall. The Music Center’s other buildings, the Mark Taper Forum and the Howard Ahmanson Theater, opened in 1967 to similar fanfare. 

This research makes two important and related contributions to the standard narratives on postwar urban renewal and cultural institution building. First, it highlights a momentous yet under-analyzed shift in federal urban policy between 1949 and the 1954 Federal Housing Act. Second, the Music Center’s construction illuminates the role of urban policy in crafting cultural spaces in the United States after World War II. Situated at the nexus of urban history, cultural history, and policy history, this research looks beyond the traditional topics of housing and economic growth to frame a new set of questions about the ways in which cultural construction came to fruition through urban renewal policy.