This Month at the MHS

In 1812, Massachusetts was bitterly divided along partisan political lines and a wave of popular protests greeted the declaration of war on 18 June. The MHS is commemorating the bicentennial with the exhibition Mr. Madison's War: The Controversial War of 1812. The exhibition showcases a number of letters, broadsides, artifacts, and images from the Society's rich collections including a midshipman's log of the USS Constitution describing the ship's first great victory, letters written by John Quincy Adams to his mother while serving as the American minister to Russia, and a brass cannon captured from the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.

On 2 July 1776, the Continental Congress resolved "That these United Colonies are, and of right, ought to be, Free and Independent States." In a letter written to Abigail Adams on 3 July 1776, John Adams reflected on the event and summed up what it meant for Americans of his own time and in the future. He writes that the day will be celebrated with, "Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other." Adams seems to have understood more clearly than any other member of the Continental Congress the momentous importance of the vote for independence on 2 July, 1776 and how it should be celebrated. He was right about everything except the date. On 2 July, in celebration of America's independence, the MHS will open an exhibition of letters and documents relating to this important moment in United States history. The exhibition will be on display through 31 August.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, romantic vision, the apprehension of the invisible or the ideal through a combination of mental and ocular vision, became a popular way for Americans to engage not only with the natural landscape, but with the city and city life. This project investigates why, in the spectacular world of the nineteenth-century city, Boston’s Transcendentalists, clairvoyants, blind autobiographers, naturalists, artists, photographers, and numerous others became invested in seeing more than meets the eye.

Moore's project adopts a comparative, transatlantic approach to explore how female litigants in England and early colonial America used the law courts to protect their rights to property. Based on a study of over 3,000 court cases, Moore's work shows that women were independent and self-directed legal layers, and that these women challenged ideas of hierarchy and subordination by initiating litigation before the courts.

Join us for a Seaside Seminar!

Who: Teachers and Library Media Specialists, Grades 5-12

When: August 13-16, and one Saturday morning in the Fall, 2012

Cost: $50 registration fee covers three lunches, one supper, and all snacks. All materials, instruction, and admissions are included.

Benefits: Four days in a scenic North Shore setting, as well as 30 PDPs and the opportunity to earn additional graduate credit through Framingham State University.

Documents and Dilemmas

In this workshop, participants will explore the challenges faced by the new nation in the years after the American Revolution. Participants will examine five sets of documents selected from the Massachusetts Historical Society that shed light on key issues, including the rights and responsibilities of a new government, the needs of a diverse citizenry, slavery, women’s roles, and America’s relationship with the world. Tigether with fellow participants and workshop staff, we will investigate:

• the essential questions raised in each of the documents concerning the challenges facing this new country.
• how these questions can be used as a theme to follow and investigate throughout an American History course.
• why types of lesson plans you could build around these documents.

For more information, including a detailed schedule, please contact the education department at education@masshist.org or (617) 646-0557.

Cotton Mather was much impressed with Basnage's History of the Jews up to the Present Time for both Basnage's scholarship and the book's content.  Mather epitomized Basnage's book and titled it an "Appendix to Acts" in his Biblia.  By looking at the way Mather worked with the book we can learn much about Mather as a historian.

This project investigates the on-the-ground production of the rules and networks of credit exchange in the colonies of Pennsylvania and Jamaica between the Restoration and the Seven Years' War. Building on new theories of emergence, Hicklin argues that it was the long-distance and longer-term nature of Atlantic credit exchange that altered traditional debt relations. Further, the increasingly distant credit relations brought questions of risk, uncertainty, and the politics of political economy to the fore. This study, in its focus on intra- and inter-colonial borrowing and lending deprivileges London as the center for commercial change.  What had been a regionally, economically, and socially variant system at the time of the Restoration became a largely unified credit economy by the time of the Seven Years' War through a process of evolution more than revolution.