MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY TO PARTICIPATE IN BLUE STAR MUSEUMS
The Massachusetts Historical Society is one of more than 1,500 museums across America to offer free admission to military personnel and their families this summer in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts, Blue Star Families, and the Department of Defense
The MHS is pleased to announce the launch of Blue Star Museums, a collaboration among the National Endowment for the Arts, Blue Star Families, the Department of Defense, and more than 1,500 museums across America to offer free admission to all active duty military personnel and their families from Memorial Day through Labor Day 2012. Leadership support has been provided by MetLife Foundation through Blue Star Families. The complete list of participating museums is available at www.arts.gov/bluestarmuseums.
This summer, in commemoration of the bicentennial of the War of 1812, the MHS will open the exhibition Mr. Madison’s War: The Controversial War of 1812. This exhibition provides insight into the political life of Massachusetts just before the war, when the Bay State was bitterly divided due to tensions between the Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans. Among the many treasures from the Society’s collections, a log book from the Constitution will be on display, showing the entries that Midshipman Frederick Baury made, describing the ship’s actions early in the war. The exhibition will open on June 18 and be on view through September 8.
“Through Blue Star Museums, the arts community is extending a special invitation to military families to enjoy over 1,500 museums this summer,” said NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman. “This is both an opportunity to thank military families for their service and sacrifice, as well as a chance to create connections between museums and these families that will continue throughout the year. Especially for families with limited time together, those on a limited budget, and ones that have to relocate frequently, Blue Star Museums offers an opportunity to enjoy one another and become more fully integrated into a community.”
“As we enter the third consecutive year of the Blue Star Museums program, we are happy provide an opportunity for our nation’s service members and their families to connect with our national treasures,” said Blue Star Families CEO Kathy Roth-Douquet. “Through this distinctive collaboration between Blue Star Families, the National Endowment for the Arts and more than 1,500 museums across the United States, military families have an unparalleled opportunity to visit some of the country’s finest museums for free.”
This year, more than 1,500 (and counting) museums in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and American Samoa are taking part in the initiative, including more than 300 new museums this year. Museums are welcome to join Blue Star Museums throughout the summer. The effort to recruit museums has involved the partnership efforts of the American Association of Museums, the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Association of Children’s Museums, the American Association of State and Local History, and the Association of Science-Technology Centers. This year’s Blue Star Museums represent not just fine arts museums, but also science museums, history museums, nature centers, and 70 children’s museums. Among this year’s new participants are the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar in Richmond, Virginia, the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, NM, the Cleveland Botanical Garden in Cleveland, Ohio, the Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco, California, the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, and the World Figure Skating Museum & Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
About Blue Star Museums
Blue Star Museums is a collaboration among the National Endowment for the Arts, Blue Star Families, the Department of Defense, and more than 1,500 museums across America. The program runs from Memorial Day, May 28, 2012 through Labor Day, September 3, 2012. The free admission program is available to active-duty military and their family members (military ID holder and up to five family members). Active duty military include Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and active duty National Guard and active duty Reserve members. Some special or limited-time museum exhibits may not be included in this free admission program. For questions on particular exhibits or museums, please contact the museum directly. To find out which museums are participating, visit www.arts.gov/bluestarmuseums. The site includes a list of participating museums and a map to help with visit planning.
Museums that wish to participate in Blue Star Museums may contact bluestarmuseums@arts.gov, or Wendy Clark at 202-682-5451.
This is the latest NEA program to bring quality arts programs to the military, veterans, and their families. Other NEA programs for the military have included Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience; Great American Voices Military Base Tour; and Shakespeare in American Communities Military Base Tour.
About the Massachusetts Historical Society
The Massachusetts Historical Society is one of the nation’s preeminent research libraries, with collections that provide an unparalleled record of the vibrant course of American history. Since its founding in 1791, the MHS has fostered research, scholarship, and education. With millions of pages of manuscript letters, diaries, and other documents, as well as early newspapers, broadsides, artifacts, works of art, maps, photographs, and prints, the MHS offers a wide-ranging perspective on the United States from the earliest beginnings of the nation to the present day. The galleries are open Monday to Saturday from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. For more information visit www.masshist.org.
About Blue Star Families
Blue Star Families is a national, nonprofit network of military families from all ranks and services, including guard and reserve, with a mission to support, connect and empower military families. In addition to morale and empowerment programs, Blue Star Families raises awareness of the challenges and strengths of military family life and works to make military life more sustainable through programs and partnerships like Operation Honor Cards, MilKidz Club and Blue Star Museums. Membership includes military spouses, children and parents as well as service members, veterans and the civilians who strongly support them. To learn more about Blue Star Families, visit www.bluestarfam.org.
About the National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts was established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. To date, the NEA has awarded more than $4 billion to support artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation for the benefit of individuals and communities. The NEA extends its work through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector. To join the discussion on how art works, visit the NEA at www.arts.gov.
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MHS PRESENTS KENNEDY MEDAL TO GORDON S. WOOD
On May 16, the MHS honored Gordon S. Wood as the 11th recipient of the John F. Kennedy Medal. Awarded to persons who have rendered distinguished service to the cause of history, it is the highest award given by the Society. Wood, a Corresponding Fellow of the MHS since 2002 and the Alva O. Way University Professor at Brown University, was presented the medal as part of the Society’s Annual Meeting. In remarks to MHS Fellows and Members he spoke about the way in which history writing has divided between the academics who write for one another and the growing numbers of popular non-academic historians who write for the general reading public.
Wood, a Corresponding Fellow of the MHS, is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. Over a long career, he has authored numerous books including Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993, and Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, which won the American Publishers Association Prize for History and Biography in 2010. As well, he writes frequently for The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. In 2010, Wood was awarded with the National Humanities Medal “for scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.” Wood received his B.A. degree from Tufts University and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University under MHS Trustee Emeritus and Fellow Bernard Bailyn.
MHS President Dennis Fiori remarked, “The Society has honored ten historians with the medal since its establishment shortly after President Kennedy’s death. As a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian with a long career of distinguished scholarship, it gives us particular pleasure to add Gordon Wood’s name to the list of recipients.”
Shortly after President Kennedy’s death, the Society received several gifts designated to perpetuate his memory as an active member of the Society and a great friend of historical scholarship. The MHS determined to create a medal in President Kennedy’s name and commissioned eminent artist and MHS Fellow Rudolph Ruzicka to design the medal.
The medal is awarded to persons who have rendered distinguished service to the cause of history. It is not limited to any field of history or to any particular kind of service to history. The previous recipients of the medal are Samuel Eliot Morrison (1967), Dumas Malone (1972), Thomas Boylston Adams (1976), Oscar Handlin (1991), Edmund S. Morgan (2002), Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr. (2003), Bernard Bailyn (2004), John Hope Franklin (2005), Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (2006), and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (2009).
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A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life: The Photographs of Clover Adams, 1883-1885
In May 1883, Clover Adams, a descendant of Boston’s Sturgis and Hooper families and the wife of the historian Henry Adams, picked up her camera and began taking photographs—of her husband, of afternoons at the beach on Boston’s North Shore, and of eminent friends who frequented the Adamses’ home on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., H. H. Richardson, Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, and John Hay. Examples of these photographs are on exhibit through 2 June at the MHS. Based on guest curator and MHS Fellow Natalie Dykstra’s book, Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt this month, the exhibition showcases Clover’s striking photographs, many of which have not been seen before in a public venue. It also highlights Clover’s many letters and the notebook she used to record the chronology and technical aspects of her photographs, as well as Henry’s letters and other family materials.
Clover Adams came from privilege, married into one of America’s first families, and presided over a celebrated salon in Washington, D.C. She had, as a friend noted, “all she wanted, all this world could give.” With her photography, she began an exploration of visual beauty that she also imbued with questions about life’s meaning and a woman’s place in her culture, conveying what she thought and felt not with words but with expressive, vital images. Inspiration for the composition of her photographs came from fine art she had seen and collected, and while her pictures could be playful—her “dogs at tea” is a perfect example—she could also evoke an intense feeling of loss, as with her photograph of the Arlington graveyard.
Clover’s life began to unravel just as she became adept with this powerful new technology for recording it . A recurrent undertow of dark moods gathered force until, on a Sunday morning in December 1885, Clover committed suicide by drinking from a vial of potassium cyanide. A chemical she needed to develop her photographs had become the means of her death.
Clover’s story has long been shrouded in mystery, yet she left behind clues. Most eloquent are her revelatory photographs, which invite us to look beyond the circumstances of her death and to stand with her in the world where she lived.
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Diary of Thomas Jefferson's Granddaughter Published
The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) announced the publication of Thomas Jefferson's Granddaughter in Queen Victoria's England: The Travel Diary of Ellen Wayles Coolidge, 1838-1839. The diary, part of the Society's collections, unveils the story of Ellen Wayles Coolidge and her experiences abroad. Co-published by the Massachusetts Historical Society and Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the book was edited by Ann Lucas Birle and Lisa A. Francavilla, and is distributed by the University of Virginia Press. Books are on sale at the Massachusetts Historical Society and will soon be available on amazon.com.
In June 1838, Ellen Wayles Coolidge traveled to London with her husband, Joseph Coolidge, Jr. During her nine-month stay Coolidge recorded details of her experiences abroad and of her conversations with writers such as Thomas Carlyle and Harriet Martineau. This volume brings the full text of her diary to publication for the first time with carefully researched annotations that provide historical context. “The publication of this book is the culmination of a wonderful collaboration between the Massachusetts Historical Society and Thomas Jefferson Foundation,” said MHS President Dennis Fiori.
London's docks, theaters, parks, public buildings, and museums all come under Coolidge's astute gaze as she and her husband travel the city and gradually gain entry into some of the most coveted drawing rooms of the time. Coolidge gives firsthand accounts of the fashioning of the young queen’s image by the artists Charles Robert Leslie and Sir Francis Chantrey and takes notes as she watches the queen open Parliament and battle the first scandal of her reign. Her love of painting reawakened, Coolidge chronicles her opportunities to view over four hundred works of art held in both public and private collections, acknowledging a new appreciation for the modern art of J. M. W. Turner and a fondness for the Dutch masters. Across the spectrum of her observations, Coolidge's diary is always strikingly vivid and insightful—and frequently quite funny.
Her diary entries also include memories of her family in Boston and Virginia. As she encounters her mother's schoolgirl friends and recalls the songs her grandfather, Thomas Jefferson, sang while working in his study, Coolidge's thoughts return to her youth at Monticello and the lessons she learned there.
The original four-volume travel diary that Coolidge wrote during her trip to England is housed at the MHS. In 1825, Ellen Wayles Randolph married a Bostonian, Joseph Coolidge, at Monticello and then moved to Massachusetts. The Coolidge family subsequently established a relationship with the MHS that would span generations. Thanks to the generosity of the Coolidge family, the Society is home to the second largest collection of Thomas Jefferson manuscripts and related family papers. Coolidge’s travel diary came to the MHS in 1964 thanks to Jefferson descendent Mary Barton (Mrs. Edward) Churchill.
Ann Lucas Birle, co-editor of the book, is a scholar at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. She will give a presentation about Ellen Wayles Coolidge and her diary at the MHS on 2 February 2012 at 6:00 PM. A book signing will follow. Co-editor Lisa A. Francavilla is Managing Editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series.
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