By Peter Drummey

We have just opened a new exhibition, The First Seasons of the Federal Street Theatre: 1794-1798, that complements a larger exhibition, Forgotten Chapters of Boston’s Literary History, at the Boston Public Library. The controversy over a public theater that raged in Boston in the 1790s, an old and largely forgotten story, now has been brought to life through the efforts of Professor Paul Lewis of the English Department of Boston College and his very able students. Thanks to the audio production services of Boston College, it also is the first time that the Society—and the Boston Public Library—have used QR codes in an exhibition. QR codes, the ubiquitous matrix barcodes that appear everywhere in advertisements, now are used increasingly in museum settings so that smartphone users are able to call up additional audio information about what is on display. 

The First Seasons of the Federal Street Theatre will be on display, Monday-Saturday, 10:00 AM-4:00 PM, through July 30, but more than twenty items from the MHS exhibition also are on “virtual” display at the Forgotten Chapters of Boston’s History website, www.bostonliteraryhistory.com. The online version of the First Seasons section of the Forgotten Chapters exhibition will reach a wider audience than those who are able to visit the MHS and be available for a longer period of time, but it also is an informative and engaging introduction to the original materials on show at the Society.

By Elaine Grublin

This week members of the MHS staff had fun playing in our daguerreotype studio.

Come on in and join the fun by visiting History Drawn with Light: Early Photographs from the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, an exhibition currently on view at the MHS.  

The exhibition is open to the public Monday through Saturday, 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM.   Bring your camera and strike your own pose.  

By Carol Knauff

In 1840, almost as soon as photography arrived in America, the Massachusetts Historical Society began to collect images of notable figures, artifacts, and landscapes recorded with “the pencil of nature.” Examples of these early photographs will be on display through 3 June, 2011 in the Society’s exhibition, History Drawn with Light: Early Photographs from the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Visitors can view one of Boston’s oldest photographs, taken of the Old Feather Store by MHS Member Francis C. Gray, together with portraits and views by early daguerreotype artists such as Albert S. Southworth and Josiah J. Hawes, and the later work of professional and amateur photographers who documented 19th-century American history as it unfolded. The exhibition is free and open to the public, Monday through Saturday, 1 PM to 4 PM.

Read more in a recent review of the exhibition History Framed by New Technology by Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe.

By Jeremy Dibbell

Our fall exhibit, Josiah Quincy: A Lost Hero of the Revolution officially opens on Saturday, and we hope you’ll come by and see what we have on display. The show will be open to the public without charge, 1:00-4:00 p.m., Monday-Saturday, 23 October 2010 – 22 January 2011, except from 24 December 2010 – 1 January 2011, when the Historical Society is closed for a brief holiday season respite.k

Our October Object of the Month complements the exhibit: it’s a watercolor of Col. Samuel Miller Quincy (1833-1887) in his Civil War uniform. Col. Quincy was the great-grandson of Josiah Quincy, Jr. “The Patriot,” and edited his ancestor’s legal notes (while stationed at Port Hudson during the Civil War, as Peter Drummey notes in the Object essay). He later served as “acting mayor” of New Orleans.

The exhibit celebrates the publication by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts of the final two volumes of Portrait of a Patriot: The Major Political and Legal Papers of Josiah Quincy Junior, edited by Daniel R. Coquillette and Neil Longley York, the first modern edition of the complete works of Josiah Quincy, Jr. (1744-1775). A brilliant young attorney – he was only twenty-six when, with John Adams, he defended the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials – Quincy was an ardent spokesman for the cause of liberty in Revolutionary Massachusetts, although his early death has made him less familiar today than many of his contemporaries.

The exhibition focuses on the Historical Society’s manuscript sources for the new Colonial Society volumes, including Quincy’s political and legal commonplace books, travel journals (he was a harshly critical observer of slavery in the American South), and the law reports that his great-grandson, Samuel Miller Quincy edited. In the exhibition, Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s personal papers will be shown in the context of the MHS’s enormous archive of Quincy family papers–letters, diaries, drawings, artifacts, and paintings that document eight generations of this extraordinary family–including the watercolor portrait of Samuel M. Quincy on display as our Object of the Month.

By Jeremy Dibbell

On the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s execution (2 December 1859), a reminder that you can visit our current exhibition, “John Brown: Martyr to Freedom or American Terrorist – Or Both?” through 23 December, Monday – Saturday from 1-4 p.m. The exhibit includes personal papers, photographs, broadsides, engravings, weapons, and artifacts that illuminate Brown’s life together with evidence of the continuing arguments about the morality and meaning of his actions.

And since there are a number of interesting columns about Brown and his legacy in the newspapers today I thought I’d link to those: at History News Network, David Blight’s essay “‘He Knew How to Die”: John Brown on the Gallows, December 2, 1859” examines the difficult lessons of Brown’s life and actions, concluding “John Brown should confound and trouble us.  Martyrs are made by history; people choose their martyrs just as we choose to define good and evil.  And we will be forever making and unmaking John Brown as Americans face not only their own racial past, but the ever changing reputation of violence in the present.”

In the New York Times, Tony Horwitz calls Brown’s raid “The 9/11 of 1859,” and points out parallels he sees between Brown’s raid and the attacks made on 11 September 2001 (and between Brown’s trial and the upcoming trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed).

Also in the Times, David Reynolds argues in “Freedom’s Martyr” that Brown should be remembered as an “American hero,” and suggests that Virginia governor Tim Kaine and President Barack Obama should posthumously pardon Brown.