Exhibition The Irish Atlantic 10 March 2017 to 22 September 2017 Open Monday through Saturday from 10 AM to 4 PM

Watch the recording of this event, embedded below:

Explore 175 years of the Irish in Boston from the founding of the Charitable Irish Society in 1737, through famine relief efforts led by Capt. Robert Bennet Forbes at the helm of the Jamestown, to a mass migration movement, decades of community and institutional building, and a rise in political power. The exhibition is co-sponsored by the MHS and the Forbes House Museum.

See the exhibit’s companion website for an overview, timeline, and more videos about the Irish in Boston.

Watch this video for an overview of the exhibit by guest curator William M. Fowler, Distinguished Professor of History at Northeastern University.

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MHS Tour The History and Collections of the MHS 2 September 2017.Saturday, 10:00AM - 11:30AM

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: The Irish Atlantic: A Story of Famine Migration and Opportunity.

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Brown Bag The Liberator’s Legacy: Memory, Abolitionism, and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1865-1965 6 September 2017.Wednesday, 12:00PM - 1:00PM Donald Yacovone, Harvard University

The Liberator’s Legacy explores popular memory of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and their fellow abolitionists in the decades following the Civil War and reveals how that legacy influenced the rise of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Through the lens of collective memory, this book will examine the changing meaning of the Civil War in American thought.

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MHS Tour The History and Collections of the MHS 9 September 2017.Saturday, 10:00AM - 11:30AM

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: The Irish Atlantic: A Story of Famine Migration and Opportunity.

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Public Program, Author Talk The Selected Letters of John Kenneth Galbraith 13 September 2017.Wednesday, 6:00PM - 7:00PM There will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm. Richard P.F. Holt $10 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)

In his long, cosmopolitan life, Galbraith wrote thousands of letters. Richard P. F. Holt has selected the most important of these and made them available in print for the first time. The letters provide an intimate account of the three main political goals to which Galbraith devoted his professional life: ending war, fighting poverty, and improving quality of life by achieving a balance between private and public goods in an affluent capitalist society.

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Public Program, Author Talk Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States & the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy 14 September 2017.Thursday, 6:00PM - 7:00PM There will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm. Hidetaka Hirota, City College of New York

This groundbreaking work reinterprets the origins of immigration restriction in the U.S. Faced with the influx of Irish immigrants over the first half of the 19th century, nativists in Massachusetts and New York developed policies for prohibiting the landing of destitute foreigners and deporting those already resident. These state-level policies laid the foundations for federal immigration law. Expelling the Poor fundamentally revises the history of American immigration policy by locating the roots of immigration control in cultural and economic nativism against the Irish on the 19th-century Atlantic seaboard.

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MHS Tour The History and Collections of the MHS 16 September 2017.Saturday, 10:00AM - 11:30AM

The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Tour is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you're here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: The Irish Atlantic: A Story of Famine Migration and Opportunity.

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Brown Bag Exploring Conflict, Collaboration, and Conciliation in Colonial Families before the American Revolution 20 September 2017.Wednesday, 12:00PM - 1:00PM Nina Sankovitch, Independent Researcher

The Quincy, Adams, and Hancock families represent three different social classes all living in the small village of Braintree, MA before the American Revolution. This talk considers how the men and women of the families interacted, especially in their attitudes towards England in the late colonial era, and the different roles the families played in fomenting agitation against English rule.

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Public Program, Conversation John McCormack and David K. Niles: How Two Reinvented Bostonians Altered American Politics and Foreign Policy 20 September 2017.Wednesday, 6:00PM - 7:00PM There will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm. Garrison Nelson, University of Vermont; Michael Dukakis, Northeastern University; and Peter Drummey, MHS $20 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)

John McCormack and David Niles came from large and poor families within religious minority communities. With no formal education, they reinvented themselves and moved into political circles eventually rising to be the Speaker of the House and high level White House advisor. While less well known than some of Boston’s more recent political stars, both became central to the shaping of modern American political parties and politics.

 

The program is co-sponsored by the Northeastern University Political Science Department

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Special Event, Public Program An Extraordinary Life: An Evening with John Quincy Adams 21 September 2017.Thursday, 6:00PM - 8:00PM SOLD OUT! There is a $10 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members)

This event is sold out.

President John Quincy Adams, the eldest son of founders Abigail and John, remains America’s most fascinating statesman. He began his life’s work of public service as a teenager in Catherine the Great’s court and continued until he collapsed at his desk in the U.S. Capitol more than six decades later. He served as a diplomat, secretary of state, president, and U.S. congressman. John Quincy Adams had one of the most extraordinary lives in American history, and he wrote it all down.

On 21 September, join us for a fun and festive evening celebrating John Quincy Adams. Enjoy a reception, learn about moments from Adams's life—as told through his diary and correspondence—from incoming MHS President Catherine Allgor and the staff of the Adams Papers editorial project, and explore a pop-up exhibit of the artifacts and documents that tell his story and that of our nation’s history.

Program:

6:00 PM
Reception begins

6:20 PM
The Politics of John Quincy & Louisa Catherine Adams's Drawing Room
Incoming MHS President Catherine Allgor

7:00 PM
JQA Diary Digital Project
Neal Millikan, The Adams Papers

7:25 PM
JQA in His Own Words
Sara Georgini, Amanda Norton, Hobson Woodward, The Adams Papers

There is a $10 per person fee (no charge for MHS Fellows and Members). 

To find out more about #JQA250 and how you can help, visit www.gofundme.com/JQA250.

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Teacher Workshop John Quincy Adams and American Diplomacy 23 September 2017.Saturday, 9:00AM - 4:00PM Registration fee: $25 per person

Join us as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of John Quincy Adams’s birth! JQA was active in public affairs for more than sixty years. His letters and diary shed light on national development and global trends from the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. They not only reveal the public life and private experiences of one of America’s great statesmen, but also inform our understanding of American cultural, political, and social history. Learn more about his fascinating career and how to connect his work to curriculum frameworks

This program is open to all K-12 educators. Teachers can earn 22.5 PDPs or one graduate credit (for an additional fee).

Image: John Quincy Adams, oil on canvas by Nahum Bell Onthank, 19th century. Probably after Stephen Henry Gimber's 1848 engraving.

 

Highlights:

• Learn more abou JQA's achcievements as Secretary of State, including the Monroe Doctrine and the Adams-Onis Treaty. 
• Analyze documents from the Adams family papers, including JQA's diary. 
• Discuss JQA's role in America's westward expansion. 
• Meets Adams papers editors, and learn how they make the family's work accessible to audiences of all ages. 

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Modern American Society and Culture Seminar Lost Cities of Chicago's South Side 26 September 2017.Tuesday, 5:15PM - 7:30PM Carlo Rotella, Boston College Comment: Samuel Zipp, Brown University

Any city is composed of many layers, including superseded and could-have-been versions of itself: lost cities. This essay is drawn from Rotella’s current book project on South Shore, a neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side. Over the past half-century, the area has gradually shifted toward a class system of haves and have-nots separated by an increasing divide. Its fallen orders, which include factory complexes and ethnic urban villages, nevertheless exert a persistent pull today.

To RSVP: email seminars@masshist.org or call (617) 646-0579.

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Brown Bag The Constitution of Disability in the Early United States 27 September 2017.Wednesday, 12:00PM - 1:00PM Laurel Daen, MHS-NEH Fellow

Disability emerged in the Early Republic as a meaningful bureaucratic, legal, institutional, and cultural category. It was rooted in ideas about work, social worth, and economic independence and increasingly determined by the expert discourse of medicine. This project examines this development and considers its consequences for the new nation and its citizens.

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Public Program, Author Talk Sargent's Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas 27 September 2017.Wednesday, 6:00PM - 7:00PM There will be a pre-talk reception at 5:30pm. Donna Lucey, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities $10 registration fee per person. (No Charge for MHS Members or Fellows)

 

This biography, based on original letters and diaries, illuminates four extraordinary women painted by the iconic high-society portraitist John Singer Sargent. With uncanny intuition, Sargent hinted at the mysteries and passions that unfolded in his subjects’ lives. Like characters in an Edith Wharton novel, these women challenged society’s restrictions, risking public shame and ostracism. These compelling stories of female courage connect our past with our present and remind us that while women live differently now, they still face obstacles to attaining full equality.

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Special Event Graduate Student Reception 28 September 2017.Thursday, 6:00PM - 8:00PM

Calling all graduate students and faculty in history, American Studies, or any related field! Please join us for our eighth annual Graduate Student Reception.

Starting at six pm, you can enjoy free drinks and hors d’oeuvres as you meet students and professors from other universities working in your fields. At 6:30 or a little later, set down your glass and take a behind-the-scenes tour to learn more about the Society's collections as well as the resources available to support your scholarship, from research fellowships to our five different seminar series.

Faculty, bring your graduate students! Graduate students, bring your cohort! This reception is free, but we ask that you RSVP by September 27, by emailing seminars@masshist.org or calling (617) 646-0579.

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Public Program Begin at the Beginning - Violence, Disease, and Public Medicine during the Pequot and King Philip’s War 30 September 2017.Saturday, 1:00PM - 3:00PM Kevin McBride, Pequot Museum Co-sponsored with the Partnership of Historic Bostons

This interactive talk by Kevin McBride, director of research at the Pequot Museum, and Ashley Bissonnette, Pequot Museum senior researcher, reveals how New England’s landscape were far more heavily contested than previously thought. Through an examination of musket balls, arrows, and gun parts, they will present recent archaeological findings to explore the reality of the Pequot and Philip’s Wars: epidemics, the destruction of food and shelter, and battlefield slaughter. They will also discuss the beginning of public health in the colonies.

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