| «March 2021 | April 2021 |
May 2021» | ||||
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
|
||||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
|
||||||
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
|
|
|
||||
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
|
|
|||||
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |
|
|
|
|
|||
Political cartoons have long served to provoke public debate, illustrating opinions of the day for the masses. From early in the 19th century, arguments over voting rights—who votes and who counts the votes—have been depicted in cartoons, especially with the rise of illustrated newspapers and magazines with a national circulation before the Civil War.
Featuring examples of published cartoons from the MHS collections as well as other libraries and foundations, this exhibition illustrates how cartoonists helped to tell the story of voting rights in the United States. In addition to many drawings by Thomas Nast, the most influential American political cartoonist in the decades following the Civil War, this exhibition features modern reinterpretations of these topics by editorial cartoonists, including Herblock (Herbert Block), Tom Toles, Bill Mauldin, and the work of current Boston-area artists.
Explore the online exhibition at www.masshist.org/whocounts.
close
Thomas Nast defined American political cartoons in the decades following the Civil War. His illustrations popularized icons such as the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, and even the modern image of Santa Claus. This exhibition highlights Thomas Nast’s remarkable impact through a cartoon biography created by local artists.
Explore the online exhibition at www.masshist.org/thomasnast.
close
As slavery expanded in the Americas, canine attacks were used as a particularly sadistic aspect of racist dehumanization. Through linked processes of breeding and training, slave hunters believed they had developed “natural” enemies between black people and the canines trained to hunt them. This paper investigates how fugitives responded to this interspecies violence by using various techniques of environmental resistance outside the plantation’s confines. By analyzing how fugitives used herbal combinations, waterways, and offensive weapons to subvert the canine's sensory advantage, this paper argues that enslaved communities should be understood as knowledge producers who studied their environments and used scientific awareness in their resistance.
The African American History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.
The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Many free states enacted laws that restricted African Americans' rights and movement. But over time, African American activists and their white allies built a movement to fight these racist laws. Pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women battled in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed the movement’s vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. Kate Masur and Edward Ayers will discuss Masur’s book, Until Justice Be Done, a pathbreaking new history of this early civil rights movement and it’s landmark achievements.
close
Historian David Brown sheds light on the life and times of Henry Adams, perhaps the most eclectic 
accomplished and important American writer of his time. His autobiography and modern classic The Education of Henry Adams was widely considered one of the best English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. The last member of his distinguished family—after great-grandfather John Adams, and grandfather John Quincy Adams—to gain national attention, he is remembered today as an historian, a political commentator, and a memoirist. Presenting intimate and insightful details of a fascinating and unusual American life and a new window on nineteenth century US history, Brown offers us a more “modern” and “human” Henry Adams than ever before.
close
Author of the recently-published book Innovation Economy and longtime Boston Globe columnist, Scott Kirsner, will take you on a photographic tour of 11 places in the Boston area that have given birth to world-changing inventions, from the telephone to COVID vaccines to robots that vacuum your living room. Kirsner will be joined in conversation by iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner as they discuss the dynamics that make New England such a fertile place for invention and entrepreneurship and Greiner's journey in the innovation economy.
close
By the 1950s, just as technocratic consensus settled on the opinion that Boston’s metropolitan problems demanded municipal consolidation, meaningful regional integration became a political dead letter. This paper examines how conflicting pressures towards both spatial integration and disintegration shaped the postwar city, with ecological concepts about environmental management jostling against demands for community autonomy coming from both right and left. Struggle over geographic units thereby became a key axis of conflict between different ideological strands of the politics of place.
The Environmental History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.
In 1972, a group of African American parents sued city and state officials over segregation within the Boston Public Schools. After a trial, a federal court determined that the Boston School Committee had intentionally discriminated on the basis of race by operating a dual school system that extended to school assignments, facilities, and staffing. When officials failed to produce a timely remedy, the court ordered institutional reforms, including re-districting and the re-assignment of students. In this program, panelists will reflect on the lessons to be learned from Boston’s school desegregation experience.
Moderator:
Matthew F. Delmont, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History, Dartmouth College
Speakers:
Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor, Harvard University, and Former Dean, Harvard Law School; Becky Shuster, Assistant Superintendent of Equity, Boston Public Schools; Rachel E. Twymon, whose family was profiled in J. Anthony Lukas’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Common Ground
Image courtesy of Spencer Grant.
close
The domestic realm has long captivated feminist scholars who have sought to understand the lives of women and the workings of gender. How have women experienced, challenged, leveraged, and shaped the domestic? This panel will consider these questions and discuss the domestic as a contested site of constraint and possibility. Shoniqua Roach theorizes the meanings of black domesticity as a deeply fraught space marked by anti-black sentiment and yet full of insurgent potential. Kwelina Thompson explores the history of the La Leche League – a Catholic mothers group that organized to support breastfeeding mothers in the mid-twentieth century. Finally, Laura Puaca tells the story of the expansion of post-WWII vocational rehabilitation programs to include disabled homemakers in the US.
The History of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.
close
The chain of green spaces and waterways that comprise the Emerald Necklace park system is an invaluable urban oasis. Described as “the lungs of the city” this parkland and its rivers and ponds clean the city air, provide habitats for birds and other wildlife, and greatly improve quality of life for Boston residents. Our panel will explore the past, present, and future of this urban wild, beginning with Olmsted’s vision, through the lens of social equity and environmental justice.
close
Ever since US troops occupied the Philippines in 1898, generations of Filipinos have served in and alongside the US armed forces. Historian Christopher Capozzola reveals this forgotten history, showing how war and military service forged an enduring, yet fraught, alliance between Americans and Filipinos. As the US military expanded in Asia, American forces confronted their Pacific rivals from Philippine bases and Filipinos became crucial partners in the exercise of US power. Their service reshaped Philippine society and politics and brought hundreds of thousands of Filipino immigrants to America, including World War II veterans who fought a decades-long battle to win equitable rights to citizenship and veterans benefits. Drawing on research across the U.S. and Asia, Bound by War tells the epic story of the U.S. and the Philippines through the wars the two nations fought together.
close
Since 1965, U.S. political and social discourse about immigration has been dominated by concerns over undocumented immigration, a legal and social category understood to apply almost exclusively to non-white immigrants. This panel will examine a now obscure part of twentieth century immigration history: the migration of unauthorized white Europeans. The session will complicate current understandings of the period to demonstrate that early in the twentieth century southern and eastern European immigrants were in fact stigmatized as “criminals” and “illegals.” However by mid-century, southern and eastern Europeans were able to draw upon their social and political capital to change public perceptions and state policies. Legal status provided relief from the threat of deportation or exclusion – and reinforced the racialized category of undocumented immigrant. These papers will bring the stories to light of these “other” illegal immigrants and reinsert them into the conversations and policy debates surrounding unauthorized immigration.
The Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.
close
The Young Patrons Committee invites you to a riveting hour with MHS President Catherine Allgor!
SIP your favorite cocktail (or mocktail) at this virtual event and hear new plans for the first historical society in America.
SHARE your thoughts as stakeholders helping to craft a fresh future.
SHOW OFF your MHS face mask (will be sent to all attendees post-event).
Free and exclusively for patrons under 40.
Join the ongoing MHS Young Patron conversation with events and networking opportunities for young professionals under the age of 40.
Membership for this vibrant group of patrons is discounted to $40.00 per year.
Visit www.masshist.org/members or contact agrant@masshist.org for more info.
close
Is fashion art or commerce? Frivolous or full of meaning? Is fashion evidence? This panel brings together Caroline Weber, author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution and Proust’s Duchess, and Channing Joseph, whose forthcoming book recovers the untold story of formerly enslaved William Dorsey Swann, who became, in the 1880s, a progenitor of ballroom and drag culture. They will join moderator Natalie Dykstra, author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, and now at work on a biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, in a conversation about the ways biographers use fashion to decode lives and historical contexts.
Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.
close