When James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as Mr. O, counting the nation's leading politicians and intellectuals among his admirers. And then, like so many meteoric American luminaries afterward, he fell from grace. Ogilvie's career featured many of the hallmarks of celebrity we recognize from later eras: glamorous friends, eccentric clothing, scandalous religious views, narcissism, and even an alarming drug habit. Author Caroyln Eastman, along with Sara Georgini, will discuss Ogilvie’s history, which is at once a biography of a remarkable performer and a story of the United States during the founding era.

This paper considers Atlanta mayor Andrew Young’s shifting ideas about job creation and economic opportunity to investigate how Democrats abandoned their 1970s goal of full employment in favor of policies that promoted private sector job creation via economic growth in the 1980s. By conflating growth with opportunity, Andrew Young sought to stake a middle path between development interests and anti-poverty coalitions, between white and black voters, and between civil rights liberalism and supply-side liberalism. However, economic growth and its promise of opportunity proved to be an inadequate solution for the range of issues its proponents intended it to address.

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.

As we begin to consider climate as an everyday problem, it's valuable to see how people did that in the past. With support from the Guggenheim Foundation, Joyce Chaplin is compiling and analyzing a database of manuscript notes about weather in early American almanacs,1646-1821, out of 10,578 almanacs from nine different archives or libraries. Her talk focuses on how people recorded the weather in numbers (including degrees Fahrenheit) and in words, ranging from “dull” to “elegant!” These notations are significant as records of a period of climate change, the Little Ice Age, also as records of how people made sense of and coped with that climatic disruption.

The Environmental History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. **This session does not have a pre-circulated paper. 

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 2015, the Boston Federal Reserve found the median net worth for Black families in Boston was $8, in stark contrast to $250,000 for white families. This discrepancy is largely driven by the gap in home ownership. Join community activists and urban planners as they discuss Boston’s history of redlining and discriminatory housing policies, the complicity of the banks and the real estate industry, and the consequent legacy of segregation and racial wealth disparity. We will also identify some specific actions we can take to address the inequities in home ownership.

Moderator:

Adrian Walker, Columnist, The Boston Globe

Speakers:

Lewis Finfer, Co-Director, Massachusetts Communities Action Network; Stephen Gray, Associate Professor of Urban Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Image courtesy of "Mapping Inequality":

Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed January 14, 2021, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/

Nathan Raab describes his years as the Sherlock Holmes of historical artifacts and he shows us what the past can tell us about the present. Raab shares some fascinating stories: spotting a letter from British officials that secured the Rosetta Stone; discovering a piece of the first electric cable laid by Edison; restoring a fragmented letter from Andrew Jackson that led to the infamous Trail of Tears; and locating copies of missing audio that had been recorded on Air Force One as the plane brought JFK’s body back to Washington. Every document and artifact uncovers a story—and offers new insights into a life we thought we knew.

Non-conformist resistance to the Stuart Restoration is often told as the history of ministers, regicides, and other men who actively preserved their loyalty to political and religious ideals of the 1640s and 1650s. However, many of the ongoing activities necessary to preserve the movement were carried out by women. This paper explores women’s roles in the transatlantic kinship, religious, and veterans’ networks which enabled nonconformists to sustain themselves in the face of defeat and repression.

The Pauline Maier Early 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 most exciting find in the records of puritan minister Thomas Shepard (Cambridge, 1638-1649) are the voices of the women who came to tell him their stories of spiritual seeking. Serving women, elderly widows, young wives and mothers, daughters of powerful men—all told stories of heroic seeking that feature their independent labor in reading, praying, listening, asking questions, and making meaning in a world narrowed down to just the seeker and her God. Heroic Souls, by Lori Rogers-Stokes, brings you these women’s stories—their lives and passions, and the super-charged energy for change, discovery, and meaning that they embrace.

Dr. Robert Krim, author of Boston Made: From Revolution to Robotics-Innovations that Changed the World, presents a fascinating journey through Boston’s innovation history. Looking at the range of Boston-born innovations that, over its 400-year history, have made Boston one of the world’s leading cities in innovation, Dr. Krim answers the question of why the city has remained innovative through its long history. He will describe in colorful detail the struggles the city—and its innovators—faced on their road to innovations which changed the nation or the world and will discuss how this unfettered innovative culture has helped the city reinvent itself after four devastating economic collapses.

Caroline Healey Dall (1822-1912) and Charles Henry Appleton Dall (1816-1886) met in Boston where, as a teenager in Margaret Fuller’s Conversations, Caroline learned to ask “all the great questions of life.” The handsome but sickly Charles graduated from Harvard with Henry Thoreau and was influenced by Joseph Tuckerman’s ministry to the poor. Marrying in 1844, the couple struggled to find their footing as Charles took a series of ministerial jobs, each punctuated by a period of illness. When Charles left Caroline and their two children in 1855 to establish a Unitarian mission in Calcutta, drawn to the Brahmo Samaj and the Indian nationalist cause, his health improved. “Separated by half the earth,” historian Spencer Lavan writes, “their careers began to blossom.” Caroline emerged as a vehement writer and lecturer on abolition, women’s rights, and social science. Bose and Deese will effect a 21st-century reconciliation, putting into conversation a couple whose divergence led to lives of distinctive activism, documented in Caroline’s extensive journals held at the MHS.

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.

During the late 19^th century, the upstart sheet music firms known as Tin Pan Alley developed a revolutionary approach to publishing, constructing a system able to sell songs at a previously unimaginable scale and rate. Relying on New York’s central role in national performance networks to disseminate their compositions, this industry was defined by the tension between publishers’ attempts to create mass-marketing commodities, and the fast-moving, alcohol-drenched urban environments in which their products were required to thrive.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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 School; Rachel E. Twymon, whose family was profiled in J. Anthony Lukas’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Common Ground

Image courtesy of Spencer Grant.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This seminar honors the legacy and career of noted Harvard historian and MHS Life Trustee Bernard Bailyn. In his lengthy career, Prof. Bailyn explored and wrote about various areas in Early American history. Three leading historians will discuss Bailyn's influence on their respective sub-fields and on their own scholarship in this tribute to a master scholar and teacher.

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 the 1980s, Massachusetts embraced the War on Drugs, enacting harsh mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. It took decades to confront the reality that, in addition to being ineffective and costly, mandatory minimums resulted in the pervasive and disproportionate incarceration of Black and Brown people. Panelists will discuss this troubling history, recent reforms, and the prospects for implementing drug policies that are effective, fair, and just.

Moderator:

Hon. Sydney Hanlon, Massachusetts Appeals Court

Speaker:

Sen. William N. Brownsberger, Second Suffolk & Middlesex District; Abrigal Forrester, Executive Director, Center for Teen Empowerment; Rahsaan D. Hall, Director of the Racial Justice Program, American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts; Deborah A. Ramirez, Professor, Northeastern University School of Law