Feast, sip, and celebrate history at the seventh Cocktails with Clio! 

Thursday, 1 June 2017
6:00 PM

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
Columbia Point
Boston, Massachusetts

Tickets are $300 per person

We invite you to join us for a festive evening in support of the Center for the Teaching of History at the MHS featuring Jill Lepore in conversation with Robin Young. The evening will begin with cocktails in the pavilion space overlooking the harbor. A seated dinner will follow.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of books including The Secret History of Wonder Woman and Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin. Robin Young is the co-host of Here & Now on 90.9 WBUR and NPR.

Become a sponsor of Cocktails with Clio

Our sponsors are crucial to the success of the event. As a result of their generosity, the Society’s educational and outreach efforts continue to expand. The additional funding provided by Clio enables the Center for the Teaching of History to offer a wide array of educational services including engaging workshops and hands-on student programs; online classroom tools; lesson plans and curricular resources; fellowships for students and teachers; and community partnerships. The Society also reaches out to students and teachers in its role as state sponsor of National History Day in Massachusetts. Become a sponsor and join with other history enthusiasts in demonstrating your commitment to promoting the study of American history and deepening our nation’s understanding of the diverse stories that define our past.  

For more information, visit www.masshist.org/clio/sponsor or e-mail cknauff@masshist.org.

New York City’s Central Park receives millions of visitors every year. A Description of the New York Central Park by Clarence C. Cook, published in 1869, is recognized as the most important book about the park to appear during its early years. This work has been republished with a new introduction by Maureen Meister that reveals Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s roles in the creation of the book, which served in part to champion their vision.

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.

"They being stolne":  Conflicting Views of Slavery and Governance in Early Massachusetts and Across the Empire

Holly Brewer of the University of Maryland leads a discussion of primary documents revealing Massachusetts’s contradictory views and practice on slavery.  Compared to other British colonies, where elements of slavery were justified with broad and near-feudal rationales, she argues, Puritan Massachusetts resisted the right of kings and broadened the idea of consent. These ideas helped restrict slavery, even in the face of royal approval and promotion of slavery during the later 17^th century and into the eighteenth century.

Holly Brewer is Burke Chair of American History and associate professor at the University of Maryland. She is currently finishing a book that situates the origins of American slavery in the ideas and legal practices associated with the divine right of kings, provisionally entitled Inheritable Blood: Slavery and Sovereignty in Early America and the British Empire. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for this research. Her first book, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority, won three national prizes. 

Cooking Boston: Ice Kings

Gus Rancatore, Jeri Quinzio and Judy Herrell

From the ice harvesting business and Victorian ice cream parlors like Bailey’s to innovators like Steve’s, the Boston area has an unusual obsession with ice cream. Transplants from warmer parts of the country are often surprised to see ice cream shops still open— and full—on a frigid January night. Why is this area so devoted to ice cream and how have these institutions changed the country’s taste for frozen treats?

Cooking Boston: How the Hub Shaped the American Diet

This six program series will explore the culinary history of Boston and the impact the city has had on the American diet. In the first half of the 19th century, Boston had a reputation as the center for European taste and refinement. By the end of the 19th century, the Colonial Revival movement nationally popularized foods like Boston baked beans and Yankee pot-roast shifting Boston's image from refined to rustic. In the 20th century, Boston clung to two identities: that of thrifty Puritans and of cosmopolitanism through education. This created some remarkably bland food but also made the city fertile ground for a culinary revolution. In the 1960's, chefs like Julia Child and Joyce Chen brought the flavors of the world to America through Boston.

This series will run from March through June of 2017.

Edward Everett had a distinguished career at every level of American politics from the 1820s through the Civil War. His career reveals a complex man whose shifting political opinions, especially on the topic of slavery, illuminate the nuances of Northern Unionism. Everett’s political and cultural efforts to preserve the Union, and the response to his work from citizens and politicians, help us see the complexity of the coming of the Civil War.

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.

Cooking Boston: Final Courses

Join Mount Auburn docents for a walking tour of the cemetery to visit the graves of notable chefs, inventors, and confectioners. Mount Auburn is the final resting place of 19th-century cookbook author Fanny Farmer, chefs Joyce Chen and Gian Franco Romagnoli, chocolate makers Walter Baker and William Schrafft, hotel impresario Harvey Parker of Boston’s famed Parker House, and many more.

Cooking Boston: How the Hub Shaped the American Diet

This six program series will explore the culinary history of Boston and the impact the city has had on the American diet. In the first half of the 19th century, Boston had a reputation as the center for European taste and refinement. By the end of the 19th century, the Colonial Revival movement nationally popularized foods like Boston baked beans and Yankee pot-roast shifting Boston's image from refined to rustic. In the 20th century, Boston clung to two identities: that of thrifty Puritans and of cosmopolitanism through education. This created some remarkably bland food but also made the city fertile ground for a culinary revolution. In the 1960's, chefs like Julia Child and Joyce Chen brought the flavors of the world to America through Boston.

The series will run from March through June of 2017.

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.

On April 4, 1768, in the largest student strike at any colonial college, well over half the student body of Harvard College left school and went home in protest against new rules about class preparation. Many contemporaries found the cause trivial, but in the undergraduates’ own minds it was the culmination of months of tensions with the faculty. Through the lens of the daily journal entries of Stephen Peabody, the best surviving account of colonial college life, Conrad E. Wright will guide us through the relationships among students, faculty members, and administrators.

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.

In the spring of 1967, the Boston Red Sox were coming off a season in which they had lost 90 games, and seemingly were locked in a state of mediocrity. Owner Tom Yawkey was discussing the need for a new ballpark and even hinted he might sell the club. Boston was in the midst of one of its worst economic downturns and fan interest had tapered off, with attendance barely half of what it had been in the 1940s. That all changed when a 100 to 1 longshot ballclub led by a rookie manager, Dick Williams, and a superstar left fielder, Carl Yastrzemski, won the American League pennant on the final day of the season after one of the closest races in history. “The Impossible Dream Red Sox” transformed the franchise forever.

View a temporary exhibition. View rare photos of the 1967 season taken by retired Boston Globe photographer Frank O’Brien, a collection of 1967 artifacts including Carl Yastrzemski’s jersey, and the 2004, 2007, and 2013 World Series trophies (only on June 24th).

Attend a panel discussion. Moderated by Red Sox historian Gordon Edes, panelists include authors Herb Crehan (The Impossible Dream 1967 Red Sox: Birth of Red Sox Nation), Bill Nowlin (The 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox: Pandemonium on the Field), and Tom Whalen (The Spirit of ’67: Cardiac Kids, El Birdos, and the World Series That Captivated America).

Enjoy a Red Sox game. Take a short walk to Fenway Park and enjoy a 7:15 PM game in a section of seats designated for the MHS and the panel. Please purchase your Red Sox ticket package by May 26th using the RSVP link.

Image courtesy of Frank O'Brien

In life and in death, slaves were commodities. Their monetary value was assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh explores the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives, including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, senior years, and death. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments and how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives.

Born and raised in a New England garrison town, Esther Wheelwright (1696–1780) was captured by Wabanaki Indians at age seven. Among them, she became a Catholic and lived like any other young girl in the tribe. At age twelve, she was enrolled at a French-Canadian Ursuline convent, where she would spend the rest of her life, eventually becoming the order’s only foreign-born mother superior. Among these three major cultures of colonial North America, Wheelwright’s life was exceptional: border-crossing, multilingual, and multicultural. Ann Little leads us through her life and the communities of girls and women around her.

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.

Stephen Kurkjian, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The Boston Globe, was the newspaper’s lead reporter on the Gardner art heist. He’ll give a dramatic narrative of the theft in which two men dressed as police officers were able to trick their way into the museum after hours and make off with priceless masterpieces. More than a quarter century later, none of the 13 pieces that were stolen have been recovered. Kurkjian will share details on the investigation and offer a possible missing motive.

This program is free.

“Old Ironsides” has been a source of pride for Massachusetts for well over 200 years. Launched in 1797, just six years after the founding of the MHS, the War of 1812 icon and the Society have been sharing stories for centuries. Naval historian Margherita M. Desy will describe some of the hidden treasures uncovered in the recent restoration of the Constitution and highlight resources at MHS that help tell the story of the world’s oldest commissioned warship afloat.

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.

There is no “Boston Historical Society,” but the metro area does have a wealth of history organizations. Boston and surrounding towns are steeped in local history and the inhabitants are proud of their local identity. The MHS is pleased to hold a reception for history buffs and representatives of local organizations to mingle, share recent accomplishments, and talk about the great projects on which they are working.

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.