All high school students in the United States study American history, and many of them seek mastery in the subject, which is the second most popular at the Advanced Placement level. Yet relatively few female actors appear in high school textbooks, and graduates arrive on college campuses with widely varying levels of exposure to the history of women, gender, and sexuality in America, especially prior to the 1990s. This panel discussion, featuring university faculty, secondary educators, and activist curriculum specialists, aims to seed an ongoing discussion between high school and post-secondary instructors of American history about gendering the U.S. History curriculum. What topics in women’s and gender history and in the history of sexuality get covered when, where, and how? How can college- and university-based scholars do more to connect their work with high school classrooms? How are secondary educators—and their students—advancing and reshaping the field?

This program is open to all K-12 educators. Teachers can earn 10 PDPs with the completion of a lesson plan.

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

What fuels a family’s compulsion for philanthropy? Charitable giving is an intrinsic part of our culture and its story can be told through a colorful, multifaceted family whose actions mirror America’s attitudes towards giving. Between 1638 and today, the Browns of Rhode Island have provided community leaders, endowed academic institutions, and transformed communities through art and architecture. However, they also have wrestled with society’s toughest issues slavery, immigration, child labor, inequality and with their own internal tensions. Sylvia Brown, of the family’s 11th generation, and Edward Widmer will explore this story.

The mounting political tensions that ignited the battles of Lexington and Concord are critical to the narrative of the American Revolution. However, the economic forces that propelled these iconic battles are another vital part of this history. When Benjamin Franklin wrote home describing the living conditions in Britain and Ireland, his country men were appalled. Could the Crown’s motive be to reduce the prosperous American colonies to such serfdom? This threat inspired the vast turnout of Patriot militiamen that so shocked the British and led the colonists to victory in the first armed conflictsof the War of Independence.

In 1628, King Charles the 1st made a royal grant of what is now the entire state of Massachusetts (not including Plymouth) to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Remarkably, ALL of this territory had previously been granted to others. In four separate actions between 1621 and 1623, this land had been granted, by Sir Ferdinando Gorges, President of the Council for New England, to himself and to his associates, and colonized. However, the King's Charter overrode their charters and boundaries.

At this Partnership of Historic Bostons discussion group at MHS, we will replay the struggles and strategies the Mass Bay Colony used to defend, and expand, its land grant against Gorges' accusations of usurpation, sedition, and religious non-conformity, and the efforts to recapture his lost territory by Gorges and his supporters. 

There are five readings (portions of original documents and maps), and a sixth suggested reading.  These will be emailed to everyone who registers thru MHS by Wednesday evening, April 18, and a few copies will be available at the meeting.  

Charles Manson made national news in 1969 when several “Family” members were arrested for murder, but by then he was well-established in Los Angeles. This paper explores the cultural fluidity that allowed Los Angeles’s hip aristocracy to mingle with marginal figures like Manson, but also the backlash which turned the Manson Family into a warning for the dangers of migration and the promiscuous cultural mixing that could follow.

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

Watch the recording of this event, embedded below:

Massachusetts has undertaken large scale preservation of open space by government entities. The Boston Public Garden, the Emerald Necklace, the first American public beach in Revere, the banks of the Charles River, and a network of state forests were all significant contributions to keeping open land available to the public. Were these projects pioneering? Have they shaped national discussions? Are similar projects possible today or will projects like the Community Preservation Act offer equivalent impacts?

MHS is proud to partner with the Trustees of Reservations, the Department of Conservation and Recreation, Mount Auburn Cemetery, the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, and the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center to plan this programming.

This program is supported by the Barr Foundation.

Part of a larger book project, this paper argues that the seemingly distinct conflicts across the English colonies in the 1670s were actually connected by the political initiatives of the scattered Susquehannock Indians. The dispersion of the Susquehannocks caused instability in surrounding Native American and colonial societies, drawing them into a spiral of violence interrupted only by Susquehannock success, which brought stability to the northeast and shattered the southeast.

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

This presentation will discuss how World War I disrupted traditional notions of neutrality in the United States. After the war, a movement comprised of scholars, journalists, peace activists, and “anti-monopolist” US Senators worked together to articulate a new conception of US neutrality. Unlike the more widely discussed international war outlawry movement, this national movement focused narrowly on one radical conclusion: that protection of capitalist interests had motivated World War I, and thus, that the US government must permanently disavow the right to protect those interests in order to prevent war’s future recurrence.

Watch the recording of this event, embedded below:

The Boston metropolitan area is in the enviable spot of having more people who want to live and work here than there is space for. Real estate regularly sells for prices that would have seemed inconceivable twenty five years ago. This situation puts more funds in municipal coffers, but what will this increased demand and density do to plans to preserve open space? How will climate change impact our priorities for preserving open space and how might it limit our options?

 MHS is proud to partner with the Trustees of Reservations, the Department of Conservation and Recreation, Mount Auburn Cemetery, the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, and the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center to plan this programming.

This program is supported by the Barr Foundation.

Watch the recording of this event, embedded below:

This workshop is FULL and registration has closed.  Please contact Kate Melchior at kmelchior@masshist.org with any questions.

Known as the “master of the art of narrative history,” David McCullough is the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. He will join us to discuss his perspective on history, education, and American legacy.

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

Note: Due to high demand, this workshop is currently restricted to K-12 educators ONLY. This includes both classroom educators and museum/heritage institution educators.

If you have any questions, please contact Kate Melchior at kmelchior@masshist.org or 617-646-0588.

Ann Hulbert and Megan Marshall will discuss Hulbert’s new book, which examines the lives of children whose rare accomplishments have raised hopes about untapped human potential and questions about how best to nurture it. The conversation will draw on a range of examples that span a century—from two precocious Harvard boys in 1909 to literary girls in the 1920s to music virtuosos today. Hulbert and Marshall will explore the changing role of parents and teachers, as well as of psychologists, a curious press and, above all, the feelings of the prodigies themselves, who push back against adults more as the decades proceed.

While historians have analyzed the rise of companionship and romance in marriage, they have overlooked a critical continuity: marriage continued to serve vital financial functions. This talk briefly sketches the economic importance of marriage and families’ strategies for managing wealth across generations.

MHS Fellows and Members special preview and reception for Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose &Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825 is SOLD OUT.

Virtually forgotten for 200 years, Isaac Vose and his brilliant furniture are revealed in a new exhibition and accompanying volume. Beginning with a modest pair of collection boxes he made for his localBoston church in 1788, Vose went on to build a substantial business empire and to make furniture for the most prominent Boston families. The exhibition and catalog restore Vose from relative obscurity to his rightful position as one of Boston’s most important craftsmen. Opening at the MHS on May 11, the exhibition will be on view through September 14.

Become a Member today!

Image: Couch, Isaac Vose & Son, with Thomas Wightman, carver, Boston, 1824. Historic New England, Gift of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1923.507); photograph by David Bohl.

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: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825

In 1805 and 1806, former vice president Aaron Burr traveled through the trans-Appalachian West gathering support for a mysterious enterprise, for which he was arrested and tried for treason in 1807. The Burr Conspiracy was a cause célèbre of the early republic-with Burr cast as the chief villain of the Founding Fathers—even as the evidence against him was vague and conflicting. James Lewis will explore how Americans made sense of the reports of Burr’s intentions and examine what the crisis revealed about the new nation’s uncertain future.

Watch the recording of this event, embedded below:

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

Thursday, 17 May 2018
6:30 PM

Fairmont Copley Plaza
Boston, Massachusetts

We invite you to join us for a festive evening in support of the Center for the Teaching of History at the MHS featuring Harvard President Drew Faust in conversation with MHS President Catherine Allgor. The evening will begin with a cocktail reception. A seated dinner will follow.

Tickets are $300 per person. Purchase tickets today!

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: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825

In 1824 and 1825 General Lafayette made a farewell tour of the United States. The 67-year-old hero was welcomed in an adoring frenzy. The visit to Boston of the sole surviving major general of the Continental Army was one of the largest celebrations the city had ever seen. A “Committee of Arrangements” was organized to rent and furnish an appropriate home and all of the furniture was purchased from Isaac Vose & Son. Alan Hoffman will recount the general’s visit and discuss his translation of Lafayette’s private secretary’s journal.

This talk examines the religious critique of manifest destiny put forth by New Englanders from 1848-1871. Although manifest destiny is often portrayed as an ideology rooted in Puritan theology, this talk explores how opponents of expansion in New England used religion to castigate and separate themselves from this ideology.

Black Americans did not just pray for emancipation, they conjured it. This project examines the political work of revival in wartime refugee camps and envisions emancipation as a religious event. It reckons with religion as a mediating force between the enslaved and the state, asking "Who belongs and how?" for those negotiating statelessness and peoplehood in the midst of self-emancipation.

As Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and James Monroe risked their lives and their liberty for  American independence, and as reformers, each rejoiced at the opportunity to be part of the French Revolution, praying that it in turn would inspire others to sweep away Europe’s monarchies and titled nobilities. But as the 18th century unfolded, these three embarked on different routes to revolution. As writers, soldiers,and statesmen, these three men reshaped their country and the Western world.

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: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825.

Join us in celebrating Frederick Douglass’s Bicentennial alongside three of the country’s leading Douglass scholars. A group discussion will be led by David Blight (Yale University), Lois Brown (Wesleyan University), and John Stauffer (Harvard University) on the relevance of Frederick Douglass today with a focus on the theme, “Democracy and the Informed Citizen.” What is Douglass’s rightful place in American history and how is he relevant to the social and civic concerns of today?

During the event, the projects of student winners of the Mass History Day Frederick Douglass Bicentennial Awards will be on display for guests to view, and the winners will present their projects alongside the three scholars. The afternoon will close with a specially commissioned, Frederick Douglass-themed “choral poem” researched, written, and performed by the young poets of Mass LEAP.   

This is a free, public event; you're encouraged to bring friends and family! Free parking is available and there is easy access on the T (Orange line, Roxbury Crossing).

Location: Roxbury Community College Media Arts Center

While the measurement of human intelligence is now fully in the purview of science, antebellum novelists and poets engaged in public debate over its meaning. Key to recovering this contentious field are the student essays of Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and Henry David Thoreau for Harvard professor Edward Channing in 1836.

In the eighteenth century, the far northeastern coast of North America had more in common with the trans-Appalachian west than the white settler colonial east. This talk examines British and French efforts to import white settlers in an attempt to change these demographic and political realities. These state projects offer a different view of the role of settlement in 18th-century North American empires.

Few are familiar with Massachusetts’s role at the center of the national struggle for woman suffrage. Lucy Stone and other Massachusetts abolitionists were some of the first figures who vocally opposed women’s exclusion from political life. Demanding the vote and other reforms, they launched the organized women’s movement at the first National Woman’s Rights Convention, held in Worcester in 1850.Barbara Berenson gives Massachusetts suffragists the attention they deserve in this engaging story and discusses the battle over historical memory that long obscured the state’s leading role.

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: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825

This talk examines tobacco’s role in the agriculture, commerce, and political economy of New England. By the 18th-century, tobacco figured prominently in the region, and was exported in large quantities to Dutch Suriname and to West African slave traders. Tobacco was a true “Atlantic Commodity;” and, just as in the southern colonies, it drew New England farmers into the world of Atlantic slavery.

MHS Fellows are invited to the Society's annual business meeting. RSVP by e-mailing dbeardsley@masshist.org or calling 617-646-0572.

American Cookery (1796) by Amelia Simmons is known as the “first American cookbook”and has attracted an enthusiastic modern audience of historians, food journalists, and general readers. Yet until now American Cookery has not received the sustained scholarly attention it deserves. Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald’s United Tastes fills this gap by providing a detailed examination of the social circumstances and culinary tradition that produced this American classic.

The origins of the United States are often framed as anti-monarchist, yet Americans entertain a fascination with monarchs and royalty. Is it possible to create a taxonomy of popular Orientalist images of modern Muslim and Arab rulership in the United States? Next to foreign policy considerations and economic interests, this talk searches for the private views of American travelers about modern Muslim and Arab rulers in the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825

Guest curator and furniture conservator Robert Mussey will lead visitors through the exhibition’s highlights while giving deeper context to the life and work of two extraordinary Massachusetts craftsmen, Isaac Vose and Thomas Seymour.

Join us for an open house and a one-day display celebrating milestones on the road to the end of slavery. Featured items explore the 1783 abolition of slavery in Massachusetts; celebrations within the African American community in Boston of the ending of slavery in the British West Indies in 1833; Garrisonian protest banners; and a look at the evolution of depictions of Crispus Attucks’s death in the Boston Massacre as a symbol of black abolitionism before and during the Civil War.

This talk examines three interrelated elements of Henry Adams’s literary output: his transnational focus, his reconsideration of subject/object relations, and his interest in the visual arts. While travelling during the 1890s, Adams took a break from writing to immerse himself in painting and sketching—after which he produced acclaimed works like Chartres and The Education. His time abroad represents an important transitional moment between the Romanticism of the nineteenth century and the Modernism of the twentieth century.

Chateau Higginson is a vivid and absorbing account of one man’s efforts to construct a building that would create “a new way for Bostonians—and Americans—to live.” Henry Lee Higginson is best known for founding the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but exploring his housing gamble helps bring him to life, as well as a whole social class in 19th-century urban America.

This talk explores the economic and cultural exchange between New England and Zanzibar, the premier entrepôt of the Western Indian Ocean. This trade network linked the cotton magnates of Massachusetts with the Omani elite, Indian merchants, and Swahili slaves of Zanzibar. As the trade expanded, each close-knit community found themselves increasingly dependent on an incredibly foreign counterpart for survival. This project maps the many compromises, adaptations, and concessions made in the name of profit.

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: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825.

Watch the recording of this event, embedded below:

Baseball is not just a beloved pastime for American boys and men. From 19th-century college teams formed at Vassar and Smith and the nationally celebrated Boston Bloomer Girls to the formation of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League when major male talent faced the WWII draft, women players have increasingly found ways to make their mark on the game. Today, more women than ever before are playing baseball at a world-class level, staking a claim on the most nostalgic and patriotic of American sports.

Attend a panel discussion: Moderated by Red Sox historian Gordon Edes, with panelists Maybelle Blair and Shirley Burkovich (All American Girls Professional Baseball League); Donna Mills (Women's World Cup of Baseball MVP); Marti Sementelli (U.S. Women's National Baseball Team); and Dr. Kat Williams (Women's Sports historian at Marshall University).

(sales of Red Sox game tickets have ended)

This talk will examine the emerging legal category of the “disabled” American at the end of the nineteenth century in relation to the construction of disability in Civil War literature, broadly conceived. In texts ranging from hospital newspaper poetry to mendicant narratives sold for veterans’ financial support, representations of Civil War injury engaged shifting understandings of disability: from individual condition to evolving social class.

William James advocated a philosophy of democracy and pluralism that emphasizes individual and collective responsibility for our social arrangements, our morality, and our religion. In James’s view, democracy resides first and foremost not in governmental institutions but rather in the characteristics of individuals and in qualities of mind and conduct. It is a philosophy for social change, counseling action and hope despite the manifold challenges facing democratic politics, and these issues still resonate strongly today. Stephen Bush explores how these themes connect to James’s philosophy of religion, his moral thought, his epistemology, his psychology, and his metaphysics.

Focusing on the period 1880‒1920, the peak of Irish emigration to the United States, this talk examines the education, professional training and wider public activism of first-generation Irish American women teachers.

Guest curator and American furniture specialist Clark Pearce will lead visitors through the exhibition’s highlights while giving deeper context to the life and work of two extraordinary Massachusetts craftsmen, Isaac Vose and Thomas Seymour.

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: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825.

As a doctoral student at Boston University’s School of Theology, Martin Luther King, Jr., spent some of his formative years walking the streets of Boston and living in the South End. His life in Boston was King’s first immersive experience outside of the segregated South and while he experienced the de facto racism of the North he also enjoyed the acceptance of the BU and Boston area communities. This tour will guide visitors through areas of Boston where King lived and socialized, where he met and courted Coretta Scott, and where he returned later at the height of the Civil Rights Movement to deliver powerful speeches on the struggle for racial and economic equality.

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: Entrepreneurship & Classical Design in Boston’s South End: The Furniture of Isaac Vose & Thomas Seymour, 1815 to 1825.

This talk examines the religious expressions of 18^th- and 19^th-century female Federalist writers, specifically Catharine Sedgwick, in the context of the Federalist commitment to public religion. Sedgwick’s 1824 novel Redwood looks to the French Revolution as a site of U.S. debate about role of religion in a republic, signaling her interest in her father’s earlier Federalism while staking her position in the Unitarian controversy of the early 1800s.

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.

This talk studies Phillis Wheatley’s significance to the history of black prodigy, focusing on Wheatley’s education as an enslaved child. It reconstructs Wheatley’s education in relation to early American philosophy and pedagogy of childhood, looking to primers, tract literature, and the influence of Locke. From there, it examines the often-cited (and likely fictionalized) “trials” of Phillis Wheatley—and to Jefferson’s Notes on Wheatley—to show the performance of authenticating and/or discrediting black intellect as a cultural tradition which Wheatley’s literary career inaugurated.