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Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

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Boston Athenaeum

The Boston Athenaeum , one of the oldest and most distinguished independent libraries in the United States, was founded in 1807 by members of the Anthology Society, a group of fourteen Boston gentlemen who had joined together in 1805 to edit The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review. Their purpose was to form "an establishment similar to that of the Athenaeum and Lyceum of Liverpool in Great Britain; combining the advantages of a public library [and] containing the great works of learning and science in all languages." The library and Art Gallery, established in 1827, were soon flourishing, and grew rapidly, both by purchase of books and art and by frequent gifts. For nearly half a century the Athenaeum was the unchallenged center of intellectual life in Boston, and by 1851 had become one of the five largest libraries in the United States. Today its collections comprise over half a million volumes, with particular strengths in Boston history, New England state and local history, biography, English and American literature, and the fine and decorative arts. The Athenaeum supports a dynamic art gallery, and sponsors a lively variety of events such as lectures and concerts. It also serves as a stimulating center for discussions among scholars, bibliophiles, and a variety of community interest groups.break

http://www.bostonathenaeum.org

  • New York World: Graphic Art on Sunday (1898-1911)

    Tue, Dec 6, 2005
    Before the age of electronic media, Saturday morning television, and weekend getaways, there was Joseph Pulitzer's *New York World* newspaper. The Sunday edition in particular was a visual feast of color caricatures, full-page cartoons, disaster drawings, fictional illustrations, hand-lettered typography, weird science, halftone photographs, maps and more amidst the graphic, often muckraking news. For *The World on Sunday*, Baker and his coauthor and wife, Margaret Brentano, have selected 144 of the finest examples of period reporting, bold and playful graphic design, comic strips, and society pieces. Baker's introductory essay argues for the significance and beauty of Pulitzer's paper, and Brentano's detailed captions and notes accompany the colorful reproductions throughout the volume. Athenæum member Nicholson Baker has published seven novels and three works of nonfiction, including *Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper*, which won the National Book critics Circle Award for nonfiction in 2001. He is a regular contributor to *The New Yorker* and the *New York Review of Books*.
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  • 54th Regiment and the Color of War

    Tue, Sep 30, 2003
    Shakespeare & Company actress Susannah Melone portrays Annie Kneeland Haggerty Shaw in The Color of War, an original play adapted and directed by Shakespeare & Company artist Mary Guzzy. Shortly after marrying Annie Kneeland Haggerty, a young girl from a wealthy family in New York, Robert Gould Shaw took command of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the Union army's first all-black fighting regiment in the Civil War, and was ordered to active duty in the Carolinas. The Color of War is the story of their relationship told through the letters Robert wrote to Annie during their courtship and after they were married. This stage dramatization of Shaw's letters sheds light on the many professional and personal struggles he faced during this intriguing period in history.
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  • Oath of a Surgeon Under Fire

    Thu, Oct 23, 2003
    Khassan Baiev discusses his experience as a doctor during the Russian-Chechen war. Little understood and largely ignored by the West, the Russian-Chechen war represents one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent memory, claiming upwards of 150,000 lives in the past 10 years. Dr. Khassan Baiev saw the worst of it as one of the few surgeons to remain behind after fighting began in 1994. *The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire* is his testament to the horrors of wartime and the first inside account to emerge by a native Chechen.
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  • Gaining Ground: History of Landmaking in Boston

    Tue, Dec 2, 2003
    Historian Nancy Seasholes gives us the first complete account of when, why, and how Boston's land was created. Fully one-sixth of Boston is built on made land. Although other waterfront cities also have substantial areas that are built on fill, Boston probably has more than any city in North America. Seasholes introduces findings from recent archeological investigations in Boston and relates landmaking to the major historical developments that shaped it. At the beginning of the 19th century, landmaking in Boston was spurred by the rapid growth that resulted from the burgeoning China Trade. The influx of Irish immigrants in the mid-19th century prompted several large projects to create residential land (not for the Irish, but to keep the taxpaying Yankees from fleeing to the suburbs). Many landmaking projects were undertaken to cover tidal flats that had been polluted by raw sewage discharged directly on them, removing the "pestilential exhalations" thought to cause illness. Land also was added for port developments, public parks, and transportation facilities, including the largest landmaking project of all, the airport.
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  • Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London

    Tue, Mar 9, 2004
    Lisa Jardine draws a portrait of the gifted but cranky English scientist Robert Hooke, known to history as much for losing quarrels with more prominent scientists as for his achievements. He was one of the founding fathers of the Royal Society and teamed with Christopher Wren in rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666. Hooke is perhaps best, and certainly unjustly, remembered for losing to Newton in a challenge for credit as discoverer of the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction.
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  • Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living (1900-1939)

    Thu, Mar 11, 2004
    Virginia Nicholson explores the way of life of the Bohemian artists of the early 20th century - the majority of them artists, poets, writers, and composers - who were brave enough to jettison Victorian conformity and to invent a whole new way of living. Rebels and free spirits, they pioneered a domestic revolution, carrying idealism and creativity into every aspect of daily life. From Dylan Thomas to Robert Graves, Katherine Mansfield to Dora Carrington, they rejected tea parties, chaperones, monogamy, and mahogany. Deaf to disapproval, they painted, danced, and wrote poetry with passionate intensity, they experimented with homosexuality and open marriages, and often sacrificed comfortable homes to take to the road or to move into Spartan garrets. Yet their choice of a free life led all too often to poverty, hunger, addictions, and even death. This lecture brings to life the flamboyant, eccentric pioneers to whom we owe so many of our freedoms today.
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  • Race and Place

    Tue, Mar 2, 2004
    Ted Landsmark discusses how demographic and educational changes affect Boston's near-term future, and the unanticipated ways in which our cultural identities are evolving. The formation of racial and ethnic identities were key aspects of 20th century American culture. As traditional racial dichotomies dissolve in the 21st century, some new, and some very old, elements of cultural identity are taking precedence in American life: artisanry, class, education, and a sense of place are emerging as significant shapers of identity. Even as media and commercial homogeneity aggregate and level our differences, immigration and rediscovered cultural roots are churning our perceptions of who we believe we are as Americans. Boston, a city generally viewed as both a portal for new populations and as a staid community where relatively few ethnic or racial minorities achieve high levels of political or cultural visibility, is undergoing some of the largest demographic and educational changes in its history.
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  • Literacy and Picturacy

    Thu, Jan 8, 2004
    When literacy is the universal standard of cultural achievement in both nations and individuals, the ability to read a picture is so little recognized that we do not even have a name for it. On the contrary, the opposition between pictures and words commonly separates literate from illiterate, the educated elite from the barbarous idolators of the image. With examples ranging from the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux to the disturbing contemporary photographs of Sally Mann, James Heffernan seeks to complicate the cultural polarity by showing that pictures demand to be read quite as much as printed pages do, that we cannot "recognize" their meaning until and unless we learn to interpret their signs, which largely depend on the cultural conventions within which they are framed. But learning to read pictures also means listening to the questions they raise and the challenges they pose to authority of the word.
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  • Making a Case for Comic Fiction

    Tue, Feb 3, 2004
    Mameve Medwed, Tom Perrotta, and Stephen McCauley explain and defend comic fiction.
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  • American West: Lewis and Clark Expedition

    Thu, Mar 18, 2004
    Clay S. Jenkinson employs the Chautauquan methodology of a stand-up, unscripted monologue in his first-person portrayal of Meriwether Lewis. His educational, humorous, and delightful monologue is followed by an in-character question and answer session with the audience, and ends with Jenkinson sharing his own insights into the character of Captain Lewis and the expedition. The Federalist called the Louisiana Purchase "the wildest chimera of a moonstruck mind"; Thomas Jefferson referred to it as a "two ocean continental empire for liberty"; and Meriwether Lewis, captain of the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition, thought it was the opportunity of a lifetime to be the first citizen of the United States to step foot on the unexplored wilderness of the American West.
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