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  • An Evening with Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University President Emerita

    https://youtube.com/live/jRaZSeFPcsI?feature=share Drew Gilpin Faust, President Emerita of Harvard University, joins us for a special evening reflecting on her instant New York Times bestselling memoir, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury.  Professor Faust reflects on the formative experiences of her youth during the turbulence of the 1950s and 60s – including her time as a student […]

  • Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH3ulITG5ok Leila Philip, professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, highlights how beavers played an oversized role in American history and how they can play an important role in its future.  Beaverland is a poignant personal narrative, a startling portrait of the secretive world of the contemporary fur trade, and an engrossing […]

  • Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close

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    44th Annual Mary Lesneski Memorial Lecture https://youtube.com/live/J2SDh6yMVWI?feature=share Who gets pockets, and why? It’s a subject that stirs up plenty of passion: Why do men’s clothes have so many pockets and women’s so few? Hannah Carlson, fashion historian at the Rhode Island School of Design, joins us for a conversation on the issues of gender politics, […]

  • Thoreau’s Pencil: Annual Earth Day Forum

    https://youtube.com/live/SDq2sXpri9I?feature=share Join historian Augustine Sedgewick in conversation with Robert A. Gross, author of Transcendentalists and Their World, for a deep dive into the history of the Thoreau family’s pencil manufacturing business. A story of environmental history and material culture, Thoreau’s pencils bring us to Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida where enslaved people harvested red cedar and […]

  • A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Robert D. Richardson III Annual Forum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlgIKlQh7BE More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James […]

  • Half American: A Memorial Day Forum

    https://youtube.com/live/_NJ8qXMdCTU?feature=share Join Dartmouth College Historian Matthew F. Delmont for a forum on his award-winning new book Half American: The Heroic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad.  More than one million Black soldiers served in World War II in segregated units while waging a dual battle against inequality in the […]

  • American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty that Shaped a Nation

    https://youtube.com/live/XhThp1SDWo8?feature=share Inspired by the discovery of a mysterious manuscript in an old farmhouse just north of Concord, historian John Kaag takes us on a multi-generational exploration of one of America’s first and most expansive pioneer families. The Bloods explored and laid claim to the frontiers—geographic, political, intellectual, and spiritual—that would become the very core of […]

  • Butch Heroes: A Conversation with Ria Brodell

    This forum is postponed. Please keep an eye out for a new date. Ria Brodell is a non-binary trans artist, educator, and author with a current solo exhibition at the Fitchburg Art Museum. Ria joins us at the Museum for a conversation on their ongoing series entitled Butch Heroes. Through this revelatory project of historic […]

  • An Evening with Tiya Miles on Harriet Tubman

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRxvSmNSWWo National Book Award–winning author Tiya Miles, joins 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner Jacqueline Jones for a revelatory conversation on the myth and the truth behind Harriet Tubman, one of the most famous Americans ever born who few really understand. A figure more out of myth than history, Harriet Tubman becomes an even clearer and sharper […]

  • 1774 and All That

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    1774 and All That: Reflections on a Long Year of Revolution One of the most acclaimed and original colonial historians of our time, Mary Beth Norton, shares her landmark text 1774: The Long Year of Revolution chronicling the revolutionary changes that occurred from December 1773 to April 1775—from the Boston Tea Party to the Battles […]

  • How to Become Famous with Cass Sunstein

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    How to Become Famous with Cass Sunstein What makes someone who becomes famous, famous? Harvard law professor, public intellectual, and bestselling author Cass Sunstein offers clear and surprising answers in his new book How To Become Famous: Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be. Using modern data analysis techniques to show […]