2006 Public Programs
The History of Failure and the Failure of History
by Scott Sandage
Tuesday, April 18, 2006, 7:30 p.m.
Even we here ...
A One-Person Play in the Words of Abraham Lincoln
Assembled and performed by Michael Fox Kennedy
The language of Even we here... comes from Lincoln's personal
letters,
recorded remarks, speeches, wartime messages, and other sources. Forceful
and vivid, with great variety of mood and tone, it evokes Lincoln's
tenderness, indignation, humor, grief, defiance, and passionate eloquence.
While the play often touches on Lincoln's personal life as a husband and
father, it focuses primarily on his rise from obscurity in Illinois, his
struggle against slavery, and his ordeal in the Civil War. In the end,
Lincoln's words of hope survive the assassin's bullet.
Michael Fox Kennedy trained as an actor at the American Shakespeare
Festival in Stratford, Connecticut and as a Fulbright Scholar at the
London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He has written several plays,
one of which was produced on National Public Radio. He was inspired to
create Even we here... by a love for Lincoln and a belief that
Lincoln's
words could strengthen our understanding of the ideals and principles on
which the nation is founded. He assembled the Lincoln texts, wrote the
transitions, and designed the production. Thomas Griffin directed.
Savior of the Nation: Lincoln's Assassination and the Birth of an
American Icon
An Illustrated Lecture by Richard Wightman Fox
Special Lecture for K-12 Educators
Environmental Hazards, Eighteenth-Century Style
By Gordon S. Wood
A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American
Nation
By Catherine Allgor
Friday, June 16, 2006
The twenty-fourth annual James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the
History
of the Book
We declare you independent
whether you wish it or not:
The Print Culture of Early Filibusterism
by David S. Shields
Wednesday, October 18, 2006, 7:30 p.m.
The Third Annual Robert C. Baron Lecture
Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America
by Martin E. Marty
Thursday, October 19, 2006, 7:30 p.m.
Benjamin Franklin and Music
by Ellen R. Cohn
In honor of the tercentenary of Benjamin Franklin's birth, historian and
musician Ellen Cohn will present a lecture/recital focusing on Franklin's
musical life -- the instruments he played, his theories of musical
aesthetics, and the songs he loved to sing. She will illustrate it with
examples of the kinds of music that Franklin admired and with some of
Franklin's own songs including a ballad he wrote when he was twelve years
old, a love song he wrote for his wife, and clever drinking songs that
enjoyed widespread popularity.
Ellen R. Cohn is editor-in-chief of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin
(Yale
University Press), a comprehensive, annotated edition of Franklin's
writings and correspondence, and senior research scholar in the History
Department at Yale University. She has published and lectured widely on
various aspects of Franklin's life, from his charting of the Gulf Stream
to his activities as a printer in France, and is the outstanding authority
on Franklin's musical interests. Ellen Cohn also was trained as a
classical pianist. Since 1976 she has been a performer of traditional
songs and instrumental music of North America and the British Isles,
playing piano, guitar, mandolin and concertina. She has toured, either
with groups or solo, throughout the United States, Canada, England and
France.
Thursday, November 2, 2006, 7:30 p.m.
Blue Colonial
by David Roderick
Blue Colonial (Copper Canyon Press, 2006) is the winner of the
ninth
annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, a
competition
judged this year by Robert Pinsky. In this collection, David Roderick
re-imagines the past in order to explore the burdens of our historical
inheritance: vanished Native American tribes, the seeds of American
culture, and our physical and psychological encroachment on the natural
landscape. Whether he is writing about historical legacy or his own back
yard, Roderick has arrived at a voice of distinct solitariness and precise
observation.
David Roderick conducted research for Blue Colonial at AAS as a
Robert and
Charlotte Baron Creative and Performing Artist and Writers Fellow in 2003.
He earned an M.F.A. in poetry at the University of Massachusetts and was a
Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. A native of
Plymouth, Massachusetts, he is currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Tuesday, November 7, 2006, 7:30 p.m.
Mayflower
by Nathaniel Philbrick
In this lecture based on his latest work, Mayflower: A Story of
Courage,
Community, and War (Viking, 2006), bestselling author and National
Book
Award winner, Nathaniel Philbrick explains in riveting detail the
startling tale of our country's origins -- the half-century that began in
peril, ended in war and contained seeds of everything that would come to
define America and its inexorable push west. Philbrick relays the stories
beyond the myths of the Pilgrims detailing the dramatic story of first
settlement through King Philip's War while weaving an epic tale of human
endurance, diplomacy, violence, cowardice, and heroism.
Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of the acclaimed international
bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, which spent over 40 weeks on
The New
York Times bestseller list and won the National Book Award for nonfiction
in 2000. Philbrick has also written Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas
Expedition, 1838-42 and Revenge of the Whale, an account of the
Essex
disaster for young readers. He is founding director of the Egan
Institute of Maritime Studies on Nantucket Island and a research fellow at
the Nantucket Historical Association. A champion sailboat racer, he has
also written extensively about sailing.
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Directions to Antiquarian Hall
The American Antiquarian Society is funded in part by the Massachusetts
Cultural Council, a state agency that supports public programs in the
arts, humanities, and sciences.
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