American Inspiration, our in-person author series launched in Fall 2019. See below our past presenters and their books exploring themes of personal identity, families and immigration, and social and cultural history.
Most in-person events take place in our historic rotunda at 99-101 Newbury Street in Boston’s Back Bay.
Celebrating one of America’s greatest female novelists, this biography brings to life Willa Cather -- her artistry and endurance, her immigrant family and the prairies on they lived, and her trailblazing success as a journalist and writer.
In the early 20th century, Willa Cather leapt into the forefront of American letters with the publication of her novels O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918). At the time, she was well into middle age. Her success followed years of working in journalism in Nebraska, brief spells of teaching, and editorial work on magazines. Chasing Bright Medusas is her story told by of another mature and highly accomplished writer, the award-winning biographer Benjamin Taylor, a lifelong lover of Willa Cather’s work. Taylor’s elegant exploration of her artistic endurance and of her early years and family, bring us back in time to portray vividly the challenges of being an immigrant family, a woman, and a literary trailblazer -- one the greatest authors of the twentieth century.
Hear from the author of a revelatory memoir about a 330-mile walk from Washington, D.C., to New York City—an unforgettable pilgrimage to the heart of America across some of our oldest common ground.
Neil King Jr.’s desire to walk from Washington, D.C., to New York City began as a whim and soon became an obsession. By the spring of 2021, events had intervened that gave his desire greater urgency. His neighborhood still reeled from the January 6th insurrection. Covid lockdowns and a rancorous election had deepened America’s divides. Neil himself bore the imprints of a long battle with cancer.
Determined to rediscover what matters in life and to see our national story with new eyes, Neil turned north with a small satchel on his back and one mission in mind: To pay close attention to the land he crossed and the people he met.
What followed is an extraordinary 26-day journey through historic battlefields and cemeteries, over the Mason-Dixon line, past Quaker and Amish farms, along Valley Forge stream beds, atop a New Jersey trash mound, across New York Harbor, and finally, to his ultimate destination: the Ramble, where a tangle of pathways converges in Central Park. The journey travels deep into America’s past and present, uncovering forgotten pockets and overlooked people. At a time of mounting disunity, the trip reveals the profound power of our shared ground.
Following the discussion that will happen both in-person in the Rabb Lecture Hall of the Central Library in Copley Square and online over Zoom webinar, there will be time for an audience Q&A. At approximately 7:00 PM, there will be an author signing facilitated by Trident Booksellers and Cafe for in-person attendees. During the program, online attendees will be provided with a link to order copies of the book from Porter Square Books.
In this dual biography of two famous women whose sons changed the course of the 20th century, the award-winning historian Charlotte Gray breathes new life into Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt. Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons offers a fulsome portrait of how leaders are not just born but made.
Sara Delano, the mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Jennie Jerome, the mother of Winston Churchill, were both born into upper-class America in 1854. A vivacious extrovert, Jennie married Lord Randolph Churchill, a rising politician and scion of a noble British family. Deeply conventional Sara Delano married a man as old as her father. As mothers, both woman turned their energies toward enabling their sons to reach the epicenter of political power on two continents. Set against one hundred years of history and filled with intriguing social insight, Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sonsreveals how these two remarkable individuals with dramatically different personalities shaped the characters of their adoring sons, men who would go on to change the world.
Explore the origins of the most iconic words and concepts in American history with English historian Peter Moore. His spirited group biography provides a richer understanding our country’s colonial past and current ideology.
The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. “The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness” was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration. Then came a series of deletions and a long chain of revisions stretching across the Atlantic and back. In making these words into rights, Jefferson reified the hopes (and debates) not only of a group of rebel-statesmen in the colonies, but also of an earlier generation of British thinkers who could barely imagine a country like the United States of America.
Peter Moore’s Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness tells the true story of what may be the most successful import in U.S. history: the “American dream.” Profiling the generation that preceded the Declaration in 1776, this fascinating work reveals the influence and impact of the day’s leading figures including Benjamin Franklin, the British publisher William Strahan, the cultural giant Samuel Johnson, the ground-breaking historian Catharine Macaulay, the firebrand politician John Wilkes, and revolutionary activist Thomas Paine. Moore shows why, and reveals how these still-nascent ideals made their way across an ocean and started a revolution.
Join American Ancestors for a shimmering discussion about artists and their summer communities, the “utopias” they created for their friends, families, and students during the first half of the twentieth century on Cape Ann and Cape Cod.
Their names are iconic: Edward Hopper, Charles Hawthorne, Hans Hoffman, Willem de Kooning, Josef and Anni Albers, and Walter Gropius. The artist residents of summertime seashore communities hold a special place in America’s history. To this day, in private collections, museums, and galleries, they portray our country in transition in the last century, its welcoming light and obscuring shadows, burgeoning with industrial and political power.
Join John Taylor “Ike” Williams and Elliot Bostwick Davis for a discussion of their new books looking at the vision and ascendancy of several celebrated artists associated with summer colonies and communities. Our presenters will spotlight individual paintings and measure the cultural impact and their creators who, imbued with summertime spirit and sensitivity, became our country’s cultural luminaries. Don’t miss these authors’ insights on Cape Ann and Cape Cod as it was experienced and represented by its artists, and the lasting impact of their work.
Join us for a shimmering discussion about artists and their summer communities, the “utopias” they created for their friends, families, and students during the first half of the twentieth century on Cape Ann and Cape Cod.
Presented by the American Inspiration series from American Ancestors/NEHGS in partnership with the Cape Ann Museum and Provincetown Arts Association and Museum.
A portrait of late 19th-century Boston and one of its most daring and celebrated women, Isabella Stewart Gardner – the connoisseur and visionary collector who created an inimitable legacy in American art and transformed the city.
When Isabella Stewart Gardner first arrived in Boston in 1861, she was twenty years old, newly married to a wealthy trader, and unsure of herself. Puzzled by the frosty reception she received from the city’s coterie of “bluebloods,” she strived to fit in and had limited success. Then after two devastating tragedies, she discovered her true spirit and passion for collecting. When Isabella opened her Italian palazzo-style home as a museum 1903 to showcase her old masters, antiques, and objects d’art, she was well-known for scandalizing Boston’s upper society.
The Lioness of Boston is historical fiction – a richly detailed portrait of a time, also a cultural and social history. Author Emily Franklin reveals the day’s mores and expectations which Isabella, a feminist before feminism, rejected, opting instead for friendships with painter John Singer Sargent; writers Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Orne Jewett; and neighbor Julia Ward Howe. With novelist Claire Messud, Franklin discusses her process for researching and bringing to life this remarkable woman – her friends, her family, and her era.
Presented by the American Inspiration series from American Ancestors/NEHGS in partnership with Boston Public Library.
The dramatic and uplifting story of legendary outdoorsman and conservationist JohnMuir’s quest to protect one of America’s most magnificent landscapes, Yosemite.
“Everybody needs beauty, as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” —John Muir
In this portrait of a place, a time, and a movement, the bestselling author Dean King takes us behind the scenes, to the beginning of America’s love affair with Yosemite Valley. In June of 1889 in San Francisco, John Muir—iconic environmentalist, writer, and philosopher—met face-to-face with his longtime editor Robert Underwood Johnson, an elegant and influential figure at The Century magazine. Before long, the pair ventured to Yosemite Valley, the magnificent site Muir had visited twenty years earlier. There, they confronted a shocking vision, as predatory mining, tourism, and logging industries had plundered and defaced “the grandest of all the special temples of Nature.” The rest is history: that watershed moment led to the creation of Yosemite National Park, and launched an environmental battle that at once captivated the nation and ushered in the beginning of the American environmental movement. Join us for King’s illustrated presentation of his riveting new book, Guardians of the Valley, “a rich, enjoyable excursion into a seminal period in environmental history.” (The Wall Street Journal)
Likely the last in her family line to qualify for tribal citizenship with the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, Leah Myers elegantly blends Native folklore, personal history, and the search for identity in this highly anticipated memoir, Thinning Blood.
Because of her tribe’s strict blood quantum laws, Leah Myers may be the last of her family to be formally recognized as a member of her tribe. For her, this realization carries with it a responsibility to preserve her heritage and her ancestors’ memory. Thinning Blood is Myers’s attempt to capture a record of her family’s history, presenting the stories of four generations of women. Beginning with her great-grandmother, the last full-blooded Native member in their lineage, she connects each woman with her totem to construct her family’s totem pole: protective Bear, defiant Salmon, compassionate Hummingbird, and perched on top, Raven. Myers weaves together tribal folktales, the history of the Native genocide, and Native mythology. With fresh perspectives and profound insight, she offers crisp and powerful vignettes of her own life between White and Native worlds. Thinning Blood is at once a bold reclamation of her female identity and a searingly honest meditation on heritage, family, and what it means to belong.
Leah Myers is in conversation with Kaitlin Curtice, also author, poet-storyteller and member of the Potawatomi nation.
King mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge a deeper understanding of “the leader, the preacher, the orator, the husband, the father, the martyr, the human being…in all his heroic, tragic Glory. Hallelujah!" (Ken Burns) King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. Bestselling biographer Jonathan Eig gives us an intimate view, casting fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. In this remarkable account of our only modern-day founding father, we gain an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements. Join us for Eig’s presentation and discussion with Peniel Joseph, Professor and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, The University of Texas at Austin, one day after the Juneteenth holiday. This talk is brought to you by American Ancestors New England Historical and Genealogical Society (NEHGS), the Boston Public Library and the Museum of African American History.
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A “fast-paced and highly absorbing” (Wall Street Journal) history of the fierce final chapter of the "Indian Wars," told through the lives of the two most legendary and consequential American Indian leaders, who led Sioux resistance and triumphed at the Battle of Little Bighorn**.
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull: Their names are iconic, their significance in American history undeniable. Together, these two Lakota chiefs, one a fabled warrior and the other a revered holy man, crushed George Armstrong Custer’s vaunted Seventh Cavalry on June 25, 1876. Both had grown to manhood on the High Plains of the American West, in an era when vast herds of buffalo covered the earth, and when their nomadic people could move freely. The Battle of Little Bighorn was the beginning of the end for their treasured and sacred way of life. Drawing on a wealth of previously ignored primary sources, award-winning author Mark Lee Gardner delivers the definitive chronicle, thrillingly told, of these extraordinary Indigenous leaders. _The Earth Is All That Lasts_ is a grand saga, both triumphant and tragic, of their struggle to maintain the freedom of their people against impossible odds.
Presented by the American Inspiration Series from American Ancestors/NEHGS in partnership with GBH Forum Network.
### Resources - Books
_Witness: A Hunkpapha Historian's Strong-Heart Song of the Lakotas_ by Josephine Waggoner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013)
_The Crazy Horse Surrender Ledger_, edited by Thomas R. Buecker and R. Eli Paul (Lincoln: Nebraska State Historical Society, 1994)
_The Sitting Bull Surrender Census: The Lakotas at Standing Rock Agency, 1881_ by Ephriam D. Dickson III (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2010)
_Sitting Bull: His Life and Legacy_ by Ernie LaPointe, Great-Grandson of Sitting Bull (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2009)
