Nathaniel Philbrick with Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy

Free Virtual Event: Thursday, September 23 at 6 p.m. ET

Moderator: Ryan J. Woods of American Ancestors/NEHGS
Presented in partnership with Boston Public Library, Porter Square Books, and GBH Forum Network

The award-winning and best-selling author of Mayflower grapples bluntly and honestly with Washington’s legacy as a man of the people, a reluctant president, and a plantation owner.

In the fall of 1789, Washington, only six months into his presidency, set out on the first of four road trips as he attempted to unite what were in essence thirteen independent states into a single nation. In the fall of 2018, Philbrick, his wife Melissa, and their dog Dora set out on their own series of road trips as they retraced Washington’s route. At historic houses and landmarks from Savannah, Georgia, to Kittery Point, Maine, Philbrick met reenactors, tour guides, and other keepers of history’s flame. Travels with George paints a picture of eighteenth century America that is as divided and fraught as our country today and shows how Washigton’s all-consuming belief in the Union helped to forge a nation.

Lovers of history and writing are invited to join us after the event for an extended Q+A with the author. Separate registration is required. Learn More

Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of In the Heart of the Sea, winner of the National Book Award; Mayflower, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Valiant Ambition, winner of the George Washington Prize; Bunker Hill, winner of the New England Book Award; In the Hurricane’s Eye; Sea of Glory; The Last Stand; Why Read Moby Dick?; Away Off Shore; and Second Wind.

Ryan J. Woods is Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer of American Ancestors/New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS). A dedicated researcher, Woods has authored pedagogical articles about the use of historical biographies to teach character and ethics. He has also contributed genealogical articles and several book forewords for historical and genealogical publications; he regularly presents at national historical and genealogical conferences and events.

Writing History: An Extended Q&A with Nathaniel Philbrick

Cost: $50, includes Zoom Meeting Virtual Event and personalized book

Thursday, September 23 at 7:30 p.m. ET

Moderator: Ryan J. Woods with Catherine Allgor, President of the Massachusetts Historical Society
Presented in partnership with Massachusetts Historical Society and Porter Square Books

Following his Zoom Webinar public talk (separate registration required), Nathaniel Philbrick will engage in further conversation and Q&A. He’ll answer your questions about his inspirations, research, and process behind writing Travels with George and his other works of American history. Moderator Ryan J. Woods will be joined by Catherine Allgor, President of the Massachusetts Historical Society to facilitate this more intimate Zoom meeting.

Armando Lucas Correa with In Search of Emma: How We Created Our Family

Free Virtual Event: Tuesday, October 12 at 6 p.m. ET

Moderator: Elizabeth Jurenovich, MS, LCPAA, LPC, LMFT, Abrazo Adoption Associates
Presented in partnership with Boston Public Library

The moving story of a man who always wanted to be a father and the long emotional road to making his dream come true.

Born in Cuba and raised in the USA, Armando Lucas Correa epitomized the American dream. He had everything he wanted: an incredible job as the editor of People magazine, meeting and interviewing glamorous celebrities; a steady partner; and a comfortable life filled with travel. But he wanted a child. Though his family, with two fathers, would not be traditional, Correa was undaunted. They chose surrogacy and, with the help of science and patience—an egg donor, a gestational mother who was unconditionally supported by her partner and family—Correa’s dream finally came true with the birth of his daughter. In Search of Emma is his inspiring and beautiful story of love, family, and fatherhood.

Armando Lucas Correa is a Cuban writer, journalist and editor. His first novel, The German Girl was an international bestseller, translated into fourteen languages and published in more than twenty countries. A multi award winner, Correa was most recently named “Journalist of the Year” by the Hispanic Public Relations Association of New York. Since 1991, he has worked as an American journalist for El Nuevo Herald, The Miami Herald and People en Español, where he is currently Editor in Chief.

Elizabeth Jurenovich, MS, LCPAA, LPC, LMFT, is the founder and Executive Director of Abrazo Adoption Associates in San Antonio, Texas. Before becoming a licensed therapist, she played piano professionally, worked in public relations, and directed church children’s choirs. In addition to her Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology, she earned a a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Sociology and majored in piano at Interlochen Arts Academy. The daughter of a preacher, she raised two sons as a single mother.

Mae Ngai with The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics

Free Virtual Event: Tuesday, October 19 at 6 p.m. ET

Moderator: Jia Lynn Yang, national editor for the New York Times and author of One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965
Presented in partnership with Boston Public Library, Boston Book Festival, and GBH Forum Network

How the Chinese diaspora, particularly migration to the world’s goldfields, reshaped the nineteenth-century world

In roughly five decades, between 1848 and 1899, more gold was removed from the earth than had been mined in the 3,000 preceding years, bringing untold wealth to individuals and nations. But friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalyzed a global battle over “the Chinese Question”: would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration? Join us for a discussion of these definitive cultural and political movements which impact us to this day, featuring two remarkable authors and experts on the topics of Chinese-American history and immigration.

Mae Ngai is Lung Family Professor Asian American Studies and a professor of history at Columbia University. She is the author of the award-winning work Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America.

Jia Lynn Yang is the national editor at The New York Times. She was previously deputy national security editor at The Washington Post, where she was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team. She is the author of the acclaimed work One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965.

Anne Willan with Women in the Kitchen: Twelve Essential Cookbook Writers Who Defined the Way We Eat, from 1661 to Today

Free Virtual Event: Thursday, November 4 at 1 p.m. ET

Moderator: Sheryl Julian, award-winning food writer
Presented in partnership with State Library of Massachusetts

A culinary historian traces the origins of American cooking through profiles of twelve essential women cookbook writers, highlighting their key historical contributions and recipes.

Anne Willan, multi-award-winning culinary historian, cookbook writer, cooking teacher, and founder of La Varenne Cooking School in Paris, explores the lives and work of women cookbook authors whose important books have defined cooking over the past three hundred years. Beginning with the first published cookbook by Hannah Woolley in 1661, Women in the Kitchen moves through history to show how female cookbook authors have shaped American cooking today. Don’t miss learning more about such the lives and influences as such influential cooks and chefs as Fannie Farmer, Julia Child, and Alice Waters.

Anne Willan founded La Varenne Cooking School in Paris in 1975 and has written more than thirty books, including the double James Beard Award–winning, The Country Cooking of France, the Gourmand Award¬–winning The Cookbook Library, and the groundbreaking La Varenne Pratique, as well as the Look & Cook series, showcased on PBS. In 2013, she was inducted into the James Beard Foundation Awards Hall of Fame. Willan serves as an Emeritus Advisor for The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts.

Sheryl Julian was the longtime award-winning Food Editor of The Boston Globe. She trained at the Cordon Bleu schools in London and Paris, was deputy director of La Varenne cooking school in Paris, is co-author of The Way We Cook, and editor of The New Boston Globe Cookbook. She runs food styling workshops in the Boston area, writes regularly for The Boston Globe, and teaches food writing in the Gastronomy master's program at Boston University.

Robert A. Gross with The Transcendentalists and Their World

Free Virtual AND In-Person Event: Thursday, November 9 at 6 p.m. ET

Presented at Rabb Lecture Hall, Boston Public Library, 700 Boylston Street; and virtually as Zoom Webinar
Moderator: Lucinda Brockway, Program Director for Cultural Resources, The Trustees
Presented in partnership Boston Public Library and The Trustees

A fresh view on nineteenth century Concord and its community of thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature spread from New England to the corners of the earth.

From the 1820s through the 1840s Concord, Massachusetts was home to celebrated authors, poets, and philosophers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May and Bronson Alcott. These Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. Hear from Bancroft-winning historian Robert A. Gross about his latest work, The Transcendentalists and Their World, an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers who pursued spiritual truths.

Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Minutemen and Their World (1976), winner of the Bancroft Prize, and of Books and Libraries in Thoreau’s Concord (1988); with Mary Kelley, he is coeditor of An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840 (2010). A former assistant editor of Newsweek, he has written for Esquire, Harper’s, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times and his essays have appeared in The American Scholar, New England Quarterly, Raritan, and Yale Review.

Lucinda (Cindy) Brockway is Program Director of Cultural Resources, for The Trustees, where she leads a team of cultural resource specialists seeking innovative solutions for research and stewardship of their unique cultural sites. She and her team facilitated the curation of landscape research, planning and investments in the Old Manse (Concord), one of three National Landmark sites owned by The Trustees. Brockway is the author of two books and has published articles in Old House Journal, Colonial Homes, Accent, Nineteenth Century, and the American Public Gardens Association Magazine.