As a part of a bicentennial series celebrating Boston Athenaeum writers, Marshall Moriarty presents orator and statesman Daniel Webster (1782–1852); Representative Martha M. Walz presents activist Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880); and Daniel R. Coquillette presents sixth President of the U.S. John Quincy Adams (1767–1848).

As part of a bicentennial series celebrating Boston Athenaeum writers, Jill Ker Conway discusses the work of maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morison (1887–1976); Megan Marshall discusses Christian author and first female entrant to the Athenaeum, Hannah Adams (1755–1831); and Philip McFarland discusses historian Francis Parkman (1823–1893).

Mount Auburn Cemetery president William Clendaniel reviews the 175-year history of Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery, the nation's first landscaped cemetery and a National Historic Landmark. This lecture includes visual aids.

The lecture's audio may be downloaded as an mp3.

Author and professor Howard Zinn and professor James Green look at the Chicago Haymarket Riot of May 1886, in which a bomb killed several policeman at a Chicago labor rally, and the resulting trial and executions. They also discuss the history of the working class in the U.S. generally.

Scholar Jeffrey Matthews explores the life of Alanson B. Houghton, American industrialist, politician, and diplomat (to Germany, 1922-1925, and to Great Britain, 1925-1929). Houghton uses this exploration to examine U.S. foreign policy between World War I and World War II, citing Houghton's criticism of policy under Presidents Harding and Coolidge.

Audio and video options are available.

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"The Cold War was more than the product of post-World War II tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, argues John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University. Rather, it was the product of events extending all the way back to the 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that Russia and the United States would become the world's foremost powers. In this lecture, delivered at the Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminar 'The Cold War,' Gaddis examines U.S.-Soviet relations from the nineteenth century through the end of World War II, tracing the myriad causes of the Cold War."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"Bureaucrats, University of Colorado professor of history Patricia Limerick argues, are often the most overlooked (at best) or reviled (at worst) of government officials, but they wield tremendous powers that shape Americans' daily lives. Nowhere is this more true than in the bureaucracy of the U.S. Department of the Interior. A wide-ranging agency charged with both protecting land and promoting its use, the Department of the Interior implements federal law over millions of acres of land and mediates the claims of environmental, mining, foresting, farming, and ranching interests, among others. Bureaucracies like the Department of the Interior may be boring, Limerick argues, but historians cannot ignore their impact on the development of the American West."