According to the Library of Congress Webcasts site:

"Beginning in the 1890s through the 1930s, independent grocers (white and black) formed a variety of innovative alliances—cartels, buying syndicates, and cooperatives—to navigate major changes within the trade. Through organizations like the Boston Wholesale Grocers' Association, Independent Grocers' Alliance, Red & White Stores, and Colored Merchants' Association, small businessmen formulated alternative ways of dealing and distributing goods, challenged chain stores, and created new entrepreneurial opportunities for black proprietors. Cooperative enterprise had limitations, however; while some groups advanced, others struggled to maintain a united front. This talk explores both successes and failures while questioning the role of collaboration in small business."

Book conservator Barbara Adams Hebard discusses the role of women in the history of the Boston Athenaeum, and Athenaeum associate director John Lannon discusses the 1999-2002 renovation of 10 1/2 Beacon Street.

Audio and video options are available.

Art historian Douglass Shand-Tucci details the life of Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), designer of major works such as West Point, Princeton University, and Rice University. Shand-Tucci emphasizes Dram's diverse interests and endeavors, reaching far beyond architecture.

Producer Callie Crossley leads a panel of black journalists in a discussion on the power of the black press in social movements, beginning in the 1800s and continuing to the present day. The presentation includes an audio clip from the documentary Soldiers Without Swords.

Author and journalist Simon Winchester examines the 1906 California earthquake, which devastated San Francisco. He focuses on the geology that allowed this earthquake and the historical impact of the quake.

Professor Mitchell Zuckoff follows the life of Italian immigrant Charles Ponzi (1882-1949), legendary con man who set up the Securities Exchange Company, which promised investors massive returns on their investments based on the buying and trading of international postal reply coupons. The scheme, begun around 1918, collapsed in 1920 after the Boston Post revealed it to the public. The presentation includes slides.

Audio and video options are available.

Boston Historical Society editor Helen R. Deese discusses the 45-volume diary of Boston Transcendentalist, feminist, writer, and reformer Caroline Healey Dall (1822-1912). Deese focuses on the thorough, extensive picture of the life of a 19th-century woman that the diaries represent.

Professor Lewis Dabney traces the life of Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), major literary critic of the 20th century. Dabney discusses Wilson's three classics of literary and intellectual history—Axel's Castle, To the Finland Station, and Patriotic Gore—and the many women with whom Wilson had rocky relationships.

Audio and video options are available.

Chairman of Aeronautics at the Smithsonian Institution Peter L. Jakab explores the Wright brothers' invention of the airplane and how the brothers were able to achieve flight when scientists and engineers for centuries had failed to do so. Jakab discusses the impact of the airplane on the "world at large"—particularly in 1905, three years after its invention, the year Einstein published his most notable papers.