Writer Charles C. Calhoun, author of Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life, shows how the American poet Longfellow Henry Wadsworth blended the Federalist politics and Unitarianism of his parents' generation with the German romanticism he discovered on his own travels. Calhoun discusses Longfellow's life and his influences.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Charles Fuller discusses his life and motivations as an African-American author. The presentation also includes discussions and performances which bring the testimonies of slaves, soldiers, reporters, and activists from the Civil War to life, focusing on African-American history during the Civil War and African-American memory of the war.
Authors Philip McFarland and Debby Applegate trace the lives of the Beechers, a family which included the siblings Henry Ward Beecher, a famous preacher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Audio and video options are available.
Jan Turnquist, executive director of Orchard House, looks at the history of the Orchard House, childhood home of novelist Louisa May Alcott and her family. Turnquist describes the lives of each family member in detail. The presentation includes slides.
Audio and video options are available.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Du Bois Institute at Harvard, discusses the African and African-American experience from W.E.B. Du Bois to John Coltrane in a comprehensive study, with an emphasis on Du Bois's concept of the "Encyclopedia Africana"—an encyclopedia of all Black culture and history—as a weapon against racism.
Art historian Abaigeal Duda looks at the work of African-American artist Lucy Cleveland (1780-1866), whose textile sculptures provide a record of the abolition movement prior to and during the Civil War.
According to the WGBH website:
"Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr. (1874-1954) was a Boston writer and bachelor bon vivant, best known for having preserved his family's Beacon Street home as a museum of Victorian style and taste. The Wounded Eros, a short documentary film by Todd Gernes, explores the aesthetic relationship between Gibson's literary production and the material culture contexts of his museum and library, set within the social history of turn-of-the-century gay Boston. Following the film, a dramatic reading, These Four Walls: A History of a Romantic Friendship, directed by Jacqueline Romeo and featuring John Anderson and Aleksander Feliks Wierzbicki, will extend the exploration of Gibson's life by depicting his enduring relationship with the eccentric self-styled "Count" Maurice de Mauny Talvande."
A series of historians pays tribute to Arthur Schlesinger, special assistant to John F. Kennedy and Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian and biographer. Schlesinger is a guest on the panel.
Biographer and journalist Richard Reeves compares and contrasts the presidencies and legacies of John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.
Biographer Charles Calhoun looks at the life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the society he encouraged and kept at his Craigie House, which included many major writers and intellectuals of the day.
The audio of this lecture is available independently as an mp3 file.