Long before the Civil War, Lucy Stone and other Massachusetts abolitionists opposed women's exclusion from political life. They launched the organized movement at the first National Woman's Rights Convention, held in Worcester. After the war, state activists founded the Boston-based American Woman Suffrage Association and Woman's Journal to lead campaigns across the country. Their activities laid the foundation for the next generation of suffragists to triumph over tradition. Author Barbara Berenson gives these revolutionary reformers the attention they deserve in…

Fact: New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe is descended from three women who were tried for witchcraft in Salem. Fiction: Her latest work, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs, is a bewitching story of a woman with a similar history. Meet Connie Goodwin. She’s a young, tenure-track professor in Boston.  She’s also an expert in witchcraft.  By day, she studies the history of magic in colonial America―especially women’s home recipes and medicines―and exposes society's threats against those fluent in these…

On All Saints Day 1755, tremors from an earthquake measuring 9.0 (or higher) on the Moment Magnitude Scale swept from the Atlantic seabed toward the Iberian and African coasts.  Lisbon, one of the wealthiest cities in the world and the capital of a vast global empire, was directly in their path.  Within minutes, much of the city lay in ruins. But this was only the beginning. The quake unleashed a giant tsunami which smashed into Portugal’s coastline and barreled up…

It took an untold number of weapons to win World War II:  tanks, submachine guns, flame throwers, rifles, and grenades.  But one of the Allies’ most powerful weapons was the art of deception.  Elaborate plots, phantom armies, fictious radio transmissions, controlled leaks, double agents and other clever ruses spun a deadly web of deception for the enemy. Local historian Michael McNaught will unravel some of the greatest military secrets and strategies taking place off the battlefield at this fascinating talk.

The day before Woodrow Wilson took the presidential oath of office in 1913, he expected a throng of onlookers when he arrived in Washington.  He was upstaged by one woman--twenty-five-year old Alice Paul—and 8,000 suffragists, who marched with banners and floats down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. A half million spectators, supporters and detractors watched.  The New York Times called it “one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in this country.”  The new president called the spectacle’s…

The USS Constitution is the world's oldest commissioned naval vessel still afloat.  President George Washington named the wooden-hulled, three-masted heavy frigate of the United States Navy after the United States Constitution. She was launched in 1797, one of six original frigates authorized for construction by the Naval Act of 1794. The vessel is most noted for her actions during the War of 1812 against the United Kingdom, when she captured numerous merchant ships and defeated five British warships, one of…

They came seeking religious freedom.  They found an untamed, inhospitable and dangerous wilderness. They struggled with deprivation, disease and death. Through the grace of God and with the help of the "People of the Dawn," they survived. As the 400th Anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims approaches, travel back to 1620 and relive their first year: the difficult voyage over the Atlantic, the landing on Cape Cod shores, the “first encounter” with the Wampanoag Nation, the move onward to…

On November 23, 1968, there was a turbulent and memorable football game: the season-ending clash between Harvard and Yale. The final score was 29-29. To some of the players, it was a triumph; to others a tragedy. And to many, the reasons had as much to do with one side’s miraculous comeback in the game’s final forty-two seconds as it did with the months that preceded it, months that witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy,…

In March 1621, when Plymouth's survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth's governor, John Carver, declared their people's friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the “First Thanksgiving.” The treaty remained operative until King Philip's War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy…

Author and SEA professor Richard J. King talks about his new book, Ahab's Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick and its connections to Falmouth whaling captain Lewis Lawrence. Lawrence sailed the Pacific in the same era as Melville and his unique, data-heavy logbook and chart reveal volumes about how 19th-C whalemen understood their impact on whales and the rest of the global ocean. Ahab's Rolling Sea tells the story of Melville's relationship with the watery world: what he witnessed, read,…

POSTPONED: STAY TUNED FOR A NEW DAY & TIME While the United States was embroiled in the Great War overseas, a lethal enemy was at work stateside as well.  In October 1918 alone, 195,000 Americans died, making it the deadliest month in American History.  The killer was influenza.  It infected about 500 million people—one third of the world’s population.  At least 50 million people died worldwide, with about 675,000 deaths in the United States. Now, more than a century later,…