Programs
Campus Tours at the Museums (June-Oct 8)
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday from 10-2
We also host historical walking tours year round.
For special events, see below.
Events Search and Views Navigation
January 2022
VIRTUAL TALK: “An Atlas of Extinct Countries” with Gideon Defoe
Countries die. Sometimes it’s murder, sometimes it’s by accident, and sometimes it’s because they were so ludicrous, they didn’t deserve to exist in the first place. Occasionally they explode violently. A few slip away almost unnoticed. Often the cause of death is either “got too greedy” or “Napoleon turned up.” Now and then they just hold a referendum and vote themselves out of existence.
Find out more »CANCELLED-VIRTUAL TALK: “All the Frequent Trouble of Our Days” with Rebecca Donner
In 1932, Mildred Harnick began holding secret meetings in her apartment. Together, this small band of political activists wrote leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution. Under the cover of night, they slipped the leaflets into mailboxes, public restrooms, and phone booths around Berlin. Mildred also began helping Jews escape, plotting acts of sabotage, and recruiting more and more working class Germans to the cause. By 1940, hers was the largest underground resistance group in Berlin.
Find out more »VIRTUAL TALK: “The Confidence Men” with Margalit Fox
A lawyer. A mechanic. A Ouija board. One of the greatest cons ever. But Harry Jones and Cedric Hill weren’t your typical Confidence Men. They were British officers imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during World War I.
Find out more »February 2022
VIRTUAL TALK: “The Nine” with Gwen Strauss
The Nine follows the true story of the author’s great aunt Hélène Podliasky, who led a band of nine female resistance fighters as they escaped a German forced labor camp and made a ten-day journey across the front lines of WWII from Germany back to Paris. The nine women were all under thirty when they joined the resistance. They smuggled arms through Europe, harbored parachuting agents, coordinated communications between regional sectors, trekked escape routes to Spain and hid Jewish children in…
Find out more »VIRTUAL TALK: “Stampede” with Brian Castner
In 1897, the United States was mired in the worst economic depression that the country had yet endured. So when all the newspapers announced gold was to be found in wildly enriching quantities at the Klondike River region of the Yukon, a mob of economically desperate Americans swarmed north. Within weeks tens of thousands of them were embarking from western ports to throw themselves at some of the harshest terrain on the planet--in winter yet--woefully unprepared, with no experience at…
Find out more »VIRTUAL TALK: “A Shot in the Moonlight” with Ben Montgomery
After moonrise on the cold night of January 21, 1897, a mob of twenty-five white men gathered in a patch of woods near Big Road in southwestern Simpson County, Kentucky. Half carried rifles and shotguns, and a few tucked pistols in their pants. Their target was George Dinning, a freed slave who'd farmed peacefully in the area for 14 years, and who had been wrongfully accused of stealing livestock from a neighboring farm. When the mob began firing through the…
Find out more »VIRTUAL TALK: “Dress Codes” with Richard Thompson Ford
Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Merchants dressing like princes and butchers’ wives wearing gem-encrusted crowns were public enemies in medieval societies structured by social hierarchy and defined by spectacle. In Tudor England, silk, velvet, and fur were reserved for the nobility, and ballooning pants called “trunk hose” could be considered a…
Find out more »VIRTUAL TALK: “Veritas” with Ariel Sabar
In 2012, Dr. Karen King, a star religion professor at Harvard, announced a breathtaking discovery just steps from the Vatican: she'd found an ancient scrap of papyrus in which Jesus calls Mary Magdalene "my wife." The mysterious manuscript, which King provocatively titled "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife," had the power to topple the Roman Catholic Church. It threatened not just the all-male priesthood, but centuries of sacred teachings on marriage, sex, and women's leadership, much of it premised on the…
Find out more »March 2022
CANCELLED!!!IN PERSON TALK: “A History of America in Ten Strikes” with Erik Loomis
A History of America in Ten Strikes―published in the wake of the teachers' strike that swept the country in 2018―challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. Labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers' strikes in American labor history in "chapters are self-contained enough to be used on their own in union trainings or reading groups" (Labor Notes), and adds an appendix detailing the 150 most important strikes in American history. These labor uprisings do…
Find out more »VIRTUAL TALK: “Our Team” with Luke Epplin
In July 1947, not even three months after Jackie Robinson debuted on the Brooklyn Dodgers, snapping the color line that had segregated Major League Baseball, Larry Doby would follow in his footsteps on the Cleveland Indians. Though Doby, as the second Black player in the majors, would struggle during his first summer in Cleveland, his subsequent turnaround in 1948 from benchwarmer to superstar sparked one of the wildest and most meaningful seasons in baseball history. In intimate, absorbing detail, Luke…
Find out more »VIRTUAL TALK: “Blood and Treasure” with Tom Clavin
The explosive true saga of the legendary figure Daniel Boone and the bloody struggle for America's frontier It is the mid-eighteenth century, and in the 13 colonies founded by Great Britain, anxious colonists desperate to conquer and settle North America’s “First Frontier” beyond the Appalachian Mountains commence a series of bloody battles. These violent conflicts are waged against the Native American tribes whose lands they covet, the French, and finally against the mother country itself in an American Revolution destined…
Find out more »IN PERSON TALK: “Red Line” with Joby Warrick
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Black Flags, the thrilling unknown story of America’s mission in Syria: to find and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons and keep them out of the hands of the Islamic State In August 2012, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was clinging to power in a vicious civil war. When secret intelligence revealed that the dictator might resort to using chemical weapons, President Obama warned that doing so would cross “a red line.” Assad did it anyway, bombing the Damascus…
Find out more »May 2022
IN PERSON TALK: “Coffeeland” with Augustine Sedgewick
The epic story of how coffee connected and divided the modern world Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world. But few coffee drinkers know this story. It centers on the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, where James Hill, born in the slums of Manchester, England, founded one of the world’s great coffee dynasties at the turn of the twentieth century. Adapting the innovations of the Industrial Revolution to plantation agriculture, Hill…
Find out more »September 2022
Grave Undertakings: A Walk through Falmouth’s Old Burying Ground
From the most respected minister to the lowliest outcast, everyone in Falmouth ended up here eventually. See their markers and hear their stories as our tour guide leads you through this hidden gem of a cemetery. NOTE: Please park in the 300 Committee lot at 157 Locust Street. Use the crosswalk to cross Locust St. and head towards the large boulder of the Mariners' Memorial. Opposite the Memorial, across Mill Rd., join your tour guide at the top of Cemetery…
Find out more »Grave Undertakings: A Walk through Falmouth’s Old Burying Ground
From the most respected minister to the lowliest outcast, everyone in Falmouth ended up here eventually. See their markers and hear their stories as our tour guide leads you through this hidden gem of a cemetery. NOTE: Please park in the 300 Committee lot at 157 Locust Street. Use the crosswalk to cross Locust St. and head towards the large boulder of the Mariners' Memorial. Opposite the Memorial, across Mill Rd., join your tour guide at the top of Cemetery…
Find out more »Grave Undertakings: A Walk through Falmouth’s Old Burying Ground
From the most respected minister to the lowliest outcast, everyone in Falmouth ended up here eventually. See their markers and hear their stories as our tour guide leads you through this hidden gem of a cemetery. NOTE: Please park in the 300 Committee lot at 157 Locust Street. Use the crosswalk to cross Locust St. and head towards the large boulder of the Mariners' Memorial. Opposite the Memorial, across Mill Rd., join your tour guide at the top of Cemetery…
Find out more »October 2022
Grave Undertakings: A Walk Through Falmouth’s Old Burying Ground
From the most respected minister to the lowliest outcast, everyone in Falmouth ended up here eventually. See their markers and hear their stories as our tour guide leads you through this hidden gem of a cemetery. NOTE: Please park in the 300 Committee lot at 157 Locust Street. Use the crosswalk to cross Locust St. and head towards the large boulder of the Mariners' Memorial. Opposite the Memorial, across Mill Rd., join your tour guide at the top of Cemetery…
Find out more »Harvest House Tour
Harvest House Tour The tour will feature seven distinctly different properties. Several historic houses on the Town Green date back to the 1700 and 1800's they tell the story of the colorful characters who founded Falmouth. There will be three homes in the town's prestigious seaside neighborhood of Belvidere Plains, two homes in The Moors, one of the earliest community associations dating back to 1925, they feature panoramic views of Martha's Vineyard and Vineyard Sound. Each home will be staged…
Find out more »Art’s Falmouth – JAZZ STROLL 2022
ArtsFalmouth’s Jazz Stroll 2022 will be held Saturday, October 15, 2022 from 6 to 8:30 PM along Main Street and Palmer Ave in downtown Falmouth. All performances are an hour long, and are free and open to the public. The Bill Taylor Quartet performs at Museums on the Green, 55 Palmer Avenue, from 7 to 8 PM. Saxophonist Bill Taylor leads the quartet with mellow jazz improvisations.
Find out more »Scandals, Crimes, and Disasters Walking Tours
All tour participants will receive a free appetizer from Estia Greek Restaurant on Main Street, good for the night of the event. Are there ever any “things that are best forgotten?” Perhaps, but we believe these particular scandals, crimes, and disasters can remind us that history was real life before it was written down. In this brand-new walking tour about the other side of local history. From petty feuds and social spats to serious crimes of robbery and murder, we…
Find out more »Sins, Sips, and Secrets
This October we invite you to join us for a night at the Museum. On an interactive tour, participants will visit the 1790 Dr. Francis Wicks House to hear a different story in each room of Falmouth’s nefarious and unearthly past. Using first person accounts, diaries, and newspaper records, you will hear things about the actual fears about the night, wayward travelers, and spirits in times past. During the event, a complimentary bar will be available from 5pm to 8pm,…
Find out more »Scandals, Crimes, and Disasters Walking Tours
All tour participants will receive a free appetizer from Estia Greek Restaurant on Main Street, good for the night of the event. Are there ever any “things that are best forgotten?” Perhaps, but we believe these particular scandals, crimes, and disasters can remind us that history was real life before it was written down. In this brand-new walking tour about the other side of local history. From petty feuds and social spats to serious crimes of robbery and murder, we…
Find out more »Wicked at Wicks: A Children’s Halloween Celebration at the Falmouth Museums on the Green
Come down to the Falmouth Museums on the Green for a fun family Halloween event. The event will include trick-or-treating at several historic properties on our campus including the 1790 Dr. Francis Wicks House, pumpkin painting, storytelling, and a costume parade. Participants will also have the opportunity to learn about local history, including stories about Halloween in Falmouth in years past. Come dressed to impress and enjoy the best of fall in Falmouth. $10 per child. Member’s children are $5.…
Find out more »November 2022
The Making of an Exhibition: A Curator’s Lecture on the Charles Willson Peale exhibition at the Hammond-Harwood House Museum
Our Executive Director, Rachel Lovett, will be giving a lecture on her recent exhibition "Ambition: Charles Willson Peale in Annapolis" which she created at her former institution, the Hammond-Harwood House Museum in Annapolis, Maryland. Have you ever wondered how an exhibition is developed? In this lecture, participants will get a behind the scenes look at the making of the exhibition Ambition: Charles Willson Peale in Annapolis. Rachel Lovett, former Hammond-Harwood House curator, will discuss the concept for the show, how…
Find out more »December 2022
Christmas with the Conants
Saturday December 10th, 2022 Tours at 3pm and 4pm This holiday season join the Falmouth Museums on the Green for a program filled with cheer, crafts, and stories of yesteryear. In the early 20th century, the Conant family lived in the house that now serves at the headquarters for the museum. Their daughter Eleanor fondly remembered her time in the house and later wrote Cape Cod Yesteryears: The Life and Short Stories of Eleanor Conant Yeager. In the memoir, she…
Find out more »
