The 2020 Lowell Lecture Series, presented by the Paul Revere House in partnership with Revolutionary Spaces and Boston’s Green Ribbon Commission, will focus on three distinct time periods to explore how climate patterns have changed around Boston, how humans interacted with, contributed to, and adjusted to such changes, and what the implications of these actions were for Boston and New England.
Historians Anya Zilberstein and Andrew Robichaud will provide historical perspectives, and Zoe Davis, Amy Longsworth, and Nina Zannieri will provide contemporary insights and connections to historical spaces for this vitally important issue.
The lectures will take place on the last three Tuesdays in September (15, 22, & 29) from 6:30–7:45 P.M. Thanks to sponsorship from the Lowell Institute, they are free to attend virtually and will be streamed live via Facebook Live and YouTube Live (YouTube links for each stream follow each individual event description below.) The recordings of each event will also be available on our accounts if you miss a livestream: www.facebook.com/thepaulreverehouse & www.youtube.com/user/paulreverehouse.
September 15: “Global Warming and Global Cooling in Early Boston” Anya Zilberstein, Associate Professor of History, Concordia University (Montreal). Prof. Zilberstein’s lecture will reveal why we should care that early Bostonians were at the center of vigorous debates about whether New England’s climate had radically changed since the start of the colonial period, and how this information allows us to weigh this history’s significance for the highly charged debates about actual climate change in the present. https://youtu.be/nQVtlrUNNR0
September 22: “Frozen Over: Boston’s Nineteenth Century Ice Age” Andrew Robichaud, Assistant Professor of History, Boston University. The Boston area became a key center of ice production and trade in the nineteenth century. As ice became a pervasive commodity, it remade everyday life in important ways. This talk explores those transformations in and around Boston in what was Boston’s economic and cultural “ice age,” and considers its lasting implications. https://youtu.be/5S9TEGQoPvw
September 29: Panel Discussion: “Where We Are, and Where Do We Go from Here?” Zoe Davis, Boston’s Climate Resilience Project Coordinator; Amy Longsworth, Director, Boston Green Ribbon Commission; Nina Zannieri, Executive Director, Paul Revere Memorial Association. This panel discussion will allow for an instructive reflection on how Boston arrived at this particular climatological moment, where policies may go from here, and the past and future impact of such policies on historic sites. https://youtu.be/UQW6QkIOZ_Q
All lectures are from 6:30-7:45 P.M. Free on Paul Revere House Facebook Live and Paul Revere House YouTube Live. The lecture series is presented by the Paul Revere Memorial Association in partnership with Revolutionary Spaces and Boston’s Green Ribbon Commission. This series is made possible by a grant from the Lowell Institute.
For more information about the Lowell Lectures Series, please contact Robert Shimp, Paul Revere House, at robert@paulreverehouse.org or at (617) 523-2338.
