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Lectures at Atlanta History Center

 

The Atlanta History Center offers a variety of lectures throughout the year showcasing award-winning authors who share insight into their latest publication.  Books are available for purchase in the Atlanta History Center Museum Shop during lectures and a book signing follows each Aiken, Elson, and Livingston lecture. 
 
Admission for all lectures is $5 for members, $10 for nonmembers, and FREE to Annual Fund donors unless otherwise noted. 
 
Reservations are required for all lectures.
For more information or to purchase tickets, please call 404.814.4150.

All lecture ticket purchases are non-refundable.
 
Learn more about our Margaret Mitchell House lectures.
 


 


 

 SEPTEMBER 2010


Atlanta History Center: Jonathan Safran Foer
Eating Animals
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
7:00 PM



Eating Animals is a carefully researched, artfully told, funny, and personal exploration of what we eat and why, how what we eat affects our lives and the environment, and how every individual can make seemingly small choices that will enact big change. Jonathan Safran Foer, author of the acclaimed novel Everything Is Illuminated, delves into the environmental and social effects of factory farming and relates personal stories that influenced his decision to become a vegetarian. Eating Animals will move readers — and eaters — of every persuasion to participate in the ongoing conversation about what we eat and challenge them to take a naked look at what is too often conveniently brushed aside.

Presented by:



Aiken Lecture: Isabel Wilkerson
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
Friday, September 10, 2010
8:00 PM

The Warmth of Other Suns chronicles a watershed event in American history--the decades-long migration of African-Americans from the South to the North and West, from World War I through the 1970s—through the stories of three individuals and their families. In her book, Wilkerson traces the lives of Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster, from their difficult beginnings in the South, to their critical decisions to leave behind all they know and look for a better life in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.

Isabel Wilkerson is Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. In 1994 she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. This is her first book.


Aiken Lecture: John Stauffer

Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
Thursday, September 30, 2010
8:00 PM

Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln were the self made men of their time. One man was a former slave and a radical reformer who became one of the nation’s most brilliant writers and speakers. The other was an outsider, born dirt-poor, who became one of America’s greatest presidents. While the Civil War raged, the two titans—Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln—formed an unlikely friendship that changed the nation’s course.

In his book, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, John Stauffer traces how each man used the other—and how their political game ultimately led to mutual admiration and respect.

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 OCTOBER 2010



Cherokee Garden Library Lecture: James R. Cothran

Charleston Gardens and the Landscape Legacy of Loutrel Briggs
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
7:00 PM



Join the Cherokee Garden Library at the Atlanta History Center for an evening lecture with notable landscape architect and garden historian, James R. Cothran, who will discuss his new book, Charleston Gardens and the Landscape Legacy of Loutrel Briggs. This volume provides a fascinating account of the life and career of renowned landscape architect Loutrel Briggs, the individual most directly responsible for the development of the distinctive Charleston garden style.

This special evening is a fundraising event for the Cherokee Garden Library endowment. Admission is $35 per person.

Please call Staci Catron at 404.814.4046 for more information.



Livingston Lecture: Ron Chernow
Washington: A Life
Monday, October 25, 2010
8:00PM



In Washington: A Life celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one volume life of Washington, this crisply paced narrative carries the reader through his troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian War, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and his magnificent performance as America’s first president.

Ron Chernow is the prize-winning author of five previous books. His first, The House of Morgan, won the National Book Award. His two most recent books, Alexander Hamilton and Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, were both nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. Chernow lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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  NOVEMBER 2010
 


Lit Center Presents: Breakfast with Condoleezza Rice at AHC

Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family. 
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
8:00 AM Breakfast, 9:00 AM Lecture and Booksigning
 


Spend the morning at the Atlanta History Center for a special breakfast program with one of the most influential women of our time, Condoleezza Rice, as she shares stories from her new memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family.  Rice recounts growing up in Birmingham in the 1960s, during the turbulent civil rights era and how her parents’ love and support encouraged her not to set limits on what she could achieve.  As comfortable describing lighthearted family moments as she is recalling the poignancy of her mother’s battle with cancer and the heady challenge of going toe-to-toe with Soviet leaders, Rice holds nothing back in this candid account.  This is the story of Condoleezza Rice that has never been told – not that of an accomplished world leader, but of a little girl and a young woman trying to find her place in a sometimes hostile world, and of two exceptional parents and an extended family and community that made all the difference.

Condoleezza Rice was the sixty-sixth United States Secretary of State and the first black woman to hold the office.  Prior, she was the first woman to serve as National Security Advisor.  She currently teaches at Stanford University.

This Lecture is presented by the Literary Center at Margaret Mitchell House and will be held at the Atlanta History Center. Admission is $35 for members; $40 for nonmembers. Ticket includes coffee and light pastries and an autographed copy of Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family.  Reservations are required.  To make a reservation or receive more information, call 404.814.4150.


Refreshments provided by:









Livingston Lecture: Joseph Ellis
First Family: Abigail and John Adams
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
8:00 PM

The prizewinning, bestselling author of Founding Brothers and His Excellency brings America’s preeminent first couple to life in a moving and illuminating narrative that sweeps through the American Revolution and the Republic’s tenuous early years. Joseph J. Ellis gives us a story both intimate and panoramic: equal parts biography, political history and love story. In a fifty-plus-year political and personal partnership, John and Abigail strategized over civic and foreign affairs as often as they discussed their children. Their remarkable connection is epitomized in words he wrote to her after his election to the presidency: “I can do nothing without you.” The Adams marriage—in all its complexity, richness, triumph, and sorrow—is revealed as never before in this masterly and essential work.

Joseph J. Ellis won the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers. His portrait of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx, won the National Book Award. He is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.


Crossroads of Conflict

Saturday, November 6, 2010
2:00 PM

FREE LECTURE

Based on a comprehensive survey of sites identified by the Georgia Civil War Commission in 2000, Crossroads of Conflict covers 350 historic sites in detail, bringing the experience of the war to life.  Written by Georgia Civil War Commission staff members Barry L. Brown and Gordon R. Elwell, this full-color edition of Crossroads of Conflict is an updated and significantly expanded version of the guide released by the state of Georgia in 1994.  Color photographs and period images document the locations, which include major and minor battlefields, POW camps, hospitals, houses, buildings, bridges, cemeteries, and monuments.  The war experiences of all Georgians, not just soldiers, are addressed within the guide’s informative text, and a detailed chronology is included.



Amy Sedaris

Simple Times
Presented by the Literary Center at Margaret Mitchell House
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
7:00 PM

 



According to Amy Sedaris, it’s often been said that ugly people craft and attractive people have sex. In her new book, Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People, she sets the record straight. Demonstrating that crafting is one of life’s more pleasurable and constructive leisure activities, Sedaris shows that anyone with a couple of hours to kill and access to pipe cleaners can join the elite society of crafters.

Amy Sedaris hails from North Carolina and studied and performed with Chicago’s Second City. She has appeared in film, television, and stage productions, and is the bestselling author of I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence.

Admission is $35 for members and $40 for nonmembers. Ticket includes an autographed copy of Simple Times.



Elson Lecture: Pauline Maier
Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788
Thursday, November 11, 2010
8:00 PM



Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 tells the dramatic story of the two-year debate over the ratification of the Constitution, filled with chicanery and statesmanship, drawing on the speeches and letters of founding fathers on both sides of the debate -- the first new account of this seminal moment in American history in decades.

Pauline Maier is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at M.I.T.  and the author of several books and textbooks on American history, including From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams, and American Scripture, which was on the New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice" list of the best 11 books of 1997 and a finalist in General Nonfiction for the National Book Critics' Circle Award.  

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DECEMBER 2010

Elson Lecture: A.J. Langguth

Driven West: Andrew Jackson's Trail of Tears to the Civil War
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
8:00 PM



By the acclaimed author of the classic, Patriots, and Union 1812, this major work of narrative history portrays four of the most turbulent decades in the growth of the American nation. After the War of 1812, Presidents Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, and Polk led the country to its manifest destiny across the continent, but the forces and hostility unleashed by that expansion led inexorably to Civil War. Langguth tells the story of the desperate fate of the Cherokees driven out of Georgia and of their leaders who tried in vain to save them: Major Ridge and his son, John Ross, Elias Boudinot. He presents vivid firsthand witnesses of their march West at bayonet point—the infamous Trail of Tears—and the tragedy that awaited them across the Mississippi.The broiling national collision would lead to the Mexican War, to bloody frontier wars over whether territories were to be slave states or free, to the doctrines of nullification and secession and, finally, to Civil War. In his masterly narrative of this saga, Langguth captures the misery and betrayals, the energy and exuberance of a young nation as it rushes to its destiny.

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Additional Information

The Aiken Lectures are made possible with generous funding from the trust of Lucy Rucker Aiken.

The Elson Lectures are made possible with generous funding from Ambassador and Mrs. Edward Elson. The Elson Lectures feature scholarly addresses by our nation's prominent historians.

The Livingston Lectures are made possible with generous funding from the Livingston Foundation of Atlanta.

The Cherokee Garden Library Lecture Series features expert-led discussions covering Southern garden history, historic horticulture and the preservation and restoration of historic gardens and landscapes in the Southeast. 

The Sidney Isenberg Lectures present some of the leading writers of our times, and are supported in part through the generosity of its donors. Past lecturers have included Ken Burns, Judith and Milton Viorst, Calvin Trillin, and James McBride, among others.


 



 
         
         
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