Lectures
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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. View lectures presented at the Margaret Mitchell House, our Midtown campus.
Admission for all lectures is $5 for members, $10 for nonmembers, and FREE to AHC Insiders unless otherwise noted. Reservations are required for all lectures. Please call 404.814.4150 or reserve your tickets online. All lecture ticket purchases are non-refundable.
 Cherokee Garden Library: Susan Haltom, One Writer's Garden: Eudora Welty's Home Place Wednesday, February 22, 2012 7:00 PM  Even in her earliest short stories, the writer Eudora Welty (1909–2001) wove images of southern flora and gardens into her writing, yet few outside her personal circle knew that they originated in her own passionate connection to her home garden in Jackson, Mississippi, designed by her mother. Near the end of her life, Welty recounted her memories of the lost garden to Susan Haltom, a local garden designer, who helped bring it back. When Welty died in 2001, a restoration of the garden was well underway—and with it, the untold story of the garden’s place in the writer’s artistic life. Woven throughout this fascinating story are passages from Welty’s unpublished writing as well as excerpts from her personal letters.
Susan Haltom is a garden designer and Preservation and Maintenance Coordinator of the Eudora Welty garden. She has published in Mississippi Magazine, Old House Journal, and Magnolia, publication of the Southern Garden History Society. This special evening is a fundraising event for the Cherokee Garden Library endowment. Admission is $25 individual; $50 couple; $250 patron. Reservations are required. Call 404.814.4046 or email.  Livingston Lecture: Ira Shapiro, The Last Great Senate: Courage and Statesmanship in Times of CrisisTuesday, February 28, 2012 8:00 PM  The U.S. Senate today seems to have lost its way. Bitter partisanship and personal beliefs take preference over thoughtful legislation and principled compromise. This is far removed from the Senate of the 1960s and 1970s, which advanced the Great Society and the Civil Rights Movement, debated the Vietnam War, and held President Richard Nixon accountable for Watergate. Those decades marked a golden age of the Senate and its work, when legislation was passed from both sides of the aisle and Senators collaborated with colleagues across party lines.
Ira Shapiro moved to Washington in 1975 and served for twelve years in senior positions in the Senate, playing important roles in accomplishments as diverse as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Senate Code of Ethics, and completing the Metrorail system. During the Clinton Administration, he served as a leading U.S. trade negotiator, earning the rank of ambassador. Today, he practices international trade law in Washington, D.C.
Mary Boykin Chesnut began her diary in February 1861, a few months before the attack on Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and ended it on June 26, 1865, just days after the last battle of the war. Between those dates, Chesnut often lived near the site of historic events as they unfolded, including Montgomery, Charleston, Columbia, and Richmond. As a result, she was an eyewitness to history and the pages of her diary capture the changing fortunes of the South and the role of politics, war, society, race, and slavery as her reflections of the Civil War unfold from within the aristocratic circles of Southern society. Chesnut's famous diary is now published with her personal photograph albums, which had been lost in the 1930s and rediscovered in 2007. Conscientiously annotated and edited by Martha M. Daniels, a Chesnut descendant, many of these personal images have never before been seen. The photographs complete Chesnut’s Civil War history, providing insight into her culture and the nation’s greatest conflict, and creating the record of words and pictures that Mary Chesnut always intended.
Since her wildly successful debut memoir, Under the Tuscan Sun, and the subsequent movie release, Frances Mayes’s name has become synonymous with all things Tuscan. Food has always played a starring role in Frances’s writings, but never before has she shared a collection of the robust, honest recipes that she regularly enjoys with her husband, Ed, and their Italian friends. In her first-ever cookbook, The Tuscan Sun Cookbook, Frances and Ed welcome readers to Bramasole, their home in the countryside, introduce their friends, and share recipes that they have enjoyed as honorary Italians.
Frances Mayes is the author of four books about Tuscany. The now-classic Under the Tuscan Sun–was a New York Times bestseller for more than two and a half years and became a Touchstone movie starring Diane Lane. It was followed by Bella Tuscany and two illustrated books, In Tuscany and Bringing Tuscany Home. She is also the author of the novel, Swan, six books of poetry, and The Discovery of Poetry. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Judith B. Tankard is a landscape historian, author and preservation consultant. She received an M.A. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and taught at the Landscape Institute, Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, for 20 years. Her articles and book reviews have been published in many magazines, including Hortus, Apollo and Country Life. She lectures regularly both in the United States and Britain. She is the author or co-author of seven illustrated books on landscape history, including most recently Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes and Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
Free to the public. Reservations are required by calling 404.814.4046 or via email. Back to Top
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AHC Lecture: Martha M. Daniels, Mary Chesnut’s Illustrated Diary: Mulberry Edition Boxed Set
Frances Mayes, The Tuscan Sun Cookbook
Cherokee Garden Library: Judith B. Tankard, Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden 
AHC Lecture: Robert J. Cook, Troubled Commemoration