On July 4, 1776, representatives of the United States of America assembled in Congress to formally notify King George III of their intent to separate from British rule. Their Declaration of Independence enshrined many of the political principles that would inform a new nation unlike any other that had ever existed. As we approach the 250th anniversary of this document, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and National Humanities Medal recipient Gordon Wood joins Providence Athenæum Executive Director Matt Burriesci for a conversation about the American Revolution, its radicalism, and its legacy.

Book sale and signing

Experimental archaeology resurrects the hidden details of lost civilizations. These are scientists gone rogue: They make human mummies. They investigate the unsolved murders of ancient bog bodies. They carve primitive spears and go hunting, then knap their own obsidian blades to skin the game. They build perilous boats and plunge out onto the open sea—all in the name of experiencing history as it was, with all its dangers, disappointments, and unexpected delights.

New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean joins these experimental archaeologists on their adventures across the globe, from the Andes to the South Seas. He fires medieval catapults, tries his hand at ancient surgery and tattooing, builds Roman-style roads, and much more. Lively, offbeat, and filled with stunning revelations about our past, Dinner with King Tut sheds light on days long gone and the intrepid experts resurrecting them today, with startling, lifelike detail and more than a few laughs along the way.

Book sale and signing

Genealogy is everywhere– online, on screens, and through organizations and conferences and more. But technologies aside, genealogy was everywhere in the 18th century, too. And while we may think of 18th-century Americans as largely the subject of genealogy research, they were active participants in what was a foundational interest and practice in their own time. Family histories were deeply meaningful for diverse early Americans, but it was also baked into the very structures of their society through law, politics, and religion. From deep research across 18th-century British America, Karin Wulf’s new book, Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America examines how we can understand the role of genealogy then, and its impact now.

Book sale and signing

A deadly secret lurks within our spice racks, medicine cabinets, backyard gardens, and private stashes.

Scratch beneath the surface of a coffee bean, a red pepper flake, a poppy seed, a mold spore, a foxglove leaf, a magic-mushroom cap, a marijuana bud, or an apple seed, and we find a bevy of strange chemicals. We use these to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin), recover from surgery (opioids), cure infections (penicillin), mend our hearts (digoxin), bend our minds (psilocybin), calm our nerves (CBD), and even kill our enemies (cyanide). But why do plants and fungi produce such chemicals? And how did we come to use and abuse some of them? Based on cutting-edge science in the fields of evolution, chemistry, and neuroscience, Noah Whiteman’s Most Delicious Poison reveals the origins of toxins produced by plants, mushrooms, microbes, and even some animals; the mechanisms that animals evolved to overcome them; and how a co-evolutionary arms race made its way into the human experience.
This perpetual chemical war not only drove the diversification of life on Earth, but also is intimately tied to our own successes and failures. You will never look at a houseplant, mushroom, fruit, vegetable, or even the past five hundred years of human history the same way again.

Whiteman will be joined by Professor Sohini Ramachandran during the moderated Q&A.

Book sale and signing

Walter S. Feldman (1925 – 2017) was a modernist painter, printmaker, mosaicist, and book artist who spent most of his life and career in Providence, Rhode Island. Join art professional Catherine Little Bert to situate Feldman’s art books within the broader history of postwar American art and the development of contemporary book arts.

In 1985, Feldman shifted his focus toward the creation of handmade artists’ books, a transition that redefined the arc of his career. After more than twenty years at Brown University, Feldman established Ziggurat Press—followed by Brown/Ziggurat Press in 1990—where he conceptualized books as unified works of art. His practice integrated image, text, structure, and typography into objects that challenge traditional distinctions between visual art and the book form.

Two major themes shaped Feldman’s approach: collaborative works developed with poets, and introspective volumes that address central concerns of his artistic life—World War II, Jewish identity, memory, and an exploration of typography and mark making. His contributions to the field were recognized in 1993 with his appointment as John Hay Professor of Bibliography, and his influence endures through the Walter Feldman Book Arts Studio at the John Hay Library, founded in 2005.

Feldman’s artists’ books have been shown widely and are included in significant public collections such as Harvard Library, Boston Public Library, New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, Wellesley College, and Brown University, among others.

Bert will be joined by art historian Suzanne Scanlan during the moderated Q&A.

Artist and wildlife rehabilitator Sheida Soleimani is the Executive Director of Congress of the Birds, Rhode Island’s only avian-specific wildlife rehabilitation center with an onsite release facility. Soleimani will discuss what wildlife rehabilitation entails—from emergency triage and medical care to the ethical responsibility of preparing animals for successful release—and how these practices guide the organization’s 24-hour triage clinic in Providence and its rehabilitation and release center in Chepachet, where over 1,000 avian patients are treated annually. Drawing on her background as an artist, Soleimani will also explore how Congress of the Birds integrates art, education, and advocacy as tools for community engagement, ecological awareness, and reimagining our interdependence with the natural world.

In the 1860s Samuel Clemens invented the literary persona and stage-name “Mark Twain,” and became America’s most famous humorist and satirist—and perhaps the most famous American in the world by the time of his death in 1910. Today, we think of Twain as the author of the classic (and controversial) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; in his own day, he was known as both an author and comic performer. How did Twain bring Western humor traditions and vernacular language to lecture tours, stories, and novels to millions of people across the globe? Twain’s satirical humor deflated pretensions, violated Victorian cultural norms, and took on serious political issues such as slavery and U.S. imperialism. Historian Philip Gould explores some of the main thematic and psychological dimensions of Twain’s humor, which probed what he saw as the darker side of human nature.

Mark Twain—writer, raconteur, provocateur, and social critic—was also Samuel Langhorne Clemens—son, father, brother, friend, and employer. With a focus on the 17 years Twain spent with his family in Hartford, and the relationships that sustained him through this period, Erin Bartram, Associate Director for Education at the Mark Twain House & Museum, explores the complex interaction between Twain’s public persona and private life. Only by attending to the two in concert can we truly understand the power and influence of his work in his own time and think about the ways that work still provokes us today.

Feathers can turn up in the unlikeliest of places: the nostrils of a murder victim, the engines of a crashed airliner, the drying machine lint trap of a former KKK Grand Dragon who tarred and feathered a Civil Rights activist. These are just some of the cases that the world’s first forensic ornithologist, Roxie Laybourne, encountered during her storied and at times tumultuous career within the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Using nothing but her microscope and the museum’s massive collection of birds, Roxie pioneered methods for turning shredded fragments of feathers into accurate species identifications. Chris Sweeney, author of The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne, unearths the history of this unusual and utterly consequential field of science and tell the story of the enigmatic woman who pioneered it.

Book sale and signing to follow.

With this edition of Homer’s Odyssey, the celebrated author, critic, and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn brings the great epic to vividly poetic new life. Widely known for his essays on classical literature and culture in The New Yorker and many other publications, Mendelsohn gives us a line-for-line rendering of The Odyssey that is both engrossing as poetry and true to its source. Rejecting the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, he artfully reproduces the epic’s formal qualities—meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance—and in so doing restores to Homer’s masterwork its archaic grandeur. Mendelsohn’s expansive six-beat line, far closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer’s dense verses without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original.

The result is the richest, most ample, most precise, and most musical Odyssey in English, conveying the beauty of its poetry, the excitement of its hero’s adventures, and the profundity of its insights. Supported by an extensive introduction and the fullest notes and commentary currently available, Daniel Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative version of this magnificent and enduringly influential masterpiece.

Daniel Mendelsohn will be joined in conversation by Johanna Hanink, Brown University Professor of Classics.

Book sale and signing to follow.