Members are invited to join us for a review of the 2025-2026 fiscal year and for Board of Directors elections. A reception will begin at 5pm; the speaking portion of the evening will begin at 5:30pm.

Amelia Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937, days away from completing her record-setting flight around the world. The official search was abandoned after 16 days. The unofficial search has never ended.

In Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life, Rachel Hartigan retraces the three main theories of Earhart’s disappearance, introducing a cast of eccentric characters consumed by discovering the truth. Did the aviator and her navigator fly off course to spy on Japanese military bases, only to be captured? Did they land on a remote Pacific island—where Hartigan traveled—and die as castaways? Or did they run out of fuel and crash into the ocean?

Hartigan, a former National Geographic writer, intersperses the search for Earhart with the story of Earhart’s extraordinary life—her unstable childhood, her itinerant early career, and her unconventional marriage to a PR-savvy publisher who transformed her into an aviation icon—and illuminates why we remember Amelia Earhart today.

Welcome to the hidden, squirming world of parasites, some of the most misunderstood creatures with whom we share the Earth (and our bodies).

There is the tapeworm, which can grow 120 feet in length within the gut of a whale; the tsetse fly, a notorious vector of disease that can pierce the skin even of crocodiles with its needle-like mouth; and the most universal symbol of parasitic behavior: the leech. Long villainized as, well, parasitic, these creatures are actually a vital part of every ecosystem—and Dr. Dino Martins, an award-winning entomologist and biologist from Kenya, has made it his life’s mission to demystify these beguiling beings.

Hidden Creatures is a journey across the world ten times over, from Martins’s home in the wilds of East Africa to the rainforests of Borneo to cities and backyards across the globe. Along the way we encounter brilliant and eccentric experts who join Martins on his adventures to investigate not only parasites but their hosts, from hyraxes and hippos to, of course, humans.

National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower, reveals how California’s Gold Rush forged the modern United States—and lit the long fuse to civil war.

In January 1848, a carpenter spotted flecks of gold in a shallow stream at Sutter’s Mill in California—triggering the greatest voluntary migration in U.S. history and jolting a fragile republic already sliding toward crisis. In The Rush, Philbrick transforms the Gold Rush from a tale of sudden riches into the origin story of America’s modern contradictions: capital consolidated at dizzying speed, democracy in thrall to private power, xenophobia weaponized in the name of liberty—and a stubborn belief in the American experiment that refuses to die. This is the story of a nation tearing at the seams—a republic tested by its own ideals.

Philbrick follows the gold as it moves from riverbed to countinghouse to the halls of power, revealing how vigilantism hardened into law and how debates over slavery in the West tipped the balance in Washington. The result is a clear, human story of how a scramble for wealth reshaped ideas of freedom, labor, and belonging—and how California’s rise helped push a fractured nation toward war. The Rush is alive with characters whose choices still reverberate: a searing, panoramic epic that captures both the fury and the promise of America.

A copy of The Rush is included with each in-person ticket.

Please note that while the entire program will be simulcast live, only the moderated Q&A portion will be recorded and archived on our website.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . all men are created equal . . . with certain inalienable rights . . . life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 250 years after they were written, these words remain at once familiar and startling. What do they mean to us today? Do we understand them in the same way the Founders did? Historian and former presidential speechwriter Ted Widmer seeks to answer these questions by returning to where the nation’s story began, the Declaration of Independence, to trace the remarkable history of how it came to be and how it has shaped the democratic aspirations of Americans and others for more than two centuries.

Weaving together more than sixty fascinating original texts, Widmer finds in the words of succeeding generations of Americans—radicals and conservatives, revolutionary insurgents and civil rights leaders, presidents and philosophers—the key to understanding the extraordinary durability of America’s founding ideas.

Color is one of the most foundational experiences we have as humans–yet clear communication about color eludes most of us. Never mind the arguments of whether aqua is a blue or a green (or neither): what do you do with colors like “lake,” which can be both a blue and a red, or “puce,” which is not the color that most people think it is? How do you describe the difference between lime green and Kelly green, or Kelly green and grass green, or this paint company’s “Kelly green” and that paint company’s “Kelly green”? This conundrum is one scientists, linguists, philosophers, and manufacturers have agonized over for hundreds of years. It seemed a hopeless case. But one small group of scientists, led by one man obsessed with color descriptions, decided to fix it once and for all with the help of the biggest dictionary company in America – and, in doing so, teach English speakers how to navigate the technicolor world around them. Join author and lexicographer Kory Stamper on a wild romp through the modern history of the attempt to define color.

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