Simon Winchester has long been a font of far-reaching, deep-digging, and sometimes delightfully arcane knowledge: from the stories of all-but-forgotten men who shaped civilization to the secrets of the world’s great oceans to seismic catastrophes that literally changed the world. Now, this New York Times bestselling author takes on his most elemental subject – knowledge itself.

In Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, Winchester takes a millennials-long journey through the story of how knowledge has been acquired, stored, and passed on, how that dissemination has evolved with time, and how – in an age where a world of information is just a cell phone away – the thoughtfulness and wisdom that derives from knowledge might be under threat.

Winchester takes us back to before the ancients Greeks, to medieval Germany and Victorian Belgium, to the creation of the first encyclopedias and the phenomenon of Wikipedia, and even to contemporary Bangalore, India, where a network of schools ignites the spark of curiosity for once-hopeless slum children. The human impulse to know things, to understand what they mean, and to apply that understanding has been the bulwark of civilization. But nowadays, Winchester wonders, when the information in any library can be retrieved effortlessly on a handheld device, what are the implications for humankind? If computers are more powerful than even the greatest human brains, what will it mean for society? If we no longer have a need for knowledge – if computers do it all for us – then what is human intelligence even for? In short: What is knowledge without wisdom? And what would a world without wisdom look like?

In the winter of 1722, on the eve of a major conference between the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois) and Anglo-American colonists, a pair of colonial fur traders brutally assaulted a Seneca hunter near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. Though virtually forgotten today, the crime ignited a contest between Native American forms of justice – rooted in community, forgiveness, and reparations – and the colonial ideology of harsh reprisal that called for the accused killers to be executed if found guilty. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Covered with Night, historian Nicole Eustace reconstructs the attack and its aftermath, introducing a group of unforgettable individuals – from the slain man’s resilient widow to an Indigenous diplomat known as “Captain Civility” to the scheming governor of Pennsylvania – as she narrates a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations. Taking its title from a Haudenosaunee metaphor for mourning, Covered with Night ultimately urges us to consider Indigenous approaches to grief and condolence, rupture and repair, as we seek new avenues of justice in our own era. Eustace will be joined in conversation by Karin Wulf, the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian at the John Carter Brown Library.

This program is presented as part of the Expansive Histories of the Early Americas program series, in partnership with the John Carter Brown Library.

Focusing on the work of Black potters in the 19th-century American South, the MFA Boston’s Hear Me Now exhibition presents approximately 50 ceramic objects from Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, a center of stoneware production in the decades before the Civil War, together with contemporary responses. Join curator and Chair, Art of the Americas Ethan Lasser to explore this story about art and enslavement – and about the joy, struggle, creative ambition, and lived experience of African Americans in the decades before the Civil War. The exhibition features many objects never before seen outside of the South, bringing together monumental storage jars by the enslaved and literate potter and poet Dave or David Drake (about 1800–about 1870) with rare examples of the region’s utilitarian wares and powerful face vessels by unrecorded makers.

It also links past to present, in part by including the work of leading contemporary Black artists who have responded to or whose practice resonates with the Edgefield story. Established figures like Theaster Gates and Simone Leigh, as well as younger, emerging artists like Adebunmi Gbadebo, Woody De Othello, and Robert Pruitt, have contributed to the show. Working primarily in clay, these artists respond to the legacy of the Edgefield potters and consider the resonance of this history for audiences today.

The show will run March 4 – July 9, 2023 at the MFA Boston.

On a Saturday in New York City in 1912, around the wooden tables of a popular Greenwich Village restaurant, a group of women gathered, all of them convinced that they were going to change the world. It was the first meeting of “Heterodoxy,” a secret social club. Its members were passionate advocates of free love, equal marriage, and easier divorce. They were socialites and socialists; reformers and revolutionaries; artists, writers, and scientists. Their club, at the heart of America’s bohemia, was a springboard for parties, performances, and radical politics. But it was the women’s extraordinary friendships that made their unconventional lives possible, as they supported each other in pushing for a better world. In Hotbed, author Joanna Scutts illuminates the dazzling story of the Greenwich Village feminists who blazed the trail for the movement’s most radical ideas.

Why do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us intimate access to an astonishing variety of other lives, experiences, and places across the ages. Reflecting on a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, The Lives of Literature explores, with passion, humor, and whirring intellect, a professor’s life, the thrills and traps of teaching, and, most of all, the power of literature to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.

As an identical twin, Weinstein experienced early the dislocation of being mistaken for another person -and of feeling that he might be someone other than he had thought. In vivid readings elucidating the classics of authors ranging from Sophocles to James Joyce and Toni Morrison, he explores what we learn by identifying with their protagonists, including those who, undone by wreckage and loss, discover that all their beliefs are illusions. Weinstein masterfully argues that literature’s knowing differs entirely from what one ends up knowing when studying mathematics or physics or even history: by entering these characters’ lives, readers acquire a unique form of knowledge – and come to understand its cost.

Sarah and Angelina Grimke – the Grimke sisters – are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, indeed a long-overdue corrective, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality.

That the Grimke sisters had Black relatives in the first place was a consequence of slavery’s most horrific reality. Sarah and Angelina’s older brother, Henry, was notoriously violent and sadistic, and one of the women he owned, Nancy Weston, bore him three sons: Archibald, Francis, and John. While Greenidge follows the brothers’ trials and exploits in the North, where Archibald and Francis became prominent members of the post–Civil War Black elite, her narrative centers on the Black women of the family, from Weston to Francis’s wife, the brilliant intellectual and reformer Charlotte Forten, to Archibald’s daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, who channeled the family’s past into pathbreaking modernist literature during the Harlem Renaissance.

In a grand saga that spans the eighteenth century to the twentieth and stretches from Charleston to Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond, Greenidge reclaims the Black Grimkes as complex, often conflicted individuals shadowed by their origins. Most strikingly, she indicts the white Grimke sisters for their racial paternalism. They could envision the end of slavery, but they could not imagine Black equality: when their Black nephews did not adhere to the image of the kneeling and eternally grateful slave, they were cruel and relentlessly judgmental—an emblem of the limits of progressive white racial politics.

A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy – both traumatic and generative – of those myths, which reverberate to this day.

The discovery of a highly toxic, arsenic-based green pigment in the cover of a Victorian-era, cloth-covered book at Winterthur Library launched The Poison Book Project. This ongoing project investigates potentially toxic colorants used in the manufacture of 19th-century bookbinding materials, crowd-sources an inventory of confirmed arsenic green 19th-century books, and explores safer handling and storage methods. How are these books identified? Why were they made? How deadly are they, really? Lead conservator Melissa Tedone will share the project’s research into heavy metals and the historical context behind these beautiful but potentially dangerous volumes.

In-person attendees will receive an emerald green color swatch bookmark to aid in the visual identification of potentially arsenical books.

“I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.” Inspired by these few words, spoken by Josephine Baker at the 1963 March on Washington, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow and bestselling author Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines – whether it’s the twenty-seven seconds in “Gimme Shelter” in which Merry Clayton wails the words “rape, murder,” a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt – has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib’s own personal history of love, grief, and performance.

Touching on Michael Jackson, Patti LaBelle, Billy Dee Williams, the Wu-Tang Clan, Dave Chappelle, and more, Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space – from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio.

The Q&A portion of this program will be recorded.

New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean has been called “a national treasure” by The Washington Post and “a latter-day Tocqueville” by The New York Times. Her deeply moving explorations of American stories both familiar and obscure have earned her a reputation as one of America’s most distinctive journalistic voices. She is author of seven books, including The Orchid Thief, Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Library Book, the incredible story of the history and burning of the Los Angeles Public Library. Orlean will be joined in conversation by R. Tripp Evans.