AHC Additions to Spring 2013 Lecture Schedule
ATLANTA, Georgia– The Atlanta History Center offers lectures on a wide variety of topics, from presidential history and gardens to social history and non-fiction adventures. Past lectures have featured renowned authors like Sara Gruen, David McCullough, Gretchen Rubin, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stacy London, and Taylor Branch. The Atlanta History Center’s spring 2013 lecture line-up continues to offer audiences a wide variety of subject matter with current and award-winning authors.
Each lecture program is designed to join authors and audiences in an intimate setting complete with author presentation, audience discussions, and book signings. Lectures are held at either the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead or at the Margaret Mitchell House in Midtown. Admission for lectures is $5 members, $10 nonmembers, and free to AHC Insiders unless otherwise noted. Reservations are required, please call 404.814.4150 or purchase advance tickets online at AtlantaHistoryCenter.com/Lectures.
April 2013
Aiken Lecture: Tony Burroughs, Black Roots: A Beginner’s Guide to Tracing the African American Family Tree
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
8:00 pm
Location: Atlanta History Center
Author and leading African American genealogist Tony Burroughs discusses his bestselling book, Black Roots: A Beginner’s Guide to Tracing the African American Family Tree.
Discover how to trace, document, record, and write your family's history with this easy-to-read, step-by-step authoritative guide. Black Roots highlights some of the special problems, solutions, and sources unique to African Americans. Based on solid genealogical principles and designed for those who have little or no experience researching their family's past, but valuable to any genealogist, this book explains everything you need to get started, including: where to search close to home, where to write for records, how to make the best use of libraries and the Internet, and how to organize research, analyze historical documents, and write the family history.
Tony Burroughs is an internationally known genealogist who taught genealogy at Chicago State University for fifteen years. Burroughs researched Olympic Gold Medal sprint champion Michael Johnson’s family history and consulted on the Reverend Al Sharpton-Strom Thurmond genealogy; the Oprah Winfrey genealogy; African American Lives2; The Real Family of Jesus and consulted with Chicago Public Schools, New York Public Schools, Chicago City Colleges and Ancestry.com. Burroughs is first Vice-President of the Board of Directors of the Illinois
Genealogical Society. He received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Genealogy Society, Fellow of the Utah Genealogical Association, and Fellow of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium.
Support: Aiken Lecture Series is supported by Lucy Rucker Aiken Foundation. Additional funding provided by the Georgia Genealogical Society and the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, Metro Atlanta Chapter.
For book review or interview with the author, please contact Leigh Massey, Director of Marketing Communications for Atlanta History Center, 404.814.4033 or LMassey@AtlantaHistoryCenter.com
The Sidney Isenberg Lecture Series: An Evening with Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Thursday, April 11, 2013
8:00 pm
Location: Atlanta History Center
From Andrew Solomon, the National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon, comes Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity. Culled from ten years of research on different kinds of exceptional children and 40,000 pages of interview transcripts from conversations with more than 300 families across America, Far From the Tree examines extreme versions of the profound difference that all parents and children feel from one another.
Solomon tells stories of children who have been heartbreakingly tragic victims of intense prejudices, but also stories of parents who have embraced their children’s differences and tried to alter the world’s understanding of their conditions. Solomon’s humanity and erudition – and the eloquence he discovers in the voices of his subjects – are transformative.
Together, the categories he explores compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles are heightened versions of a universal experience. The courageous and profoundly affirming stories of many of these families point a way for all of us to expand our definition of the human family and to increase tolerance. Far From the Tree will rattle our prejudices, question our policies, and inspire our understanding of the relationship between illness and identity. Above all, it will renew and deepen our gratitude for the herculean reach of parental love.
Andrew Solomon is the author of the novel A Stone Boat and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, winner of fourteen national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a New York Times bestseller, now published in twenty-two languages. He lives in New York and London with his husband and children.
Support: The Sidney Isenberg Lectures have been established by his friends, colleagues, and family as an expression of love and appreciation for his values and commitment to the healing process and to the advancement of learning and growth – affirming his conviction that the human relationship is the agency through which change comes about.
For book review or interview with the author, please contact Kate Lloyd, Publicist for Simon & Schuster, at Kate.Lloyd@simonandschuster.com
Lifestyle Lecture Series: An Evening with Curtis Stone, What’s for Dinner: Delicious Recipes for a Busy Life
Monday, April 15, 2013
7:00 pm
Location: Atlanta History Center
Classically trained, world-renowned chef Curtis Stone, host of Bravo’s popular Top Chef Masters, has cooked in hundreds of homes across the globe. While every household is unique, there is one thing we all have in common – we are busy. Whether we are shuttling kids to soccer, juggling schedules, or working late at the office, getting dinner on the table is daunting. Stone, however, believes a home-cooked meal is always worth the effort, so he created What’s for Dinner: Delicious Recipes for a Busy Life featuring 130 effortless and inspired recipes.
Whether you’re looking for healthier fare, living on a budget, or having friends over, Stone can help you put a delicious meal on the table every night of the week. Each day has been given a unique focus to create a culinary roadmap of timesaving kitchen solutions and doable dishes.
Australian native Stone is the author of four cookbooks. He is also the creator of Kitchen Solutions, a line of cookware sold worldwide, and writes a monthly column for Men’s Fitness. Stone honed his skills in London at Café Royal, under three-star Michelin chef Marco Pierre White, and at Mirabelle and the revered Quo Vadis. He lives in Los Angeles with his family.
For book review or interview with the author, please contact Alison Masciovecchio, Publicity Manager for Random House Publishing Group at amasciovecchio@randomhouse.com
Jill McCorkle, Life After Life
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
7:00 pm
Location: Margaret Mitchell House
Life after Life is a profoundly beautiful exploration of life and death through the most true-to-life characters one is likely to meet in fiction: the residents and staff of Pine Haven Retirement Center Fulton, North Carolina. Jill
McCorkle has always been interested in probing the lines between fiction and reality, and between tragedy and comedy. With this novel, she charts the precarious line between life and death, the split moment when the reader is aware of both places at once.
Jill McCorkle is the author of four story collections and five novels from which five have been selected as New York Times Notable Books. The recipient of the New England Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Prize for Literature, she teaches writing at North Carolina State University and lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
For book review or interview with the author, please contact Kelly Bowen, Publicity Director, 919.913.3865 or Kelly@algonquin.com
May 2013
Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, A Seige, A Revolution
Monday, May 6, 2013
8:00 pm
Location: Atlanta History Center
In Bunker Hill, Nathaniel Philbrick, award-winning author of In The Heart of the Sea and Mayflower, brings his talents to the story that ignited the American Revolution. With passion and insight, Philbrick reconstructs the geographic and ideological landscape in a narrative of the robust, messy, blisteringly real origins of America.
For most of us the American Revolution is about Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, and George Washington led to the formation of the United States. Lost in this account is the interplay of ideologies and personalities that provoked a group of merchants, farmers, artisans, and sailors to take up arms against their own country. Philbrick reveals the growing tension that climaxed in June 1775 with the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major and decisive battle of what became the American Revolution.
Philbrick is The New York Times bestselling author of National Book Award winner In the Heart of the Sea, Pulitzer Prize finalist Mayflower, Sea of Glory, and The Last Stand. He is also the author of Why Read Moby-Dick? and Away Off Shore. He lives on Nantucket.
Support: Provided by the American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati and the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of Georgia.
For book review or interview with the author, please contact Louise Braverman, Associate Director for Viking / Penguin Publicity at 212.366.2752 or louise.braverman@us.penguingroup.com
Maria Semple: Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
7:00 pm
Location: Margaret Mitchell House
Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a satire about the perils of hyperactive modern parenting, what technology does to the family, and a quirky daughter’s search for her beloved, brilliant, misanthropic mother, Bernadette.
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect; and to fifteen-year-old Bee, she’s simply Mom. When Semple’s story opens, Bernadette has disappeared and Bee begins a quest to find her.
Semple is the author of This One Is Mine. Before turning to fiction, she wrote for the television programs Mad About You, Ellen, and Arrested Development, and her writing has appeared in the New Yorker. Semple lives in Seattle, where she teaches fiction, studies poetry, and tries to stay off the Internet.
For book review or interview with the author, please contact Morgan Moroney of Little, Brown and Company at 212-364-1577
The Civil War and the Forging of Character Lecture Series
David Blight, Emancipation at 150: How Does the Civil War Have a Hold on Our Historical Imagination?
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
7:00 pm
Location: Atlanta History Center
The Atlanta History Center is pleased to be in partnership with the Lovett School for their four-year lecture series “The Civil War and the Forging of Character” which commemorates the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and the Battle of Atlanta.
This lecture series brings to Atlanta speakers and scholars who can engage all of us—students, teachers, parents, alumni, and the community at large—on critical matters of character and integrity as demonstrated during this defining period in our nation’s history.
As part of this series, and in conjunction with the Atlanta History Center’s newest exhibition Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: How the Word is Passed Down, the History Center hosts an evening lecture with noted historian David Blight. Blight is Professor of American History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is also an award winning author of several books including American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and When This Cruel War is Over.
This lecture is held at the Atlanta History Center and is free to the public. Reservations are required; please call 404.814.4150 or reserve tickets online at AtlantaHistoryCenter.com/Lectures.
Support: The Lovett School is presenter of “The Civil War and the Forging of Character”, made possible by The Jack and Anne Glenn Character Education Speakers Fund, through the generosity of the Jack and Anne Glenn Charitable Foundation and brothers Jack, Alston, Bob, and Lewis Glenn, and in cooperation with the Atlanta History Center.
For book review or interview with the author, please contact Leigh Massey, Director of Marketing Communications for Atlanta History Center, 404.814.4033 or LMassey@AtlantaHistoryCenter.com
Elson Lecture: Jeff Shaara. A Chain of Thunder
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
8:00 pm
Location: Atlanta History Center
Continuing the trilogy that began with A Blaze of Glory, the New York Times-bestselling author Jeff Shaara returns to chronicle another decisive chapter in America’s Civil War. In A Chain of Thunder, the action shifts to the fortress city of Vicksburg. There, in the vaunted “Gibraltar of the Confederacy,” a siege for the ages cemented the reputation of one Union general and all but seal the fate of the rebel cause. Drawing on comprehensive research and his intimate knowledge of the Vicksburg Campaign, Jeff Shaara weaves fiction out of the cloth of historical fact. By giving voice to their experiences at Vicksburg, A Chain of Thunder vividly evokes a battle whose outcome still reverberates more than 150 years after the cannons fell silent.
Shaara is the author among others of The Rising Tide, To the Last Man, The Glorious Cause, and Gone for Soldiers, as well as Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, two novels that complete the Civil War trilogy that began with the Pulitzer Prize--winning classic The Killer Angels, written by his father, Michael Shaara.
Support: The Elson Lectures feature scholarly addresses by our nation’s prominent historians and are made possible with generous funding from Ambassador and Mrs. Edward Elson.
For book review or interview with the author, please contact Greg Kubie, Publicist for Ballantine Bantam Dell Random House Publishing Group, at 212.782.9038
June 2013
Victoria Wilcox: Inheritance
Saturday, June 1, 2013
2:00 pm
Location: Margaret Mitchell House
The name Doc Holliday conjures images of the Wild West and the shootout at the O.K. Corral, but before he was a Western legend he was a Southern son, born in the last days of the Old South with family links to Gone With the Wind. Now his story is told for the first time in a trilogy of novels, Southern Son: The Saga of Doc Holliday.
The story begins with Inheritance, set during the turbulent times of the American Civil War, as young John Henry Holliday welcomes home his heroic father and learns a terrible secret about his beloved mother. His only confidant is his cousin Mattie Holliday, the childhood sweetheart who shares his memories of plantation life and better days before the war. But Mattie is not around to comfort him when tragedy strikes and John Henry’s young hero-worship turns to bitter anger.
Victoria Wilcox is founding director of the Holliday-Dorsey-Fife House Museum, the antebellum house of the family of John Henry "Doc" Holliday. Her work with the house uncovered a link between Doc Holliday and the real people behind Gone With the Wind. Wilcox’s eighteen years of research then led to the writing of Southern Son. A member of the Western Writers of America, her writing on the Old South and the Wild West has been featured in publications such as True West and North Georgia Journal.
For book review or interview with the author, please contact Leigh Massey, Director of Marketing Communications for Atlanta History Center, 404.814.4033 or LMassey@AtlantaHistoryCenter.com
Livingston Lecture Series: Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
Monday, June 10, 2013
8:00 pm
Location: Atlanta History Center
From Civil War historian Allen C. Guelzo comes the reality of the Battle of Gettysburg, portraying the ordinary soldier and depicting the personalities and circumstances that produced one of the great battles of all time. Never before has a book examined the intense fighting of the individual soldier, studied the politics of military decisions, or placed the battle in the context of nineteenth-century military practice. What emerges is a previously untold story, and through such scrutiny the cornerstone battle of the Civil War is given vivid new life.
Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, both winners of the Lincoln Prize. His work has appeared among others in the American Historical Review, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Wall Street Journal.
Support: The Livingston Lectures are made possible with generous funding from the Livingston Foundation of Atlanta.
For book review or interview with the author, please contact Kim Thornton, Senior Publicist for Alfred A. Knopf, at 212.572.2299 or kthornton@randomhouse.com
Dorothea Benton Frank, The Last Original Wife
Monday, June 24, 2013
7:00 pm
Location: Margaret Mitchell House
Dorothea Benton Frank dissects a successful marriage in a tale of wit, charm, and Southern atmosphere. Leslie Carter is the last original wife among her husband’s group of cronies. They have all traded in their first wives for younger, blonde, and more enhanced models. Leslie is proud of the longevity of her marriage, until she is golfing with her husband and slips into a manhole … and nobody realizes she is gone. Recognizing the sham of her life, Leslie sets out reclaim the strong, vibrant, sexy woman she was meant to be.
Frank is the New York Times-bestselling author Sullivan’s Island; Plantation; Isle of Folly Beach; and Porch Lights. She is an avid cook, enjoys fly fishing, reading and travel, and is a frequent speaker on the creative process for students of all ages. She divides her time between the South Carolina Lowcountry and New Jersey.
For book review or interview with the author, please contact Buzzy Porter, Tour Planning and Author Support, at 919.901.9061 or buzzy@buzzyporter.com