AHC Announces 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.
February 2013
Lifestyle Lecture Series: An Evening with Bobby Deen, From Mama’s Table to Mine
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
7:00 pm
Location: Atlanta History Center
Bobby Deen, bestselling author, host of the number one Cooking Channel show, Not My Mama’s Meals, and son of food personality Paula Deen, grew up on the delicious Southern comfort food for which his mother is known. Full of love, flavor and, unfortunately, calories, Bobby found himself an overweight young man. Unwilling to sacrifice flavor, he began tweaking recipes to contain fewer calories. The delicious result is his new cookbook with Melissa Clark, From Mama’s Table to Mine, that features 120 recipes of Southern comfort-food classics, and all under 350 calories and jam-packed with flavor.
Bobby Deen, along with his brother, Jamie, got his start in the food business when their mother hired them to deliver sandwiches. Bobby is a regular guest on the Today show, Good Morning America, Rachel Ray, and Dr. Oz. He is the host of the Cooking Channel’s Not My Mama’s Meals and a frequent guest on many Food Network shows, including Paula’s Home Cooking.
Promotional Support provided by Viking Store and Cooking School
Cherokee Garden Library: J. Ryan Gainey, The Gathered Garden
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
4:00 pm
Location: Atlanta History Center
Join the Atlanta History Center's Cherokee Garden Library for a lecture with internationally-known landscape designer, plantsman, and artist J. Ryan Gainey.
His latest volume, The Gathered Garden, showcases exquisite botanical illustrations depicting a palette of plants, arranged seasonally, that thrive in our Atlanta gardens. The book also discusses the history of
the plants themselves and the stories of how Ryan gathered them from dear friends and family to imbue his garden with beauty.
Lecture is followed by an exploration of a botanical art display, book signing, and reception in the History Center's McElreath Hall. This lecture is free to the public. Reservations required, please call 404.814.4046 or email SCatron@AtlantaHistoryCenter.com.
March 2013
Janice Rothschild Blumberg, Prophet in a Time of Priests: Rabbi “Alphabet” Browne, 1845-1929
Sunday, March 3, 2013
2:00 pm
Location: Atlanta History Center
Between his arrival in the United States during post-Civil War Reconstruction and his death at the onset of the Great Depression, Edward Benjamin Morris Browne grabbed headlines as a rabbi, journalist, attorney, and political activist, all in the pursuit of justice. While serving congregations in numerous cities, including Atlanta, he published the South's first Jewish-interest newspaper, delivered opening prayers in Congress, served as honorary pall bearer for President Ulysses S. Grant, and helped Benjamin Harrison win the presidency.
Janice Rothschild Blumberg is a native of Atlanta and graduated from the University of Georgia. She studied American Jewish history while experiencing it, as the widow of two outspoken Jewish leaders, civil rights activist Rabbi Jacob Rothschild of Atlanta and David Blumberg of Knoxville. With a personal interest and unrelenting curiosity, Blumberg has meticulously researched and carefully documented the life of this controversial American rabbi.
Livingston Lecture: Tracy Thompson, The New Mind of the South
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
8:00 pm
Location: Atlanta History Center
Though many observers say the South has disappeared, Georgia native Tracy Thompson asserts it has merely drawn on its oldest tradition: an ability to adapt and transform. Thompson traveled throughout the region and discovered a South both amazingly similar and radically different from the land she knew as a child. Through African Americans, evangelical Protestants, Latino immigrants, and more, the South is rediscovering its agrarian traditions, seeking racial reconciliation, and reinventing what it means to have roots in an increasingly rootless global culture.
Tracy Thompson is a reporter and essayist who writes about diverse subjects, including psychiatry, law, and the Civil War. She is the author of The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression and The Ghost in the House. Drawing on mountains of data, interviews, and a whole new set of historic archives, Thompson paints a heartening, often surprising picture of a region filled with promise and paradoxes, and one that is laying a path for the rest of the nation to follow.
The Livingston Lectures are made possible with generous funding from the Livingston Foundation of Atlanta. This lecture will be held at the Atlanta History Center.
Lifestyle Lecture Series: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
7:00 pm
Location: Atlanta History Center
What are the differences between a winning and losing performance? In Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing, New York Times bestselling authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman reveal how to tip the odds of success in our favor, either at the office, school, playing field, or home. Looking at competition through a multidisciplinary lens integrating wisdom from politics, finance, genetics, neuroscience, psychology, and other fields, Bronson and Merryman reveal hidden factors that fuel our determination, passion, and competition, and explore how to harness the forces of competition to succeed.
Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman are authors of the New York Times bestseller, NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children. They have won nine national awards for reporting, including PEN Center USA Literary Award for Journalism; the American Association for the Advancement for Science (AAAS) Award for Science Journalism; an “Audie” from the Audio Publishers Association; and two Clarion Awards.
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 IllinoisGenealogical 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tags: