Events to Dig Out For

Back here I featured the Old South Meeting House’s January events devoted to fabric arts in the eighteenth century. Lynne Bassett’s program “Out of Whole Cloth: Quilting in the Pre-Industrial Era” had to be canceled because of last week’s snowstorm. So it’s rescheduled to this Thursday, 3 February, at 12:15 P.M.—just after this week’s snowstorm. If the weather cooperates long enough to let this show go on, admission to the Old South costs $6, and is free for members. Bring your own quilts to bundle up in!

Also on Thursday, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host the acronym-resistant Boston Area Early American History Seminar, starting at 5:15 P.M. This month the discussion will be about Jason Sharples’s paper “The Politics of Fear: Slave Conspiracy Panics, Community Mobilization, and the Coming of the American Revolution,” available at the M.H.S. for reading in advance. The main response will come from Ben Carp of Tufts University, and then the discussion will become general.

On next Wednesday, 9 February, at 6:30 P.M. Alex Goldfeld will speak at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square on “From the North End to Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Community Since 1783”. His announcement says:

Spanning the time from the Revolution to the Civil War, this is an illustrated presentation about the dynamic, African-American neighborhood on the north slope of Beacon Hill, an area once considered part of the old West End.

Last March, Alex spoke about Boston’s pre-Revolutionary free black community, centered in the North End, to a capacity crowd. This event is free and open to the public, and more information is here.

[The photo of the hub of the solar system getting in buried in snow like my car tires comes from maliciousmonkey via Flickr under a Creative Commons license. It’s actually three years old, but the thought’s what matters.]