Thursday, February 21,
6:30 p.m. at the
Aldrich House, 110 Benevolent Street,
Providence
Free Admission, To R.S.V.P.: Dalila Goulart
(401) 331-8575 x45 or
programs@rihs.org
Lecture:
Children’s Play, Children’s Culture:
Historical Insights
What is the function of play? Is it just a
purposeless children’s activity, or can we glean an insightful look into
children’s culture from its study? Please join us in welcoming
Dr. Howard Chudacoff, Professor of
American History at Brown University, who will discuss his
new book
Children at Play: An American History. The study of
childhood became a serious social topic starting in the late
nineteenth-century, and Children at
Play is a comprehensive look at this history. Drawing from
his recent book, Chudacoff will trace shifts and continuities in the
ways American children have played from colonial times to the present.
Copies of the book will be on sale and Dr. Chudacoff will be available
for signing.
Friday and
Saturday, February 22 and 23 at the
John Brown House Museum, 52 Power Street,
Providence
For more information: Barbara Barnes
(401) 273-7507 x62 or
bbarnes@rihs.org
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Special
Floral-Themed Tours at the John
Brown House Museum
This weekend, the
John Brown House Museum will be offering
house tours with a floral theme. These special tours will be offered in
collaboration with the annual Rhode
Island Spring Flower and Garden Show being held at the Rhode
Island Convention Center the same weekend. Tours begin at 10:30 a.m., 12
noon, 1:30 p.m., and 3:00 p.m. The special tour fee for this weekend is
$5 per person.
Wednesday,
February 27, 5:30 p.m. a
Library Talk at the
Rhode Island Historical Society Library, 121
Hope Street, Providence
Free Admission, To R.S.V.P.: Lee Teverow
(401) 273-8107 x10 or
lteverow@rihs.org
Lecture:
Organizing Commerce:
Boston and New
York, 1634-1760
Join us in welcoming
Sasha Nichols-Geerdes,
a New England Regional Fellowship Consortium research
grant recipient and Ph.D. candidate at UCLA. Sasha will be discussing
his research on the organization of
domestic trade during the colonial period in the north,
particularly in New York and Boston. The lecture will trace how
these organizations formed due to a number of factors, including the
availability of cash, local and provincial institutions, and land
distribution.
At the Providence Public Library …
During this Black
History Month, Providence Public Library is pleased to welcome
internationally acclaimed and award-winning
author Dinaw Mengestu for
a book discussion and signing of his debut novel
“The Beautiful
Things That Heaven Bears”
on Sunday, February 24
from 1:00 – 4:00 pm at Central Library, 150 Empire Street, Providence.
This program is presented in partnership with Brown
University’s Africana Studies Department. A book discussion from 1:00
– 2:00 pm will be led by Brown Professor Bernard Matambo. There will be
a reading by Mengestu from 2:00 – 3:00 pm, followed by a book sale and
author signing at 3:00 pm
(Hardcover:
$23; Paperback: $14).
150 Empire Street,
Providence, RI 02903
CONTACT: Lisa Miller, 455-8057 or Tonia
Mason, 455-8090
www.provlib.org
About the author
Dinaw Mengustu is an
internationally acclaimed, award-winning young writer at the beginning
of his literary career. Born in 1978 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he
immigrated to the United States in 1980 with his mother and sister,
joining his father, who fled the communist revolution two years before.
He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA
program in fiction. A former
Rolling Stone reporter, Mengestu is a recipient of a Lannan
Literary Fellowship, the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book
Foundation, and the Guardian First Book Prize.
About the novel
An affecting tale of a little-known group of African immigrants in
Washington D.C., The Beautiful
Things That Heaven Bears (Penguin/Riverhead Books, 2007)
opens a new window on the entire American experience. It is an
unforgettable story that will captivate anyone who has ever sought to
build a new life, to realize his/her highest ambitions, and to embrace
life fully.
This
novel has also won the Prix Du Premier Roman Etranger in France, was a
New York Times Notable
Book of 2007, and was one of Amazon.com Editors’ Best of 2007.
“I was profoundly moved by
this tale of an Ethiopian immigrant’s search for acceptance, peace, and
identity.”
¯ Khaled Hosseini, author of
The Kite Runner
“A
searing novel…of expatriate loneliness and urban despair.”
¯ New Yorker
“The deeply felt pain in
Mengestu’s novel is offset by the solace of friendship
¯
whether it’s a friendship that
hovers on the verge of romance, a friendship between an adult and a
child or, above all, the friendships that steady the daily lives of
fellow immigrants. Mengestu brilliantly summons up the tribe Maeve
Brennan once called ‘travelers in residence’ — men and women suspended
between continents; suspended, too, between memory and forgetting.” ¯
from a review by Rob Nixon,
The New York Times, March
’07
“A great African novel, a great
Washington novel, and a great American novel.”
¯ The New York Times
Book Review
