Naturalist Titian Ramsay Peale no doubt would have celebrated #squirrelappreciationday. His watercolors captured a variety of squirrels during his travels across North America.
Our founder Benjamin Franklin was born #onthisday in 1706. Each year, institutions founded by Franklin and some of his biggest admirers hold a celebration including this procession to his grave at 5th and Arch streets in Philadelphia.
Visit Sketching Splendor Thursday-Sunday through December 29 to learn more about the artistic and scientific contributions of John James Audubon, William Bartram, and Titian Ramsay Peale.
The museum team is hard at work to finish the object selections for our 2025 exhibition, Philadelphia: The Revolutionary City, inspired by the collaborative project with The Library Company of Philadelphia and Historical Society of Pennsylvania: https://therevolutionarycity.org/
Find out more this Monday August 12 at Science on Tap, Untapped, with @scihistoryorg.
The American Philosophical Society gives out the oldest scientific medal in North America- the Magellanic Premium. This year, Caltech Professor of Molecular Biology, Barbara Wold, will receive the golden medal for her work in gene expression. https://www.amphilsoc.org/2024-magellanic-premium-medal
Did you know that the popular nursery rhyme "Pop Goes the Weasel" is more than 300 years old? Join us in celebrating National Pop Goes the Weasel Day on June 14 by visiting the APS exhibition Sketching Splendor and see if you can find William Batram's drawing of this wily animal sketched while on his 1773-77 travels through the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida.
Happy Halloween
Happy Halloween from the APS!
N.Y. bat, Vespertilio novabnacensis L., Titian Ramsay Peale, 1819–20.
Susan O. Montgomery Lecture: Performance and Conversation with Curtis Faculty
On December 12th, two members of the leadership team at the Curtis Institute of Music will join each other in conversation at the Susan O. Montgomery Lecture Series. Nick DiBerardino (composition, ’18), Senior Associate Dean of Performance Studies and Chair of Composition Studies, and Amy Yang (piano, ’06), Associate Dean of Piano Studies and Artistic Initiatives will discuss their multifaceted roles as creators, interpreters, educators, and leaders, with a special focus on the ways their artistry has driven their unique careers.
This program will interweave musical performance and conversation. Mr. DiBerardino, who brings to Curtis a distinguished musical and scholarly pedigree, will speak about how his formative experience attending Curtis led to subsequent positions in which his transformative vision has shaped the school. He will also present and discuss the creative process behind an original composition. Ms. Yang will perform a solo piano work she commissioned from current Curtis composition student Alistair Coleman, who she first encountered in her previous role as program director of Curtis Summerfest’s Young Artist Summer Program. Ms. Yang will speak about interpretation, her collaborative process with composers, and the evolutionary stages of Mr. Coleman's piece.
Together, Ms. Yang and Mr. DiBerardino hope to weave a picture of the fertile artistry at the core of the Curtis educational experience and the musical values they work to uphold for future generations.
Opium’s Long Shadow: From Asian Revolt to Global Drug Control
In the late 19th century, China and the United States were societies, cultures and political systems further removed from each other than today. Yet, thanks to the support of other Asian pressure groups, China was able to find common ground with the United States in combating what Asian educators, journalists, activists and diplomats described as the greatest curse afflicting global public health: a perceived epidemic of opium addiction ravaging minds, bodies, families and societies across Asia and the Atlantic world.
Opium’s Long Shadow: From Asian Revolt to Global Drug Control traces the anti-opium sentiment and politics they expanded from China, India and Japan to the Atlantic world, the United States and the League of Nations in Geneva. As a global history, the book explains why obstacles to the abolition of the opium trade – from historical disputes and political interests to economic pressures – could only stem the wave of anti-drug protests until the 1890s when a new, official consensus emerged in the international community that has endured to this day: that governments who sponsored the trade in narcotic drugs risked the status of rogue states. Shorn of a romanticized rendering of international cooperation, the odium of opium became a moral deterrent to states around the world, showcasing a story of dramatic change across the boundaries of culture, language and nation.
Steffen Rimner is presently Assistant Professor in the History of International Affairs and Ad Astra Fellow at University College Dublin in Ireland. He was honored to a receive a Franklin Research Grant by the American Philosophical Society for research that led to the publication of Opium’s Long Shadow: From Asian Revolt to Global Drug Control (Harvard University Press 2018). He has also published in the Journal of Global History and the Journal of the British Academy. Born in Germany, he was educated at the University of Konstanz, Yale and Harvard where he obtained his Ph.D. He s
Panel 5: Resiliency & Wrap-up discussion
“Historicizing Resiliency: Public Humanities and Emergency Management in the Anthropocene”
Brendan Gillis (Department of History, Lamar University)
“AI for Multi-scale Urban Flood Resilience Planning”
Xinyue Ye (Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning/Department of Geography, Texas A&M University)
“’Where Your House is Drowning’: Principles for Deconstructing Flooding Resilience in Self-Build Housing through Participatory Design”
Bobuchi Ken-Opurum (Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute)
“Black Ecologies, Subaquatic Life, and the Jim Crow Enclosure of the Tidewater"
James T. Roane (Africana Studies and Geography/Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, Rutgers University)
Moderator: Joyce Chaplin (Department of History, Harvard University)