Chautauqua Lecture Series 2018

For Better, For Worse: Exploring History through Four Compelling Relationships

This year’s Chautauqua Series will focus on four historically significant couples with ties to Coastal Georgia and will examine the challenges they faced during their lives together. Lectures will take place on Thursday evenings, August 2, 9, 16, and 23 at 6 p.m. in the A.W. Jones Heritage Center Event Hall. The cost for the series is $50 for members and $95 for non-members. Reservations are required.

Historian Steven C. Hahn, Ph.D., will kick off the series on Thursday, August 2, with a program entitled “Branded and Stigmatized: Mary Musgrove and Thomas Bosomworth.” Dr. Hahn’s biography, The Life and Times of Mary Musgrove, unraveled the story of one of colonial Georgia’s most fascinating characters. Born to a Creek mother and an English father, Musgrove became a key player in the realms of trade and diplomacy, which were typically dominated by men. She and her third husband, Thomas Bosomworth, an agent of Indian affairs for General Oglethorpe who became an Anglican priest, asserted her rights to three islands and other land, and she was eventually granted St. Catherines Island. Dr. Hahn is a professor of history and department chair at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Georgia and a doctorate from Emory University.

On August 9, Daniel Kilbride, Ph.D., will present “A Marriage Not Made in Heaven: Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler.” While researching his book, An American Aristocracy: Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia, Dr. Kilbride became acquainted with the ill-fated marriage of Fanny Kemble to Pierce Mease Butler. He later wrote the essay on Kemble entitled “Becoming Georgian” for UGA Press’s Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times. Dr. Kilbride received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida and is professor of history at John Carroll University near Cleveland, Ohio.

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Chautauqua Lecture Series 2018

Presidential couple Herbert and Lou Hoover will be the subject of the August 16 lecture. The Hoovers visited Coastal Georgia as guests of Howard Coffin in 1930. Canadian author Kenneth Whyte has recently published a critically acclaimed biography that examines the 31^st president’s remarkable career. Revered for organizing major relief efforts in Europe during World War I, Hoover was later maligned as president during the Great Depression. At his side in good times and bad was his wife Lou, an accomplished person in her own right. The couple met at Stanford University, where Mrs. Hoover graduated as the only female geology major. Whyte is the former editor-in-chief of Maclean’s magazine and author of The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, a Washington Post Book of the Year.

The series will close on August 23 with a lecture on the relationship between American artist Maxfield Parrish and his wife Lydia. In the early 20th century, St. Simons Island became a seasonal refuge for Lydia Parrish. She developed an interest in the preservation of the Gullah Geechee musical heritage, publishing the landmark Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands in 1942. The lecture, “Getting Away from It All: Maxfield and Lydia Parrish, from New Hampshire to Georgia,” will be presented by Sylvia Yount, the Lawrence A. Fleishman Curator in Charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yount organized a major exhibition on Maxfield Parrish, with accompanying catalog, for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in art history from the University of Pennsylvania.

The 2018 Chautauqua Lecture Series is sponsored by Wells Fargo Advisors.