The Lee Lectures

Typically offered once in each season during the academic months, this series of three or more lectures covers a variety of topics from important persons and historic places to matters of preservation, conservation, and collecting. Visitors as well as members are invited to attend. The lectures are co-sponsored by the Madison Beach and Recreation Department, which graciously offers use of the large meeting space upstairs at the Memorial Town Hall.

$7, adults; $5 members; $2, children ages 10 and older
Adult Series Subscription, $15 (send check payable to Madison Historical Society, 14 Meetinghouse Lane, Madison CT 06443)
4:00 p.m. at the Memorial Town Hall on the Madison Green
8 Meetinghouse Lane
All programs are recommended for adults and children 10 and older.


Fall-Winter-Spring 2009--2010

November 22, 2009
Chilling Tales for an Autumn Afternoon
Jeanne Donato

Costumed storyteller Jeanne Donato will enchant and enthrall audiences with colorful legend and lore of New England. If you dare, come hear the Connecticut tale of "The Bloody Apples" and the "Ballad of Pirate Lee."

January 17, 2010
Roots and Routes of the Pequot War
David Naumec

Dr. David Naumec of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center will discuss the battlefields and historical sites of the Pequot War of 1636-1638—one of the most controversial and significant events in Colonial and Native American history. Naumec uses a show-and-tell format that encourages participation, ideas, and questions.

March 21, 2010
John Brown: Fiery Persuader or Modern Terrorist?
Anne Farrow

Following on the heels of the 150th anniversary of the attack on Harper’s Ferry, journalist and editor Anne Farrow, co-author of Complicity: How The North Promoted, Prolonged,, and Profited from Slavery, examines the terrifying passion and violence of Connecticut-born abolitionist John Brown—murderer? or martyr?

For more information, call (203) 245-4567.

History Book Talks

In addition to The Lee Lectures, the Madison Historical Society co-presents, with R. J. Julia Booksellers, history book talks that are of special interest to our members as well as to the general public. These talks offer opportunities for book lovers and history buffs to meet the authors, hear firsthand stories of the research done to create the books, and obtain signed first-edition copies of notable books by prize-winning authors. These programs begin at 7:00 p.m. Space is limited, so please call the store at 203.245.3959 to reserve a seat or to pre-order copies of the selected books. R. J. Julia Booksellers is located at 768 Boston Post Road in downtown Madison.

January 14 James Bradley, The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War. Tickets for this event are $5.00 which may be applied to the purchase of a book. According to the New York Times, "this incendiary new book angrily and persuasively connects Theodore Roosevelt's noxious racial views to his foreign policy miscalculations."

February 15 Thomas Fleming, The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers. Tickets for this event are $5.00 which may be applied to the purchase of a book. According to Washington Post's reviewer Justin Moyer, twentieth-century presidents and politicians have nothing on earlier political architects when it comes to scandal. "Those who think only prudes attended the Constitutional Convention should know that Independence Hall's closets were not free of skeletons," he writes, in reference to author Thomas Fleming's well-researched peek into the boudoirs of America's founding fathers. Fleming agrees: "Knowing and understanding the women in their lives adds pathos and depth to the public dimensions of the founding fathers' political journeys."

February 25 Leslie Strauss, Outhouses of Connecticut. This event is free. Enjoy a Powerpoint presentation of Connecticut's smallest and most private structures. Learn why these little buildings are still preserved by Nutmeggers.

March 15 Howard Frank Mosher, Walking to Gatlinburg, A Novel. Tickets for this event are $5.00 which may be applied to the purchase of a book. According to Publisher's Weekly, this "Civil War odyssey in the tradition of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and Robert Olmstead's Coal Black Horse, ... is old-fashioned in the best sense of the word." After accidentally causing the death of a runaway slave he was leading to Canada, seventeen-year-old Morgan Kinneson goes in search of his older brother, Pilgrim, a Union soldier reported MIA at Gettysburg. As PW reports, "Morgan's rite-of-passage through an American arcadia despoiled by war and slavery is an engrossing tale...".

April 13 M.William Phelps, The Devil's Rooming House: The True Story of America's Deadliest Female Serial Killer. Tickets for this event are $5.00, which may be applied to the purchase of a book. According to its publisher, this gripping tale of a legendary, century-old murder spree relates the true-crime tale of a silent, simmering killer who terrorized New England in 1911. As a terrible heat wave killed more than 2,000 people, a reporter for the Hartford Courant noticed a sharp rise in the number of obituaries for residents of a rooming house in Windsor, Connecticut, and began to suspect its owner, Amy Archer-Gilligan, who had opened the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids four years earlier. “Sister Amy” would be accused of murdering both of her husbands and up to sixty-six of her patients with cocktails of lemonade and arsenic; her story inspired the Broadway hit Arsenic and Old Lace.

April 23 Tony Williams, The Pox and the Covenant: Mather, Franklin, and the Epidemic That Changed America's Destiny. Tickets for this event are $5.00 which may be applied to the purchase of a book. According to its publisher, this is the story of such well-known figures as Cotton Mather, James Franklin, and young Benjamin Franklin, struggling for their cause—although not always for the side one might expect. In the end, the incredible results of an eighteenth-century smallpox epidemic would reshape the colonists' view of their destiny, setting for America a new course, a new covenant, and the first drumbeats of revolution.

August 12 Thomas Fleming, Now We Are Enemies. Tickets for this event are $5.00 which may be applied to the purchase of a book. Hailed as a masterpiece, Now We Are Enemies tells the story of the Battle of Bunker Hill, a key clash of the American Revolution.  Author of many distinguished histories and historical novels, Thomas Fleming celebrates with us the 50th anniversary of this volume’s publication, first released in 1960.

November 17 Cathryn J. Prince, A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science. Tickets for this event are $5.00 which may be applied to the purchase of a book. Adjunct professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University and freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, Prince tells the tale of Benjamin Silliman, a Weston resident and young chemistry professor at Yale College, who rigorously investigated the fiery crash of a meteor in the Weston woods in 1807 and established himself as one of America's first bona fide scientists.

Madison Remembers

The MHS oral history project offers occasional opportunities for Madison citizens to share their personal experiences on selected topics. All stories will be recorded, and all will become part of an audio archive dedicated to preserving the voices of Madison as its citizens recall the important events in town history.

Check back for announcments of upcoming oral history events. There is no fee for this program, either to participate or to attend. Members of the public are welcome to attend as audience members, regardless of their personal experience with the particular topic of the day. Madison Remembers programs are held at the Lee Academy.

Field Trips

Check back for announcements of upcoming field trips.