From award-winning journalist and author John A. Jenkins comes a revolutionary exploration of the summer before Watergate—a parallel world of a half-century ago when America faced events and crises strikingly similar to those of today—told through the lives and words of those who lived it. Inflation rages. Crime is rising. Abortion rights take center stage at the Supreme Court. China poses an existential threat. Black lives are under attack. The president battles the press as he seeks to subvert not just the political order but the rule of law itself. This is the Summer of ’71—a pivotal, operatic season of hope and despair, missed opportunities and era-changing decisions. More than a half-century later, it’s difficult to overstate the importance of events that defined the American experience during that fateful five-month period spanning May to September 1971. On May Day, President Nixon orchestrates a massive police-military response to disrupt the biggest anti-war demonstration in history. Two days later, the Supreme Court announces that it will take up Roe v. Wade. In the weeks and months that follow, friction escalates between the police and the Black Panthers, Congress debates universal healthcare, Attica prisoners riot, and the New York Times publishes the Pentagon Papers—a turning point that ultimately dooms Nixon’s presidency and his legacy. Summer of ’71 brings it all to the page through first-person accounts that are only now becoming available: the papers, diaries, and oral histories of key players. Award‑winning journalist and author John A. Jenkins witnessed many of the events himself, and draws on a multitude of sources, including Nixon’s White House tapes, to tell the story of that time as no one else could. Here is both a fascinating, brilliantly researched read in its own right, and a critical lens through which to view today’s political discord.

About the Speaker

John A. Jenkins is a multi-award-winning journalist, author, publisher, and entrepreneur. With a specialty in partisans and power, he is the author of The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist, and Summer of ’71. He has written hundreds of features for major magazines in the U.S. and abroad, including The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and The Washington Monthly. A 4-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit, one of the highest awards in legal journalism, he is the founder of Law Street Media, one of the most widely visited and highly engaged law-and-policy sites on the web. Prior to starting Law Street, Jenkins served for 15 years as President & Publisher of CQ Press, the leading political science textbook and reference publisher. Currently, he co-leads the predictive-AI start-up PoliScio Analytics, which he co-founded in 2022.

When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, the landmark case overturning Roe v. Wade, it marked a turning point in the lives of millions of Americans. It was also the culmination of a decades-long movement whose grievances were embodied by the man who wrote the court’s opinion: Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. Steely in his demeanor, with an impassive appearance that defies changing fashions, Alito could be the family lawyer in a 1960s television drama. But when he talks there is an emotional undercurrent, a fast-flowing stream beneath a placid surface. This is a man driven to push boundaries and mold ideas. His aim is to right the wrongs of the past six decades, as he saw them. He was the prized son of an Italian-born father and a mother whose parents emigrated from Italy shortly before her birth, worked their way into the middle class despite anti-Catholic prejudice and humiliating setbacks like evictions, and exacting big achievement demands of their children. But his family’s values came under attack during the sixties and later when Alito was at Princeton as the Vietnam war raged, women demanded equality, and their brand of patriotism was devalued. The Federalist Society provided a safe space for Alito and those like him, and he moved fast up the judicial ladder to eventually land on the Supreme Court. There he has been aggressive in pushing the law in new, conservative directions—from pushing for expanding rights for the religious conservatives, overturning affirmative action, extending the right to bear arms to thwart gun controls, and reducing the power of the Environmental Protection Agency. And finally—most crucial to his legacy—he was the author of Dobbs v. Jackson, bringing the conservative legal movement full circle in overruling Roe v. Wade. His ethnic and religious background, his intellectual confidence, and his unyielding determination are all illustrative of a group of men and women who, beset by grievance, embarked on a decades-long mission to change the rules that govern society.

About the Speaker

Peter S. Canellos is the author of The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero, and the editor of the bestselling Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy. He served as executive editor at POLITICO, leading the newsroom during the 2016 presidential campaign, and the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe. He has also been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors award in 2011 for excellence in editorial writing along with the 2022 George Polk Award, Robin Toner Award, and News Leaders Association Batten Medal for his writing about the Supreme Court.

In 1854, the American entrepreneur Cyrus Field set out to lay a 2,000-mile telegraph cable across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing like it had ever been attempted. Field knew nothing about telegraphy, electricity, ships, or oceans, and science itself still lacked a universal theory of electricity. But he believed that wiring the world for near-instantaneous communication would bring about peace on Earth. In 1866, after enduring over a decade of global scorn, catastrophic failures, staggering losses, and brushes with death, he would finally lay his great cable, ushering in the global information age. From acclaimed author James M. Tabor, Lightning Beneath the Sea is an unforgettable tale of radical vision, unwavering determination, and triumph against overwhelming odds that transformed life on Earth forever. In a propulsive narrative, Tabor tells how Field swiftly assembled an all-star scientific dream team that included telegraph legend Samuel F. B. Morse; a young Lord Kelvin, called the da Vinci of his day; Michael Faraday, the father of electrical engineering; and legendary philanthropist Peter Cooper. Together they battled epic storms, freak accidents, corporate sabotage, the enmity of Abraham Lincoln, and the hubris of the project’s original chief electrician—an eccentric who insisted on being called Wildman—while racing two rival efforts to establish telegraphic communications between continents. When it was finally done, Field’s cable lay up to 2.5 miles deep under the ocean, and the London Daily News announced: “Time and space seem literally annihilated.” The cable’s legacy can be traced today in the hundreds of descendants that still carry 98 percent of the world’s information through a “world undersea web.”

About the Speaker

James M. Tabor is the author of six books, including the award-winning Forever on the Mountain and best-selling Blind Descent. A creator of the History Channel’s Journey to the Center of the World, he has written for Time, Smithsonian, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and others. He lives in Waitsfield, Vermont

She is more violent than Lady Macbeth, more complex than Ophelia, more strategic than King Lear’s daughters. She is the only Shakespearean character, male or female, whose entire life—from youth to old age—appears on stage. She is a wealth of insight into Shakespeare’s understanding of, and influence on, ideas of gender and sexuality, and she speaks by far the most lines of any of his female characters. She has allowed the likes of Peggy Ashcroft, Helen Mirren, and Sophie Okonedo full range for their stunning talents. Yet today, most audiences have still never heard of Margaret of Anjou. But who was Margaret? In the fifteenth century, she was a fourteen-year-old French princess married to an English king, soon thrust into command amid a bloody civil war. A hundred and fifty years later, she was resurrected on the Elizabethan stage in four of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III. And in every era since the Bard’s, actors, directors, and producers have recast their own Margaret, slicing, dicing, and rearranging the original Shakespeare to highlight or diminish Margaret’s role depending on the sensibilities of the time. It is this evolution of Margaret’s portrayal that Charles O’Malley and Scott W. Stern track in Shakespeare’s Margaret, from Elizabethan boy-actors in wigs enacting misogynist fears of witchy women to feminist celebrations of Margaret’s uninhibited grasp of power and clever commentaries on global politics and world leaders such as Margaret Thatcher. Her story, as it has changed over the centuries across the page and on the stage, brings to life the evolution of theatre and shows how Shakespeare’s plays have always been living collaborations among actors, directors, writers, critics, and history itself, still unfolding.

About the Speaker

Charles O’Malley holds a doctorate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from the Yale School of Drama and has worked at theatres across the United States. He is the editor of Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance.

Scott W. Stern is a scholar and critic. He is the author of The Trials of Nina McCall, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas, which the Times called “powerful new history.”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was only twenty-seven-years old when she began work on one of the most important novels in the English language. Two years later in 1847, she completed Wuthering Heights. It took the world almost a century to catch up to Brontë’s masterpiece, and it has taken even longer to know Brontë—an elusive figure, with a ghostly legacy provoked by her early death and the loss (and likely destruction) of almost all her personal papers. Drawing on formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts, This Dark Night constructs a portrait of Brontë, her famous writing sisters Charlotte and Anne, and the effect of their sisters’ and mother’s tragic deaths. In the first full-length biography in over twenty years, renowned scholar Deborah Lutz sketches the days of a woman crafting otherworldly fiction while running her father’s parsonage: writing interweaving with household work, daydreaming, and exploring the rough-hewn outdoors. As she traces the influence of Brontë’s life and work, Lutz follows how Brontë’s fantastical early poems of the night sky, women rulers, and outsiders and rebels grew into the stormy, transcendent Wuthering Heights. Lutz also illuminates the overlooked ways that the legendary writer addressed debates of her time that still resonate today, including questions of gender and sexuality, race and class, and rapid industrialization set against the natural world. From her menagerie of dogs and birds to the beloved moors that Brontë wandered and later emblazoned in her novel, Lutz depicts the passions of an author at odds with convention. Uniting the domestic and the cosmic, This Dark Night plumbs the life and writing of this idiosyncratic woman, dark soul, and monumental genius.

About the Speaker

Deborah Lutz is the author of six books, most recently This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life. A previous book, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, was shortlisted for the PEN/Weld Award for Biography. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and has twice been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships. She teaches Victorian literature and culture at Pennsylvania State University as the George and Barbara Kelly Professor in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature. Past honors include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Cabinet Magazine, and many other venues, and she is the editor of two Norton Critical Editions—Jane Eyreand Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Natalie Dykstra grew up in the Midwest, first near the shores of Lake Michigan, then in a suburb west of Chicago. She received her undergraduate degree in Classics followed by graduate degrees in American Studies at the University of Wyoming and the University of Kansas. She won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her work on Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life as well as grants from the Schlesinger Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society, where she was elected an honorary fellow in 2011. She received a 2018 Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, published by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. This work also has been supported by the inaugural 2018 Robert and Ina Caro Fellowship sponsored by the Biographers International Organization (BIO). She has served as a board member of BIO since 2020. She is emerita professor of English and senior research professor at Hope College, where she taught writing, literature, and the arts for twenty years. She lives with her husband in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Nationally known, the pastel portraits of newly married John and Abigail Adams at the Massachusetts Historical Society are icons of early Federal history; yet accomplished and prolific as the artist was, Benjamin Blyth is largely unknown today. Other sitters painted or sketched by Blyth include the only known portraits of Dr. Ezekiel Hersey, whose bequest founded Harvard Medical School; Gen. Israel Putnam, hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill; and the family of Elias Hasket Derby, “America’s first millionaire.” Blyth is well represented in John Langdon Sibley’s multi-volume accounts of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Harvard graduates, which include nine Blyth portraits of subjects for whom no other image exists. He was an important, if under-recognized, contributor to the visual iconography of the era. Art historian Bettina A. Norton’s Benjamin Blyth: Salem’s 18th Century Limner in a Time of Radical Upheaval is a long overdue, definitive account of Blyth’s life and work. Included are 153 portraits (pastels, oils, miniatures and prints), more than twice the number previously known. A measure of Blyth’s talent is that a dozen had been attributed earlier to John Singleton Copley. Adding to the appeal of Benjamin Blyth, Norton’s astute assessments treat Blyth’s portraits as character studies rather than simple likenesses of the formidable figures who sat for him during this formative era of American history.

About the Speaker

Bettina A. Norton’s professional life has centered on American graphic arts and social history. Her interest in Benjamin Blyth developed when she was in charge of the print collection at the former Essex Institute, now incorporated into the Peabody Essex Museum. She is the author of Edwin Whitefield, Nineteenth Century North American Scenery (Barre Press, 1977) and numerous articles. A graduate of Wellesley College, she lives in Boston, in the house in which she grew up.

Our love of flowers and desire to be close to them has, across cultures and for millennia, created both landscapes and livelihoods. In this book, Christin Geall covers hot topics such as aesthetics, appropriation, fair trade, floriculture, globalization, indigeneity, modernism, seasonality, and tokenism—to name only a few of the over eighty entries presented here in an accessible A to Z format. In her inimitable style, Geall shares personal stories and ideas from growers and designers, weaving her narratives between art, ecology, and history to get readers truly thinking about their relationships to plants, gardens, and design.

About the Speaker

Christin Geall is an acclaimed writer, designer, and photographer whose work focuses on the intersections of nature, culture, and horticulture. She is the author of Cultivated: The Elements of Floral Style. Following the success of her first book, she now turns her attention to our global relationships with flowers and plants.

Join us as Pulitzer Prize winning author Jayne Anne Phillips and award-winning novelist, Jessica Brilliant Keener read from their new books and discussed writing, memory, and the power of ritual.

Small Town Girls is Jayne Anne Phillips’ ninth book and first nonfiction title–a memoir in essays–in which she reflects on her origins and the mysteries of memory. In her singular first-person voice, she brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her closeness with her mother. She recreates the place she calls home, its foundational truths and the densely woven ties among the women of the town, and offers insights into the fellow writers and touchstones that moved and influenced her. Phillips writes of her relationships with inspiration, spirituality, culture, and the troubled annals of the last American centuries. Small Town Girls was Oprah’s #1 anticipated new book and is a Boston Globe bestseller

Jessica Brilliant Keener’s third novel and fifth book, Evening Begins the Day, interweaves the stories of two families in crisis–one dealing with marital infidelity, the other with an at-risk teenage daughter–with the ancient Jewish spiritual ritual called the Counting of the Omer. Told from multiple points of view, this multigenerational tale addresses intimate struggles with betrayal, anger, and shame and asks the question: can we heal from love’s deepest wounds? The novel follows a trajectory from isolation and despair to community and hope. Praised as “restrained and powerful” by the Jewish Book Council.

About the Speaker

Born and raised in West Virginia, Jayne Anne Phillips, at 26, published Black Tickets, a first book of stories that influenced a generation of writers and won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. Her first novel, Machine Dreams, was a finalist for the NBCC and was chosen one of twelve Best Books of the Year by the New York Times. A second book, Fast Lanes, a tour de force collection of stories told entirely in first person voices, preceded Shelter, in which the child characters, two sets of sisters and the young son of the camp cook, grapple with their parent’s secrets and their own intuitions, is set in a 60’s era Girl Guides camp deep in a forest primeval. MotherKind follows Kate through the first year of her infant son’s life and the last year she shares with her terminally ill mother. Lark and Termite, finalist for the National Book Award, the NBCC Award, and the Prix de Medici Etrangers (France), traces the magical connection between a soldier caught up in the Korean War, the disabled son he will never know, and Lark, a young girl who believes her brother Termite is deeply conscious of more than he appears to understand. Quiet Dell (a Publisher’s Weekly and WSJ Fiction of the Year), is a portrait of Depression-era America that follows the real-life saga of a 1931 serial murderer who used matrimonial agencies to seduce wealthy widows, but takes as its heroines the three children of an Illinois widow and the female reporter who won’t stop looking for them. Night Watch, awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, follows a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the apocalyptic, post-Civil War years in mountainous West Virginia. Small Town Girls, ‘a writer’s memoir’, the author’s first nonfiction book, was published to acclaim in 2026. The recipient of Guggenheim, Howard, NEA, and Rockefeller Fellowships, is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jessica Brilliant Keener‘s novel, Strangers in Budapest, (Algonquin, 2017) was an Indie Next pick, chosen as a “best new novel” by Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, Chicago Magazine, and landed on the Southern Independent Bookstore Assn. bestseller list. Her debut novel, Night Swim, was a national bestseller and called “moving” by the New York Times followed by her collection of award-winning stories, Women In Bed, praised by Publishers Weekly for its “ability to deliver as much exquisite detail as the stories’ brevity will allow.” National Book Circle Critics award winner, Edith Pearlman, lauded the collection by describing Keener as “a master of immediacy.” Keener’s fiction has been recognized in The Pushcart Prize under “Outstanding Writers.” She is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist’s Grant, creative writing scholarships from Wesleyan University, Brown University, and multiple fellowships awarded by the Virginia Center for Creative Arts as well as a fellowship in Women’s Leadership from the Omega Institute in NY. Her feature articles (more than 100) have appeared in The Boston Globe; O, The Oprah Magazine, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Lilith, Design New England, Writer’s Digest, and the award-winning anthology, Alone Together, Love, Grief, and Comfort in the time of Covid-19, winner of the Washington State Book Award. The Jewish Women’s Archive, The Jewish Community Voice, and The Presbyterian Outlook have included Evening Begins the Day on their 2026 Summer Books lists.

In historic, bucolic Concord, Massachusetts, a centuries-old forest has been removed to make way for a new, eco-friendly housing development. The locals are upset by the destruction, but out-of-towners like Hazel Stoddard are flocking to put down roots in their new guilt-free dream homes. Soon a tragedy leaves Hazel unmoored in her new life, and she begins to feel the pull of the absent forest. Hazel is not alone—her neighbors, real estate agent Stella Flint and teenage environmentalist Polly Bauer, each have their own traumas and their own relationship to the land. The three women are drawn together to save the last remaining oak tree, or they risk losing themselves to lingering shadows that only they can see. In The Forest Becomes Her, Julie Carrick Dalton brings hope and reverence to this lush celebration of multigenerational female relationships, the ever-evolving female form, humanity’s connection to our changing world, and the mysteries that still exist in nature.

About the Speaker

Julie Carrick Dalton has published more than a thousand articles in The Boston Globe, BusinessWeek, The Hollywood Reporter, Orion Magazine, Electric Literature, and other publications. A former beekeeper and organic farmer, she is a frequent speaker on the topic of writing fiction in the age of climate crisis and is a member of the teaching faculty at Drexel University’s MFA Program. When she isn’t reading, writing, or teaching, you can probably find her skiing, swimming, kayaking, working in her garden, or trying to keep track of her four children and two dogs.

Alex George is a writer, a bookstore owner, a lawyer, and the founder of the Unbound Book Festival. His novels include A Good American, Setting Free the Kites, and The Paris Hours, and have been translated into more than ten languages. In addition to his novels, his writing has appeared in the Washington Post, LitHub, and numerous other publications. He teaches creative writing at Emerson College in Boston.