Lunch on a Beam, also known as Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, shows ironworkers eating lunch on a steel beam during the construction of Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building in 1932. It’s a photo so famous you can likely picture it in your mind: seated in a row, eleven men chat and break bread 850 feet above the ground, the dense cityscape behind them. While the scene may look spontaneous, the photo was taken during a publicity shoot to promote Rockefeller Center’s new skyscraper. And despite the image’s renown, for years, little information was available about its subjects or its photographer. In Lunch on a Beam, Rockefeller Center archivist Christine Roussel interweaves the art, architectural, and social history behind the photograph with her personal experience as a confidante to the financiers who developed Rockefeller Center. She tells the stories of the fearless photographers, brazen publicity men, the ironworkers, and their immigrant and Indigenous communities. This portrait of eleven construction workers, she points out, is also a celebration of the nation’s richest man. She examines how, in the depths of the Great Depression, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., took it upon himself to build a monument to American industry and sell it to the public. Featuring striking images from the Rockefeller Center Archives, Lunch on a Beam calls attention to the fascinating paradoxes contained in a single photo and celebrates the men who built an architectural marvel at great personal risk. This is a story of art and commerce, and the role of a photograph in the myth making of New York City.

About the Speaker

Christine Roussel is the Archivist of the Rockefeller Center Archive. For many years, she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as director of the reproductions studio and special assistant to the director. Upon leaving the museum, she advised Vice President Nelson Rockefeller on his art collection and founded the monument restoration company C. Roussel Inc. Her books include The Art of Rockefeller Center and A Guide to The Art of Rockefeller Center. She lives in New York City.

William Morgan is an architectural historian, photographer, and author of numerous books on American architecture and landscape. He holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware and taught for many years as Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Louisville, with additional appointments at Princeton University and Brown University. His writing has appeared widely in national and international publications, and his architectural criticism has earned two Pulitzer Prize nominations.

In the stormy, scandalous summer of 1816, daring eighteen-year-old Claire Clairmont changed the course of literature forever. But then—unlike her stepsister Mary Shelley—she was forgotten, until now. During the dangerous storms of The Year Without Summer, a group of famous young writers gathered at a mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Brilliant Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her fiery fiancé Percy Shelley, the famously promiscuous Lord Byron, and John Polidori, his sexually tormented personal physician. At the group’s center was Claire Clairmont, Mary’s impressionable, clever, and dangerously loyal stepsister. Those months of desire, betrayal, and creative passion gave the world the works of Frankenstein, the modern vampire, and the mythic image of these Romantic literary giants. In this intense and propulsive story of love, lust, art and betrayal Claire tells her story, trying to solve the mystery of why she was all but erased from history. Claire—herself a writer—is desperate to free herself from the uncomfortable role she plays in her sister’s marriage in London. Fueled by Jane Austin’s romantic novels, and believing love offers freedom, Claire begins an affair with celebrity Lord Byron and convinces Mary and Shelley to follow him to Switzerland. With the threat of paparazzi lurking nearby, Claire’s intimate connection to each member of the celebrity group grows more complex. Her journey of self-discovery leads her to document everyone’s secrets in her journal, and when climate disaster causes food shortages, Claire learns to forage, determined to prove her worth in a world built by and created for men. The real Claire Clairmont poured her love, life, and razor-sharp wit into her pages, yet her journal from 1816 is curiously missing and each member of the group had a reason to take it. With searing relevance to our here and now—of celebrity worship, climate disaster, of complicated femininity, Love & Other Monsters is the untold origin story of Frankenstein, a feminist reckoning of sisters, survival, and the creation of monsters—both those on the page and those who walk among us.

About the Speaker

Emily Franklin is the bestselling author of twenty-five books including The Lioness of Boston, based on the life of trailblazer Isabella Stewart Gardner, now in its eleventh printing and recently featured as a clue on Jeopardy! Her fiction, poetry, essays, and photos have been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Kenyon Review, Guernica, and The Journal of the American Medical Association, among many other places, as well as featured and read aloud on National Public Radio, longlisted for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her next novel Love & Other Monsters, historical fiction based on the forgotten—but important life of Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s stepsister who was integral in the creation of Frankenstein, will be published in April 2026. She lives outside of Boston with her spouse and four children.

Ilyon Woo is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of MASTER SLAVE HUSBAND WIFE: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, an instant New York Times best-seller, one of the New York Times “Ten Best Books of the Year,” a People Magazine “Top 10 Book of the Year,” and a finalist for a Kirkus Prize. She is also the author of THE GREAT DIVORCE: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times. She holds a BA in the Humanities from Yale College and a PhD in English from Columbia University.

The Westerners tells two richly detailed and interwoven stories. The first reveals the captivating lives of women and men moving through the American West—Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Canadian and Asian immigrants—in the 19th century. The second tracks the attempts of many Americans to erase these westerners from history, through a frontier myth that lionized individualism and conquest and celebrated white settlers traveling west in search of prosperity. Nelson’s vivid, eye-opening account centers on seven extraordinary individuals whose lives capture the true history of the frontier: Sacajawea, not just Lewis and Clark’s guide but an explorer who forged her own path; Jim Beckwourth, a biracial fur trader whose sharp cultural insight made him indispensable; María Gertrudis Barceló, a Hispana gambling saloon owner who broke every stereotype to become the wealthiest woman in Santa Fe; Ovando Hollister, a gold miner, soldier, and newspaper man who championed Western expansion; Little Wolf, a Northern Cheyenne chief whose courageous leadership secured his people’s future; Canadian immigrant Ella Watson, who strove to become a ranch woman in a male-dominated world; and the defiant Polly Bemis, a Chinese immigrant who carved out a life in Idaho despite federal expulsion efforts. Nelson roots this bold new history of the American West in the deep research and gripping storytelling that have garnered her critical acclaim. Highlighting the perseverance and ingenuity of the communities that have otherwise been forgotten or erased from history, The Westerners challenges us to reimagine who we are and where we came from.

About the Speaker

Born and raised in Colorado, Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer based in Boston, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of five books, including The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist in History) and Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Nonfiction). Her new book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier, was published by Scribner in March 2026. Dr. Nelson writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, and Time. She is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians and was the 2024-2025 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth-Century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

At the end of 2019, Tom French retired from a four-decade career in business, determined to return to interests that had defined his youth and see what meaning they still held. One of these interests was mountaineering. Another was adventure travel, with a particular focus on Nepal. A third was cross-country ski racing. Having taken “gap years” between school and university, and again before he started work, he decided to take a gap year before settling into the expectations of retirement. One year turned into three as he rebuilt his athletic strength, competed in cross-country ski marathons, and climbed some of the world’s highest mountains, including two expeditions to Mount Everest. On the first Everest climb, a cyclone forced him to turn around high on the mountain and descend the treacherous Lhotse Face in a blizzard. On the second, he approached the mountain through the remote Makalu Barun region, the first climber ever to do so, and climbed to the summit on a moonlit night. But this is a book about much more than Everest. It is about beauty and joy found in wild places, about cross-country ski racing and mountaineering more broadly, and—most of all—about a journey to find meaning in life and reconnect with the passions of youth. Tom described the narrative arc of his book through a presentation featuring stunning images from mountaineering and ski expeditions worldwide, including the Himalayas, Andes, and North America

About the Speaker

Tom French is a lifelong mountaineer, cross-country skier, and lover of the outdoors. A senior partner emeritus of McKinsey & Company, he is currently board chair of the Trustees of Reservations, a director of Corning Incorporated, and serves on several other nonprofit boards. He lives in Massachusetts, with his wife, Jill.

Adventures In The Louvre has captivated readers with its intimate, revelatory journey into the world’s most famous museum. For this special event, Elaine Sciolino presented the newly updated edition of her book, released in the wake of the dramatic Louvre heist that shocked France and made headlines around the world. With fresh perspectives from her recent reporting for The New York Times and other publications, she offered fresh insight into what the theft reveals about the museum’s history, vulnerabilities, and enduring power. With the curiosity of a journalist, the eye of a storyteller, and the warmth of a seasoned Parisian flâneuse, Sciolino introduced attendees to the artworks she loves most both celebrated and overlooked—and to the people who keep the Louvre alive: curators, restorers, guards, firefighters, artisans, and archivists. opens doors normally closed to the public, guiding readers through the museum’s galleries, rooftops, archives, ateliers, and hidden corners. Part investigative reporting, part travelogue, part cultural history, this presentation illuminated the Louvre as a living, breathing organism magnificent, labyrinthine, and endlessly human. This expanded edition of the book includes a new chapter with updates about the museum, including an ambitious billion-dollar proposal to renovate the Louvre with a new underground entrance and special galleries for the Mona Lisa as well as the brazen 2025 theft of crown jewels from the Apollo Gallery.

About the Speaker

Elaine Sciolino is a contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times. She is a best-selling author of six books, including, most recently, Adventures in the Louvre, named an Economist and a Library Journal best book of the year, a Smithsonian Magazine best travel book, and a New York Observer best art book. Her earlier books include The Seine, The Only Street in Paris, La Seduction, and Persian Mirrors, based on her years covering Iran since the 1979 revolution. Sciolino has been decorated chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the highest honor of the French state, for her “special contribution” to the friendship between France and the United States. She serves on the Executive Committee of Reporters Without Borders and on advisory councils for French and for Iranian studies at Princeton University. Born in Buffalo, New York, she holds a master’s degree in French history from New York University and several honorary doctorates. She has lived in Paris since 2002.

The biography of the heroic life of Gisela Warburg Wyzanski, a courageous young German Jewish woman who leveraged her wealth and family connections to save countless children from annihilation at the hands of the Nazis. This compelling story was told through a treasure trove of letters and documents carefully preserved by Gisela and recently discovered by her daughter, Anita Wyzanski Robboy, the book’s author. It outlined Gisela’s tireless efforts to rescue European children and place them in appropriate settings in their parentless journey to new lives in the land now known as Israel. Attendees traveled with Gisela through Germany, Palestine, England, and the United States, and met her mentors — some of the most powerful and influential Jewish leaders of this historically significant pre-WWII to post-WWII era. They learned about both the horrors of the Holocaust and the tremendous power of one determined and courageous person to make a difference in the world.

About the Speaker

Anita Wyzanski Robboy wears many hats. She is a partner in the Boston law firm, Prince Lobel & Tye, LLC, a Visiting Scholar/Research Associate at Brandeis University, and the author of Aftermarriage: the Myth of Divorce, and Lewis Hayden: From Fugitive Slave to Free Mason. Her articles have appeared in numerous legal publications. Formerly a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University, Robboy is a graduate of Boston University, Tufts University, and Swarthmore College. She is the daughter of Gisela Warburg Wyzanski, the subject of A Force For Good, and Judge Charles E. Wyzanski.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment natural historians and classifiers redefined what it meant to be human. By 1800, they had recast the very idea of humankind, sorting the world’s peoples into rigid biological categories for the first time in history. Prize-winning biographer Andrew S. Curran retraces this often-misunderstood story by plunging into the lives and ideas of the most influential individuals behind this reconceptualization, among them Louis XIV, Voltaire, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson. Moving from the gilded halls of Versailles to the slave plantations of the Caribbean, from the court of the Mughal Empire to the drawing rooms of Monticello, Biography of a Dangerous Idea not only reveals the Enlightenment’s entanglement with empire and oppression—it offers a bold reassessment of the era’s most celebrated luminaries.

About the Speaker

Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. A scholar and biographer, his writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, TIME, the Paris Review, and the Wall Street Journal. He is also the author or editor of five books. His most recent, edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is Who’s Black and Why? His previous book was the prize-winning biography Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019).

Tina Montenegro is an Assistant Professor of French Literature at Boston College, specializing in Medieval Studies. Widely published in both medieval literature and art, her research explores the reception of classical rhetoric, intellectual history, and literary and art theory. She is currently finalizing her book manuscript, The Place of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, which examines civic poetry of the late Middle Ages through the reception in France of Brunetto Latini’s thirteenth-century Tresor. Among other courses, she teaches “Fight Like the French”, in which she and her students explore the historical French passion for interrogation and debate.

After the Arts and Crafts movement coalesced in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, it made its way quickly to the United States. Architects and artisans embraced its values, advocating for handicraft in building design while promoting a respect for nature, simplicity, native materials, and regional culture. Taking the audience on a journey from coast to coast, Maureen Meister presented buildings that reflect Arts and Crafts ideals in distinctive ways and connected them to the movement’s major themes. Beautifully illustrated with 150 images, Arts and Crafts Architecture across America features buildings from Boston to San Diego, highlighting iconic examples by Ralph Adams Cram, Irving J. Gill, Greene and Greene, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The book also brings to the fore many lesser-known figures, including women architects such as Marion Mahony and Cora Cadwallader Tuttle and Black architects such as William A. Hazel and Paul R. Williams. In approachable prose, author Maureen Meister distills key elements of Arts and Crafts architecture, and her broad national perspective reveals new insights, including the close relationships among the movement’s leaders. Sharing an Arts and Crafts philosophy, they worked in multiple building styles to suit a vast yet united country.

About the Speaker

Maureen Meister has published extensively on the relationship between the Arts and Crafts movement and American architecture. She holds a doctorate from Brown University and has spent her career teaching art and architectural history at Boston area universities, including Lesley, Northeastern, and Tufts. She is a member of the Boston Athenaeum and was a regular visitor to 10½ Beacon Street when she was writing this new book.

This talk was presented in partnership with the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art.

She hid on a Red Cross boat to reach Omaha Beach on D-Day. She walked the abandoned streets of Hong Kong to take food to her daughter’s father, a prisoner of war. She fought off the advances of overzealous Yugoslavian diplomats, found overlooked details of world history in a dentist’s kitchen in Sarajevo. She traveled alone to Mexico. She traveled alone to Congo. She traveled alone to the American South. She married Hemingway. She married a Chinese poet-playboy-publisher, then married a British war hero. She fell in love with H. G. Wells. She gave birth and raised a child on her own. She landed on the front page of the newspaper. She wrote for the great magazines of her time—Vogue, The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar. She wrote a play. She wrote a memoir. She wrote a genre-breaking travel narrative. She wrote bestsellers. She wrote and wrote and wrote. She changed the very way we think about writing and the way journalists craft stories—which sources are viable, which details are important—and the way women move and work in the world. She was Martha Gellhorn. She was Emily “Mickey” Hahn. She was Rebecca West. Each woman was starry-eyed for success, for adventure, and helped ensure that other starry and restless women could make unforgettable lives for themselves. They fought for their lives and their work. They were praised and criticized for it all. In language as lively and nimble, in passages as intimate and adventurous, and with conviction as fierce and indefatigable as her subjects’ own, Julia Cooke’s Starry and Restless plays out the stories of three women across three decades and five continents. Martha, Mickey, Rebecca—journalists, authors, mothers, lovers, friends. These women didn’t just bear witness to the great changes of the twentieth century; their curiosity, grit, ambition, and stories changed the world.

About the Speakers

Julia Cooke is the author of the books Come Fly the World, a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist and a Malala’s Book Club pick, and The Other Side of Paradise. Her essays have been published in A Public Space, Salon, The Threepenny Review, Smithsonian, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and her reporting has been published in Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times, Playboy, and more. She holds an MFA from Columbia University.

Nina MacLaughlin is the award-winning author of Wake, Siren (FSG), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Massachusetts Book Award; the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the New England Book Award; as well as Summer Solstice and the bestselling Winter Solstice (Black Sparrow), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. She writes a newsletter on New England literary news, and her work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, AGNI, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times Book Review, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Meatpaper, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.