Mill Talk: Back to Nature: The Boston Associates and the Landscape of 19th-century Massachusetts with Kate Viens, PhD
Streaming Live online via YouTube LINK HERE
In city after city today, we struggle to catch a glimpse of the natural landscape. Roads float above the rise and fall of the land, and rivers are hidden by the commercial buildings, factories, and housing that line their banks. In the words of historian Robert F. Dalzell, this is the world the Boston Associates made. Yet scholars overlook the extent to which these capitalists were, themselves, products of the pre-industrial agrarian landscape. Whether they rode horseback through bucolic villages or felt the gale winds of a sailing voyage, they formed ideas of nature that persisted even as they found ways to exploit the region's resources in the service of industry.
Join this Mill Talk to learn how, even as the Boston Associates were building mills, canals, and railroads, nature remained for them a source of respite and wonder.
Kate Viens is the Director of Education at the Charles River Museum.
Kate received her PhD from Boston University in American and New England Studies in 2020.
The Mill Talks at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation are free and open to the public and are made possible by the generous support of the Lowell Institute.
