Hybrid Author Talk - Join us online or in-person!

Venture back to the 19th Century to meet statesman George Boutwell, who fought for racial and economic equality alongside Presidents Lincoln and Grant. Hear from his biographer, also a distant relation, author Jeffrey Boutwell, and Harvard professor Robert Putnam about this remarkable man, his family, and this turbulent, formative period in American history.

During his seven-decade career in public life (1840-1905), George Sewall Boutwell sought to “redeem America’s promise” of racial equality, economic equity, and the principled use of American power abroad. The son of a Massachusetts farming family of modest means, Boutwell was at the center of efforts to abolish slavery, establish the Republican Party, assist President Lincoln in funding the Union war effort, facilitate Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, impeach President Andrew Johnson, and frame and enact the Fourteenth and Fifteenth civil rights amendments. He helped lay the foundations of the modern American economy with President Grant, investigated white terrorism in Mississippi in the 1870s, and opposed American imperialism following the Spanish-American War alongside Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and Booker T. Washington. Don’t miss Jeffrey Boutwell’s discussion of the biography Boutwell, introducing an important public figure who has long been hiding in plain sight; also his discussion with the public policy expert and award-winning author Robert D. Putnam.

Jeffrey Boutwell is a writer, historian, and science policy specialist whose forty-year career spanned journalism, government, and international scientific research.  Now living in Maryland, he grew up in the Boston area, has a Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T., and worked for many years at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge.  Jeffrey and George share a common ancestor, the indentured servant James Boutwell, who emigrated in 1632 from England to Salem, Massachusetts.

Robert D. Putnam is the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and a former Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Nationally honored as a leading humanist and a renowned scientist, he has consulted for the last four US Presidents and written fourteen books, including the bestselling Our Kids and Bowling Alone, and most recently, Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. In 2012, President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal.