Lecture Series

One of the premiere lecture series in Hampton Roads, The Mariners’ Museum Lecture Series offers Museum members and Hampton Roads residents dynamic and memorable stories of mankind’s relationship with the sea. The Lecture Series has grown and now presents approximately 15 lectures each year designed to enlighten and engage curious minds with thought-provoking topics and meaningful dialogue.

GENERAL INFORMATION

Unless noted, Lecture Series events are held in the Main Lobby of the Mariners’ Museum at 100 Museum Drive, Newport News, VA. Lectures begin at 7:00 P.M. and doors open at 6:15 P.M.

Each lecture features a presentation by the author, a Q&A with the audience, book signing, and a light reception.
 

All lectures below are free and open to the public. Mariners’ Museum Members can make a seating reservation by calling 757-591-7715 or using the online reservation links below. Reservations are not required, but encouraged. General Admission seating is available for non-Members.

Author’s books are sold in the Museum Shop and will be available the evening of the lecture. For more information, please call the Museum Shop at 757-591-7792.

View the Civil War lecture Series.

The Mariners' Museum Lecture Series is made possible, in part, by support from the Peninsula Community Foundation of Virginia.

Thursday, January 24 •  7:00 pm

When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail
Eric Jay Dolin

Made in China

It’s a phrase that Americans have become accustomed to seeing on many of the things they buy. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that in October 2012, the U.S. total trade deficit with China hit a record $29.5 billion. The number is an indicator of what has become the most important bilateral relationship in the world.

On Thursday, January 27, bestselling author Eric Jay Dolin will export us back to the beginnings of this long and complicated trade relationship. Taken from his new book, When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail, Dolin traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. Peopled with fascinating characters – from the "Financier of the Revolution" Robert Morris, to murderous pirates, to the Chinese emperor Qianlong, who considered foreigners inferior beings – this early trade in tea, silk and opium would lead to some of America’s legendary fortunes. Brilliantly illuminating one of the least understood areas of American history, this fascinating story helps us to understand today’s China and the current economic, political, and cultural relationship between the two countries.

Dolin is the award-winning author of the bestselling Leviathan: The History of Whaling In America, and Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. Dolin is a graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in environmental policy.

"Eric Jay Dolin’s engagingly paced narrative…in fascinating ways tells us much about who we are today."
--- Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod and Salt

"a smart, riveting history of….the opium trade, ecology, seafaring, and the perfume market…. An all-around outstanding work of maritime history."
--- Douglas Brinkley, author of Cronkite and The Wilderness Warrior

 Members, CLICK HERE to reserve your seats online for this lecture or call (757) 591-7715

Thursday, February 21 • 7:00 pm

Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life 
Daniel Klein

It is not the young man who should be considered fortunate but the old man who has lived well, because the young man in his prime wanders much by chance, vacillating in his beliefs, while the old man has docked in the harbor, having safeguarded his true happiness.
--- Epicurus

From the ancient Greeks to Columbus-era European explorers, tales of a Fountain of Youth have been recounted across the world for thousands of years. Today, the search for everlasting youth continues in department store’s health and beauty aisles and our local pharmacy.

On Thursday, February 21, New York Times best-selling author Daniel Klein will argue our youth-obsessed culture is missing out. Taken from his new book, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life, Klein will recount his journey to the Greek island of Hydra to discover the secrets of aging happily.

In Greece, Klein writes, saying that a man “wears his age on his face” is a compliment. Drawing on the lives of his Greek friends in the small port city, as well as philosophers ranging from Epicurus to Sartre, Klein learns to appreciate old age as a distinct and extraordinarily valuable stage of life. His conclusion: old age is a privilege to be savored, rather than a disease to be cured or a condition to be denied.

Klein studied philosophy at Harvard but spent much of his career in Los Angeles where he wrote jokes for comedians such as Lily Tomlin and Flip Wilson, designed stunts for Candid Camera, and created game shows for Merv Griffin.  The author or coauthor of thirty other books, including the bestseller, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar…, Klein lives in Western Massachusetts.

“…a delightful and spirited conversation, offering up the ingredients inherent to the art of living well in old age.”
--- Publisher’s Weekly

“a lovely little book with both heart and punch…an ‘evolving philosophy of a good and authentic old age.’”
--- Booklist

 Members, CLICK HERE to reserve your seats online for this lecture or call (757) 591-7715

Wednesday, March 27 • 7:00 pm

Lifesaving Lessons: Notes from an Accidental Mother
Linda Greenlaw

Linda Greenlaw isn’t a woman who shies away from a challenge.  The nationally renowned swordfish boat captain made famous in the film The Perfect Storm, Greenlaw is also a bestselling author and television celebrity.  Despite nearly three decades of risking life and limb in pursuit of most anything with fins, she was unprepared for the greatest adventure of her life: becoming the legal guardian of a young girl named Mariah. 

Living on an island off the coast of Maine, Greenlaw and the other residents were rocked by the revelation of Mariah’s abuse at the hands of her uncle.  The island residents came together to rescue the teenager and nominated Greenlaw – not the picture of maternal warmth – to be her guardian. On Wednesday, March 27, join us as Greenlaw speaks on her experience and her new book, Lifesaving Lessons: Notes from an Accidental Mother. A remarkably candid and tenderly funny memoir, Lifesaving Lessons follows the unexpected mother-daughter pair as they navigate their new life together. 

Linda Greenlaw, America’s only female swordfish boat captain, was featured in the book and film The Perfect Storm.  Through three New York Times bestsellers and her role in the Discovery Channel's hit series Swords, Linda Greenlaw has undoubtedly become America's best-known fisherman.

 Members, CLICK HERE to reserve your seats online for this lecture or call (757) 591-7715

Wednesday, April 10 • 7:00 pm

The Death of the USS Thresher: The Story Behind History’s Deadliest Submarine Disaster
Norman Polmar 

When she first went to sea in April of 1961, the U.S. nuclear submarine USS Thresher was the most advanced submarine to date. On the morning of April 10, 1963, the Thresher was on a test dive off the New England coast when she sent a message to a surface support ship one thousand feet above:

. . . minor difficulty, have positive
up-angle, attempting to blow…
Then came the sounds of air under pressure
and a garbled message:
. . . exceeding test depth . . .

Last came the eerie sounds that experienced navy men knew from World War II: the sounds of a submarine breaking up and compartments collapsing.

On April 10, The Mariners’ Museum commemorates the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the USS Thresher with renowned naval and intelligence consultant and author, Norman Polmar. Taken from his book, The Death of the USS Thresher: The Story Behind History’s Deadliest Submarine Disaster, Polmar will recount the dramatic circumstances surrounding her implosion, which killed all 129 men on board, and the lessons the Navy learned. It was the first loss of a nuclear submarine in history and one which would later cause the Navy to send Dr. Robert Ballard, under the guise of the search for the RMS Titanic, on a top-secret mission to map and collect data on the nuclear fuel.

Norman Polmar has been a consultant to several senior officials in the Navy and Department of Defense, the Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and several U.S. Senators. Polmar has written or coauthored more than 50 books and numerous articles on naval, intelligence, and aviation subjects and is a columnist for Proceedings and Naval History magazines.

This lecture is made possible by the generous support of Tom and Nancy Clark.

 Members, CLICK HERE to reserve your seats online for this lecture or call (757) 591-7715

Thursday, May 16, 2013 • 7:00 pm

The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
Denver Brunsman

A fundamental component of Britain’s early success, naval impressment not only kept the Royal Navy afloat—it helped to make an empire. In total numbers, impressed seamen were second only to enslaved Africans as the largest group of forced laborers in the eighteenth century.

In The Evil Necessity, Denver Brunsman describes in vivid detail the experience of impressment for Atlantic seafarers and their families. Brunsman reveals how forced service robbed approximately 250,000 mariners of their livelihoods, and, not infrequently, their lives, while also devastating Atlantic seaport communities and the loved ones who were left behind. Press gangs, consisting of a navy officer backed by sailors and occasionally local toughs, often used violence or the threat of violence to supply the skilled manpower necessary to establish and maintain British naval supremacy. Moreover, impressments helped to unite Britain and its Atlantic coastal territories in a common system of maritime defense unmatched by any other European empire.  Drawing on ships’ logs, merchants’ papers, personal letters and diaries, as well as engravings, political texts, and sea ballads, Brunsman shows how ultimately the controversy over impressment contributed to the American Revolution and served as a leading cause of the War of 1812.

Denver Brunsman, Assistant Professor of History at George Washington University, is an editor of both Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development and Revolutionary Detroit: Portraits in Political and Cultural Change, 1760–1805. 

Members, CLICK HERE to reserve your seats online for this lecture or call (757) 591-7715

You may make reservations until 4pm the day of the lecture.
General admission seating is available to non-members

Find additional resources on these subjects and more at The Mariners’ Museum Library at Christopher Newport University. Information on the Museum Library – the largest maritime library in the Western Hemisphere – can be found at www.marinersmuseum.org/library