BEDFORD HOUSE IS CLOSED FOR HISTORIC RESTORATION.
Our Red Barn Discovery Center is open on Saturdays from 10am-2pm through October.
Lecture with Steven Brill
- January 21, 2025
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Steven Brill, The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World–And What We Can Do
Yes, new media forms have always had the power to turn people against each other with misinformation and disinformation (Brill begins with Cleopatra). But Death of Truth argues that current politics and technologies take that power “from the slingshot age to the nuclear age.” Thankfully, he also offers solutions to the problems that modern media present. Brill is a lawyer, journalist and media entrepreneur, founder of Court TV and The American Lawyer, and most recently NewsGuard Technologies, a news service that uses actual editors and analysts – not an AI or an algorithm – to rate the reliability and credibility of news and information websites. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School and author of hard-hitting books on health care, education, homeland security and more, he also teaches journalism at Yale College, where he and his wife, Cynthia, founded the Yale Journalism Initiative.
This lecture will be held at Bedford Playhouse (633 Old Post Rd, Bedford, NY) due to ongoing construction at John Jay Homestead.
6:30 – Reception with light refreshments
7:00 – Lecture begins
8:00 – Book signing
Interested in becoming a member of the Scholars Committee? Click here.
Please check back soon for ticket sale information.
- January 21, 2025
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Lecture with Sarah Gronningsater
- March 11, 2025
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Sarah Gronningsater, The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom
Under New York’s 1799 Gradual Abolition scheme, a child born to an enslaved mother (as of a certain date) was deemed “free,” but had to continue as the servant of the mother’s owner until the age of 25 (for a girl) or 28 (for a boy). Gronningsater develops a deeply researched picture of the lives, politics, and legal efforts of this generation of Black children of ambiguous status, and how they combined with others to help shape important changes to the U.S. Constitution as well as groundbreaking state and Federal civil rights legislation. Gronningsater is a historian of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States at the University of Pennsylvania; she has won multiple academic prizes and citations, and awards for excellence in teaching, notably Richard S. Dunn Award for Distinguished Teaching, the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Penn Friars Senior Society Faculty Award.
This lecture will be held at Bedford Playhouse (633 Old Post Rd, Bedford, NY) due to ongoing construction at John Jay Homestead.
6:30 – Reception with light refreshments
7:00 – Lecture begins
8:00 – Book signing
Interested in becoming a member of the Scholars Committee? Click here.
Please check back soon for ticket sale information.
- March 11, 2025
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Lecture with Brenda Wineapple
- April 9, 2025
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
In 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, John Scopes was charged with breaking the new law that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. His trial became an international sensation, with brilliant and famous personalities – one, a former presidential candidate – representing the opposing sides during the so-called Roaring Twenties. Keeping the Faith brings to life this trial, its combatants, and the way it exposed profound divisions in America that still resonate today, over the meaning of freedom, religion, education, and civil liberties in a democracy. A former fellow at the Dorothy B. and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment, Wineapple has received such honors as the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her essays and reviews regularly appear in The New York Review of Books among other publications.
This lecture will be held at Bedford Playhouse (633 Old Post Rd, Bedford, NY) due to ongoing construction at John Jay Homestead.
6:30 – Reception with light refreshments
7:00 – Lecture begins
8:00 – Book signing
Interested in becoming a member of the Scholars Committee? Click here.
Please check back soon for ticket sale information.
- April 9, 2025
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
This month we are taking a brief look at the interesting life of John Jay’s brother, James Jay. Born into a large family, James was 13 years older than John, and left home to begin his medical studies in Edinburgh around the time of John’s birth in 1745. It is doubtful the boys ever had…
Read MoreJuly – Olive Branch Petition In the early years during the conception of American independence, when the flames of revolution were ablaze and the fate of the new nation hung in the balance, a group of patriots sought to pursue reconciliation with their British counterparts. One of the key figures behind this bold endeavor was…
Read MoreThis month we are digging into the story of Colonel William Jay and his trusted horse ‘Old Fred.’ William and Fred survived numerous harrowing battles together during the American Civil War. On the property at John Jay Homestead is a gravestone that William had made for Fred that provides us with a written record of…
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