Longfellow House Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site

What does this house reveal about our shared past? Here, history was made, and history was written. Highlighting the house and its remarkable collections (original to the Longfellow period), this conversational tour will explore links between:

• Colonial-era slavery and freedom;
• Washington’s headquarters at the start of the American Revolution;
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetic legacy;
• The Longfellow family’s legacy of historic preservation and cultural change.

Short on time? Tour the first-floor collections on this informal exploration of American history, culture, and identity.

What does this house reveal about our shared past? Here, history was made, and history was written. Highlighting the house and its remarkable collections (original to the Longfellow period), this conversational tour will explore links between:

• Colonial-era slavery and freedom;
• Washington’s headquarters at the start of the American Revolution;
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetic legacy;
• The Longfellow family’s legacy of historic preservation and cultural change.

Short on time? Tour the first-floor collections on this informal exploration of American history, culture, and identity.

Explore General George Washington’s first headquarters of the American Revolution, which marks its 250th anniversary this summer. Headquarters was a testing ground for many of the ideals, institutions, and questions that still define our nation. This conversational tour explores Cambridge Headquarters as a hub of revolutionary activity, where generals, enslaved people, paid laborers, poets, Indigenous diplomats, politicians, and soldiers shaped history - and how later generations would shape its memory.

Explore the people, ideas, and questions that shaped General George Washington’s first revolutionary headquarters 250 years ago this July. Choose your path through this free, all-ages event featuring historic house and outdoor walking tours with J.L. Bell; family activities; talks by historians; living historians portraying George Washington (John Koopman), William Lee (Quinton Castle), and Martha Washington (Sandy Spector); Cambridge Open Archives, a Story Walk, and more. 

The house at 105 Brattle Street, now Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, served as Washington’s first military headquarters of the American Revolution from July 1775-March 1776. Headquarters was a testing ground for many of the ideals, institutions, and questions that still define our country. This event will reveal Cambridge Headquarters as a complex hub of revolutionary activity, where generals, enslaved people, paid laborers, poets, Indigenous diplomats, politicians, self-emancipated families, and soldiers shaped history.

All talks take place indoors (Carriage House)

10:15 am "Get Ready with Martha," Sandy Spector (living historian, Martha Washington)

Learn all about the clothing of 1775 as Mrs. Washington finishes dressing for her day. There will be some stories and some gossip, too!

An almost-anonymous journal in the Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site collection provides a look at daily life in the Continental Army in Cambridge.  Corporal Moses Sleeper spent most of the Siege of Boston encamped and building barracks around Prospect Hill.  His perspective adds to our understanding of the experience of the soldiers under General Washington’s command.

12:30 pm Washington in the Native Northeast, Dr. Ben Pokross

This talk describes George Washington's interactions with Indigenous people while he lived in the Vassall House. Beginning with Washington's experiences as a surveyor in the Ohio River Valley, the presentation will focus on his diplomatic encounters with Abenaki, Haudenosaunee, Passamaquody, and Maliseet peoples, among others, during the Siege of Boston. Although these meetings did not play a crucial role in the conflict, remembering Washington's Indigenous diplomacy reminds us that the early days of the Revolution occurred within the longstanding networks of the Native Northeast. 

Ben Pokross is the former Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site, where he researched the site's Indigenous history. In the fall, he will be a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. 

1:15 pm On Managing a Headquarters that is also a Household, Sandy Spector (living historian, Martha Washington)

2:00 pm Phillis and George: Thoughts on letter-writing, power, and self-representation, Dr. Nicole Aljoe

Nicole N. Aljoe is Professor of English and Africana Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is co-Director of The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and Mapping Black London digital project, and Director of the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac. Her research and teaching focuses on 18th and early 19th Century Black Atlantic and Caribbean literatures with specializations on the slave narrative, early novels about race, and digital humanities. Aljoe is the author of multiple books, most recently The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Eighteenth-Century Literature (2024), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Prince (2025), and The Cambridge Companion to Ignatius Sancho (forthcoming). Her essays have appeared in African American Review, American Literary History, Anthurium, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, The Journal of Early American Literature, and Women’s Studies.

2:45 pm Cambridge's Black Community, 1775, Dr. Caitlin DeAngelis Hopkins

The American Revolution was a time of both possibility and peril for Black residents of Cambridge. Enslaved people used the conflict as an opportunity to pursue their liberty, while simultaneously navigating the threat of separation from their families, deadly epidemics, and violence. In this talk, we will discuss the ways that Black Cantabrigians used the Revolution to advance freedom-seeking strategies that predated the fighting. Some used the upheaval to move far away. Others took jobs at Washington's Headquarters. A few made complex legal arguments to claim pieces of their enslavers' estates. In every case, Black residents used their knowledge and networks to protect themselves and their families.

10:30 am Children of the Revolution: Boys & Girls in Cambridge during the Siege of Boston, J.L. Bell 

Meet at the mansion’s driveway for a walk around the Tory Row neighborhood and Harvard Square viewing sites and hearing stories of young people caught up in the opening of the Revolutionary War: Loyalists forced from their homes, soldiers in their teens or younger, war refugees, and enslaved children seizing their own liberty.

1:30 pm Cambridge as a Seat of Civil War, J.L. Bell

Meet at the Washington Gate on Cambridge Common. This tour explores how the Cambridge community split on religious, political, and class lines between 1760 and 1775, culminating in a militia uprising in September 1774 and the outbreak of actual war in April 1775. Hear how the wealthy and congenial Tory Row neighborhood fell apart and became a stretch of military barracks and hospitals.

J. L. Bell is the proprietor of the Boston 1775 website, making daily offerings of history, analysis, and unabashed gossip about the American Revolution in New England. He is the author of a book-length study for the National Park Service about Gen. George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters in 1775 and 1776.

11:30 am, 2:30 pm Deep Dive: Headquarters of a Revolution

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Funded by Eastern National, a non-profit partner of the National Park Service.

The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. This concert is presented in partnership with the New England Poetry Club.

Robert Pinsky’s recent book of poems is Proverbs of Limbo. PoemJazz album of the same title is available on Spotify and Apple Music. His autobiographical prose book is Jersey Breaks. This reading will feature a special musical performance by the inimitable Stan Strickland.

Robert’s honors include the Korean Manhae Award, the Italian Premio Capri and the Harold Washington Award from the City of Chicago. He has honorary degrees from institutions including Stanford University, The New School, and the University of Michigan.

As United States Poet Laureate, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, with brief videos in which thousands of American readers, of varying backgrounds, ages, and regions, read poems they admire by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Frank O’Hara, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Glück, Siegfried Sassoon.

The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. This concert is presented in partnership with the Berklee Summer in the City concert series.

Yu Chun Chan is an erhu player and composer from Hong Kong, China. In 2024, he was awarded a full-tuition scholarship to attend Berklee College of Music, where he continues to deepen his understanding of Chinese traditional music while exploring its intersections with other genres to forge a unique path for erhu performance and composition.

At Berklee, Chan received the Instrumental Performance Award at the Career Jam concert and award show. He was also featured as both a performer and composer at South by Southwest in 2025 and was commissioned by the Berklee Global String Ensemble and Harvard CAMLab to compose for a multimedia installation exploring Buddhist culture.

The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. This concert is presented in partnership with the New England Poetry Club.

In person and streaming online at WE (too) THE PEOPLE: Stephanie Burt and Diannely Antigua - YouTube.

Diannely Antigua Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of the collections Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which was the winner of a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She  received her MFA at NYU and has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. From 2022-2024, she was the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence.

Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor. In 2012, the New York Times called Burt “one of the most influential poetry critics of her generation.” Burt grew up around Washington, DC and earned a BA from Harvard and PhD from Yale. Burt’s books include We Are  Mermaids (2022), After Callimachus (2020), Advice from the Lights (2017), Belmont (2013), Parallel Play (2006), and Popular Music (1999).

Burt’s works of criticism include The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (2016); Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Art of the Sonnet, written with David Mikics (2010); The Forms of Youth: 20th-Century Poetry and Adolescence (2007); Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden (2005), with Hannah Brooks-Motl; and Randall Jarrell and His Age (2002).

Burt has taught at Macalester College and is now Professor of English at Harvard University.

With special musical guest Todd Brunel. Brunel is a critically acclaimed clarinetist and sax player and the director of music at St Thomas Aquinas High School in Dover, NH. He performs extensively as a classical and jazz musician.

The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public.

New York City-based guitarist Pete Smith (and H.W. Longfellow descendant) returns to the Longfellow House with bassist Gregory Ryan to play a free concert on the lawn at 3:00 pm.  The duo will be performing choice standards from the jazz and American Songbook traditions, including compositions by Billy Strayhorn, Cole Porter, Cedar Walton, Jerome Kern, Charlie Parker as well as music from Brazil and Cuba.  Spend a lovely afternoon in the shade with us, listening to the sweet sounds of this exceptional duo.

Pete Smith is a New York City-based guitarist who performs in a wide range of musical settings.  As a founding member of Grupo los Santos (Santos4tet), a vanguard Afro-Cuban and Brazilian-style quartet, he has played New York’s Town Hall and concerts throughout the U.S., Cuba & Austria. He has performed at the Berlin Jazz Festival and Montreal Jazz Festival, as well as concerts in thirty countries throughout Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. He has worked with Norah Jones, trumpeter Donald Byrd, Cuban trombone master Juan Pablo Torres, Andrew Hill, Kat Edmonson, Vince Giordano & the Nighthawks, the Moonlighters, Madeline Peyroux, Natalie Merchant and Huun-Huur-Tu, and is a member of Michael Feinstein’s Carnegie Hall Big Band. In 2023 he traveled to Congo-Kinshasa (DRC) as a member of the band Opius Bliss—as cultural ambassadors for the US Embassy—to perform for and teach, play and dialogue with local musicians in Kinshasa and Kisangani. 2023 also saw the release of Santos4tet's 4th album "Santos 4".  In 2024, Santos4tet was the recipient of a JazzRoad Touring Grant from SouthArts, funded by the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, which supported their 5-city tour of the Sountheast.  Pete will be recording a new album with bassist Sean Smith (The Smith Duo) in 2025.

New York City native Gregory Ryan has established himself as an in-demand sideman on both acoustic and electric bass. His big supportive sound, swinging style, and complete understanding of harmony and his role on the bandstand combine to create his ability to make even the most complex modern composition swing in the tradition of the great bass players. At home in a variety of musical worlds — accomplished in Brazilian, Cuban, funk, and mainstream jazz styles — he performs in festivals and concerts worldwide. His Latin Jazz resumé includes performances with the Lincoln Center Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, Arturo O’Farrill, Papo Vazquez’ Pirates Troubadours, Yosvany Terry and Brazilian Jazz artists Helio Alves and Maucha Adnet.  Mr. Ryan has appeared with pianists James Williams, Mulgrew Miller, Harold Mabern, and Benny Green; guitarists Jim Hall and Pat Martino; vocalists Karrin Allyson and Dena DeRose; and numerous jazz luminaries including Eric Alexander, Regina Carter, Billy Harper, Tom Harrell, and Albert “Tootie” Heath, among many others.