Where:
Boston Athenæum
10 ½ Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02108
Admission:
$Free with admission
Categories:
< 21, Lectures & Conferences, Meetup
Event website:
http://www.bostonathenaeum.org/events/4864/koh-i-noor-history-world%E2%80%99s-most-famous-diamond
On March 29, 1849, the ten-year-old Maharajah of the Punjab handed over to the British East India Company in a formal Act of Submission to Queen Victoria not only swathes of the richest land in India, but also arguably the single most valuable object in the subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-i-Noor diamond.
Using original eyewitness accounts and chronicles never before translated into English to craft the first comprehensive and authoritative history of the object, William Dalrymple and Anita Anand trace the true history of the diamond, dispelling the myths that have long surrounded this awe-inspiring jewel.
William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of "In Xanadu," "City of Djinns," "From the Holy Mountain," "The Age of Kali," "White Mughals," "The Last Mughal," and, most recently, "Nine Lives." He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Credit Bikramjit BoseLiterary Reportage, the Hemingway Prize, the French Prix d'Astrolabe, the Wolfson Prize for History, and the Scottish Book of the Year Award. In 2012 he was appointed Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in Humanities at Princeton University. He lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.
Registration is not required.
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The Athenæum's five galleried floors overlook the peaceful Granary Burying Ground, and, as Gamaliel Bradford wrote in 1931, "it is safe to say that [no library] anywhere has more an atmosphere of its own, that none is more conducive to intellectual aspiration and spiritual peace." The building was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1966.
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