History Lecture

Sam Houston will always be remembered for his influence on Texas history, but he was also a frontiersman and an important American political figure in the 19th century. This captivating lecture by the creator of the EMMY Award winning documentary Sam Houston: American, Statesman, Soldier, and Pioneer, will detail Sam Houston’s remarkable life including his rebellious teenage years when he ran away to live with a local Cherokee tribe, his later struggles with marriage and sobriety, and much more.

Join Chase Untermeyer as he discusses his book inside Reagan’s Navy for an engaging, up-close narrative of Untermeyer’s experiences in the Pentagon. The work is interwoven with descriptions of events and people, humorous anecdotes, and telling quotations. In March 1983, President Reagan offered Untermeyer an appointment as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

Join us to uncover the story of Ernest Shackleton’s attempt to be the first to cross Antarctica. Shackleton and his crew left in 1914 and would not return until two years later, having never set foot on the continent. What the crew achieved during the voyage is an extraordinary tale of survival and endurance.

The sea voyage is one of the earliest metaphors about the meaning of life. This lecture looks at how that metaphor works. First, we examine a short poem by Walt Whitman that seems to be about a merchant vessel. Next, we examine the story told in four nineteenth-century oil paintings by Thomas Cole, the Dean of the so-called Hudson River School of artists.

“The Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the war. Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea or in the air depended ultimately on its outcome.” – Winston Churchill.

The Texas coastline and offshore waters are flat, shallow, featureless, filled with shoals and subject to extreme weather including hurricanes and nor’easter gales. Throw in two centuries of naval warfare in Texas waters and you get a recipe for shipwrecks.

December 2015 marked the fifteenth anniversary of the Houston Maritime Museum. As the Museum begins the process of moving to a larger facility on the Turning Basin, we look back on our beginnings as the brainchild of founder James L. Manzolillo. This lecture looks back at the life and passion of Jim Manzolillo as the inspiration for the museum we know today as well as fifteen years of concerted efforts to take the institution to the Port.

This lecture is inspired by a fascination with the Mexican government’s vision and the leadership of a handful of Texans that led to the transformation of a bay and a bayou to create a key engine of prosperity, the Port of Houston. The success of the Port has resulted from efforts made by these visionaries working through varied political systems, worldviews, and cultural differences.

In 1684, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, set sail on the La Belle to establish a French colony at the mouth of the Mississippi River. The story of this ill-fated expedition and recent discovery of the 300 year old wreck is an epic tale of adventure, exploration, international intrigue and death. This history, now told through the conservation of its recovered 1.5 million artifacts, has enough bizarre twists and turns to satisfy maritime novelists like C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brien.