Profs and Pints Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Mermaid Tales,” a discussion of the enigmatic water spirits of East Slavic countries, with folklorist Philippa Rappoport of George Washington University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-rusalki .]

Be careful out there. According to Slavic folklore, in the late spring the rusalki, an East Slavic version of mermaids, emerge from lakes and streams to water crops and to claim lives. They're mostly beautiful, with wild hair and blazing eyes, and they’re more than happy to drag smitten young men to watery graves.

Join Philippa Rappoport, an expert on Slavic folklore and rituals, for a discussion of the water spirits of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and the traditions centered around them. She'll describe how rusalki were both revered and feared by people who would sing songs in their honor while carrying protective charms.

You'll learn how East Slavic mermaid lore permeated wedding rituals and parades, inspired the construction of effigies, and reflected beliefs about women that, throughout the world, have translated into a lot of concern over how women wear their hair and cover their heads.

Philippa has wowed crowds with fascinating talks on East Slavic nature spirits and folktales related to the underworld and winter. Her accounts of mermaids promise to be equally entertaining. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Doors open at 5. The talk begins at 6:30.)

Image: “Rusalka and her daughter,” an engraving by I. Volkov published in 1899.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Goddess of Spring and the Underworld,” an introduction to the Greek goddess Persephone in her many incarnations, with Brittany Warman, former instructor at Ohio State University and co-founder of the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-persephone .]

Join Brittany Warman, who has earned a huge following among Profs and Pints fans by delivering fantastic talks on folklore, myths, legends, and fantasy, for the perfect event for the season: a look at the spring goddess Persephone and the many ways in which she has inspired the human imagination.

The story of Hades and Persephone is one of the most famous—and most retold—episodes in Greek mythology. Persephone’s abduction, her interlude in the Underworld, and her partial return to the world above have inspired statues and webcomics, ancient cults and contemporary poetry. Thousands of years after her tale was first told, we’re still fascinated by this goddess.

Brittany will discuss how Persephone’s appeal lies in her liminality in being caught between two very different worlds and lives. She represents spring, renewal, and rebirth because Earth blooms with her return, but she’s also the Queen of the Underworld. From a 21st-century perspective, she’s basically a goth girl adorned with a flower crown.

We’ll also look at Persephone’s mythic roots, including their connections to the Eleusinian Mysteries. And then we’ll dive into some of the ways that Persephone has been revised and retold in recent years, from the Tony award-winning musical Hadestown to the webcomic Lore Olympus to memes and fairy tales and fashion.

After all, why be just one thing when you can be the queen of spring and of darkness? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Talk begins at 4:30. Attendees may arrive any time after 3 pm.)

Image: From “Proserpine” (Persephone) painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1882. (Birmingham Museums Trust / Wikimedia Commons.)

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “A Return to the Gilded Age,” with Allen Pietrobon, assistant professor of Global Affairs at Trinity Washington University and former professorial lecturer of history at American University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/baltimore-gilded-age .]

Crippling economic crises. Fears related to immigration and disease. Income inequality. Corporate monopolies. Technological disruption. Big money unduly influencing politics. A few wealthy men seizing control of how most Americans exchanged information and got the news.

Sound like 2025? Actually, here we’re talking about America from 1875 to 1900.

Known as “The Gilded Age,” it was a crucial era of rapid industrialization, economic dislocation, social change and turbulence, and political turmoil. It set the United States on the path to becoming the most economically powerful country in the world while also creating an astronomical wealth gap between the rich and the poor.

Some enterprising Americans took advantage of economic disruption to succeed. Industrial tycoons like the Rockefellers and the Carnegies built unthinkably large business empires and then used their monopoly power to hold down wages and shut down competition. They deployed their vast profits to buy politicians, corrupting politics and tilting it and the economy in their favor.

Expansive new factories needed unskilled workers, who arrived via the largest wave of immigration in American history. New arrivals from Europe and Asia poured into rapidly expanding major cities, which came to be seen as rife with corruption and filled with squalor. As many Americans who were ill-equipped to compete in this new economy found themselves left behind, strikes broke out and labor violence, protests and counter-protests bloodied the streets. All the while Americans grew increasingly divided and angry at their political leaders.

Join award-winning professor Allen Pietrobon as he describes this tumultuous period and explores why this all sounds so familiar to us today. Among the questions he’ll answer: How did this period draw to a close? Might ours have a similar end? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5. The talk begins at 6:30.)

Image: An 1883 cartoon from Puck magazine depicts rich robber barons being carried by the workers of their day (Library of Congress / Wikimedia).

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Genius of Benjamin Franklin,” with Richard Bell, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-ben .]

Benjamin Franklin’s genius is a puzzle. Born the tenth and youngest son of a decidedly humble family of puritan candle-makers, his rise to the front ranks of science, engineering, and invention was as unexpected as it was meteoric. Despite having only two years of formal schooling, he would end up receiving honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and St. Andrews, as well as the 18th century’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize for Physics.

Like his hero, Isaac Newton, Franklin was driven by a perpetual dissatisfaction with the world as he knew it. He optimized, tinkered, and improved. Hardly the tortured genius, he took a schoolboy’s pleasure in everything he made. Experimenting was a constant source of beauty, pleasure, and amusement for him, even when things went wrong (which they did all the time).

In this talk Richard Bell will examine many of Franklin’s ideas to make life simpler, cheaper, and easier for himself and everyone else. It turns out that those ideas encompassed not only natural science and engineering—the kite experiments and the bifocals for which he is justly remembered—but also all sorts of public works, civic improvements, political innovation, and fresh new business ideas. His experimenter’s instinct, his relentless drive to build a better world one small piece at a time, even encompassed innovations in medical device design, in music, in cookery, and in ventriloquism.

Be on hand as Dr. Bell, a favorite of Profs and Pints fans who previously has given a host of excellent talks, returns to the stage to discuss what lessons—and great intellectual habits—we all can learn by examining Benjamin Franklin’s life. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5. The talk begins at 6:30.)

Image: Benjamin Franklin near a bust of Isaac Newton as painted by David Martin in 1767 (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts).