Author: J. L. Bell

Folks interested in textile history should enjoy the exhibit “Stitching the Revolution: Quilts as Agents of Change,” on display at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut, through August 25.

Quilting is traditionally confined to the domestic sphere and often relegated to the status of craft or minor art, but this exhibition explores the practice as an avenue for expressing potent beliefs and creating meaningful change. Tracing the history of quilts as a medium for communicating revolutionary ideas, it pairs historic and contemporary quilts spanning over 200 years. On display are approximately 30 quilts from the Mattatuck Museum’s collection plus loans from New England institutions and contemporary artists.

You can learn more about “Stitching the Revolution,” curated by Keffie Feldman, at this webpage. The exhibit catalogue, available for free in the gallery, includes an essay by longtime Dublin Semianr friend Lynne Z. Bassett about the development of American quilts as powerful expressions of emotion, politics, culture, and more.

We are still delighted at how our 2024 conference took us deep “Into the Woods” to consider New England’s forests in so many ways. Everyone who attended the conference, in person or virtually, has now received an email with a link to review recordings of the presentations.

All of us at the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife would like to thank everyone who made this year’s Seminar possible. Our crackerjack program committee gathered a strong set of panels, and those presenters all shared fascinating work!

We are grateful to naturalist Laurie Sanders of Historic Northampton, Dan Sousa of Historic Deerfield, and Jeanne Solensky of Deerfield’s Memorial Libraries for terrific pre-seminar tours and activities.

And of course we are thankful for all the attendees who joined us in person or online, whose comments and questions make the seminar into lively and collegial exchange of ideas and information. That is the long tradition we’re proud to maintain.

We could not have held this conference without the help of our co-sponsors: the American Antiquarian Society; Boston University’s Program in American & New England Studies; the Forest History Society; Historic Northampton; and UMass Amherst’s History Department and Public History Program. We are also grateful to the Society of American Foresters and the Collaborative for Educational Services for administering professional development credits for seminar attendees.

And of course our deepest appreciation goes out to everyone at Historic Deerfield, the Dublin Seminar’s longtime host and home.  The care, skill, and commitment of the whole talented staff at Historic Deerfield is essential to the success of the annual seminar.

Our work continues. As part of our ongoing publications, we’ll prepare a Proceedings volume for this year’s seminar. And soon we’ll have announcements about the 2025 Dublin Seminar in New England Folklife!

K-12 educators can receive up to 10 Professional Development Points (PDPs) for attending our upcoming “Into the Woods: New England Forests and Forestry in Fact and Imagination” conference. These will be administered by the Collaborative for Educational Services in Northampton.

People interested in the environmental history of New England can attend in person at Historic Deerfield on June 28–29, or online on those dates or through recordings that will be up for the month of July. Here’s all the information about the schedule and registration.

Thanks to the Society of American Foresters for approving up to 12 Continuing Forestry Education (CFE) credits for forestry professionals who attend our upcoming “Into the Woods: New England Forests and Forestry in Fact and Imagination” conference.

People interested in the history of New England forests can attend in person at Historic Deerfield on June 28–29, or online on those dates or through recordings that will be up for the month of July. Here’s all the information about the schedule and registration.

As we prepare for our “Into the Woods” conference on June 28–29, here’s another interesting scholarly event from the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester.

This year’s Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) summer seminar, to be held June 8–14, will be on “Disability Histories in the Visual Archive: Redress, Protest, and Justice.”

The seminar will be led by Laurel Daen and Jennifer Van Horn. Sessions will focus on the visual and material cultures of disability in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America, using the unparalleled collections of the AAS.

For more information and to register, go to this page.

(Our 2021 seminar explored “Living with Disabilities in New England, 1630-1930,” with Prof. Daen the first to present a paper. The volume of papers from that conference is now in press.)

On Tuesday, March 5, Katheryn Viens will present her paper “Farm, Factory, and Mine: Worcester Coal and the Role of Extractive Industries in Early 19th-Century New England” as part of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Environmental History Seminar series.

Kate Viens has been metaphorically toiling in the mines herself as our treasurer, shoring up the Dublin Seminar’s legal and financial footing.

Her essay will focus on the Worcester Coal Company (founded 1828) and how its founder, William Elijah Greene, doggedly pursued the knowledge, capital, markets, and transportation necessary to exploit his Massachusetts landholdings. Brian C. Black of Penn State will comment on the paper.

This event begins at the M.H.S. with a reception at 4:30 PM, and the seminar will start both in-person and online at 5:00. To register to attend either in-person or virtually, visit the M.H.S. at this link: https://www.masshist.org/events/farm-factory-mine

We’ve posted the call for papers for our our June 28–29 conference on “Into the Woods: New England Forests in Fact and Imagination.” See the criteria here: https://dublin-seminar.org/2024-call-for-papers-into-the…/ The submission deadline is Monday, February 19.

In that arboreal spirit, our clerk and longtime board member Georgia (Gigi) Barnhill was recently one of the guests on Doug Still’s “This Old Tree” radio show & podcast. She shared a story of an inspiring tree on behalf of the Amherst Historical Society: https://buff.ly/3RSnfvU

We’re planning the next Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife on June 28–29, 2024, in Deerfield. Look for more news in the coming months!

On Thursday, April 7, Katherine Ott, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, will deliver an online talk titled “Disability Things, History, and Mental Health” via the Connecticut Historical Society.

The event description says: “Humans come in many varieties—size, gender, intellect, skin color, communication style… Why has it been such a struggle to embrace the differences? Using objects from history as a guide, this talk examines some of the ways disability has collided with assumptions about how to be human.”

Here is the online exhibit “EveryBody: an Artifact History of Disability in America” that Ott curated for the Smithsonian.

Ott’s free online talk is scheduled to begin at 7:00 pm. Sign up for this event through this webpage.

The 2021 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife addressed the topic of “Living with Disabilities in New England, 1630-1930.” Review that program of presentations here. Our team is editing papers from that conference into one of our upcoming Proceedings volumes.

Our 2022 conference topic “Tools and Toolmaking in New England” isn’t just about axes and sledgehammers and anvils—tools traditionally used by men. It’s equally about darning needles and flour sifters and hot-water bottles—tools more associated with women, and just as demanding of technology and skill.

Through May 1, people can appreciate what tools like needles and scissors could produce in skilled hands at the Florence Griswold Museum’s exhibit “New London County Quilts & Bed Covers, 1750‒1825.” It explores how this one Connecticut county produced such exceptional work drawing on sources from both sides of the Atlantic.

This exhibit is curated by Lynne Z. Bassett, a longtime member of the Dublin Seminar planning committee and co-chair of this year’s conference. She brings deep expertise on needlework, textiles, costumes, quilts, and of course the tools behind the creation of those artifacts. Visit the Florence Griswold Museum website for the schedule of lectures, demonstrations, and gallery talks she’s also lined up this spring.