Conferences in Fall 2006

On 10-12 November, Historic Deerfield is hosting a symposium on powder horns of the French & Indian War, in connection to its exhibit of the William H. Guthman collection of horns. Registration brochure available from the website. I checked out these horns last summer, and they're quite interesting as military folk art.

Before that, on 6-8 October, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture has a conference on Warfare and Society in Colonial North America and the Caribbean in Knoxville, Tennessee. Among the sessions on Friday is "The Obligations and Opportunities of Military Service", with these enticing speakers and topics:

Chair: Sylvia R. Frey, Tulane University, emeritus
Opportunity and Risk in Eighteenth-Century Warfare: Privateering and Fugitive Slaves in British North America, Charles R. Foy, Rutgers University
Gone for a Soldier: Who Were the New England Provincial Soldiers?, Steven C. Eames, Mount Ida College
Joining the Continental Army: Young Men Coming of Age as Revolutionary Soldiers, John Ruddiman, Yale University
Friends and Brothers: Boy Soldiers of the Continental Army, Caroline Cox, University of the Pacific
Comment: Elizabeth Mancke, University of Akron

Also, the following day: The Massachusetts Art of War, 1765–1775, Harold E. Selesky, University of Alabama. Nearly all of those topics dovetail with my research, and there are other notables speaking as well.

The OIEAHC conference is free, and I'm already an Institute associate. I have an uncle in Knoxville who might be willing to put me up. But can I wrangle the airfare and the time away? (Plus, at next June's OIEAHC/Society of Early Americanists conference in Williamsburg there will be a panel on apprentices. Oh, what to do?)