Down to the Sea in Deerfield with the Dublin Seminar, 24-26 June

On the weekend of 24-26 June, Historic Deerfield will host the annual Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, this year’s topic being “New England at Sea: Maritime Memory and Material Culture”:

Focusing on how the region remembered its maritime past, the weekend begins with a keynote address by the historian W. Jeffrey Bolster on the pivotal role that Gloucester, Massachusetts, played in the memory of its fishing industry.

It continues with individual topics such as chart making, the keeping of ship logs, and ship-design technologies. Later sessions address subjects such as whaling, slaving, privateering, and maritime family life; the rise of marine societies and efforts to preserve old ships; and the growth of maritime antiques businesses. The conference concludes with minorities’ experience of seafaring and maritime laboring and the material culture of sailors’ (and diplomatic) dress.

An optional workshop presented on Friday afternoon will examine the history of celestial navigation including a detailed exploration of the sextant, and Mystic Seaport’s digital resources used in genealogical and maritime-related research.

The main program of nineteen lectures (with discussion periods after each grouping) will begin in the Deerfield Community Center at 7:00 P.M. on Friday evening and will continue until around noon on Sunday. The conference registration fee includes lunch and dinner on Saturday, June 25, plus coffee and (really good locally made) doughnuts each morning.

The Dublin Seminar casts a wide net for researchers and for attendees, including university scholars, other educators, curators, collectors, librarians, preservationists, students, and the general public. Selected papers from this event will be published in a couple of years as the 2016 Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.

For more information and to register, visit this webpage.