Children’s Play at the Dublin Seminar in Deerfield, 24 June

On Saturday, 24 June, the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife will take place at Historic Deerfield. This year’s theme is “Small World: Toys, Dolls, and Games in New England.”

The day will feature nine talks on the culture of children’s play in New England and adjacent areas of New York and Canada in the 17th through 19th centuries. The event description says:

The conference opens with talks on the material culture of toys by fashion specialists, archaeologists, and historians who will discuss the making of high-style dolls, the distribution of toys in girls’ industrial schools, and toy-making during and after the Civil War.

It continues with an examination of English emblematical books for children, printed board games designed for young minds, and the evolution of children’s libraries in the larger eighteenth century. . . . The Seminar is designed for educators, historians, collectors, independent scholars, librarians, preservationists, and museum curators, as well as students and the general public.

I’ll be there giving a presentation on football (or what we Americans call soccer), its reputation in British culture, and how it took on a political meaning in redcoat-occupied Boston during the late 1760s.

Click here for a complete schedule of lectures and registration information for this year’s Dublin Seminar. Registration costs $70, or $40 for students. Past seminars have been two or three days in length, and this year the committee chose a shorter program to allow more people to attend.

Since the 1970s the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife has presented annual conferences, exhibitions, and publications exploring the life, work, and culture of ordinary New Englanders. The seminars are now sponsored and hosted by Historic Deerfield. The collections of papers from past years are excellent sources on many topics, from gravestones to clothing to supernatural beliefs.