“Tools and Toolmaking” at the 2022 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife

The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife has announced the subject of this year’s conference: “Tools and Toolmaking in New England.”

This event will take place in Deerfield, Massachusetts, on 24-25 June 2022, in partnership with the Early American Industries Association, Historic Deerfield, the Eric Sloan Museum, and the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts.

It will include a keynote address, “Tool Stories,” by Steven Lubar, Professor of American Studies, History, and the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, and author of a book in progress exploring the cultural history of tools.

The Dublin Seminar invites all scholars to propose papers and presentations at this conference on “the history and historiography of tools and toolmaking before 1900 in the region that encompasses present-day New England and adjacent areas of New York and Canada.” The announcement says:

We encourage discussion of Indigenous Native American tools and technologies that predate colonial contact, colonial settler tools, archaeological finds, collections, and reproductions. The Seminar hopes to consider tools in the context of home, farm, and workshop in a variety of uses, including artisanal trades and settings of industrial production. Early examples of tools made and used in traditional trades and crafts employed in New England’s first mills also constitute an important area of interest.

Proposals might address any of the following questions:

• How did Indigenous people devise and adapt specific tools and technologies utilizing regional resources?
• How did Indigenous toolmakers resist, adapt, and/or incorporate European materials?
• What can the sharing and giving of tools tell us about relationships in the past?
• In what ways were tools and tool creation specific to age, gender, class, and ethnicity in New England before 1900?
• How were innovations in tool making and work processes devised, shared, and circulated among different groups?
• How did tools and their making affect lifeways and workstyles in the region?
• How did patent law and legal considerations impact tool making and tool design?
• How did small-scale tool making and use change in response to industrial systems?
• How was training in tool usage accomplished?
• How did innovations in tool making and work processes represent patterns of knowledge transfer and facilitate the adoption of new tools and methods?
• In what ways did the making and use of hand tools reflect the shift from agrarian landscapes and small farms to commercial centers and large-scale industrial systems?
• In what ways did tools lead to class stratification?
• Why and when did early tools become a focus for antiquarian collectors?
• In what ways did tools help shape, represent and/or transgress gender or other identities?

Additional topics might include:

• artisanal efforts to recover and recreate specific modes of individual tool-making
• the production and acquisition of commemorative and/or souvenir tools
• tools in children’s or educational literature
• the ad hoc creation, adaptation, or application of tools
• the appearance of tools in fine or decorative arts
• tools as they are uncovered archeologically
• the hazards of tool usage, e.g. “tailor’s cramp” and other conditions
• the alteration of tools to accommodate disabilities

The Dublin Seminar has always valued inclusion, both in studying the full gamut of New Englanders and their daily lives instead of the elite and in the researchers who participate, coming from a range of professional backgrounds and disciplines. By tools the committee means not just carpenter’s planes and new-fangled inventions but also knitting needles, fishing gear, and the hoops that children learned to use when fetching buckets of water, as shown above.

This will will be a hybrid conference, held on site in Deerfield and online. It will consist of a keynote address and approximately seventeen lectures of twenty minutes each. Dublin Seminar presenters are expected to submit their papers for consideration to the Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar to be published about eighteen months after the conference.

To submit a paper proposal for this conference, send (as a single email attachment in Word or as a P.D.F.) a one-page prospectus that describes the paper and its sources and a one-page vita or biography by 11 Mar 2022 to dublinseminar@historic-deerfield.org. For the text of this call and additional information, see the conference page at Historic Deerfield.