“Recalling the Revolution in New England” at the 2025 Dublin Seminar

The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife has announced that its 27–28 June 2025 conference at Historic Deerfield will focus on the topic “Recalling the Revolution in New England.”

The seminar says:

On September 11, 1765, political leaders in Boston attached a plaque to a majestic elm and named it “Liberty Tree” to honor its role in an anti-Stamp Act protest the previous month. New Englanders thus started to commemorate the events of the American Revolution even before they had any idea there would be such a revolution. Over the following centuries, people from New England shaped the national memory of that era through schoolbooks, popular poetry, civic celebrations, monuments, and more.

On the 250th anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775, the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife welcomes proposals for papers and presentations that address the broad range of ways the people of New England have looked back on the nation’s founding—and what they forgot, or chose to forget, in the process.

For this year the seminar invites proposals for papers and presentations that illuminate how the peoples of the region have commemorated, memorialized, documented, invoked, fictionalized, and even forgotten the American Revolution through the Bicentennial period. Papers should examine events and trends in New England and adjoining regions.

The Seminar encourages papers grounded in interdisciplinary approaches and original research, particularly material and visual culture, manuscripts, government and business records, the public press, oral histories, and public history practice or advocacy. Papers addressing such contemporary themes as gender dynamics, racial dimensions, and environmental aspects of Revolutionary commemoration are strongly encouraged.

Some possible topics might include:

• Efforts to recover the stories of marginalized participants in the American Revolution
• The processes of local commemoration in orations, pageants, reenactments, and more
• Recreating and depicting the American Revolution in popular fiction, theater, prints, and toys
• The collecting and preservation of Revolutionary-era artifacts and material culture
• Activating, maintaining, and interpreting historic sites, battlefields, monuments, homes, and other spaces
• The formation and activities of historical societies and heritage organizations
• Contesting the memory and meaning of the American Revolution

Researchers whose proposals are accepted will be invited to prepare a 20-minute presentation of that work and present it on site in Deerfield. They’ll be expected to make a written version of about 7,000 words available for inclusion in the Dublin Seminar Proceedings.

The Seminar will convene on 27–28 June. That will be a hybrid program with both on-site and virtual registration options for attendees. The conference keynote will be provided by Dr. Zara Anishanslin of the University of Delaware, author of the forthcoming book The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists who Championed the American Revolution.

To submit a proposal, scholars should prepare (as a single email attachment, in MS Word or as a PDF, labeled LASTNAME.DubSem2025) a one-page prospectus that describes the paper and the archival, material, or visual sources on which it is grounded, followed by a one-page vita or biography. Send that to dublinseminar@historic-deerfield.org by noon on Monday, 23 Jan 2025.

One last detail about the 2025 Dublin Seminar: I’m one of the co-chairs of the organizing committee along with Erica Lome of Historic New England.