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The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife is an annual series of conferences and publications that explores everyday life, culture, work, folklore, material culture and traditions in New England's past. [1] [2]
First hosted by the Dublin School in Dublin, New Hampshire, on June 19 and 20, 1976, the Dublin Seminar is an annual gathering of avocational and professional scholars (academics, curators, librarians and others) as well as students and enthusiasts who convene each year around a topic in the history and material culture of New England. [3] It was established when Peter Benes, then a graduate student in Boston University’s American & New England Studies Program, organized a gathering of scholars interested in early New England gravestones; initially planned for about forty participants, by the time the seminar occurred some 116 scholars, curators, preservationists and enthusiasts had assembled to hear nineteen lectures. [4]
Participants in this event went on to form the Association for Gravestone Studies. [5] Plans were made to convene the following year as well, around the topic of New England archaeology. [6] The Seminar convened in various locations in its early years, including the Concord Museum, the University of New Hampshire, and other venues; the Seminar met in Deerfield, Massachusetts, as early as 1982 for the "Foodways in the Northeast" gathering, in association with Historic Deerfield, and began meeting regularly in Deerfield after 1987, where it continues to meet today. [7]
The first Proceedings, Puritan Gravestone Art, edited by Peter Benes, was published jointly by Boston University and The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, in 1977, and included landmark articles like David D. Hall, "The Gravestone Image as a Puritan Cultural Code." [8] Jane Montague Benes began serving as associate editor of the Seminar's annual proceedings by the seminar's second year. [9] The Dublin Seminar proceedings were associated with Boston University until Historic Deerfield became its partner and co-sponsor in 2008. [10]
Since 1976, the seminar has hosted almost 750 scholarly presentations at its annual meeting and published nearly 400 articles in its annual Proceedings, including work by leading historians including Kevin M. Sweeney, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Jane Nylander and Abbott Lowell Cummings.[2] In 2011, Dublin Seminar founders Peter and Jane Montague Benes received the Bay State Legacy Award for their contribution to scholarship. [11] In 2014, they were recognized with a Leadership in History Award from the American Association for State and Local History. [12]
Puritan Gravestone Art (1976)
New England Historical Archeology (1977)
Puritan Gravestone Art II (1978)
New England Meeting House and Church, 1630-1850 (1979)
New England Prospect: Maps, Place Names, and the Historic Landscape (1980)
The Bay and the River: 1600-1900 (1981)
Foodways in the Northeast (1982)
American Speech, 1600 to the Present (1983)
Itinerancy in New England and New York (1984)
Families and Children (1985)
The Farm (1986)
Early American Probate Inventories (1987)
House and Home (1988)
New England / New France: 1600-1850 (1989)
Medicine and Healing (1990)
Algonkians of New England: Past and Present (1991)
Wonders of the Invisible World, 1600-1900 (1992)
New England’s Creatures: 1400-1900 (1993)
Painting and Portrait Making in the American Northeast (1994)
Plants and People (1995)
New England Music: The Public Sphere, 1600-1900 (1996)
Textiles in Early New England: Design, Production and Consumption (1997)
Rural New England Furniture: People, Place and Production (1998)
Textiles in New England II: Four Centuries of Material Life (1999)
New England Celebrates: Spectacle, Commemoration, and Festivity (2000)
Women’s Work in New England 1620-1920 (2001)
The Worlds of Children, 1620-1920 (2002)
Slavery/Antislavery in New England (2003)
New England Collectors and Collections (2004)
Life on the Streets and Commons, 1600 to the Present (2005)
In Our Own Words: New England Diaries, 1600 to the Present, Diary Diversity, Coming of Age (2006)
In Our Own Words: New England Diaries, 1600 to the Present 2, Neighborhoods, War, Travel, and History (2007)
New England and the Caribbean (2008)
Waterways and Byways, 1600-1890 (2009)
Dressing New England: Clothing, Fashion, and Identity (2010) [co-sponsored by the Costume Society of America]
Beyond the Battlefield: New England and the Civil War (2011)
The Irish in New England (2012)
Foodways in the Northeast II (2013)
Let the Games Begin: Sports and Recreation in New England (2014)
Schooldays in New England: 1650-1900 (2015)
New England at Sea: Maritime Memory and Material Culture (2016)
Small World: Toys, Dolls and Games in New England (2017)
Religious Spaces: Our Vanishing Landmarks (2018)
Entertainments at Taverns and Long Rooms in New England, 1700-1900 (2019)
Living With Disabilities in New England, 1630-1930 (2021)
Occasional Publications
Amelia F. Miller. Connecticut River Valley Doorways: An Eighteenth-Century Flowering (1983)
Peter Benes. Charles Delin: Port Painter of Maastricht and Amsterdam (1987)
Alan Clark Buechner. Yankee Singing Schools and the Golden Age of Choral Music in New England, 1760-1800 (2003)
John Butler Yeats was an Irish artist and the father of W. B. Yeats, Lily Yeats, Elizabeth Corbett "Lolly" Yeats and Jack Butler Yeats. The National Gallery of Ireland holds a number of his portraits in oil and works on paper, including one of his portraits of his son William, painted in 1900. His portrait of John O'Leary (1904) is considered his masterpiece.
John Winthrop was an English Puritan lawyer and one of the leading figures in founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the second major settlement in New England following Plymouth Colony. Winthrop led the first large wave of colonists from England in 1630 and served as governor for 12 of the colony's first 20 years. His writings and vision of the colony as a Puritan "city upon a hill" dominated New England colonial development, influencing the governments and religions of neighboring colonies in addition to those of Massachusetts.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628–1691), more formally the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, was an English settlement on the east coast of North America around the Massachusetts Bay, one of the several colonies later reorganized as the Province of Massachusetts Bay. The lands of the settlement were in southern New England, with initial settlements on two natural harbors and surrounding land about 15.4 miles (24.8 km) apart—the areas around Salem and Boston, north of the previously established Plymouth Colony. The territory nominally administered by the Massachusetts Bay Colony covered much of central New England, including portions of Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Connecticut.
Robert Treat was a New England Puritan colonial leader, militia officer and governor of the Connecticut Colony between 1683 and 1698. In 1666 he helped found Newark, New Jersey.
The Winthrop Fleet was a group of 11 ships led by John Winthrop out of a total of 16 funded by the Massachusetts Bay Company which together carried between 700 and 1,000 Puritans plus livestock and provisions from England to New England over the summer of 1630, during the first period of the Great Migration.
Richard Mather was a New England Puritan minister in colonial Boston. He was father to Increase Mather and grandfather to Cotton Mather, both celebrated Boston theologians.
Historic Deerfield is a museum dedicated to the heritage and preservation of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and history of the Connecticut River Valley. Its historic houses, museums, and programs provide visitors with an understanding of New England's historic villages and countryside. It is located in the village of Old Deerfield which has been designated a National Historic Landmark District, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The museum also hosts the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.
The written history of Boston begins with a letter drafted by the first European inhabitant of the Shawmut Peninsula, William Blaxton. This letter is dated September 7, 1630, and was addressed to the leader of the Puritan settlement of Charlestown, Isaac Johnson. The letter acknowledged the difficulty in finding potable water on that side of Back Bay. As a remedy, Blaxton advertised an excellent spring at the foot of what is now Beacon Hill and invited the Puritans to settle with him on Shawmut.
Parson Jonathan Fisher (1768–1847) was the first Congregational minister from 1794 to 1837 in the small village of Blue Hill, Maine in the United States. Although his primary duties as a country parson engaged much of his time, Fisher was also a farmer, scientist, mathematician, surveyor, and writer of prose and poetry. He bound his own books, made buttons and hats, designed and built furniture, painted sleighs, was a reporter for the local newspaper, helped found Bangor Theological Seminary, dug wells, built his own home and raised a large family.
The Old Ship Church is a Puritan church built in 1681 in Hingham, Massachusetts. It is the only surviving 17th-century Puritan meetinghouse in the United States. Its congregation, gathered in 1635 and officially known as First Parish in Hingham, occupies the oldest church building in continuous ecclesiastical use in the country. On October 9, 1960, it was designated a National Historic Landmark, and on November 15, 1966, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Peter Bulkley was an influential early Puritan minister who left England for greater religious freedom in the American colony of Massachusetts. He was a founder of Concord, and was named by descendant Ralph Waldo Emerson in his poem about Concord, "Hamatreya".
A colonial meeting house was a meeting house used by communities in colonial New England. Built using tax money, the colonial meeting house was the focal point of the community where the town's residents could discuss local issues, conduct religious worship, and engage in town business.
Ethan Allen Greenwood (1779–1856) was an American lawyer, portrait painter, and entrepreneurial museum proprietor in Boston, Massachusetts, in the early 19th century. He established the New England Museum in 1818.
Samuel Leland Montague was a Massachusetts politician who served on the Common Council, the Board of Aldermen and as the Mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
William Joseph Weaver (1759-1817) was an artist born in London who came to prominence in North America. His portrait of Alexander Hamilton hangs in the United States State Department, and his full-length portrait of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, hangs in Province House, Canada. He also worked for Joseph Booth's Polygraphic Society.
Funerary art in Puritan New England encompasses graveyard headstones carved between c. 1640 and the late 18th century by the Puritans, founders of the first American colonies, and their descendants. Early New England puritan funerary art conveys a practical attitude towards 17th-century mortality; death was an ever-present reality of life, and their funerary traditions and grave art provide a unique insight into their views on death. The minimalist decoration and lack embellishment of the early headstone designs reflect the British Puritan and Anglo-Saxon religious cultures.
The following is a list of works about Boston, Massachusetts.
Ipswich lace is a historical fashion accessory, the only known American hand-made bobbin lace to be commercially produced. Centered in the coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts north of Boston, a community of lacemaking arose in the 18th century. Puritan settlers to the area likely made and wore lace as early as 1634, because Sumptuary laws from the early colonial records indicate this activity. In fact, the earliest known record of the act of lacemaking in the region comes from a court case in 1654 associated with the home of Governor John Endicott. An indentured servant in the household accused the governor's son Zerubbabel with assault, which occurred while she was working at her lace cushion. Earliest known records of the commercial production indicate that lace produced by local women was used to barter for goods in the 1760s, as denoted by ledger account books belonging to local merchants. These laces were sold in the region from Boston to Maine.
Ella Wilcox-Thomas Sekatau, or Firefly-Song of Wind, was a poet, historian, and Ethnohistorian and Medicine Woman of the Narragansett Indian Nation. Instrumental in the Narragansett's federal recognition in 1983, she was a powerful cultural and political presence in her community and across the Native American community of New England. Sekatau was one of the first Native American interpreters to partner with Brown University's Heffenreffer Museum of Anthropology in their education program, and was also a key figure for the Wampanoag history program at Plimoth Plantation, now Plimoth Patuxet.
Zerubbabel Collins (1733–1797) was a carver of stone gravestones in New England in the 18th century. He has been called "one of the most important carvers represented in Vermont in the years after the American Revolution" and "one of the most talented [gravestone carvers] of his time".