Abstract AS New England towns, commissions, and societies prepare reenactments, exhibitions, and productions for the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, organizers and audiences alike find themselves reflecting explicitly on the relationship between the founding of the United States and the present moment. These relationships are not new. When Boston reenacted the Boston Tea Party in 1973, tens of thousands of protestors flooded the streets, calling for political changes that ranged from protecting the environment (represented by throwing oil drums into Boston Harbor) to the impeachment of Richard Nixon (strung up in effigy). In 2023, there were no such public disruptions to the reenactment. Instead, the Revolution seems to have been appropriated by contemporary politics rather than the other way around. Nowhere was this more obvious than the use of the American Revolution's language and imagery in the insurrection of January 6, 2021, when armed rioters attempted to disrupt a national election at the United States Capital while chanting “1776.”
Abstract I will never forget my first Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife. In June 1987, I was a nervous undergraduate just two weeks into the Historic Deerfield Summer Fellowship Program at Historic Deerfield, a museum of early American history and culture in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Attendance at the Seminar was mandatory. The subject was “Early American Probate Inventories.”1 Together with my nine fellow fellows, I joined the registrants crowded into a lecture hall on the Deerfield Academy campus. Several of the scholars whose work we were reading were slated to present, and at the event's helm was a white-haired man in a blue-and-white striped seersucker suit who summoned us to the proceedings by ringing an historic school bell. Speakers who had the temerity to run over their allotted time were dispatched with vigor. I was, in equal parts, terrified, thrilled, and mesmerized.
Abstract For many New England institutions, the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution will focus on the events of 1776. In other regions that don’t celebrate the same landmark dates, commemoration will necessarily differ. In this roundtable, four leaders explore how they are approaching the anniversary and planning for the future.
The genesis of the Dublin Seminar as a gathering place for people with intense curiosity about specific things (a/k/a "shameless eclecticism"), attracted a loyal audience from its inception. This is evident from the effort by the past and present members of the Board of Trustees to keep the Dublin Seminar going, even after the death of its mainstay, Peter Benes. It is also evident from the loyalty of people such as my cousin Elna Headberg, a third-grade teacher from Marlborough, Massachusetts with a keen interest in genealogy and local history, including gravestones, who attended faithfully for over four decades.1 I presented my first paper at the 1989 Dublin Seminar "New England/New France," while I was a first-year graduate student in the American and New England Studies Program at Boston University.2 This experience was formative in many ways, perhaps most importantly for the blend of academic rigor and welcome that made me think, "Ah! This is the life for me."
