History Bites is a series of thirty minute lectures to inform and entertain, covering various aspects of the history of Amherst and the lives of those who once lived here.
Bring your lunch, and we provide coffee, tea and cider for you as you listen to the presentations. The programs begin promptly at 12:15 with seating and beverages ready just before noon. The lectures are free and everyone is welcome to attend.
Thanks to the work of our dedicated trustees, you can view archived video of past History Bites lectures here.
Fall Lectures Schedule (more TBA!)
TBA
Friday, September 7th
Methodist Church History
by Terry Tarr
Friday, September 21st
(More information TBA!)
Native American/King Philips War
by Lisa Brooks
Friday, October 5th
Lisa Brooks is associate professor of English and American studies at Amherst College. Her first book, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, reframes the historical and literary landscape of the northeast, and received the Media Ecology Association’s Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture in 2011. Although deeply rooted in her Abenaki homeland, Brooks’s work has been widely influential in a global network of scholars. She served on the inaugural Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), and currently serves on the editorial boards of SAIL and Ethnohistory. She also works on the advisory board of Gedakina, a non-profit organization focused on Indigenous cultural revitalization, traditional ecological knowledge, and community wellness in New England. Her second book, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War is forthcoming from Yale University Press (January 2018).
The Devil’s Juggles: Witchcraft Accusations in 17th-Century New England
by Michael Thurston
Friday, October 19th
In their influential analysis of the Salem Witch Crisis, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum offer events in Northampton as a telling counter-example to the rash of witchcraft accusations in the eastern Bay Colony. Where residents of Salem Town and Salem Village interpreted the visions and behavior of young women as evidence of a malevolent “invisible world, they argue, residents of the western town understood similar phenomena as evidence of a nascent “awakening” of enthusiastic Christian faith. But was the Connecticut River Valley really free of what Cotton Mather called the Devil’s “juggles”?
This talk (newly updated from its 2016 version) surveys the appearance of witchcraft in the seventeenth-century history of Valley towns and villages, pointing out familiar patterns of accusation and interrogation. While we’ll venture as far as Bridgeport, and spend some time in Wethersfield, CT (site of the largest pre-Salem witch panic in the colonies), we’ll also focus on such close-to-home cases as that of Mary Bliss Parsons and Hadley’s “Half-Hung Mary.” And just as events in Salem were re-narrated and reinterpreted by writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we will see that events in western Massachusetts and Connecticut, too, were transformed by later writers to serve those writers’ own purposes.
How V-mail won WWII
by Tom Weiner
Friday, November 2nd
(More information TBA!)
Lincoln/Sunset Historic District
Maurianne Adams
Friday, November 16th
(More information TBA!)
TBA
Friday, November 30th
These are all entries under the letter “C” in the book Amherst A to Z, written by Elizabeth Sharpe. The book is illustrated with pictures of artifacts from the Amherst History Museum, historic images from the Jones Library’s Special Collections, as well as photographs of our town and the folks who live here.