Maine Humanities Council

Samuel Sewall, the only judge to publicly repent his decision to condemn twenty people to death as witches in 1692, is the subject of Eve LaPlante’s new biography, Salem Witch Judge: The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall (HarperOne, 2007). LaPlante counts Sewall as her sixth great-grandfather, a family connection that gave her access to rare documents not previously available. Using these papers, as well as Sewall’s extensive personal diaries and letters, she vividly recreates Sewall’s life and times. LaPlante is the author of two previous books, Seized (a multidisciplinary exploration of temporal lobe epilepsy) and American Jezebel (a biography of Anne Hutchinson), and essays for The Atlantic, the New York Times, Ladies’ Home Journal, Gourmet, and Boston.

This talk was part of the Portland Public Library’s Brown Bag Lecture Series. We welcome your feedback on this Eve LaPlante reading.

 

 Eve LaPlante [43:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (364)

“Weaving History and Literature: the African American Oral and Written Tradition” brought five writers together to read from their work and discuss how African American history is revealed through storytelling and literature. The speakers were JerriAnne Boggis, founder and director of the Harriet Wilson Project; Kate Clifford Larson, biographer of Harriet Tubman; novelists Michael C. White and David Anthony Durham; and poet Patricia Smith. Biographies of the speakers are available here; download the walking tour map of the Portland Freedom Trail in PDF format here.

This event was held at the Portland Museum of Art on July 11, 2008. We welcome your feedback.

 

 Portland Freedom Trail [89:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (782)

Charles Calhoun is Scholar in Residence at the Maine Humanities Council. He is the author of Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (2004), A Small College in Maine: 200 Years of Bowdoin (1993), and the volume on Maine in the Compass American Guide Series (4th ed., 2005). Born in Monroe, Louisiana, he studied history at the University of Virginia and law at Christ Church, Oxford. In this talk, Calhoun identifies storytelling techniques (such as suspense, fulfillment, gratification, and apt quotation) that biographers can adopt in their own writing. With input from Teaching American History Through Biography participants, he analyzes passages from three contemporary biographies—Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, Blanche Wiesen Cook’s Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884-1933, and Peter Guralnick’s Searching for Robert Thompson—for examples of these techniques.

This talk was part of the 2008 Teaching American History teacher program in Brunswick, Maine. What do you think of Charles’ answer to the question of what makes a good biography, and what would your answer be? Please leave your thoughts here.

 

 Why Are Some Biographies So Good? [68:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (535)

Neil Rolde’s 2006 book, Continental Liar from the State of Maine, is a biography of James G. Blaine, the Maine politician who dominated the American political stage from just before the Civil War and almost until the twentieth century. A former Maine politician himself, Rolde is a prize-winning historian and author of Unsettled Past, Unsettled Future: The Story of Maine Indians; The Interrupted Forest: A History of Maine’s Wildlands; Maine, Down East and Different; and many other books. A former Board member of the Maine Humanities Council, Rolde won the Constance H. Carlson Public Humanities Prize in 2005.

This talk was part of the Portland Public Library’s Brown Bag Lecture Series. We welcome your feedback on this Neil Rolde podcast.

 

 Neil Rolde [54:45m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (381)