The Bidwell House Museum, in collaboration with the Monterey Community Center, is excited to again present the off-season program “History Talk Replay”. Join friends and neighbors at the Monterey Community Center on one Sunday afternoon in January, February and March to view a broadcast of one of our popular summer History Talks. First up on Sunday January 12 at 1pm is a talk from 2019 titled Coming to Terms with Colonial America: Another Look at Natives and Other Early Americans. The History Talk Replay series is free, but donations are welcome.
Scholarly study of Native Americans before ca. 1800 has flourished recently, extending our knowledge of Indian peoples during that era well beyond Squanto and Pocahontas. Nonetheless, to a surprising degree, when talking about the continent’s first peoples we still use language that would be familiar to William Bradford and Capt. John Smith. Is thinking about our loaded vocabulary an exercise in “political correctness”? Or is it simply “correctness”?
Born and raised in Minnesota, James Merrell is the Lucy Maynard Salmon Professor of American history at Vassar College. Recipient of several fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEH, he is the author of The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors From European Contact Through the Era of Removal and Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier. Both books won the Bancroft Prize; Into the American Woods was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
The Bidwell House Museum is located at 100 Art School Road, Monterey, MA. The Museum is closed for the season but will re-open on May 25, 2020. The gardens and grounds are open for free, year round. For more information, please call 413-528-6888 or go to www.bidwellhousemuseum.org.