The Second Half of the Year
It might not seem like it, but we are now halfway through 2024. . . seems a good time to note the events currently scheduled for the second half of the year.
In July, there are two: on the evening of Thursday, 11 July, it's Slavery and Segregation. This was offered live once before and also online. Centered largely but not exclusively on decisions written by West Barnstable's own Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1830 to 1860, we will look at the institution of slavery as it tainted Massachusetts before the Civil War, as well as at Shaw's treatment of school segregation in Boston in a decision central to the pernicious concept of "separate but equal" that stained American life into the 1950s. This talk will take place in the charming Thacher Hall, across Route 6A from the Edward Gorey House Museum in Yarmouth Port. Thacher was long a Swedenborgian church (the "New Church"), built in 1870, and is well worth a look regardless of the occasion.
On Friday, 26 July, we return with Them Bones, this time at the 1717 Meetinghouse in West Barnstable—another wonderful building worthy of your examination if you've not been there. Or if you have. This event will benefit Friends of Ancient Cemetery, volunteers who preserve, protect, and promote Yarmouth's oldest burial ground (dating to c. 1676), located on Center Street near Ancient Way, in Yarmouth Port. Bones concerns sites associated with death that I've visited in Paris (Le Dome des Invalides, Catacombs, Père Lachaise Cemetery) and in Rome (Capuchin crypt, Keats-Shelley House, Theatre of Pompey, Botticelli's Tomb).
August is of course August. We return to Thacher Hall in September, on Tuesday the 24th, with a "premiere", a kind of sequel to Bones called Them Bones. . . Again: Facing Death in Munich and Vienna and along the Danube. Same framework as Bones, with much different places visited this year in April. A consideration of the phenomenon of saints' relics, including one spectacular one; an unusual and partially folk-created memorial to two musicians who lived 400 years apart; crypts, including that of the Habsburgs; and a look at some Viennese painters, depicters of death, and victims of one of the deadliest pandemics in history and of suicide (warning here of that issue).
There are three so far scheduled for October. On Thursday the 17th, I'll talk for the first time at the Historical Society of Santuit and Cotuit, located at the lovely Dotteridge House on Main Street, Cotuit. The topic is the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, which episode has proved controversial, and unfortunately evergreen, for nearly a century. The Massachusetts centers of the case are found not far away, of course, but there is one thread that, however unlikely, unspools in Cotuit.
Then, for that most wonderful time of the year, we have celebrated seasonally at Sturgis Library, and these have extended to Eastham Public Library. First up is Dracula, which premiered last year at Sturgis—this year it'll be in Eastham, on Tuesday the 22nd. This program centers on the 1897 novel and its literary antecedents, and not so much on the myriad films everyone loves. Finally, at Sturgis on Tuesday the 29th, the first time with Werewolf. That one will be about lycanthropy. Yes. . . lycanthropy.
CJ Shaw and me, a few years ago, during the. . . as you see.