Abby Epplett, Historian

Early today — Wednesday, March 22 — at 4:00 p.m., I attended the webinar “ Phillis Wheatley Peters in Material Memory ” hosted by the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, MA . This talk featured five speakers who each held a unique perspective on the life and work of Revolutionary War era African-American poet Phillis Wheatley Peters . The first presentation was given by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers , an English professor at the University of Oklahoma and author of The Age of Phillis , published by Wesleyan University Press in 2020 and long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry . Jeffers described her first encounter with the works of Wheatley Peters while an English student at Talladega College , an HBCU in Alabama. In 2003, she read The Trials of Phillis Wheatley by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. When Jeffers became a Robert and Charlotte Baron Artist Fellow at the AAS in July 2009, she read the memoir of Margaretta Matilda Odell , a White woman and f...

Yesterday — Monday, October 30, 2023 at 6:00 p.m. — I watched the three-expert panel Bringing Phillis to Life hosted by Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) at their headquarters in Boston and streamed via Zoom. The talk focused on the life and work of Phillis Wheatley , a colonial American poet who was the third woman, first Black person, a first enslaved person in British North America to publish a book of poetry, called Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral . Each speaker presented for about ten minutes, followed by a twenty minute Q&A. Dr. Tara Bynum, professor at University of Iowa , recently published the book Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America . She spoke in a lyrical style describing surviving letters between Wheatley and her friend, Obour Tanner , another formerly enslaved Black woman who lived in Newport, RI. The letters were written between 1772 and 1779, and they are currently held by MHS , and the story of how they got there ...

Historic New England Summit 2023 just finished earlier today! Held at The VETS , or Veterans Memorial Auditorium, in Providence, Rhode Island on Thursday, November 2, and Friday, November 3, this two-day event brought together members of Historic New England (HNE) and others interested in the history and preservation of the area. I also attended the first HNE Summit last year, in 2022, and summarized both Day 1 and Day 2 for that conference. This post summarizes Day 1 of this year’s event based on my fifteen pages of notes. Day 2 is coming soon. If you would like to learn more about any of the sessions, please let me know, and I can post a more detailed write-up or share my notes. Opening Welcome The Summit began with an introductory view that reviewed ongoing HNE projects such as the reimagination of the Haverhill Center and the Recovering New England’s Voices project. Danikah Chartier , Indigenous Community Liaison and Researcher at HNE, gave a land acknowledgemen...