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New Summer Exhibit at Nahant Historical Society
Nahant Historical Society
41 Valley Road, Nahant, MA 01908
781-581-2727
Press Release July 14, 2004
ENLISTING A NATION:
THE ART OF PERSUASION IN WORLD WAR I POSTERS
The Nahant Historical Society is pleased to offer its new summer exhibition of World War I posters. Nahanter W. Donnison Hodges collected almost all the posters as a teenager during World War I. His son, W. Donnison Hodges, Jr. gave them to the Society in 2002. This exhibit is further enhanced by many World War I artifacts from the Society's collections. Enlisting a Nation is a retrospective that has been co-curated by both Society staff and Tufts Museum Studies Program Exhibition Planning 2004 class. Led by their adjunct professor, Nahanter Kenneth C. Turino, the students have spent this past winter and spring preparing this exhibition. Mr. Turino is also Director of Exhibitions with Historic New England. Prior to this summer engagement in Nahant the exhibition ran for three weeks in May at the Tufts University Gallery where it received excellent reviews. This graphically powerful exhibit will commence with a reception for Society members on Sunday July 18, 2004 from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. in the Serenity Room at the Nahant Community Center at 41 Valley Road. Members may certainly bring guests. New members are welcome to join that afternoon.
Limited parking at the Nahant Community Center encourages carpooling, walking and biking. Alternative shuttle van service will be available from St. Thomas Church parking lot at 248 Nahant Road between 1:45 and 4:15 p.m. Light refreshments will be served.
Exhibit hours will then start July 21st through the end of September during the regular exhibition hours of the Society on Wednesdays, Thursdays and the first Sunday of each month from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. Admittance is free but voluntary donations will be gladly accepted.
As an extra bonus to celebrate the opening of Enlisting a Nation, the Society has responded to many requests not only locally but also worldwide to reprint our modern history of Nahant in Military Annals of Nahant by Nahanter Gerald W. Butler. This volume, the result of over 30 years, now in soft back, will be available for purchase at $30 including tax. For those unfamiliar with this work entailing 30 years of research on Nahant's coastal military installations, which protected Boston Harbor from 1886 until 1960. Supported by vivid drawings and rare photographs it documents the use of Nahant as first an observation post, then through its vital armament during both World Wars and the early part of the Cold War. Of special note to our new exhibition, Enlisting a Nation, this book documents the ultra-secret anti-submarine laboratory on East Point during World War I. Mr. Butler will graciously be available to autograph copies. Following the members' opening, Military Annals of Nahant will be available at both the Society and the Nahant Public Library.
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Stopping the Clock: A Time to Remember Salem Pequot Mills Strike
A New Exhibit by the Salem Harbor CDC.
Funded in part by a grant from ENHC, the exhibit explores the labor history of the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company, focusing in particular on the long and dramatic strike of 1933. (The Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company was a Pequot mill located on the site currently occupied by Shetland Park.) Close to two thousand workers struck against the "stretch-out" that tried to increase their workload, and to maintain the seniority system. Abandoned by their national union, workers formed a strike committee and found allies in the most unlikely places: the Communist Party, the ex-mayor of Peabody, a socialist, the local shoe-makers union, the Unitarian church. The story has never been told, and this exhibit is a first step in uncovering it. The exhibit is open at The Enterprise Center at Salem State College Monday through Friday, 8:30am to 5pm, July 8 - August 27. For more information, please call 978-542-6389.
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New Book - Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory
Visitors to Essex County and residents, of course will want to peruse a new book that commemorates the influence of Salem on American culture and explores how Hawthorne and others helped create its unique identity. Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory (Northeastern University Press, May 2004) is a comprehensive look at the 400-year, multi-layered history of the city its people, legacies, and myths. Edited by Salem State College professors Dane Morrison and Nancy Schultz, the anthology examines what creates a sense of place. Through essays, poetry, and photography, this collection encourages readers to reconsider the notion of place, including the ways in which the local intersects with the national and the global.
With over forty photographs that reveal the rich textures of the city, from Federalist era mansions to gritty waterfront, Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory features reflections by mystery writer Margaret Press ("Salem as Crime Scene"), British witch trials expert Frances Hill ("Salem as 'Witch City'"), poet J.D. Scrimgeour ("Montage of Brick and Water"), and ten other essayists. Readers will enjoy the broad range of topics, such as Native American habitation ("Salem as Frontier Outpost"), religion ("Salem as Religious Proving Ground"), architecture ("Salem as Architectural Mecca"), and globalization ("Salem as Global City").
Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory puts the infamous 1692 witch trials in dialogue with other aspects of the city's history, including its China Trade adventures recounted by Dane Morrison. Hawthorne's contributions to American culture are explored in several of the book's essays, and each chapter starts with an epigraph by Salem's most famous son. As Nancy Schultz observes, Salem as a metaphor for the American experience was "Hawthorne's creation," and his stories "helped fulfill young America's ambitions for a literature of its own."
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2004 News Archives
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