The Jonathan Fisher House, Blue Hill Public Library, and Blue Hill Books will co-sponsor a panel discussion with three of the authors included in the new book What We Know, What We Wish: Maine Statehood, Historical Commemoration, and the Urgency of Public History, on Tuesday, July 22 at 7:00 PM in the Howard Room at the Blue Hill Public Library. Panelists will include Liam Riordan, co-editor of the book and Adelaide C. and Alan L. Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine; and contributors Kevin D. Murphy, Professor of History of Art & Architecture at Vanderbilt University, and Michael McVaugh, Wells Professor of History at the University of North Carolina. The discussion will be moderated by Hannah Cyrus, board member at the Jonathan Fisher House.
Cities, states, and nations are grappling with how best to commemorate historical events and anniversaries in ways that are fair, accurate, and open public dialogue about the often contested past. What We Know, What We Wish springs from varied approaches to the historical commemoration of Maine’s state bicentennial in 2020 that involved academics, independent scholars, local and statewide cultural organizations, sovereign Wabanaki nations, and the state itself in the form of the Maine State Bicentennial Commission. While wide-ranging in their goals and values, all sought to take advantage of opportunities for collaboration to contribute to a dynamic and multi-faceted practice of public history. These new essays use Maine’s bicentennial as a focal point to put public history theory into action. Its diverse contributors share stories about the past that move beyond celebration to reflect crucial ways that the past shapes our understanding of the present and our aspirations for the future.
This volume’s core argument is that academics need to collaborate more fully with independent scholars, history-based cultural institutions, and the general public in order for public history to thrive and to improve the quality of civic life. What We Know, What We Wish does this through wide ranging essays that discuss the long statehood era in Maine from the 1770s to 1820s as well as its legacies in the state centennial commemoration of 1920 and museum exhibits from the 2020 bicentennial. The occupational and cultural diversity of the collection’s contributors together with the content of their essays offer a model for how to put public history principles into practice to foreground meaningful historical reflection that is urgently needed in divided communities around the world.
About the Panelists:
Liam Riordan is Adelaide C. and Alan L. Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine. He is author of Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic and was the co-editor with Jerry Bannister of The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era. He currently serves on the City of Bangor’s Historic Preservation Commission and the board of the Great Pond Mountain Conservation Trust. He is a past board member of the Maine Humanities Council and past director of the Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center at the University of Maine.
Kevin D. Murphy is Professor of History of Art & Architecture and the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of History of Art & Architecture at Vanderbilt University, teaching courses in 19th- and 20th-century architecture and material culture, primarily in Europe and North America. He has published the books, Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture and Community on the Eastern Frontier, as well as The Cathedral of Notre-Dame of Paris: A Quick Immersion, and Memory and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay. He has been a fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, among other institutions. Murphy has contributed to such publications as The Magazine Antiques and Art New England, as well as a variety of professional journals. He is a summer resident of Brooklin.
Michael McVaugh is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina and a summer resident of Blue Hill. His research focuses on the growth of medical and surgical learning in the Middle Ages, particularly as shaped by the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century universities, and on the concomitant medicalization of European life. Additionally, McVaugh has served on the Board of Directors at the Jonathan Fisher Memorial and acted as a docent at the Fisher House, and has spearheaded recent efforts to transcribe Fisher’s collections of sermons from his personal shorthand into plain English.
This event is open to the public and free of charge. Books will be available for sale and signing.