The public is cordially invited to attend the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Sippican Historical Society, to be held June 11 at the Marion Music Hall. The meeting will begin at 7:00 pm, and will feature a brief wrap-up of the Society’s business year, followed by the special presentation titled Blogging, Now and Then, by Harvard Professor Robert Darnton. Darnton’s lecture will explore how, long before the Internet, Europeans exchanged information in ways that anticipated blogging. The key element of their information system was the “anecdote,” a term that meant nearly the opposite then from what it means today. By tracking anecdotes through texts, we can rethink the history of books and reassess a rich strain of history and literature.
Professor Darnton, a part-time Marion resident, is an accomplished academician and author. After teaching at Princeton University from for almost 40 years, Darnton became Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard in 2007. His outside activities include service as a trustee of the New York Public Library and the Oxford University Press (USA) and terms as president of the American Historical Association and the International Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Among his honors are a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, election to the French Legion of Honor, and the National Humanities Medal conferred by President Obama in February 2012. Professor Darnton has written and edited over two dozen books, one of which – The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History – has been translated into 18 languages. His latest books are The Case for Books; The Devil in the Holy Water, or The Art of Slander in France from Louis XIV to Napoleon; and Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris.
The Marion Music Hall is located at 164 Front Street, and ample parking is available across the street in the Island Wharf lot. The event is free to the public and no reservations are required. For more information, please email info@sippicanhistoricalsociety.org or call 508-748-1116.