Starting at 9:00 AM on Saturday, July 7th, and running until about 7:00 PM that evening, Salem Maritime National Historic Site will be hosting “Enduring Hawthorne: A Marathon Reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.”
With the help of many, many volunteers we will read The Scarlet Letter from beginning to end.
Join us from the beginning or stop by to listen as the novel progresses. Watch for special “Hawthorne’s Custom House” tour and the opportunity to make your own scarlet letter to publicly state your personal sins.
We ask everyone interested in helping to read to please email gavin_gardner@nps.gov. He will be pulling together the volunteer list and organizing a planning meeting later in June to brief all of the readers. Let us know by June 15 if you are interested in volunteering for a five minute reading slot.
The Summer Salon series kicks off with Crocker Snow Jr., who will be speaking about his latest book, Nantaska: The Minnow and the Whale.
An award-winning journalist, Crocker Snow, Jr., a native New Englander and veteran international journalist, spent 50 years as a foreign correspondent and editor. After serving as Managing Editor of The Boston Globe in the 1970s, he was founding editor of The World Paper from 1979 to 2001, a monthly report of original news and analysis that appeared in seven languages in twenty-seven countries. From 2002-14, Snow, Jr. was the director of Tufts University’s Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where he specialized in Middle East media as well as on the global impact of climate change and the warming Arctic.
Snow has long observed Nantucket and Alaska through family, friends and as a matter of professional interest in his work. Author of the 2016 book, Muskeget: Raw, Restless, Relentless Island, in NANTASKA he unites the two—”Nan-Taska”—and compares Nantucket and Alaska in fresh ways that kindle imagination and insight. Brimming with lively stories, people and anecdotes, the book reveals startling parallels between these two seemingly diverse lands. Beginning with their shared whaling histories, NANTASKA invigorates a multitude of topics on cultural connections shaped through vital climate change issues—with deep ties to people, places, weather and environment—and highlights critical community involvement as well as the mutual relationship to the sea and its impact on human lives and legacies.
Lavishly and colorfully illustrated, NANTASKA comes alive with vivid photographs from celebrated Inupiat photographer Brian Adams from Gridwood, Alaska, author of the award-winning I Am Alaskan photo book. Adams works with the Anchorage Museum and has covered the peoples, resources and wilds of Alaska throughout his professional life. In November, 2017, he explored Nantucket with his Leica camera in pursuit of parallel photographic studies to accompany Crocker Snow’s NANTASKA.
John Kerry, former US Senator/Massachusetts, Secretary of State under the Obama Administration, and longtime Snow family friend, has enthusiastically endorsed NANTASKA.
Discussion group meets on the second Saturday of the month at 11:00 a.m.
Talk by Polly Wilbert and Pat Donahue
Members, Friends of Greenlawn
Polly and Pat, who together have led eight tours of Greenlawn Cemetery, will share what they’ve learned during Greenlawn research about wealthy benefactor Walter Scott Dickson, who gave Dickson Memorial Chapel and its adjacent conservatory to the city in memory of his wife Georgianna; the Rev. Jacob Stroyer, a slave from South Carolina, who after the Civil War ministered to blacks in Salem as the founder and preacher of the Salem Colored Mission; and Malcolm Harrison Miller, author of 3,500 poems in 54 mostly self-published books, who recently became the subject of a documentary film about his life and work.