Interpreting Slavery and Freedom in New England: A 2-day Workshop for Interpreters, Educators, and Museum and Historic Site Staff Sponsored by the Center for Reconciliation March 26-27 • 9 AM–4 PM • Providence, RI The Center for Reconciliation hosted a 2-day workshop to help New England’s museum community work through the continuing challenges that interpreting…
Tuesday, April 3, 2018 • 7–9 PM • Panel Discussion at Concord Carlisle High School • Sponsored by Concord Carlisle Adult and Community Education
Come join this discussion on how to navigate our differences: politics, religion, values, life style. How do we learn to have conversations around issues that sometimes divide us? How do we learn to listen better, discuss, and even bridge that divide?
This symposium will take a critical look at the true nature of the Underground Railroad movement as it wove its way through the different avenues of old established New England towns, including oral history, African American cultural landscapes, archaeology, geography, and material culture.
![Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? We have you covered with a little Robbins house trivia. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem entitled Peter’s Field. Peter’s Field most likely referenced Peter Hutchinson, who was the last African American owner of The Robbins House. Peter purchased the home in 1852 and lived with his wife, Nancy, and several of their children in the home until 1868. Emerson described Peter’s farm, and by extension the original area of farmland attached to The Robbins House out in the Great Field like this:
KNOWS he who tills this lonely field
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight and at morn?]
That field by spirits bad and good,
By Hell and Heaven is haunted,
And every rood in the hemlock wood
I know is ground enchanted.
[In the long sunny afternoon
The plain was full of ghosts:
I wandered up,
I wandered down,
Beset by pensive hosts.
For in those lonely grounds the sun
Shines not as on the town,
In nearer arcs his journeys run,
And nearer stoops the moon.
There in a moment I have seen
The buried Past arise;
The fields of Thessaly grew green,
Old gods forsook the skies.
Happy Reading!](http://robbinshouse.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)