With its fall Speaker Event schedule, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum is pleased to spotlight a range of accomplished presenters sharing their unique expertise and storytelling to highlight the region’s rich history, environment, and culture.
Hosted in the Van Lennep Auditorium and available virtually, these programs are designed to spark important conversations while fostering connections between the past, present, and future of the Bay. They are supported by the Upper Shore Regional Folklife Center under the Maryland Traditions program of the Maryland State Arts Council.
The suggested ticket cost is $8 per session. To sign up, and get more information, visit cbmm.org/SpeakerSeries.
“I am looking forward to this whole series of Speaker Events,” CBMM’s Vice President of Education & Interpretation Jill Ferris said. “Bringing individual perspective and historical scholarship, each presenter explores a different aspect of life in the Chesapeake to help us better understand the world around us.”
The fall series begins next Tuesday, Sept. 17 at 5:30pm, with a homecoming via “The 1960s in St. Michaels: An Author Talk with David Guth.” A St. Michaels native, Guth will share an advance reading from his new historical fiction novel “In the Moment” based on his own experiences growing up in the Bay Hundred area in the 1960s that inspired his work.
The spotlight will be on the traditional workboats that line many area harbors on Thursday, Oct. 10, with a presentation from maritime journalist and historian Larry Chowning on Chesapeake Bay Deadrises.
The deadrise and cross-planked bottom style of boatbuilding started on the Bay in the 1880s, when builders of wooden boats began using planks, instead of logs, to create hulls with an unmistakable V-shaped bottom. Chowning will share insights into the history and culture of the deadrise, which grew to be so popular that both Maryland and Virginia have named deadrise vessels as their state boats.
Not far from CBMM’s campus, a team of archaeologists have been searching a remote part of Dorchester County since late 2020 for evidence of Harriet Tubman’s early life, including her birthplace and the 10-acre home site of her father, Ben Ross. On Wednesday, Oct. 30, Dr. Julie Schablitsky will provide a glimpse into the historical research and archaeology that has gone into the effort to locate and interpret these sites with “The Archaeology of Harriet Tubman’s Birthplace.”
On Friday, Dec. 6, CBMM will delve into its newest special exhibition with “Sailing to Freedom: Recovering and Re-centering the Maritime Dimension of the Underground Railroad.”
This program will feature Dr. Timothy Walker, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth whose book “Sailing to Freedom” provided the basis for CBMM’s soon-to-open exhibition in the Changing Exhibitions Gallery. Walker will share how his research has expanded understanding of how freedom was achieved by sea and what this journey looked like for untold numbers of African Americans.
More mission-focused Speakers Events are on the horizon in 2025, including a talk with historian Eric Cheezum sharing his scholarly research on Chessie the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster (Jan. 30) and a program on the future of the Bay watershed (Feb. 6) with Martha Shimkin of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office and Anna Killius of the Chesapeake Bay Commission.
Additional speakers and programming will be announced in the coming months. Find more information about all CBMM’s upcoming events at cbmm.org/events.
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