New England Celebrates: Spectacle, Commemorations, and Festivity

This publication is a collection of papers presented in June of 2000. Focusing on a range of celebrations in New England, the papers address ritualized public observances such as annual processions, civic participants or spectators, or commemorated past events, and national holidays.

The following is a list of the title and author of each paper:  Night Processions: Celebrating the Gunpowder Plot in England and New England by Peter Benes, “The Floral Architect”: Rules and Designs for Processions by Paige W. Roberts, The 1823 “Centennial” Celebration of New Hampshire’s Settlement by Richard M. Candee, “The Celebration Not Partisan”: Portsmouth and the 1856 Centennial of Printing in New Hampshire by Michael A. Baenen, John Pierce’s Pitch Pipe: Music and Myth-Construction in Early National Celebrations by Richard J. Bell, Questioning Authority: The June Training of the University Invincibles by John Thomas, Historical Pageantry in Old Deerfield: 1910, 1913, 1916 by Angela Goebel Bain, Something to Admire: Cultural Nationalism, Symbolic Dissonance, and the Fourth of July in New England’s Canadian Borderlands, 1840 – 1870 by Andrew C. Holman, “No Harvest of Oil”: Nantucket’s Agricultural Fairs, 1856 – 1890 by Aimee E. Newell, Mountain Christenings: Landscape and Memory in Edward Hitchcock’s New England by Karen Halttunen, The Boston Board of Trade Transcontinental Railway Excursion of 1870 by Carol R. Kanis, Entertaining the Government: Female Tavern-Keepers and the New Hampshire Provincial Government by Marcia Schmidt Blaine, Woman Tavern-Keepers in the Connecticut River Valley, 1750 – 1810 by Anne Digan Lanning.