Introduction to The Dublin Seminar at 50

Abstract I will never forget my first Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife. In June 1987, I was a nervous undergraduate just two weeks into the Historic Deerfield Summer Fellowship Program at Historic Deerfield, a museum of early American history and culture in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Attendance at the Seminar was mandatory. The subject was “Early American Probate Inventories.”1 Together with my nine fellow fellows, I joined the registrants crowded into a lecture hall on the Deerfield Academy campus. Several of the scholars whose work we were reading were slated to present, and at the event's helm was a white-haired man in a blue-and-white striped seersucker suit who summoned us to the proceedings by ringing an historic school bell. Speakers who had the temerity to run over their allotted time were dispatched with vigor. I was, in equal parts, terrified, thrilled, and mesmerized.