The Dublin Seminar as Public History

Abstract Though my initial encounter with the Dublin Seminar was as a budding early Americanist, I returned to Historic Deerfield, and to the Seminar, as a graduate student nurturing an interest in public history—or, “pastkeeping,” to use Michael C. Batinski's valuable, and now my preferred, term to describe the work of stewarding memory, whether by museum and library professionals, preservationists, or community and family members.1 At my second Seminar, in 1991, the topic was “Algonkians of New England,” and as Nanepashemet, the important Wampanoag interpreter at Plimoth Plantation, delivered the paper “It Smells Fishy to Me: An Argument Supporting the Use of Fish Fertilizer by the Native People of Southern New England,” I began to understand how the Seminar sat at the crossroads of research and interpretation in the region's museums and historic sites.2