“Vermont women enlisted for the duration.” So said a Vermont historian assessing the war years 1861-1865. Vermont’s remarkable Civil War battlefield record is well documented, but little is known of how Vermont women sustained the home front. Historian Howard Coffin explains, with nearly 35,000 of the state’s able-bodied men at war, how women took on farming, worked in factories, served as nurses in the state's military hospitals, and more. Read More »

This lecture and slide presentation by William Hosley demonstrates how art and artifacts can be used to understand historical experience while surveying the extraordinary visual allure of historic Vermont. Read More »

The first European to divide the peoples of the world into distinct races, in the seventeenth century, claimed that the Sami people of northern Scandinavia were one of four races on earth, How did such a bizarre distinction among groups of people develop into one of the most historically significant ideas of the modern world? Professor William Edelglass will trace the intellectual history of the concept of race in the West, from its prehistory to today. Read More »

Bill Mares began making his own beer 45 years ago, when home brewing was illegal and there were no microbreweries in America. In this presentation, he offers a short history of beer itself and discusses Vermont’s small but significant contribution to the American beer revolution. Read More »