Polly Attwood is Vice President of the Drinking Gourd Project, a newly formed Concord-based nonprofit organization focused on raising awareness of Concord’s African and Abolitionist history from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Educated in England, Ms. Attwood worked for the METCO program for more than a decade, involved in minority achievement, multicultural education, and gender equity issues in elementary schools. For the past two decades, Ms. Attwood has worked in the Concord school system, dedicating much of her energy to pursuing equality issues. She currently serves as the Chair of the Concord-Carlisle Human Rights Council.

Dr. Laura Baker teaches history and history education at Fitchburg State University and is the director of the Fitchburg Oral History Project, a collaboration of the Fitchburg Historical Society and Fitchburg State University.

Kate Balug, Coordinator at the Fields Corner Collaborative, is a recent graduate of the Harvard Design School and holds a Master in Urban Planning. Her research functions at the intersection of art and the public domain, particularly in under-served urban areas.

Laurie Block is the co-founder and Executive Director, of Straight Ahead Pictures which sponsors an online project called the Disability History Museum. Straight Ahead’s work concentrates largely on the history of the body, especially issues related to people with disabilities. Her first film, FIT: Episodes in the History of the Body, an award-winning feature documentary, looked at the history of how the idea of fitness in the USA changed in the last century. Her four-hour National Public Radio documentary series Beyond Affliction: The Disability History Project, produced with Jay Allison, won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Her current project, Becoming Helen Keller, a film biography for the PBS series American Masters, aims to revision this remarkable woman’s life by developing a portrait about her that sets her interests and celebrity into the context of social welfare and human rights questions.

Matthew Brenckle is Research Historian at the USS Constitution Museum. Mr. Brenckle coordinated the Museum’s extensive research project into the lives of USS Constitution’s 1,200 War of 1812 crewmembers. That research has gone on to form the historical foundation for numerous journal publications and conference presentations, the exhibit All Hands on Deck: A Sailor’s Life in 1812, an interactive website, and a book to be published in time for the War of 1812 Bicentennial. Mr. Brenckle holds degrees in archaeology and maritime history from Brown University and East Carolina University.

Adam Bright’s writing has appeared in GOOD Magazine, CNN, and Popular Science. His profile of new age guru Eckhart Tolle was selected for a 2010 Pushcart Prize. He is currently an editor of MYOO magazine, a new online publication devoted to stories about sustainability and social change. In New York, he served as a volunteer storytelling facilitator for The Moth’s community outreach program. He is a 2003 graduate of Brown University.

Jennifer Dubois is the Director of Southeast Community Conservation for The Trustees of Reservations. She oversees The Trustees’ land and community conservation work in southeastern Massachusetts, with a focus on agricultural preservation and farm-based programs. Prior to joining The Trustees four years ago, Jennifer worked for The Nature Conservancy in Rhode Island.

Dean Eastman was a history teacher in the Beverly Public School System from 1970-2006. He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Massachusetts Christa McAuliffe Fellowship (1989), Disney American Teacher Award (1991), Harvard University’s Derek Bok Award for Public Service (2000 ), and the Preserve America Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year Award (2004 ). He was featured in the PBS Series “Only A Teacher ” and the book I Am a Teacher. Eastman and Kevin McGrath have collaborated on a myriad of student-based research projects and have co-authored a number of articles for Common-place.org. Eastman and McGrath are also the co-creators of primaryresearch.org.

Pam Ellis, Natick Nipmuc Council

Patricia Fanning has been a member of the Norwood Historical Society for many years. She is professor and chairperson of the sociology department at Bridgewater State University. She received a Master’s in American studies and a PhD in sociology from Boston College. Her research interests include medical sociology, ethnicity, and Irish studies and she has published in these areas. Her book titled Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day (2008) was named an honors title in non-fiction in the Massachusetts Book Awards competition. Her presentation today will focus on the research of her book Influenza and Inequality: One Town’s Tragic Response to the Great Epidemic of 1918 which was published by UMass Press in October, 2010.

Rachel Fletcher is the Founding Director of Great Barrington’s Housatonic River Walk and its W. E. B. Du Bois River Garden park; a founder of the Friends of the Du Bois Homesite; Co-Director of the Upper Housatonic Valley African American Heritage Trail; and Co-editor of African American Heritage in the Upper Housatonic Valley. Fletcher is a geometer and teacher of geometry and proportion to design practitioners. She is an adjunct professor at the New York School of Interior Design and Contributing Editor to the Nexus Network Journal of Architecture and Mathematics, authoring its Gometer’s Angle and other articles on Thomas Jefferson, Eero Saarinen, and Palladio.

Kristin Gallas, Director of Education and Public History for The Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery, earned a B.S. in secondary history education from University of Vermont and a M.A.T. in museum education from George Washington University. Kristin has over fifteen years of experience in formal and informal learning environments. She has developed and implemented interpretive and educational programs for the Montana Historical Society, the USS Constitution Museum, the National Heritage Museum, Shelburne Museum, and Decatur House, including programs and exhibits on sensitive history related to black sailors and American Indians. Her current projects include researching best practices for interpreting slavery at historic sites and developing programs in conjunction with the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

Pilar Garro is the site manager of Historic New England’s Beauport, Sleeper-McCann House in Gloucester, MA – a position she has held for nearly six years. Ms. Garro holds a Bachelor of Arts from Wheaton College, Master of Arts in Museum Studies from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, and attended the Attingham Summer School in July, 2010. She is active in tourism efforts on the North Shore, holding board positions with the Gloucester Destination Marketing Organization, the North Shore Community College Hospitality and Tourism Advisory Committee, and the Essex Costal Byways Steering Committee. Ms. Garro is also involved within the museum community as a co-chair for the New England Museum Association’s Historic Sites Affinity Group and frequently lectures on Beauport, Henry Davis Sleeper, and historic wallpaper.

Natasha Haverty received a Mass Humanities’ “Liberty and Justice for All” grant in June 2010, in partnership with the Norfolk Historical Commission. She and Adam Bright have spent the past year collecting oral histories of the Norfolk Prison Debate Team, which had an outstanding record against elite college teams in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Before receiving the grant, she worked at The Moth, an organization for live storytelling based in New York City. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.

Elaine McLean James has worked as a librarian in Boston and Cambridge, and as a library director in Somerville, MA and North Miami Beach, FL. Most recently Mrs. James led the research for “Finding Voices in the Silence”. Voices was a project established by the Forest Hills Educational Trust to identify prominent and noteworthy people of African-American descent who were interred at the Forest Hills Cemetery from the mid- Nineteenth Century to the present day. Sylvia McDowell, the original Scholar-in Residence for the grant, started with one name and expanded the list to over 200 entries before her death in 2010. As a tribute to Ms. McDowell’s accomplishments Elaine completed the final research report so that this pioneer researcher could get full posthumous credit. Elaine also serves on the Board of Directors for the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail. In her official capacity she enjoyed co-leading the annual BWHT “Women of Roxbury” tour in November 2010.

Frances Jones-Sneed is professor of history (PhD, University of Missouri) and Director of Women’s Studies at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams. Jones-Sneed has taught and researched local history for over twenty years. She co-directed a NEH project on “The Shaping Role of Place in African American Biography” in 2006 and spearheaded a national conference on African American Biography. In 2007 she directed a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Faculty Workshop a “We the People” project on “Of Migrations and Renaissances: Harlem/NY & South Side/Chicago, 1915–75.” In the summer of 2008 she was a fellow at the W.E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA studying “The Civil Right Movement in the 20th Century” and in the summer of 2011 she is co-directing an NEH Summer Institute on “The Role of Place in African American Biography.” She is working on an edited volume of the biography of the Rev. Samuel Harrison, a monograph on W.E.B. Du Bois, a curriculum development project with the local public schools, and is the editor of the campus publication, The Mind’s Eye. Jones-Sneed is co-director of the Upper Housatonic Valley African American Heritage Trail, is on the board of the Samuel Harrison Society and a former board member of Mass Humanities.

Elise Lemire is Professor of Literature at SUNY Purchase. She is the author of Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts (2009), a finalist for the 2010 Massachusetts Book Award, and “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (2002), both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Lemire’s scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Her current projects include Peace Vets, the story of the 1971 protest march that traced Paul Revere’s route in reverse. Organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the march resulted in the largest arrest in Massachusetts history.

Tom Lincoln is the part-time Executive Director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, a National Historic Landmark from the mid-18th century that focuses on the history of the enslaved people and the Royalls who lived here for four decades. The site includes the only extant standalone Slave Quarters in the North, as well as a large Georgian mansion, and focuses on tours, education, teacher training, and public programs. It offers a unique widow into Colonial slavery, the formation of African-American identity, and American history in the pre-Revolution period. Mr. Lincoln is a longtime historic preservation and environmental advocate with extensive experience as a “real world” public historian.

Kevin McGrath is a Librarian, English teacher, Senior Year Project Coordinator, Web Designer, and Archivist at Newton North High School. He co-created primaryresearch.org in 1999, which to this day highlights innovative approaches to teaching and learning local history with middle and high school students.

Heli Meltsner is Curator of the Cambridge Historical Society and author of Going To The Poorhouse: The Almshouses of Massachusetts and The Forces That Shaped Them, to be published by McFarland in Spring, 2012. She has been a historic preservation consultant and an architectural historian in Cambridge since 1979. Her practice has included inventories of historic resources for Massachusetts municipalities, the MBTA and DEP, nominations to the National Register of Historic Places and preservation plans. From 1989 to 1996 she was Planner with the Framingham Planning Department. She serves on the Avon Hill Neighborhood Conservation District Commission. Heli holds a BA from Swarthmore College and a MS from the Columbia School of Architecture.

Dee Morris connects contemporary audiences with the people and events of Greater Boston, especially during the Victorian era, through walking tours, lectures, and the written word. She focuses on the often-overlooked middle-class notables who impacted their communities. A life-long resident of Massachusetts, Dee has presented many programs at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Forest Hills Cemetery, and numerous historical societies.

Emily Murphy is the Historian and Public Information Officer for Salem Maritime National Historic Site. She holds a BA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, Annapolis; an MA in American Studies from the Pennsylvania State University, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University. Her dissertation, “To Keep Our Trading For Our Livelihood:” The Derby Family and Their Rise to Power, examines how mercantile families used material culture, social connections, and political participation to exert control in 18th-century Salem, Massachusetts. During nearly 25 years of working in the public history field, she has used a variety of public records to examine the lives of people who have left few written records behind.

Timothy Neumann, Project Director for the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association’s African Americans in Early Rural New England Project has served as PVMA’s executive director for 36 years and has overseen numerous educational and public programs. He also handles media coverage, grant writing, and promotion. He has a M.Ed. from Harvard University Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in History and English from Wheaton College, Ill.

Kate Preissler is the Engagement Manager for the Trustees of Reservations serving the Berkshires, the Pioneer Valley, and Central Massachusetts. She oversees the programming, outreach, and visitor’s services at approximately 40 preserved ecological and cultural landscapes in Western Massachusetts including three National Historic Landmarks and one National Natural Landmark. She holds an M.A. in History with a certificate in Public History from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a B.A. in History and English from Bates College.

Jennifer Pustz is the museum historian at Historic New England. She holds a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Iowa and Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in art history. Jennifer is also the author of Voices from the Back Stairs: Interpreting Servants’ Lives at Historic House Museums, recently published by Northern Illinois University Press and contributed to Historic New England’s America’s Kitchens publication and exhibition.

Robert Romer, emeritus professor at Amherst College, has been studying slavery in the Connecticut Valley since 2001. He has given many talks on this little-known topic – to historical societies, churches, college and high school classes, and – his favorite audience – high school history teachers. He recently published the first history of slavery in the valley – Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts (Levellers Press, 2009). He sees it as his primary mission to tell as much as we can of the stories of the many black slaves who lived in the valley in the 1700s – the “invisible men and women of our colonial past.”

D. Joshua Taylor “Josh” is a nationally known and recognized genealogical author, lecturer, and researcher. Currently, Joshua is the Director of Education and Programs at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a frequent speaker at genealogical societies, libraries, and other organizations across the United States. Active in the genealogical community, Joshua is the current Vice President of Administration for the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS), where he also serves as chairman of the Conference Planning Committee and co-chair of the FGS/ISGS 2011 National Conference. He holds an MLS (Archival Management) and an MA (History) from Simmons College and has been a featured genealogist on NBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? with actresses Sarah Jessica Parker and Ashley Judd.

Dr. Shirley Wagner is the Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Fitchburg State University where she has been a faculty member and administrator for 33 years. She also is the Vice President of the Fitchburg Historical Society, is a regular contributor to the Historical Society newsletter, and has worked on the Oral History project with Dr. Laura Baker. She is the moderator on “Remembering Fitchburg’s Jewish History,” a DVD on the importance of the Jewish community in understanding Fitchburg’s history.

William Wallace is Executive Director of Worcester Historical Museum, founded in 1875. He coordinated the move of the museum to its current location at 30 Elm Street and also managed the restoration of Salisbury Mansion, the Museum’s historic house. When not at the Museum, he can be found in a local cemetery, perhaps teaching a class on cemetery/monument history or chairing the City of Worcester’s Hope Cemetery Commission. His personal non-Worcester research interest is pre-1870 Mt. Washington, and his collecting fascination is early Mickey Mouse.

Melissa Westlake, Curator of Education at Historic Newton, develops programming for one of the few Underground Railroad sites in the state that is open to the public. She is currently managing a project to update and expand the museum’s Underground Railroad exhibit. Before coming to Historic Newton, Melissa worked at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. She holds a MA in Museum Studies/American Studies from George Washington University.

Julie Winch is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she has taught since 1985. She teaches a wide range of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including seminars on genealogy and “on-line sleuthing.” She has published five books in 18th and 19th-century African American history, including A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (2002), which received the American Historical Association’s Wesley-Logan Prize. Her latest book, The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America, will be out in June 2011.