Virtual Lecture: Sermons in Stone
Social history of the stone walls of New York and New England and based on the book, Sermons in Stone.
What do we know about stone walls? About the people who built them, and why? Stone walls are not simply monuments to the skill of Yankee farmers. The historical record makes clear that many were built by enslaved people, Native Americans, indentured servants, and children.
Written by Susan Allport, Sermons in Stone is the illuminating history of the walls, a story that begins in the Ice Age and that has been shaped by the fencing dilemmas of the nineteenth century, by conflicts between Native Americans and colonists over land use, by American waves of immigration and suburbanization.
This book brought the history of New England stone walls into many peoples consciousness and is often cited in other books that touch on the subject.
About the author:
Susan Allport is a writer turned baker. After publishing her most recent book The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s were Removed from the Western Diet and What We can do to Replace Them (University of California Press; September, 2006), she put words into action and developed a line of high omega-3 cookies: Susie’s Smart Breakfast Cookie, now sold in Whole Foods and numerous other locations. Allport’s previous books are The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging and Love (Crown, 2000); A Natural History of Parenting (Crown, 1997); Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York (Norton, 1990); and Explorers of the Black Box: The Search for the Cellular Basis of Memory (Norton, 1986). Both The Primal Feast and A Natural History of Parenting won Washington Irving Book Awards.
Allport also contributes essays, travel articles, and book reviews to The New York Times, Gastronomica, Audubon, The Hartford Courant, The Providence Journal-Bulletin, The American Scholar and The Missouri Review and lectures at the American Museum of Natural History and other locations. In 2004, she was the McGee Professor of Writing at Davidson College in North Carolina.
Allport was a graduate student in the Department of Human Genetics at Yale University. She obtained her M.S. from Tulane University in 1976 and her B.A. in English from the Claremont Colleges in 1973. A member of the Author’s Guild, the Morgenthau Preserve, and the American Oil Chemists’ Society, she lives with her family in Katonah, NY.
Registration link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-lecture-sermons-in-stone-tickets-211995402957