Brown Bag Lecture Series

The Brown Bag Lecture Series features best-selling authors from Maine and New England as well as from across the nation and world. Programs are scheduled from noon-1:00 pm in the Rines Auditorium unless otherwise noted. Bring your lunch and enjoy...Coffee, tea, and light refreshments will be provided. 

All programs are free and open to the public, and are fully accessible to people with disabilities. 

Special thanks to our Coffee provider

Books on sale at each lecture courtesy of Longfellow Books, who generously donates a portion of the proceeds to the Portland Public Library.  

    Questions about our Brown Bag Lectures or to be added to our weekly calendar e-mail, send us an e-mail!

Upcoming guest speakers include:  

August 6
Eve LaPlante, author of 
Salem Witch Judge: The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall

Samuel Sewall, the only judge (of nine involved) to publicly repent his decision to condemn twenty innocent people as witches in 1692, is the subject of this new biography by Eve LaPlante, who counts Sewall as her sixth-great-grandfather, the book charts the remarkable conversion of Sewall from a jurist who was caught up in the hysteria and fears of witchcraft to a moral hero.  He spent the rest of his life as an unlikely visionary, championing the rights of African Americans, Native Americans, and women in an era that was especially hostile to them. 

Samuel Sewall sat on the Massachusetts court that tried hundreds of people accused of witchcraft. He heard and believed the Salem Village girls who claimed their neighbors used ghosts to torture and bewitch them. As the scope of the Devil’s apparent attack on New England grew, Sewall convicted more than thirty people as witches. He stood by as nineteen women and men were hanged and one man was pressed to death with large stones. Some witchcraft suspects were strangers to him, but others were his friends.  After public opinion turned against the court, the governor halted the witchcraft trials. Yet he rewarded Sewall and other witch judges with appointments to a much higher court, and neither he nor the judges made any public statement of regret for the witch-hunt. For several years Sewall struggled with a growing sense of shame and remorse. This private effort culminated in the public moment when he – alone among colonial officials who supported the witch hunt – assumed the “blame and shame” for killing twenty innocent people. Sewall spent much of the remainder of his life repenting, trying to restore himself in the eyes of God. He authored America’s first antislavery statement, “The Selling of Joseph,” in 1700, for which his peers ridiculed him. His remarkable 1697 essay, Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica, which placed the Second Coming of Jesus Christ on the Massachusetts coast, is now considered the first work of American literature in the sense of being conscious of itself as American. His late essay calling for the “right of women” and the fundamental equality of the sexes, Talitha Cumi, is reprinted for the first time since 1725 in Salem Witch Judge.

Eve LaPlante’s introduction to her family history came via her Great Aunt Charlotte, who ran a famous inn on Cape Cod. In her spare time Aunt Charlotte traced the family’s genealogy. She gave her great niece Eve a copy of the family tree when she turned thirteen.  Previous biographies of Sewall were dryly academic. LaPlante, whose earlier biography, American Jezebel, portrayed another ancestor, Anne Hutchinson, vividly recreates Sewall’s life and times. Drawing on rare documents not previously available and Sewall’s extensive personal diaries and letters, Salem Witch Judge is a compelling work of narrative nonfiction that explores how the Salem witch trials could have happened and their most surprising results.

August 20
Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette AND
Jody Lisberger, author of Remember Love: Stories

(NOTE: THIS PROGRAM WILL RUN UNTIL 1:30)
Jody Lisbrger’s provocatively titled short story collection will make readers wonder just how and when they should ‘remember love.’  As trauma, as what persists, as what confines, as what liberates, as what disappoints, as what we live for?  And what shapes do our loves assume in all their infinite variety?  Not only the human content but the aesthetic form of these accomplished stories makes them worthy of profound attention.

Jody Lisberger’s prize-winning fiction has appeared in Confrontation, Fugue, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Louisville Review, and Thema.  She is on the faculty of the brief-residency MFA Writing Program at Spalding University, in Louisville, Kentucky.  She also teaches in the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Rhode Island, where she specializes in courses on feminist theory and postcolonial literature.  Originally trained as an anthropologist, she received her PhD in English at Boston University, where she was a University Fellow.  She also has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College.  She has taught at Holy Cross, Tufts University, Harvard University, and Brown University.  She now lives in Rhode Island.

"Like everyone, I am born naked."  With this opening line of Naslund's compelling new novel, a very human Marie Antoinette invites readers to live her story as she herself experiences it. From the lush gardens of Versailles to the lights and gaiety of Paris, the verdant countryside of France, and finally the stark and terrifying isolation of a prison cell, the young queen's life is joyful, poignant, and harrowing by turns. As her world of unprecedented royal splendor crumbles, the charming Marie Antoinette matures into a heroine of inspiring stature, one whose nobility arises not from the circumstance of her birth but from her courageous spirit.

Marie Antoinette was a child of fourteen when her mother, the Empress of Austria, arranged for her to leave her family and her country to become the wife of the fifteen-year-old Dauphin, the future King of France. Coming of age in the most public of arenas, the young queen embraces her new family and the French people, and she is embraced in return. Eager to be a good wife and strong queen, she shows her new husband nothing but love and encouragement, though he repeatedly fails to consummate their marriage and in doing so, fails to give her the thing she and the people of France desire most: a child and an heir to the throne.

Deeply disappointed and isolated in her own inti-mate circle apart from the social life of the court, the queen allows herself to remain ignorant of the country's growing economic and political crises. She entrusts her soul to her women friends, her music teacher, her hairdresser, the ambassador from Austria, and a certain Swedish count so handsome that admirers label him "the Picture." When her innocent and well-chaperoned pilgrimage to watch the sun rise is viciously misrepresented in satiric pamphlets as a drunken orgy, the people begin to turn against her. Poor harvests, bitter winters, war debts, and poverty precipitate rebellion and revenge as the royal family and many nobles are caught up in a murderous time known as "the Terror."

With penetrant insight into new historical scholarship and with wondrous narrative skill, Naslund offers an intimate, fresh, and dramatic re-creation of this compelling woman that goes beyond popular myth. Abundance reveals a compassionate and spontaneous Marie Antoinette who rejected the formality and rigid protocol of the court; an enchanting and tenderhearted outsider who was loved by her adopted homeland and people until she became the target of revolutionary cruelty and violence; a dethroned queen whose depth of character sustained her in even the worst of times.

Once again, Sena Jeter Naslund has shed new light on an important moment of historical change and made that time as real to us as the one we are living now. Exquisitely detailed, beautifully written, heartbreaking and powerful, Abundance is a novel that is impossible to put down.

September 3

The titanic three-day battle of Gettysburg left 50,000 casualties in its wake, a battered Southern army far from its base of supplies, and a rich historiographic legacy. Thousands of books and articles cover nearly every aspect of the battle, but not a single volume focuses on the military aspects of the monumentally important movements of the armies to and across the Potomac River. One Continuous Fight: The Retreat from Gettysburg and the Pursuit of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, July 4-14, 1863 is the first detailed military history of Lee's retreat and the Union effort to catch and destroy the wounded Army of Northern Virginia.

Against steep odds and encumbered with thousands of casualties, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee's post-battle task was to successfully withdraw his army across the Potomac River. Union commander George G. Meade's equally difficult assignment was to intercept the effort and destroy his enemy. The responsibility for defending the exposed Southern columns belonged to cavalry chieftain James Ewell Brown (Jeb) Stuart. If Stuart fumbled his famous ride north to Gettysburg, his generalship during the retreat more than redeemed his flagging reputation.

The ten days of retreat triggered nearly two dozen skirmishes and major engagements, including fighting at Granite Hill, Monterey Pass, Hagerstown, Williamsport, Funkstown, Boonsboro, and Falling Waters. President Abraham Lincoln was thankful for the early July battlefield victory, but disappointed that General Meade was unable to surround and crush the Confederates before they found safety on the far side of the Potomac. Exactly what Meade did to try to intercept the fleeing Confederates, and how the Southerners managed to defend their army and ponderous 17-mile long wagon train of wounded until crossing into western Virginia on the early morning of July 14, is the subject of this study.

One Continuous Fight draws upon a massive array of documents, letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, and published primary and secondary sources. These long-ignored foundational sources allow the authors, each widely known for their expertise in Civil War cavalry operations, to describe carefully each engagement. The result is a rich and comprehensive study loaded with incisive tactical commentary, new perspectives on the strategic role of the Southern and Northern cavalry, and fresh insights on every engagement, large and small, fought during the retreat.

The retreat from Gettysburg was so punctuated with fighting that a soldier felt compelled to describe it as "One Continuous Fight." Until now, few students fully realized the accuracy of that description. Complimented with 18 original maps, dozens of photos, and a complete driving tour with GPS coordinates of the entire retreat, One Continuous Fight is an essential book for every student of the American Civil War in general, and for the student of Gettysburg in particular.

The titanic three-day battle of Gettysburg left 50,000 casualties in its wake, a battered Southern army far from its base of supplies, and a rich historiographic legacy. Thousands of books and articles cover nearly every aspect of the battle, but not a single volume focuses on the military aspects of the monumentally important movements of the armies to and across the Potomac River. One Continuous Fight: The Retreat from Gettysburg and the Pursuit of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, July 4-14, 1863 is the first detailed military history of Lee's retreat and the Union effort to catch and destroy the wounded Army of Northern Virginia.

Against steep odds and encumbered with thousands of casualties, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee's post-battle task was to successfully withdraw his army across the Potomac River. Union commander George G. Meade's equally difficult assignment was to intercept the effort and destroy his enemy. The responsibility for defending the exposed Southern columns belonged to cavalry chieftain James Ewell Brown (Jeb) Stuart. If Stuart fumbled his famous ride north to Gettysburg, his generalship during the retreat more than redeemed his flagging reputation.

The ten days of retreat triggered nearly two dozen skirmishes and major engagements, including fighting at Granite Hill, Monterey Pass, Hagerstown, Williamsport, Funkstown, Boonsboro, and Falling Waters. President Abraham Lincoln was thankful for the early July battlefield victory, but disappointed that General Meade was unable to surround and crush the Confederates before they found safety on the far side of the Potomac. Exactly what Meade did to try to intercept the fleeing Confederates, and how the Southerners managed to defend their army and ponderous 17-mile long wagon train of wounded until crossing into western Virginia on the early morning of July 14, is the subject of this study.

A long time student of the Gettysburg Campaign, Michael Nugent is a retired US Army Armored Cavalry Officer and the descendant of a Civil War Cavalry soldier.  He has previously written for several military publications. Nugent is a Sergeant in the Westbrook Police Department and lives in Wells.

September 17

Elizabeth Royte, Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It

In the follow-up to Garbage Land, her influential investigation into our modern trash crisis, Elizabeth Royte ventures to Fryeburg, Maine, to look deep into the source—of Poland Spring water. In this tiny town, and in others like it across the country, she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that have made bottled water a $60-billion-a-year phenomenon even as it threatens local control of a natural resource and litters the landscape with plastic waste.

Moving beyond the environmental consequences of making, filling, transporting and landfilling those billions of bottles, Royte examines the state of tap water today (you may be surprised), and the social impact of water-hungry multinationals sinking ever more pumps into tiny rural towns. Ultimately, Bottlemania makes a case for protecting public water supplies, for improving our water infrastructure and—in a world of increasing drought and pollution—better allocating the precious drinkable water that remains.

Elizabeth Royte has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, and the New Yorker. She is the author of Garbage Land and The Tapir’s Morning Bath.

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