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The Concord Festival of Authors
2019 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Wednesday, October 30 • 7-8 PM • Concord Free Public Library, 129 Main Street
The Robbins House: History & Race
This panel features historians who authored and reviewed The Robbins House, Inc. (TRH) brochure series, which underscores the need to communicate about race and history in ways that “reflect the humanity of the millions of black men, women and children who claimed their personhood, in various ways large and small, despite the laws and systems that bound them.” The conversation will explore how throughout American history, people of African descent have demanded the right to define their racial identity through terms that reflect their proud and complex history. Moderated by Elon Cook Lee, Humanities Consultant for The Robbins House, the panel includes three of our advisory historians:
![Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? We have you covered with a little Robbins house trivia. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem entitled Peter’s Field. Peter’s Field most likely referenced Peter Hutchinson, who was the last African American owner of The Robbins House. Peter purchased the home in 1852 and lived with his wife, Nancy, and several of their children in the home until 1868. Emerson described Peter’s farm, and by extension the original area of farmland attached to The Robbins House out in the Great Field like this:
KNOWS he who tills this lonely field
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight and at morn?]
That field by spirits bad and good,
By Hell and Heaven is haunted,
And every rood in the hemlock wood
I know is ground enchanted.
[In the long sunny afternoon
The plain was full of ghosts:
I wandered up,
I wandered down,
Beset by pensive hosts.
For in those lonely grounds the sun
Shines not as on the town,
In nearer arcs his journeys run,
And nearer stoops the moon.
There in a moment I have seen
The buried Past arise;
The fields of Thessaly grew green,
Old gods forsook the skies.
Happy Reading!](https://robbinshouse.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)