VIRTUAL PROGRAM
In celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, join Keiter Family Executive Director Jane Wald on a virtual exploration of Dickinson family objects within the context of national identity and events. Beginning with the Dickinsons and the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, the program will draw on the family library and unique objects in the Museum collection including household ceramics, toys, and period artwork to examine the material texture of their nineteenth-century life. These artifacts invite us to look within the nation and consider the perspective of “a Barefoot Citizen.”
He told a homely tale
And spotted it with tears –
Opon his infant face was set
The Cicatrice of years –
All crumpled was the cheek
No other kiss had known
Than flake of snow, divided with
The Redbreast of the Barn –
If Mother – in the Grave –
Or Father – on the Sea –
Or Father in the Firmament –
Or Bretheren, had he –
If Commonwealth below,
Or Commonwealth above
Have missed a Barefoot Citizen –
I’ve ransomed it – alive –
Fr486
Jane Wald is the Jane and Robert Keiter Family Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum. She has been responsible for several major restoration and documentation studies at the Museum and is the author of “‘Pretty much all real life’: The Material World of the Dickinson Family,” in the Blackwell Companion to Emily Dickinson (2008), “The ‘Poet Hunters’: Transforming Emily Dickinson’s Home into a Literary Destination,” in the Emily Dickinson Journal (2018), and “A Short Biography of the Homestead and The Evergreens” in the Oxford Handbook to Emily Dickinson (2022).