Maine Historical Society - Programs Podcast

Recorded June 20, 2023 - Wit and Wisdom begins with the story of an odd discovery in a Maine attic—a discovery that led Joan Radner to uncover a long-lost rural tradition of joyful wintertime gatherings. We might imagine that the long, dark winter evenings and deep snows of northern New England would have isolated nineteenth-century families in their scattered farmsteads. But this was far from the truth: rural villagers saw winter as a "season of improvement," a time not only for home industries and woods work, but also for mental exercise in good company. Neighbors bent on self-improvement created local "lyceums"—they conducted formal debates on current topics and performed aloud handwritten "papers" compiling their homegrown literary compositions. Ordinary people—men and women of all ages, farmers and mechanics, and the few village intelligentsia—wrote poetry, serious essays, witty parodies, and sundry pieces teasing one another. In this podcast Joan Radner discusses what she found in found dozens o