Racism and Disenfranchisement: Then and Now

“Racism and Disenfranchisement: Then and Now” sponsored by Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House and The Thoreau Society with interviewer Jan Turnquist and guest speakers Maria Madison and Sandra Harbert Petrulionis

Watch the recording: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/-uFzHb2t_CBJW9LWuR6GU4U5NJ7ieaa82yZKrP…

Webinar Books: https://bit.ly/3haEMfw

Since 1999, as Executive Director of Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, where Little Women was written and set, Jan Turnquist has also shared the Alcott legacy in internationally acclaimed Alcott living history portrayals and an Emmy-winning documentary, now airing on PBS, Orchard House, Home of Little Women, which she wrote and directed.

Dr. Maria Madison is the Associate Dean for Equity, Inclusion and Diversity at the Heller School for Social Policy, Brandeis University.  She is also the Co-Founder and President of The Robbins House, Inc. created to raise awareness of historical roots of racism and disenfranchisement.  She completed her doctoral degree at the Harvard School of Public Health, focusing on international health epidemiology and program evaluation, with a particular focus on underserved populations. She and her colleagues recently won the Human Rights Council  for Freedom Award, 2020, and the inaugural Robert Gross Award for History from the Concord Museum, 2019.

Dr. Sandra Harbert Petrulionis is Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at Penn State University. She is the author of To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord, the editor of Thoreau In His Own Time, and co-editor of other works on Thoreau and Transcendentalism. Although she read Walden in high school, no one introduced her to the militant Thoreau until graduate school, a deficiency she takes every opportunity to correct with her own students.