ZOOM- The Character of the Place- Hartford

This program will also be streamed to our Kingsley Room. Register here if you want to watch it at the library.

When Sam Clemens first visited Hartford in 1868, he deemed it “the best built and the handsomest town I have ever seen.” But Hartford was more than just a pretty place–it was the richest city in the United States at the time. “Hartford dollars have a place in half the great moneyed enterprises of the Union,” Clemens noted, and his neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe called it “fat, rich, and cosy.”

Join us as we explore the social, cultural, and economic dynamics of the Gilded Age through the city where Clemens helped coin the term itself, as well as the ways the city shaped his career and personal life.

Erin Bartram has been the School Programs Coordinator at The Mark Twain House & Museum since 2019. She holds a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Connecticut and taught for three years at the University of Hartford. She is co-founder and editor of Contingent Magazine, and co-editor of the Rethinking Careers, Rethinking Academia series for the University Press of Kansas. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, U.S. Catholic Historian, and Religion & American Culture.

Like all Southbury Public Library programs, this event is free to attend and open to anyone regardless of town of residency. Registration is required. This program is sponsored by the Charles H. and Ella Emery Rutledge Fund.  For more information about this program, please email Rebecca at rrandall@biblio.org or call the reference desk at 203-262-0626 ext 130.