The Stockbridge Library, Museum and Archives

Join us on Saturday, June 8, 2013 from 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. for the second monthly cemetery tour of 2013, staffed by our Museum & Archives.  This month’s tour is Where Do I Get That? Making a Living in 1875.  You will learn where residents got the goods and services needed in daily life in 1875 Stockbridge. Along the way, you will meet the shopkeepers, laborers, and manufacturers who lived here, and discover the surprising range of work available in town.

This is the second of 6 monthly tours of the Stockbridge Cemetery, May through October. Each monthly tour has a different theme. All tours take place on Saturdays, from 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Parking is available at the Old Town Hall on Main Street. A suggested donation of $5.00 is welcome.

For more information, contact the Stockbridge Library at 413-298-5501 or karensmarshall [at] yahoo.com.

Join us for a talk, Q& A, and book signing with Karen Shepard, author of the new historical novel, The Celestials. This program is free and open to the public.

About the book: In June of 1870, seventy-five Chinese laborers arrived in North Adams, Massachusetts, to work for Calvin Sampson, a shoe manufacturer and one of the biggest industrialists in that busy factory town. Except for the foreman, the Chinese didn’t speak English. They didn’t know they were strikebreakers. The eldest of them was twenty-two.

Despite threats from the fired union workers, there were no major incidents of violence. Within days, the Chinese were at work. Within weeks, they were studying with local volunteers. The fired workers opened a cooperative factory, but The Knights of St. Crispin, the biggest union in the country, was broken. North Adams wouldn’t have another union strike—in any industry—for a decade.

The Celestials follows several characters but is centrally focused on the relationships between Sampson and his wife, Julia, who has had several miscarriages over the course of their childless marriage; Sampson and his new workers, whom he comes to look upon as “sons”; and the townspeople and the Celestials, who are regarded as both threatening and exotic. When Julia gives birth to a clearly mixed-race baby, the infant becomes a lightning rod for the novel’s questions concerning identity, alienation, and exile.

The Celestials is a historical novel of immigration, multiculturalism, labor, community and exclusion, alienation and reinvention, and our country’s peculiar history and relationship with all those things. It’s about our shared sense that we’re all aliens of some kind—at home in no place. The book asks us to think about how we make ourselves into the people we want to be, and what gets sacrificed along the way.

About the author: Karen Shepard is a Chinese-American born and raised in New York City. She is the author of three novels, An Empire of Women, The Bad Boy’s Wife, Don’t I Know You?, and the forthcoming The Celestials. Her short fiction has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and Ploughshares, among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in More, Self, USA Today, and the Boston Globe, among others. She teaches writing and literature at Williams College in Williamstown, MA, where she lives with her husband, novelist Jim Shepard, and their three children.

Presented by the Museum & Archives:

Abigail Williams (1721-1791) will receive callers for tea in the Library’s Bement Room.  Nineteenth and early twentieth century Stockbridge ladies (all in period costumes) will stop by for tea and local gossip of their times.

Tables will be set up so guests may partake of refreshments as well as listen to and join in the conversation. Tickets will be $5 (available at the Library).

Reservations are suggested as space is limited. For more information contact the library at 413-298-5501 or ballen[at]cwmars.org.

Save the date!  The Stockbridge Library will hold its annual used book sale, a tradition under the tent, on the library’s front lawn July 12-14, 2013, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day.

Over 16,000 gently used books, audio books, CDs, and DVDs, in 36 categories for easy browsing. Unbelievably great bargain prices. Admission is FREE ($5 donation during the Preview Period on Friday, July 12, between 9 a.m. and 12 noon.)

You can also donate your gently used books, CDs, and DVDs for the sale. Bring them to the front desk of the Stockbridge Library or for a large quantity pickup, call 413-298-5501.

All proceeds benefit the Stockbridge Library, Museum & Archives. For more information contact the Library at 413-298-5501.

More information to come.