Two hundred and fifty years ago on July 4th, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed marking the official birth of our Nation. This year’s lecture series encompasses facets of early American History. The great state of New Hampshire plays a significant role in the nation’s history, as you will learn in April, May and June. In the fall, we resume with a talk on the role of African Americans in the Revolutionary War. We end with a discussion of what the concepts of liberty and equality meant to women.
Each program begins at 5:30 pm in the third-floor Shaw Research Library of the Portsmouth Athenæum at 9 Market Square in Portsmouth, NH. Attendance is FREE for Athenæum Proprietors, Subscribers, and Friends. Guests and members of the public are welcome to attend the entire 2026 series by becoming a Friend of the Athenæum (see link below) for as little as $25 per year, payable at the door. Admission to an individual program is $15.
Reservations for each program are required as seating is limited. The link to online reservation can be found next to each program. If unable to keep your reservation, please call (603) 431-2538 to release the seat for someone else. Reserved seats are honored until five minutes before a program begins.
NOTE: Online registration ends 24 hours before the program begins; thereafter, please call (603) 431-2538, if space is available.
2026 Speakers
On April 15, Dane A. Morrison will present Revolution Comes to the Seacoast.
Four months before the “shot heard round the world” was fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the farmers and fishermen of Seacoast New Hampshire rose up to defy British authority at Fort William and Mary. This is a part of New Hampshire history with which area residents are quite familiar. Less well known is the story of how the colonists’ resistance movement came together. Textbooks recite their grievances – taxes and tyranny – and their demands – relief from impositions on their liberty and recognition of their right to representation. But books seldom explore what these terms meant to those who protested and risked their lives and livelihoods. Prof. Morrison will explore the conditions that led the Seacoast’s communities to rebel against their king.
Dane Morrison is professor emeritus of early American history at Salem State University. He has served as president of the New England Historical Association, New England Regional World History Association and Vice President of the New England American Studies Association. He holds a B.A. from Boston College and Ph.D. from Tufts University. His research has focused on contacts between early America and the world, appearing in A Praying People: Massachusetts Acculturation and the Failure of the Puritan Mission, 1600–1690 (Peter Lang, 1995); True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Eastward of Good Hope: Early America in a Dangerous World (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021); and the forthcoming Yankees Abroad: Critical Themes in World History (Hackett Press). He has also edited or co-edited five volumes on subjects as diverse as the history and contemporary experiences of indigenous North Americans and the 400-year history of Salem, Massachusetts.
On May 20, Judge William Delker will present New Hampshire’s 1776 Constitution: First in the Nation from the Beginning.
In the spring and summer of 1775, tensions between New Hampshire colonists and royal Governor John Wentworth escalated to the point that Governor Wentworth fled the colony out of fear for his own and his family’s safety. In response, New Hampshire patriots elected a provincial congress to serve as a provisional government. That body, however, had no official authority until the Continental Congress in Philadelphia granted New Hampshire permission to form a government. Thus, on January 5, 1776, New Hampshire became the first colony to adopt a constitution of its own. The lecture will explain how the 1776 Constitution was drafted, the significance of that document, and its relationship to New Hampshire’s permanent constitution adopted in 1784.
Hon. N. William Delker is Associate Justice for the New Hampshire Superior Court, to which he was appointed August 2011. Judge Delker was the Supervisory Judge for Rockingham County Superior Court from July 2014 until December 2019 when he transferred to the Hillsborough Superior Court-North in Manchester to fill a vacancy there. In April 2022, he was appointed as the Supervisory Judge of that court. Judge Delker is an active member of the Supreme Court Advisory Committee on Rules, the Judicial Conduct Committee, the N.H. Lawyer’s Assistance Program Board of Trustees, the N.H. Bar Association Leadership Academy, and Chairman of the Superior Court Law Clerk Committee. He has been actively involved in civic education with area schools and teaches Remedies and State Constitutional Law as an adjunct professor at the UNH Franklin Pierce Law School. Prior to joining the bench, Judge Delker was a Senior Assistant Attorney General in the NH Attorney General’s Office, where he worked as a prosecutor for 13 years. He founded the NH Cold Case Unit, prosecuted white collar and public integrity crimes, and worked in the appellate unit. He earned his J.D. summa cum laude from American University’s Washington College of Law and his undergraduate degree summa cum laude from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
On June 17, D. Allan Kerr will present William Whipple: Seaman, Soldier, Statesman and Signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Founding Fathers such as Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Hancock have become mythic figures over the past two-and-a-half centuries, and the entire nation will be celebrating them on this July 4th. There were, however, many other unsung patriots who risked all by putting their name to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The New Hampshire Seacoast is one of the very few American communities that can boast one of our own among the Signers. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration’s adoption presents an opportunity to learn more about Portsmouth’s Gen. William Whipple, his varied roles in the early history of the United States and his personal evolution.
D. Allan Kerr is an ex-dockworker, former newspaperman and Navy veteran who lives in Kittery, Maine. He writes a regular column for Seacoast online. He also initiated and continues to organize the annual Whipple’s Reading event in Kittery to commemorate Independence Day.
After a summer break, the 2026 lecture series returns on September 16 with Glenn Knoblock presenting African American Soldiers and Sailors of New Hampshire During the American Revolution.
One of the most interesting aspects of the American Revolution is the role played by African Americans in the fight for independence. Both free African Americans and those that were enslaved were key in manning state militias and Continental Army units, as well as serving on the high seas in the Navy and on privately armed ships. Indeed, their service to the colonies was crucial in a conflict that lasted nearly seven years. Prohibited from serving in military units and largely considered & “undesirable elements”; how is it that these African American soldiers came to fight for the cause of liberty, even when their own personal liberty was not guaranteed? How and why they enlisted, their interaction with white soldiers, service on the battlefields, how they were perceived by the enemy and the officers under whom they served, and their treatment after the war is examined.
Glenn Knoblock is an independent scholar, the top military contributor to the Harvard/Oxford University Press eight-volume African American National Biography (2008). Author of over 28 books, he documents a wide variety of subjects in New Hampshire and New England history. Mr. Knoblock’s presentation of this lecture is by arrangement with New Hampshire Humanities under that organization’s “Humanities to Go” program.
On October 21, Janet Polasky will present the Remember the Ladies’: Moving Beyond Abigail Adams.
In the Spring of 1776, Abigail Adams famously asked her husband to “give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend.” Even if, this time, John ignored his wife in the drafting of new laws for the independent republic over which he would one day preside, this private plea to pay attention to women reverberated in a few rare revolutionary proposals to recognize women as citizens and more often to acknowledge them as reasonable mothers and partners. What did liberty and equality mean to women writing novels and plays on both sides of the Atlantic in print, or to Black loyalists from Virginia opening shops in Sierra Leone and revolutionary widows in practice? One group of women threatened that, if their equal rights were not granted, they would all leave for a desert island. Prof. Polasky’s lecture explores how ideas arising in New England in 1776 moved into the revolutionary world beyond, only to return later.
Janet Polasky is Presidential Professor of History Emerita at the University of New Hampshire. Her teaching in transnational history has been recognized with the Lindberg Award for Outstanding Scholar Teacher in the College of Liberal Arts and the UNH Jean Brierley Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her favorite class to teach is a freshman seminar, Global Citizenship. The author of six books, her most recent two — Asylum between Nations: Refugees in a Revolutionary Era (2023) and Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (2015) — were published by Yale University Press. Her books include winners of many prestigious prizes. The Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies have supported her research. She is currently writing two books, one global: Revolutionary Women: A Transnational History, and the other local: Evolution of a Progressive Institution: A Church Built of Granite. Dr. Polasky is a Proprietor of the Athenæum and lives with her husband, William Lyons, in Portsmouth.
The 2026 Lecture Series is sponsored by Whole Wealth Management.
Attendance is free for Athenæum Proprietors, Subscribers, and Friends. Guests and members of the public are welcome to attend the entire 2026 series by becoming a Friend of the Athenæum (click on the button below for our online membership form) for as little as $25 per year, payable at the door. Admission to an individual program is $15.
IMAGE: Committee of Congress. Drafting the Declaration of Independence. Depiction of the drafters in Philadelphia in 1776 includes the following people: (l to r) Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
