74th Season

Due to the prevalence of COVID-19, live presentations scheduled for the Amos Fortune Forum were cancelled.  The Committee felt that an important part of the Forum is the chance to sit in the historic Jaffrey Meetinghouse on a warm summer evening, to listen, to learn and to have the opportunity to interact with the speaker, either formally, by asking questions during the presentation, or informally, by attending the reception after the presentation.

However, we are pleased to announce that we will be participants in an amazing opportunity to celebrate the 100^th Anniversary of the ratification of the 19^th Amendment giving women the right to vote.

We join Electric Earth Concerts and the Monadnock Summer Lyceum in bringing you these excellent presentations.  These three events are all on-line but both the Forum and the Lyceum events will be lived-streamed, meaning if you click on the links from our respective websites you will be able to participate in real time by submitting written questions for the speaker.  If you are not able to join us for the live broadcast, you will have the chance to access the presentations at any time, but you will not have the opportunity to question the speaker.

US history has repeatedly seen organized women leading the way to broaden participation in political life. The most recent example has been the surge of women-led new grassroots groups on the center-to-left, in response to the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Lara Putnam will describe how women’s organizing has impacted local and regional electoral politics nationwide, changing the geography of political competition in the 2018 midterms and building new networks and infrastructure that will shape 2020 and beyond.

Lara has strong ties to the Monadnock region as her parents, Rosemary and Bob, have had a home on Frost Pond for over 25 years and Lara has spent many happy days here.

Lara is currently UCIS Research Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh.  She researches social movements and political participation in local, national, and transnational dimensions.

Since 2017 she has been studying shifts in grassroots political organizing in “rust belt” Pennsylvania and beyond, publishing in both public-facing and scholarly venues, including the 2020 volume Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance, ed. Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo (Oxford University Press) as well as the Washington Post, Washington Monthly, Vox, and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Her work was cited in the August 3^rd issue of the New Yorker in their lead essay in the “Talk of the Town” section.

Putnam is immediate Past President of the Conference on Latin American History and consulting editor for digital initiatives for the American Historical Review.

We hope you will enjoy this presentation and will tune in to both the Electric Earth Concerts celebration beginning on August 15 at 4:00 p.m. (www.electricearthconcerts.org) and the Monadnock Summer Lyceum presentation, live on August 16 at 10:45 a.m.  (www.monadnocklyceum.org) and available on their website thereafter.