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Naomi Slipp, Douglas and Cynthia Crocker Endowed Chair for the Chief Curator & Director of Museum Learning at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, comes to Marion to give us a special look at one of the Museum’s current exhibits: Lighting the Way: SouthCoast Women’s Lives, Labors, Loves. SHS is delighted to welcome Naomi again as she shares more stories from this wonderful exhibit that is on view through May 4, 2025.

SHS always welcome donations at this free event that is open to members and all. An RSVP is appreciated.

Before he was executed in 1701, Captain William Kidd was one of the most notorious pirates to prowl the seas. But few know that he had an accomplice back home: his wife, Sarah, a woman whose life is a lesson in survival, resilience, and resourcefulness. SHS is pleased to present historian and journalist Dr. Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos, who tells Sarah Kidd’s story. 

In her book, The Pirate’s Wife, Dr. Geanacopoulosis takes a fresh and feminist perspective  on a historical period that’s often written around men. Utilizing a trove of original documents, Dr. Geanacopoulos reconstructs Sarah’s life (1670-1744) in New York – when the colony was a pirate haven – her roles as wife, mother, merchant, and socialite, and delves into the swashbucklingly nasty politics of the time. She was key to Kidd’s fight for his life against the people who accused him of turning from privateer to pirate, and was even initially arrested and jailed with him.  Sarah went from socialite to fugitive and international outlaw, and back again, always managing to find her own agency within the oppressive structures of colonial America.

Dr. Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos is a historian, journalist, and author of The Pirate Next Door: The Untold Story of Eighteenth-Century Pirates’ Wives, Families and Communities. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Southern Living.

Your kind RSVP  is appreciated.