Author Talk Kicks Off Summer Series
The Egan Maritime Foundation, Mill Hill Press and the Maria Mitchell Association is pleased to announce that former Nantucket resident, Margaret Moore Booker and author of Among the Stars: The Life of Maria Mitchell published in May 2007 by Mill Hill Press will kick off the summer lecture series at the historic Coffin School on Thursday, June 7 at 8 p.m.
Booker will be introduced by the nationally acclaimed and former Director of the Egan Maritime Institute of Maritime Studies, Nathaniel Philbrick. Philbrick was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in History and is a trustee of the Egan Maritime Foundation.
Maria Mitchell is usually and properly celebrated as the first American female astronomer of worldwide reputation. Her achievements as a pioneer of the education of women at Vassar College and as a national leader of women’s movements in the latter half of the 19th century are less well known. Booker’s book, exhaustively researched and annotated, documents Mitchell’s progress from Nantucket schoolgirl and librarian. Drawing on journals, scholarly publications, and letters, the author shows how this extraordinary women launched herself into the male-dominated worlds of science and education, and how she left a substantive mark on both.
This book also tells the more human story of this sturdy product of Quaker Nantucket upbringing who discovered a comet while peering through a simple telescope on the roof of her family home. She earned the price of her travels and scientific materials by computing navigational tables for the Nantucket Almanac and then moved into the larger world. She traveled around the southern United States, hobnobbed with the leading astronomers of Europe, and found herself charmed – almost beguiled – by the bohemian, artistic set of Rome. Booker tells how this broader exposure equipped Mitchell for her role as an educator and educational philosopher, and, as president of the Association for the Advancement of Women, a women’s leader of national stature. Toward the end of her life, widely honored and respected, Mitchell clung to her two beloved causes: science and the education of women.
The lecture is free of charge to Egan Maritime Foundation and Maria Mitchell Association members. The entry fee for all others is $5 at the door.
Margaret Moore Booker now resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she continues to research and write. She is the author of two other Mill Hill Press publications: The Admirals Academy and Nantucket Spirit: the Art and Life of Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin. Several paintings by Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin are on display at the Nantucket Historical Association’s Whitney Gallery at 7 Fair Street entitled The Art of Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin.
Booker is also the coauthor of Sea Captain’s Houses and Rose-Covered Cottages, which was in 2003 chosen as a “Notable Book of the Year” by The New York Times Book Review.
The next lecture offered at the Egan Maritime Foundation will be Susan Beegel speaking about Nantucket Women in History, Thursday, June 21 at 8 p.m. For a complete schedule of events and lectures, visit their web site at www.EganMaritime.org.
