Poet-Farmer Scott Chaskey Reflects on ‘Soil and Spirit’
On Thursday, August 24, the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum will host Scott Chaskey, poet-farmer and pioneer of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, for a presentation of his latest memoir, Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life (Milkweed Editions, 2023).
As a farmer with decades spent working in the fields, Chaskey’s worldview has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. His career as a writer has been influenced by these experiences, showing a profound commitment to the promotion of food sovereignty and organic agriculture. In both writing and farming, his efforts have been animated by a central conviction—that humble attention to microbial life provides us with invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities.
Soil and Spirit is a collection of personal essays, mapping the evolution of Chaskey’s thoughts on ecology, agriculture, and society through decisive moments in his biography. In its pages, he takes readers to his original homestead in Maine; the rugged Irish countryside, complete with blackberries, heather, and Nobel-Prize-winning poets; the ancient granite cliffs of the Cornwall coastline; Santa Clara, New Mexico, where he harvested amaranth seeds alongside a group of indigenous women; and finally, to Amagansett, in Suffolk County, where he recalls planting Redwood saplings and writing poetry beneath a centuries-old beech tree.
The lecture will take place at 7:00 pm in the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum’s Charles and Helen Reichert Planetarium. Support for the lecture series is generously provided by a grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation.
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Scott Chaskey is the author of Soil and Spirit. He is also the author of a memoir, This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm, and a book of nonfiction, Seedtime: On the History, Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds. His poetry, first printed in literary journals in the early seventies, has been widely published over four decades.
A pioneer of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, for thirty years he cultivated more than sixty crops for the Peconic Land Trust at Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, New York, one of the original CSAs in the country. He is the past president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York and was honored as Farmer of the Year in 2013.
Chaskey was a founding board member for both the Center for Whole Communities, in Vermont, and Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, in Shelter Island, New York. He taught as a poet-in-the-schools for over two decades and as an instructor for Antioch International and Friends World College in Southampton. He lives and works on the east end of Long Island, New York.
Untold Colonial History: ‘The Saltwater Frontier’
The Vanderbilt Museum will host Andrew Lipman, Associate Professor of History at Barnard College, for a lecture based on his award-winning book The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (Yale University Press, 2015) – on Thursday, September 28, at 7:00 pm.
In The Saltwater Frontier, Lipman shares the previously untold story of how the ocean became a “frontier” between colonists and Indians. In a radical reinterpretation of early America, Lipman’s analysis shifts our attention to when the English and Dutch empires both tried to claim the same patch of coast between the Hudson River and Cape Cod, transforming the sea itself into an arena of contact and conflict. During this period of violent European invasions, the region’s Algonquin-speaking Natives were important navigators, boatbuilders, fishermen, pirates, and merchants. Lipman’s study demonstrates how these seafarers became active players in the emergence of the Atlantic World.
Drawing from a wide range of English, Dutch, and archaeological sources, The Saltwater Frontier uncovers a new geography of Native America that incorporates seawater as well as soil. Lipman makes a persuasive case for rethinking our traditional understanding of the period and for appreciating the significance of Long Island’s coastal waters in the early history of colonial America.
The lecture will take place at 7:00 pm in the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum’s Charles and Helen Reichert Planetarium theater. Support for the lecture series is generously provided by a grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation.
Purchase Tickets
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Andrew Lipman is a historian of Early America at Barnard College in New York, New York. His research interests include the Atlantic World, early America, Native Americans, violence, technology, and the environment. His first book, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast, was a finalist for the New England Society Book Award in Nonfiction, the PROSE award in U.S. History, and the winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History.
Lipman’s work has appeared in Common-Place, Early American Studies, Reviews in American History, and the William and Mary Quarterly. He has also contributed pieces to Slate and Time. His research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, The Huntington Library, The International Seminar in the History of the Atlantic World at Harvard University, and the John Carter Brown Library. He is presently completing a book manuscript titled The Death and Life of Squanto.
Immigrants and the American Landscape
On Thursday, November 2, the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum will host Wambui Ippolito, an award-winning landscape designer, and author, for An evening lecture on the contributions immigrants have made to the American landscape.
In a relatively short period of time, American landscapes have been altered, reshaped, and diversified by intense immigrant activities. Much like waves of earlier settlement, today’s immigrants continue to change the land through their gardening activities. These individuals introduce plants and practices that are beneficial and problematic to the land, forever transforming the American terrain.
In her lecture “Immigrants and the Evolution of the American Landscape,” Ippolito will take us through various immigrant garden landscapes and histories—from the early Scottish and Irish gardeners at great estates to today’s largely Central American workforces—with hopes of inspiring a new understanding and approach to immigrant land management.
The lecture will take place at 7:00 pm in the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum’s Charles and Helen Reichert Planetarium theater. Support for the lecture series is generously provided by a grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation.
Purchase Tickets
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Wambui Ippolito is a horticulturalist, landscape designer, and author based in New York City. She is a graduate of the prestigious New York Botanical Garden School of Professional Horticulture, and she has designed gardens for commercial, residential, and public spaces. Her design for the 2021 Philadelphia Flower Show won the competition by unanimous decision.
Wambui Ippolito is the author of an upcoming book on the contributions of immigrants to the American landscape. In 2022, she was invited to design a new Exhibition Courtyard for the expansion of the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond, Virginia. Her commission marks the first time that an African-born female designer has been asked to create a permanent installation for a North American botanical garden.
‘American Rascal’: Jay Gould Builds Wall Street’s Biggest Fortune
On Thursday, December 7, the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum will host Greg Steinmetz, author of The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger, for a lecture adapted from his latest publication American Rascal: How Jay Gould Built Wall Street’s Biggest Fortune (Simon & Schuster, 2022).
In American Rascal, Steinmetz recounts the gripping life of Jay Gould, one of the nineteenth century’s most infamous robber barons, whose brilliance, greed, and bare-knuckled tactics made him wealthier than Rockefeller and led Wall Street to institute its first reforms. He shares how Gould quickly became a notorious figure at the age of twenty-four, when he paralyzed the economy and nearly topped President Ulysses S. Grant in the Black Friday market collapse of 1869 as he sought to corner the gold market.
American Rascal shows Gould’s complex, quirky character. He was at once praised for his brilliance by Rockefeller and Vanderbilt and condemned for forever destroying American business values by Mark Twain. He lived a colorful life, trading jokes with Thomas Edison, figuring Thomas Nast’s best sketches, and commuting to work on a 200-foot yacht.
The lecture will take place at 7:00 pm in the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum’s Charles and Helen Reichert Planetarium theater. Support for the lecture series is generously provided by a grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation.
Purchase Tickets
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Greg Steinmetz is an American journalist, author, and securities analyst. He was born and raised in Clevland, Ohio. He attended Colgate University, earning degrees in History and German, before attending the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Steinmetz spent fifteen years working as a journalist for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Houston Chronicle, Newsday, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger (Simon & Schuster, 2015), a highly regarded biography about wealth, politics, and religion.
