Book Signing & Publication Event

Wednesday, November 5, 2014   5 - 7 pm

Join authors J. Michael Moore and Anna Schuleit Haber at Historic Northampton for a book signing and publication party to celebrate their new book Northampton State Hospital in the Images of America series by Arcadia Press.

This volume brings to life the 135-year story of Northampton State Hospital through rare photographs drawn from the collections of Historic Northampton.

The book will be available for purchase at the book signing for a special price.

Northampton State Hospital, established in 1856, was built with the optimistic spirit of humanitarian reform. For many years, it was run by Dr. Pliny Earle, a champion of treatment that combined individualized care with manual labor, religious worship, recreation, and amusement. This vision was overwhelmed as the hospital was called upon to care for ever-larger numbers of people with varying needs. By the mid-20th century, the hospital was an isolated small “city,” with hundreds of employees caring for more than 2,000 patients in overcrowded and inadequate conditions. It became a nationally important center of political and legal struggle over the role of state hospitals in the care of the mentally ill. After being gradually phased out, the hospital was closed in 1993, and the buildings, though listed in the National Register of Historic Places, were demolished in 2006.

J. Michael Moore is a public historian who has worked on a wide range of projects in New England. He is a graduate of the UMass Public History Program. He directed the Northampton State Hospital Oral History Project, which chronicled the experience of work at this hospital for the mentally ill and the changes in mental health care over the last half century. As Industrial Historian at the Worcester Historical Museum he developed In Their Shirtsleeves, a permanent exhibition that tells the story of American industrial development through the experience of the people of Worcester, Massachusetts. Moore directed the project “Sogni D’Oro – Dreams of Gold,” which chronicled the experience of Italian immigrants and their descendants in Fitchburg and Leominster, Massachusetts. He served as a consultant and editor for the project Creating Eden: A Portrait of an American City through its Gardens, for the Somerville (MA) Arts Council. He has served as an instructor in the practice of oral history and the practice and potential of public history projects. He is the co-author, with David Glassberg, of “Patriotism in Orange: The Memory of World War I in a Massachusetts Town,” in Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism, from Princeton University Press.

Anna Schuleit Haber is a visual artist whose work lies at the intersection of painting, drawing, installation art, architecture, history, and community. Her works have ranged from museum installations made with paint, to large-scale projects in forests and on uninhabited islands, using extensive sound systems, live sod, thousands of flowers, mirrors, antique telephones, and bodies of water. One of her projects was a large-scale sound installation for the former Northampton State Hospital, in which the architecture was made to sound in a single performance of J.S. Bach's Magnificat, a choral piece in twelve movements. The project was affiliated with Historic Northampton, the Department of Mental Health, and Smith College, and included a symposium and an open forum with former patients. Anna received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, her MALS in creative writing/book arts from Dartmouth, and was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard. She was named a MacArthur Fellow for work that has “conceptual clarity, compassion, and beauty.”

The event is free and open to the public and will take place in
Historic Northampton's newly enlarged program space
at 46 Bridge Street in downtown Northampton.