P.O. Box 865, Salem, MA 01970
(978) 745-0799
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Historic Salem would like to invite you to attend the

2008 Annual Meeting

Tuesday, May 20, 2008
at the
National Park Service Visitor Center
2 New Liberty Street, Salem MA

Join us for wine, soft drinks and hor d'oeuvres to be served
at the Reception from 6:00-7:00 pm

The Meeting will begin at 7:00 pm

The evening will also feature the presentation of the
2008 Preservation Awards
Celebrating adaptive reuse and preservation projects, as well as preservation initiatives, that have advanced the preservation effort throughout Salem.
Nominations are being accepted though April 30, 2008.

Keynote Lecture:
"Shaping Civic Space: Massachusetts Courthouses and
County Seats, 1770-1850"

By Dr. Martha McNamara

Courthouses are vitally important civic buildings. In particular, those that were constructed in the early decades of the nineteenth century, dramatically reshaped the public space of Massachusetts county seats. As lawyers proliferated in the years following the American Revolution and their control over the legal system tightened, settings for judicial proceedings shifted from multi-purpose spaces integrated with a town's commercial activities to buildings designed solely to house the courts and removed from a town's market center.

Professor McNamara's illustrated lecture will explore the role of legal and architectural professionalization in the development of this new judicial architecture and of new civic spaces for Massachusetts county seats.

Martha J. McNamara is Director of the New England Arts and Architecture Program in the Art Department at Wellesley College. She is the author of From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture and Ritual in American Law, 1658-1860 (Johns Hopkins, 2004).. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Warren Center at Harvard University, she is currently at work on a study of the New England landscape in the early nineteenth century.