- Join us online or on the telephone at 7:00 p.m. each Thursday, February 11 through March 11, as well as Tuesday, March 30, to see and listen to the Clarke Historical Library’s spring speakers.
To make a reservation for any or all or the first five presentations, visit clarke.cmich.edu/Speakers2021 to register and receive an access code for each event.
- Please contact us at
clarke@cmich.edu or 989.774.3352 for more information, including information about connecting to the presentation via telephone.
- The exact time and access information for the March 30 Hemingway the presentation will be made available later.
Professor Kathryn A. Remlinger will discuss Finnish accents in the Upper Peninsula. For many years she has been interested in American regional dialects. Her interests include how dialect identifies a person and how the dialect a person speaks impacts how others perceive them.
Dr. Remlinger's book,
Yooper Talk: Dialect as identity in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019),
is based on sixteen years of fieldwork. Dr. Remlinger is a professor in 
the English Department at Grand Valley State University.
This event is made possible by the John and Audrey Cumming Endowment.
Thursday, February 18 at 7:00pm:
Chase Stevens, Invasive Species Coordinator for the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, and Dr. Anna Monfils, Professor of Biology and Director of the CMU Herbarium, will discuss aquatic invasive species, focusing on European frog-bit (Hydrocharis morsus-ranae).
European frog-bit is an invasive aquatic plant native to Europe and parts of Asia and Africa. In 1932, the plant was brought from Europe to the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa for possible commercial use as an ornamental plant. In 1939, it was found in Ottawa's Rideau Canal. The Canal connects the city's waterways to Lake Ontario. In the more than eighty years since it first appeared in the Rideau Canal, the plant has spread throughout the Great Lakes region.
European frog-bit grows rapidly and forms dense, floating mats. It can be found in slow-moving waters, such as sheltered inlets, ponds, slow-running rivers, and ditches.
- The plant forms thick mats that reduce biodiversity by crowding out native plants and preventing sunlight from reaching submerged plants.
- When a large colony of the plant dies and decomposes, it removes oxygen from the water, which can affect fish communities and other aquatic life.
- Dense masses of European frog-bit can hinder swimmers and boaters, prevent other recreational uses of waterways, and clog drainage canals and streams.
This event is co-sponsored by the Clarke Historical Library speakers' series, the University Libraries, and the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Libraries. This event is made possible by a grant from the American Library Association.
Read the blog post: February 18 Online Event: Aquatic Invasive Species in Michigan
Thursday, February 25 at 7:00pm:
International Children's Book Event
Register for this Webex Presentation
The CMU community is made up of people from all over the world who speak a language other than English. This reading event showcases both the international character of the CMU community and the Clarke's collection of international children's book.
This year, the Clarke will produce videos of members of the CMU community reading from 
the Clarke's collection. The videos will be hosted on the Clarke's website and select recordings with be featured on the evening of February 25.
This event has become an annual activity of the library, enjoyed by a large portion of the CMU community. It is based on work, begun in the 1990s with the assistance of the late Professor Susan Stan, to add volumes that exemplify the best children's books published internationally. For many years, the primary tool used to accomplish this goal we have obtained books nominated by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) for the Hans Christian Andersen award.
Every other year, IBBY presents the Hans Christian Andersen Awards to a living author and illustrator whose complete works have made a lasting contribution to children's literature. Often called the "Little Nobel Prize," the Hans Christian Andersen Award is the highest international recognition given to an author and an illustrator of children's books.
The Hans Christian Andersen Award was first given to an author in 1956 and the award was expanded to include an illustrator as well as an author in 1966.
Wendy and Andrew Mutch have specialized in identifying Aladdin homes in southeast Michigan and will discuss the company and homes they have found.
The Aladdin Company of Bay City, Michigan, was one of America's most long-lived manufacturers of mail-order, "kit homes." Begun in 1906 by two brothers, Otto and William Sovereign, the family-owned firm continued to manufacture houses until 1981. Over the firm's long history, it sold over 75,000 homes to
both individual and corporate customers.
The records of the Aladdin Company were donated to the Clarke Historical Library in 1996. The almost complete run of company catalogs, full set of sales records, over 15,000 post-World War II architectural drawings, and various other company records create an extraordinary historical resource.
Abra Berens is a chef, former farmer, and writer.
Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables is her first cookbook and is rooted in her personal experiences. It is a teaching cookbook that aims to help build reader's confidence in preparing vegetables by providing recipes, explanations of cooking techniques, and a myriad of variations for each recipe. The book was one of the
New York Times twelve best new cookbooks in the spring of 2019 and was named a Michigan Notable Book in 2020.
Berens grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and started cooking in Ann Arbor's Zingerman's Deli while in she was in college. She went on to study cooking in Ireland. After returning to the United States, she began cooking in Chicago. But while in Chicago she began to think about getting back to the farm and to cook with local ingredients.
"It was that desire to have my food be of a place. I had been talking with my husband Erik about these ideas. Then he went to Ann Arbor and had a beer with Jess, [who became] my business partner. Jess had just started farming for Zingerman's." In 2009, she co-founded Bare Knuckle Farm in Northport. From 2009 to 2014 she had two homes; moving to Michigan in the spring and then back to Chicago in the fall.
In 2015, she left Northport to open the café at Local Foods in Chicago because it made more "fiscal sense." But in 2017, she relocated to southwest Michigan and joined the team at Granor Farm in Three Oaks. There, she combines her love of farms and restaurants to create dinners on the farm that celebrate southwest Michigan's diverse agriculture.
Thursday, March 30 (Time TBD)
Hemingway
Lynn Novick, who co-produced this forthcoming PBS documentary with Ken Burns, and local Hemingway experts will discuss the documentary, which will air on WCMU April 5-7. The documentary includes material from the Clarke telling the story of Hemingway's time in Michigan.
Hemingway is a three-part, six-hour documentary film that examines the visionary work and the turbulent life of Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest and most influential writers America has produced. Interweaving his eventful biography, a life lived at the ultimately treacherous nexus of art, fame, and celebrity, with carefully selected excerpts from his short stories, novels, and non-fiction, the film seeks to see beyond the façade of the public man and allow the viewer to become familiar with a brilliant, ambitious, charismatic, and egocentric genius.
This presentation is sponsored by the Clarke Historical Library and WCMU Public Media.