Local History: Working Class Displacement and Grief in Downtown Portsmouth, Wednesday August 27

Following the release of her debut book The Tears of Other People: A History and Memoir of Displacement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, E. M. Ippolito presents her lived experience and research into the local trend of working-class displacement. From contemporary gentrification, to the red light district of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to its earliest English settlement in 1623, this history frames Portsmouth as a city defined by constant and ever-changing forms of targeted dispossession. Ippolito's research centers the ongoing history of marginalization in Portsmouth with a particular focus on the destruction of Puddle Dock and the Italian North End in the 1960s. Urgent, provocative, and sometimes painful, this exploration of the ugliest parts of historical Portsmouth nonetheless sheds light on present questions of historical grief and collective memory of the local past, as well as what restitution may look like in an unfamiliar future.

The presentation will cover topics including racism and settler colonialism in Portsmouth, the founding of Strawbery Banke Museum, commercial sex downtown, car-centric development, and suburbanization. A Q&A and book signing will follow.

Registration is not required! Just drop in.