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Pennsylvania Academy of Masonic Knowledge will celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary next month with a special symposium featuring a film screening and capped off with a banquet. From the publicity:
Our Silver Jubilee Celebration will occur on Saturday, March 15. This Symposium will be held at the Freemasons Cultural Center at the Masonic Village at Elizabethtown and is open to Freemasons, including Entered Apprentices and Fellowcrafts, their significant others, and their guests.
Click here to register.
Dress for the day is jacket and tie for men, dress or business suit for ladies. Please recognize that a cost is incurred to the program for your registration. If you pre-register and subsequently determine that you will be unable to attend, please have the Masonic courtesy to cancel your reservation by the same method and providing the same information.
Schedule for the day:
8 a.m. – Registration Opens
9:00 – Opening Ceremonies
9:20 – Presentation by Bro. Timothy Winkle: “Aprons in the Attic: Collecting Communities at the Smithsonian Institution.”
Tim Winkle is a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, focusing on firefighting, law enforcement, and community organizations, including the history of American fraternalism. Prior to this, he worked as a cataloger with the Library and Museum of Freemasonry in London, and he also served for several years as archivist for the historic collections held by Alexandria Washington Lodge 22 in Alexandria, Virginia.
Tim has researched and written on the connections between fraternal groups and museum collections in the early Republic, and he recently co-authored an article on Alexander von Humboldt’s relationship to Freemasonry for the International Review of Humboldt Studies.
10:20 – Break
10:30 – Private Screening of Join or Die
12:15 p.m. – Break for Lunch ($20)
1:30 – Reconvene
1:45 – Interactive Dialogue with Rebecca Davis, director and producer.
This presentation includes a special screening of the feature length documentary Join or Die. The documentary will not be live streamed, but is available for viewing on Netflix.
Rebecca Davis, a producer of the film, will then join the Academy live, in person, for a Q&A session. Learn more here.
In this feature documentary, follow the half-century story of America’s civic unraveling through the journey of legendary social scientist Robert Putnam, whose groundbreaking Bowling Alone research into America’s decades-long decline in community connections.
2:30 – Q&A
3:00 – Adjournment
5:00 – Social Hour
5:30 – Silver Jubilee Banquet ($50)
7:00 – 25th Anniversary Keynote Address by Bro. David Harrison: “Lost Rites of Freemasonry during the Age of Enlightenment.”
This portion of the event will not be livestreamed.
Dr. David Harrison is a UK-based Masonic historian archaeologist who has written six books on the history of Freemasonry, and contributed many papers and articles on the subject to various journals and magazines. His work appears in The Philalethes, Freemasonry Today, MQ Magazine, The Square, Knight Templar Magazine, Heredom, and New Dawn magazine. Harrison has also appeared on TV and radio providing expertise and insight into the subject of Freemasonry.
Having gained his Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool in 2008, where he focused on the development of English Freemasonry. His thesis was subsequently published in March 2009 as a book titled The Genesis of Freemasonry. A follow-up work, titled The Transformation of Freemasonry, was published the following year. Both works received critical acclaim.
His next work, a book which dealt with the Liverpool Masonic Rebellion and the Wigan Grand Lodge, was published in 2012, followed by A Quick Guide to Freemasonry which was published in November 2013. A fifth book on the York Grand Lodge was published in 2014, and his latest work, Freemasonry and Fraternal Societies, was published in 2015.
8:00 – Closing Ceremonies
I think it’s been ten years since my last visit to the Academy, but this may induce me to make the 400-mile roundtrip.
