February 2026
Snowshoe at Arrowhead
Close out Pittsfield’s 10 x10 Upstreet Arts Festival with a free family-friendly snowshoe hike around the grounds of Herman Melville’s historic house and farm, Arrowhead. This easy walk includes an introduction to the site and brief history of Herman Melville’s life there as well as a scavenger hunt. Learn about Melville’s sleigh rides and decide for yourself if Mt. Greylock really looks like a white whale. Following the hike, which will be lead by Berkshire Natural Resources Council, visit the…
Find out more »March 2026
Melville in Scotland: From the Pacific to Glasgow, to Fife and Beyond
Herman Melville is one of the greatest writers in world literature and his own quest to understand more of his Scottish ancestry has been noted but rarely explored to any depth. The Scottish recognition of Melville's ancestry was established by Hugh MacDiarmid in the 1920s and extends into present-day scholarship and evolving understanding of his significance as a world-traveler, ecological thinker and original initiator of geographical poetics. For this presentation, Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University, draws…
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