Category: Uncategorized

Mike Dixon of Elkton, MD has been named to the Board of Trustees for the National Fire Heritage Center.  The National Fire Heritage Center is the nation’s archive for historic documents, and other perishables related to fire protection. 

These perishables include:  art and artifacts, audio, books, charts and graphs, documents, maps, photography, reports, and video

Dixon is a historian, adjunct professor, and writer whose research and teaching focuses on community studies and social history.  He has served as a consultant for public television documentaries, Smithsonian Museum on Main Street Exhibits, and local government commissions.  He has appeared on The Today Show, Maryland Public Television, the National Geographic Channel, and National Public Radio Shows. 

Dixon joined the Singerly Fire Company of Elkton as a teenager in the late 1960s.  Today, he chairs the company’s museum committee and is the editor of the Maryland State Firemen’s Association newsletter, the Volunteer Trumpet.

He holds graduate and undergraduate degrees in history and the behavioral science from St. Joseph’s University (Philadelphia), Washington College (Chestertown), and Wilmington University (Delaware). 

“Michael Dixon’s unique combination of being a historical scholar and his combat firefighting experience makes him an ideal member of our Board of Trustees.  He has a built-in appreciation for what we are doing and why we are doing it.” Says NFHC President Bill Killen.

On a Friday afternoon in late July, I was on the Mason-Dixon Line as a severe thunderstorm swept across Washington and Franklin counties. As threatening clouds moved into the area, I paused and captured a few photos at one of the markers along the line. Earlier in the winter, I had explored points along the boundary in Western Maryland as part of my work as a guest curator for an exhibit at Frederick Heritage called “Reading Between the Line: The Mason-Dixon Line that Broders North and South.” Just north of Hagerstown, this location is an unincorporated Franklin County community called Mason and Dixon.

WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE — I have been studying social late 19th and early 20th-century progressive movements in some of South Jersey’s rural counties, the fieldwork concentrating on temperance, prohibition, prison reform, crime control, and voting rights.

As it concerns women’s suffrage New Jersey has a complicated history since the State’s 1776 Constitution had enfranchised men and women who were worth at least fifty pounds.  But this brief period of inclusivity came to an end in 1807 when the Assembly passed a law limiting suffrage to white male taxpayers.  After the Civil War, activistism in the State grew in harmony with the national movement, and lawmakers in Trenton were pressured to restore the franchise for women.  Across the nation suffragists in nine states had won battles, converting indecivisive politicians by 1913.  In New Jersey, the suffragists managed to get a statewide referendum on the ballot, putting the decision in the hands of men at a special statewide election on Oct. 19, 1915.

New Jersey’s voters decided not to grant women the right to vote by a big majority, so women in the Garden State had to wait for the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

For the Salem County Historical Society’s quarterly newsletter, I wrote an article examining this movement and the campaign in the state’s most rural county.  See the Quarterly Newsletter of the Salem County Historical Society, Summer 2018, for the full article.

 

Programs such as Law and Order and CSI have acquainted most people with modern techniques for solving crimes. But for most of our past, sleuths did as much as they could to investigate crimes, but they lacked the most basic tools. There wasn’t much the sheriff, part-time constable, justice of the peace, and coroner could do, except rely on obvious physical evidence and witnesses. However, as the scientific age arrived, great advances in police science allowed detectives to crack complex cases. This one-hour program draws on notorious crimes and real mysteries from yesteryear.  It discusses how science, technology, and professional police practices helped detectives catch and convict criminals and close once unsolvable cases.