Often, without realizing it, our childhood experiences push us in one direction, or another. When I was little, my father (second from left, back row) used to tell me bedtime stories about his experience as a pilot in World War II. Because he flew the North Atlantic (he is shown here on Baffin Island), among other places, he talked about the snowy peaks, massive glaciers, and the Inuit kayakers many miles out to sea. He also spoke of looking down upon blood-red splotches on the sea ice where hunters had nabbed their prey, presumably seals.
Fast forward two decades to the day when a newsletter from the
Maine Women Writers Collection crossed my desk while I was working at the
Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine. A 19th century photo of a woman, dressed in furs with a rifle strapped across her chest, captured my attention. While this one at left is a studio portrait, other images showed her as a lone figure standing against what was clearly a forbidding, Arctic landscape. Who was she? I wanted to know.
That photo started my research journey into the life of
Josephine Diebitsch Peary. Many years later, this quest has taken me to research in archives and museums, to meet with Peary family members, and to travel to northwestern Greenland to try and follow in the footsteps of some of Josephine's expeditions with her husband, Robert E. Peary.
When the
International Polar Year came around and I was teaching at the University of Southern Maine, I felt that it was time to organize a seminar at USM that could explore the history of America's interests in the Arctic. From there,
Top of the World was born.
Often, without realizing it, our childhood experiences push us in one direction, or another. When I was little, my father (second from left, back row) used to tell me bedtime stories about his experience as a pilot in World War II. Because he flew the North Atlantic (he is shown here on Baffin Island), among other places, he talked about the snowy peaks, massive glaciers, and the Inuit kayakers many miles out to sea. He also spoke of looking down upon blood-red splotches on the sea ice where hunters had nabbed their prey, presumably seals.
