June 11, 2025: Manifest Juneteenths

We're celebrating Juneteenth everywhere all the times and with tons of family. We check out two of the celebrations happening in the area in Holyoke and Amherst. In Paper city, Genuine Culture is teaming up with the Wistariahurst Museum to create a celebration of the holiday for all on June 19th, and we’ll hear from Mother son team Theresa Cooper-Gordon and Damany Gordon of Genuine Culture and Megan Seiler director of the museum about this years Juneteenth festivitiesWe’ll also head to Amherst to check out a brand new space that is re-framing the context of local history in Amherst. Ancestral Bridges is bringing the black and afro-indigenous legacies and people of the town back into the spotlight through exhibits and ongoing research. Mother-daughter team and directors Anika Lopes and Deborah Bridges show us around their new space and talk about their Juneteenth walking tour and more. And word nerd Emily Brewster, senior editor at Merriam-Webster, our dictionary in Springfield, reaches back in time to an era where the American language was experiencing a parallel expansion to the nation itself. We explore 19th century americanisms in all of their manifestations of destiny.