Americans know what lumberjacks look like: cheerful, kindly, manly men in plaid. But in their own time they were despised as pests to society. So where did our modern image come from? This talk will expose the forces, both local and national, that built our communal memory of the north woods jacks – and ask us to question where our ideas of the past come from.
Speaker Bio:
Willa Hammitt Brown is a writer, speaker and historian based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She holds a BA from Oxford University and a PhD from the University of Virginia and was on the faculty at Harvard University. In 2025 she published her first book, Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth and the American Lumberjack.
