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History Conversations
Enjoy our History Conversations, a program featuring weekly virtual lectures from our talented corps of speakers covering a wide variety of local history topics. Each lecture is live-streamed via Zoom and then posted here for a week (below).

 
 
This Week:
Offutt’s Crossroads: The Early History of Potomac and its Founding Family
Ralph Buglass
Tuesday, May 24 at 2 PM. 
 
This talk and slide presentation covers the “first family” of Potomac: the Offutts for whom Potomac was originally named (Offutt’s Crossroads). The talk, by a descendant of the Offutt family, explores when and how the village came to be called Potomac, with feuding among the family, the end of slavery, a business partnership gone bad, and attempted murder all playing a part—not to mention a few ghostly appearances in later years!
 
Register here. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Next Week:
Rewind – Mapping Gaithersburg: From Wilderness to Metropolis
With Karen Yaffe Lottes
Available starting May 30. Rewinds are pre-recorded and available for one week. No registration is required. Don’t miss these great talks!
 

Explore the history and development of Gaithersburg through maps and the census with Karen Yaffe Lottes, historian, museum educator, and the Program Coordinator for the Gaithersburg Community Museum.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Last Week:
Vintage Auto Travel in the Maryland State Archives Special Collections, 1910-1965
Maria Day, Senior Director of Special Collections, Conservation, & Library Services at the Maryland State Archives
Tuesday, May 17 at 2 PM.
 
 
 
Take a virtual field trip back in time to the early twentieth century, as Marylanders explored historic and scenic wonders of our state by automobile. This talk features maps, photographs, commercial art, tour guides, and other items from Maryland State Archives Special Collections, the State’s holdings of private documents and culturally-significant records. The presentation spans a cross-section of automobile history across the state: from the earliest cars in the State and paving of The National Road, to post-war leisure travel and the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A complete list of past History Conversations can be found here. 
 
 
 
 
Paths to the Present

Paths to the Present: Montgomery County Stories, a cable television show created by County Cable Montgomery and Montgomery History from 2000-2014, explores the often overlooked history found right in our own backyards. Produced by Emmy-winner Barbara Grunbaum and hosted by Gail Street, Paths to the Present covers a wide variety of topics highlighting this county’s past. You can watch all 86 of the episodes here.