DISCOVER HERITAGE ROUTE 23

What is TEDx?
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxPresqueIsleDistrictLibrary, where x = independently organized TED event. At our TEDx PresqueIsleDistrictLIbrary event, TED Talks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.

Featured speakers for Friday, October 5, 2018 starting at 7:30 pm

1.  Featured Speaker:  Nationally Acclaimed Artist, John Dempsey

John will address the perspective of an “artist communicating the meaning behind his work”. John’s art work was selected for inclusion in a major traveling exhibition organized by Norman Rockwell Museum, “Re-imagining the Four Freedoms”.  His work, “Sunday Night/Monday Morning” is on a national tour as part of the Enduring Ideals:  Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms.   https://mailchi.mp/c53607669980/john-dempsey-studio-news?e=cc9da3f90b.  With over 1000 submissions, John’s work was one of thirty-seven selected to be included in this featured exhibition.  It opened in New York City in May 2018 and will go on a national tour through 2020.

John will talk about what the four freedoms mean to him and the meaning behind his work.  Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear; as those were President Roosevelt’s four freedoms.  John is a resident of Presque Isle County and is an acclaimed artist whose work is exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. 

John O’Shea will present a new historical perspective of Paleo Indians from 9,900 years ago using new research and technology advancements.  John was the key person who upon examining new underwater topographical maps of Lake Huron discovered a continuous underwater ridge stretching 112 miles from northeastern Michigan to southern Ontario.  He realized that around the last Ice Age, 9,900 years ago it was a land bridge known as the Alpena-Amberley Ridge.  He is working with a team using technology upgrades that have yielded Ice Age landscapes of campsites from Paleo Indians, stone circles, remnants of a fire hearth and much more.  For over a decade, O’Shea’s team discovered archaeological sites intact all through the Amberley Ridge. His three-person submersible will be used in 2018 to investigate the bottom of a 500 foot deep cliff that has never been explored.  This Ice Age landscape once sustained caribou and its hunters for two millennia.  It disappeared under the waves of Lake Huron some 8,000 years ago.  According to O’Shea, “Science has a creative component that is, or should be, present at the beginning of every research question.  Relying on an isolated Ice Age landscape for their way of life must have made the caribou hunters fundamentally different from their contemporaries.  We want to know just how different they were.”