In Search of America's Earliest Apples

DNA Testing, Historical Research, and Offshore Islands
Slides from a talk on May 28, 2022
Todd Little-Siebold is a Professor of History at the College of the Atlantic and works with the Maine Heritage Orchard at MOFGA tracking down, documenting and preserving Maine’s heirloom apples. He has focused on the history of apples in downeast Maine for over a decade working with students to map, record, and rescue the oldest and rarest apples in the area. He teaches classes on a wide range of historical topics from agriculture, fisheries and colonialism to environmental history. His recent work has focused on using genomic profiling to unlock long lost histories of apples in Maine and America with an interdisciplinary team of researchers and apple preservationists around the country.