Historians Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, authors of the joyful historical/fictional novel Blindspot, will deliver the keynote for the 2010 Massachusetts History conference, Imagining Lives: Preserving and Interpreting Personal Stories. The conference will be held on June 7, 2010 at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, and will explore personal narrative history, from the 17th century to the present, as it pertains to local historical organizations and small museums.

Sessions will engage the personal narrative from all kinds of angles: preservation of the materials (including preserving, digitizing, transcribing, and editing oral history tapes); exhibiting lives in context; programming (lives, plays, impersonations, lectures, games); doing oral history; thematic or community story gathering; houses and their inhabitants/the "personal" narrative of a house.