The 1377th meeting of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences was held on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 at 4.30 p.m. in the Konover Auditorium of the Thomas J.Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Some 60 members and their guests attended the lecture and some 20 stayed for dinner. The President of the Academy, Ernest Kohorn welcomed the audience. He was sorry to announce that Professor Bruce Stave was stepping down as the Vice President of the Academy for the University of Connecticut and thanked him for his valuable and wise contribution for the past several years of his tenure. Dr. Kohorn then announced the appointment of the new Vice President, Professor Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh and looked forward to working with him.

He then announced the newly elected members for the University of Connecticut:
Michael Neumann, the newly designated Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Head of the Mathematics Department;
Jeffrey Ogbar, Director of the Institute of African-American Studies and Kathleen Segerson, Professor Of Economics.

Professor Bruce Stave introduced the speaker for the evening. He said that in his long teaching career he had only once awarded an A+ and that was to Walter Woodward. Walter Woodward is now the State Historian of Connecticut and Assistant Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. The title of his talk was " Captain John Smith and the Campaign for New England: A Case Study in Early Modern Place Branding."

Professor Woodward said that it is 400 years since the founding of the first colony in Jamestown and since that time place branding has developed into an established practice and even has its own journal. Captain Smith's venture was in fact a history of good marketing long before that discipline was thought of. He wanted to transform the image the British had of the northeast coast of America from one of a cold, barren and uninhabitable area to one of familiarity, comfort and attractiveness; a place where colonists' physical and mental capabilities would be enhanced. The colonies were seen as financial sink holes so Smith tried to attract venture capital by emphasizing the great fishing of the area. In the true tradition of marketing he found a celebrity, the 16-year-old Prince Charles, son of James I, to advocate for his cause. In fact when Charles became king it was his policies that drove thousands to come to America. Smith lobbied the British aristocracy for help; he capitalized on the fact that Pocahontas, the daughter of the chief of a Virginia Indian tribe, was beautiful and not a savage; and he applied to the British government for support. He lobbied the guilds for funds to produce books and maps and told them that colonization would provide work for the unemployed guild members. On November 3rd 1620 the Crown officially named New England as a colony in its charter but did not name Smith as its leader. He became bitter and felt that the image of him as not the right man to lead the settlement of the country was grossly unfair. Ever a fighter, he determined to change his image and he became a successful historian. His books brought new patrons and he continued to promote the idea that the New England colony could become a reconstruction of the immigrants' former lives and become "transplanted English vines." Indeed from 1630 to 1640 there was a great migration to the New England colony and it became the colony with the longest lasting original culture. Dr. Woodward had described in the most eloquent terms the tireless work of one man to develop a colony.