2
30
405
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Rare Books
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Pixabay
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rare-books
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Educators
Description
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This collection features contributions by teachers, education administrators and others involved in teaching at levels K-16.
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educators-humanities-moments
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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From the FCPS Inquiry Curriculum Development Project I am doing this summer
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Natalie Hanson, 36, History Teacher
Date
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July 2021
Source
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<em>People of the Book</em>
Description
An account of the resource
I read <em>People of the Book</em> by Geraldine Brooks a few days ago and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. This book combined many of my loves: reading, historical fiction, and stories of survival and humanity.<br /><br />As a history teacher, with two young kids, I don't get much time to read for pleasure during the year. And this past year of the pandemic was the hardest of my career and I had even less time for reading. I have been so happy to slow down and relax this summer and to escape into the world of this book that was so captivating. <br /><br />This book had been sitting on my nightstand for months and once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. It was such a powerful novel about imagined and embellished stories about a real live artifact, the Sarajevo Haggadah. The stories that the author created felt so real and I grew so attached to the people who helped protect this book. I learned so much about history and religion that I didn't know before. I also learned so much about the human condition. <br /><br />This is why I love my job. You can always learn more. I was so inspired by this book to keep reading others and keep learning more. I can't wait to travel and eventually see the real Haggadah. I want to share its story and hope others will get the opportunity to read this book!
Title
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<em>People of the Book </em>Reminds Me Why I Love the Humanities
Creator
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Geraldine Brooks
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people-book-reminds-love-humanities
Books & Reading
Brooks, Geraldine
Fiction
History
Learning
-
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Bone scan
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Pixabay
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bone-scan
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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Graduate Student Summer Residency 2021
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Eunice Ying Ci Lim, 29, Ph.D. Candidate, Pennsylvania State University, Comparative Literature and Asian Studies
Date
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2010
Source
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"Bone Scan"
Description
An account of the resource
Gwen Harwood's "Bone Scan" will always have a place in my heart when it comes to my inspiration for teaching Literature and my abiding interest in the humanities. Growing up in Singapore, the educational environment I was in did not prioritize literature and the humanities very much, and math and science were the core subjects that we were expected to focus on. <br /><br />However, when I was 18, I had a literature teacher who taught and prepared us to appreciate unseen poetry for the A levels and among the poems she introduced us to was "Bone Scan," which we later realized was her way of explaining her long absence from the classroom near our national exams. She was struggling with cancer and her teaching allowed us to appreciate that the poem's use of the word "scintillating" and the use of sibilants represented her desire to regard her struggle with cancer as a positive and hopeful journey rather than one to think about negatively and pessimistically. Although she eventually passed on, her influence continues to inspire me to be a better teacher and reader of literature, and continues to remind me of the importance of being attentive and committed to the text before us. I continue to return to "Bone Scan" and think how we approach, study, encounter, and teach literature reflects how we approach, encounter, and interact with others in our lives as well.
Title
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"on a small radiant screen honeydew melon green are my scintillating bones"
Creator
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Gwen Harwood
Identifier
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on-a-small-radiant-screen
Harwood, Gwen
Illness
Poetry
Self-Realization
Teachers & Teaching
-
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Title
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To Kill a Mockingbird
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Teacher Advisory Council
Description
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This collection includes contributions from the National Humanities Center's Teacher Advisory Council. The council is a 14-member board that supports the Education Programs of the National Humanities Center for a one-year term of service.
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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Eyes on the Mockingbird
Description
An account of the resource
I grew up in a very small town in rural Wisconsin. When I looked at my classmates it was like looking in a mirror. Because of that, I never realized that there were many people who were facing hardships because of their minority status and people who were taking advantage of them. Fast forward to my sophomore year of high school. Mrs. Shaw made it her mission to open our eyes. She wanted to expose us to the realities of this world. While I questioned it at the time, she showed us the entire <em>Eyes on the Prize</em> documentary. She would allow us to watch, and then she would force us to talk about it and face the facts. We had to face the fact that people could be cruel, especially if they felt they had power over others. The curriculum then went on to <em>To Kill a Mockingbird</em>. Mrs. Shaw made sure to show us that skin color is not the only way to dictate belonging in the minority. She made us see the importance of standing up for the fact that people are people, no matter what, no matter their political power.<br /><br />Without <em>Eyes on the Prize</em>, I would have never seen what was happening outside of my little hometown. I knew there were different cultures, ethnicities, and nationalities surrounding Durand, but I never came in contact with them. I certainly never knew that people had to fight to be able to go to school or that fire hoses were used to deter people from going to school. It also taught me that minority does not indicate a color or even social grouping; rather it indicates a lack of political power. By Lee showing that people in the minority were being harmed by those with power, I was able to see how important it is for me to stand up for human rights. Without the humanities, I would have been blind to the world.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Without <em>Eyes on the Prize</em>, I would have never seen what was happening outside of my little hometown. I knew there were different cultures, ethnicities, and nationalities surrounding Durand, but I never came in contact with them. I certainly never knew that people had to fight to be able to go to school or that fire hoses were used to deter people from going to school. It also taught me that minority does not indicate a color or even social grouping; rather it indicates a lack of political power. By Lee showing that people in the minority were being harmed by those with power, I was able to see how important it is for me to stand up for human rights. Without the humanities, I would have been blind to the world.
Source
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<em>Eyes on the Prize</em> and <em>To Kill a Mockingbird</em>
Creator
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Hampton, Henry; Harper Lee
Date
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1995
Contributor
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<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/education-programs/teacher-advisory-council-2017-2018/">Sarah Arnold</a>, 38, English Teacher
Identifier
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eyes-on-the-mockingbird
Bildungsromans
Books & Reading
Civil Rights
Discrimination
Documentary Films
Durand, Wisconsin
Eyes on the Prize
Film
Hampton, Henry
Human Rights
Lee, Harper
Literature
Minorities
Social Justice
Teachers & Teaching
To Kill a Mockingbird
-
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Notes on Helen Zia
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notes-helen-zia
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Angel Trazo
Dublin Core
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
Identifier
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
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NHC Graduate Student Residency Program
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Angel Trazo, 26, PhD student in Cultural Studies at UC Davis
Date
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December 2016
Source
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<em>Asian American Dreams</em>
Description
An account of the resource
While a double major in Biology and Studio Art at Colgate University, a predominantly-white university in Upstate New York, my coursework provided challenging STEM curricula and liberal arts classes steeped in the classical Western tradition. However, I did not realize what I was not learning (and had desperately, subconsciously been seeking to learn) until a guest speaker came to our little, snow laden school in the “middle of somewhere.” <br /><br />As a junior in college, I joined a newly formed club called the “Organization of Asian Sisters in Solidarity,” which brought Asian American and Asian international women and femmes together (a small group of about ten of us) to discuss our experiences at a predominantly-white campus. We did not have a single Asian American Studies class on campus, and at 20, I did not even know that Asian American Studies was a field with an activist history stemming from 1968 strikes which originated in San Francisco, the California Bay Area where I was born and raised. We, naively, decided to find guest speakers of Asian American background to bring to campus via Google search. Somehow, we convinced a famous Asian American activist, Helen Zia, to visit. <br /><br />When Helen Zia came to campus, our small club and about forty or so students and faculty gathered in the Women’s Studies Center for a lunch time discussion. Even as a co-organizer of the talk, I had no idea how pivotal Helen was to the development of Asian American Studies. (Six years later, I kick myself for not making a bigger deal out of the event or trying to get an even larger turn out, despite having already invited all of my friends on campus). Helen’s talk was based on her book, <em>Asian American Dreams</em> (2000), and she drew out personal anecdotes such as: why she chose to work in an autofactory instead of going the STEM route; her journalism and activism surrounding the unjust murder of Vincent Chin in 1982; her experience coming-out in the public eye; and what it means to have Asian American dreams. [The image is my visual notes taken of this event]. <br /><br />Helen Zia coming to Colgate was the first of many humanities moments that catalyzed my life path toward a drastically different direction than I thought it would take in 2016. In college, I was a Biology honors student who spent hours in the lab studying the relationship between mitochondrial damage and cancer and dreamed of becoming a pediatrician. However, after graduation, instead of going forward with my plans, I finally found the time to read Helen Zia’s <em>Asian American Dreams</em> (2000) in its entirety. It was the first Asian American Studies book I’d ever read and it inspired me to pursue my MA in Asian American Studies at UCLA and now my PhD in Cultural Studies at Davis, where I am a Teaching Assistant in the Asian American Studies Department. <br /><br />It saddens me to know that Ethnic Studies courses continue to be few and far between but I am hopeful that work in Asian American Studies, as well as African American Studies, Chicanx and Latinx Studies, and Indigenous and Native American Studies, will continue to emerge in our higher education and K-12 classrooms.
Title
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<em>Asian American Dreams</em>
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asian-american-dreams
Creator
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Helen Zia
Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People
Asian American Studies
Asian Americans
Ethnic Studies
Higher Education
Students
Women
-
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The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse
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Title
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Teacher Advisory Council
Description
An account of the resource
This collection includes contributions from the National Humanities Center's Teacher Advisory Council. The council is a 14-member board that supports the Education Programs of the National Humanities Center for a one-year term of service.
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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Title
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The Role of the Individual versus an Intellectual Aristocracy
Description
An account of the resource
Choosing a Humanities Moment was initially a challenging task. Over the last few years working with the organization PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the humanities, liberal arts and a philosophical education. In particular, the so-called crisis of the Humanities, the popularity of STEM fields and the blossoming of a national testing regime prompted me to think a lot about what a good education should entail. In thinking back to my own education, my Humanities Moment both shows the power and challenges of what could be called a liberal arts perspective. I attended a high school run by the Department of Defense in Heidelberg, West Germany due to my father’s job in the government service. From the start, I was culturally and politically alienated from my peers. Having lived in Germany for years, I not only had scant knowledge of recent American culture, but also had a much different perspective. Initially, I could only feel the alienation to be a shortcoming of my own. However, in the summer between 9th and 10th grade, I discovered Hermann Hesse, in particular, the novel <em>Demian</em>. The novel, a classic Bildungsroman, discusses a young student’s coming to see beyond the illusions and falsehoods of the society around him. This novel struck me with tremendous power at the time. Along with other novels of this sort, it showed me a fundamental ideal of the Humanities -- the same set of facts or experiences can can have more than one meaning -- perspectivalism. It took me awhile to come to understand all of this, but as a shy 15 year old, it gave me emotional fortitude and encouragement. Unfortunately, it also gave me a nascent sense of elitism. It didn’t just validate my feelings, but suggested the idea of an intellectual aristocracy I could potentially be a member of. As the member of the special club of those who “got it”, it suggested my experiences were superior. Later, in college, exposure to Kant, Aristotle and other very challenging philosophers introduced humility. If there was a special club, surely I couldn’t be a part of it!<br /><br />Why is this a Humanities Moment? Hesse wasn’t the only author of modernist alienation I read as a teenager, but I use him to illustrate this point because years later, another of his books again explained an important moment in my life. Three years ago, I became involved in efforts to bring philosophical education outside of the academy. I had been teaching high school philosophy for years, and was shocked to learn that there were whole organizations devoted to pre-college philosophy, and that people were doing philosophy with elementary and even pre-K students. Around this time, I read the Hesse novel <em>The Glass Bead Game</em> (<em>Magister Ludi</em>) for the first time. Although dull at times in its abstraction, the novel raises prescient points that Humanities education is still struggling with 50 years after its publication. In short, the novel describes a future world where monasteries and colleges have essentially fused, and a wildly abstract game, <em>The Glass Bead Game</em> attempts to unify all of the fields of human learning. Importantly, Castalia, where the game is played, steadfastly refuses to engage with the world outside -- intellectual pursuit literally has become a walled-off game. In the year 2017, especially, it seems crucial to find a way to explore the socially critical functions of Humanities thinking while avoiding the elitism that has led so many people to even reject the idea of a shared truth. The question -- how to bring a Humanities education and its expansion of perspective to all?
Subject
The topic of the resource
Why is this a Humanities Moment? Hesse wasn’t the only author of modernist alienation I read as a teenager, but I use him to illustrate this point because years later, another of his books again explained an important moment in my life. Three years ago, I became involved in efforts to bring philosophical education outside of the academy. I had been teaching high school philosophy for years, and was shocked to learn that there were whole organizations devoted to pre-college philosophy, and that people were doing philosophy with elementary and even pre-K students. Around this time, I read the Hesse novel <em>The Glass Bead Game</em> (Magister Ludi) for the first time. Although dull at times in its abstraction, the novel raises prescient points that Humanities education is still struggling with 50 years after its publication. In short, the novel describes a future world where monasteries and colleges have essentially fused, and a wildly abstract game, the Glass Bead Game attempts to unify all of the fields of human learning. Importantly, Castalia, where the game is played, steadfastly refuses to engage with the world outside -- intellectual pursuit literally has become a walled-off game. In the year 2017, especially, it seems crucial to find a way to explore the socially critical functions of Humanities thinking while avoiding the elitism that has led so many people to even reject the idea of a shared truth. The question -- how to bring a Humanities education and its expansion of perspective to all?
Source
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<em>Demian</em> and <em>The Glass Bead Game</em>
Creator
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Hesse, Hermann
Date
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1984
Contributor
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<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/education-programs/teacher-advisory-council-2017-2018/">Stephen Miller</a>, 48, Philosophy Teacher
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
the-role-of-the-individual
Bildungsromans
Books & Reading
Demian
Heidelberg, Germany
Hesse, Hermann
High School
Literature
Philosophy
Teachers & Teaching
The Glass Bead Game
-
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Title
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Lightbulb moment
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Pixabay
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ColiN00B, https://pixabay.com/en/light-bulbs-light-bulb-light-energy-1125016/
Text
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Title
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Response to a response
Description
An account of the resource
I was in my English class and we were talking about humanities moments for extra credit. We talked about <a href="http://humanitiesmoments.org/moment/robbins-finding-freedom-from-familiar">a woman who disagreed with the "mimetic" effect</a> and she claimed that people have a desire to be different. I agree with this idea but I also believe that each human has a purpose in this world. Each individual is born with a burning desire inside of them to fulfill this purpose and live their lives to the absolute fullest. This gives me hope that one day each individual will discover something that makes them feel alive each day and causes them to live with purpose.<br /><br /><em>Curator's note</em>: This contribution refers to the Humanities Moment "<a href="http://humanitiesmoments.org/moment/robbins-finding-freedom-from-familiar">Finding Freedom from the Familiar"</a> by Hollis Robbins.
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The Humanities Moment "Finding Freedom from the Familiar"
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Hollis Robbins
Date
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10:30 am Feb, 21 2018
Contributor
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Jacob, Johnston 20 years old. College student at Texas A&M University
Identifier
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response-to-a-response
College Station, Texas
Hope
Meta Moments
Mimetic Desire
Robbins, Hollis
Self-Realization
Students
Texas A&M University
-
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323ae5a9931631eb00b43c26a30db5ac
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Title
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Ulysses and the Sirens, illustration from an antique Greek vase
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National Humanities Center Board Members
Description
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This collection includes contributions from the distinguished board of trustees of the National Humanities Center
Moving Image
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Player
html for embedded player to stream media content
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/262250229" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
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Title
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Haunted by Homer’s Sirens
Creator
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Homer
Subject
The topic of the resource
This particular poem helped me to think about a challenge that I was facing in a different way, and helped me try to bring some sense to it. It was a catalyst to help me focus on the present and the “now,” and the worries that come with all of the things that you can’t control, in the future and the past, need to be chased out.
Description
An account of the resource
<p>About seven months ago, our son was in a tragic ski accident, and was in a coma for close to a month. And during that really painful time, we didn’t know what was going to happen. Was he ever going to wake up? Was he not going to wake up?</p>
<p>I, myself, couldn’t sleep and I was haunted all the time by thoughts of what might happen to him in the future, and how did this happen, and thinking about the past. And I remember thinking in one of those late-night moments about “The Odyssey” and about the description of the sirens on the banks. Of Odysseus asking to be tied to the mast, and having beeswax in his sailors’ ears, and realizing I had these kind of spirits that were haunting me.</p>
<p>In that context, I remember thinking very directly, “I know what those sirens are. I know what that’s about.” I didn’t know before then what—at least for me—that poem was saying. And at that moment, I realized the sirens were really from the future and from the past, and that in dealing with this situation with our son—the only way to deal with this—was by staying very much in the present.</p>
Contributor
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Kevin Guthrie, founder/president, ITHAKA
Identifier
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kevin-guthrie-homers-sirens
Source
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The Odyssey
Business Leaders
Classical Mythology
Coma
Families
Fathers & Sons
Homer
Illness
Literature
New York, New York
Poetry
Sports Accidents
The Odyssey
Time Perception
-
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3e10f05458b3f0ee8700abd21073aed7
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Title
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The Fault in Our Stars
Text
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12th grade English Teacher, Mrs. Layton!
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Cheyenne, 18 years old, living in Utah, a senior in high school
Date
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The year 2014 in my living room reading the book / watching the movie.
Source
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The book <em>The Fault in Our Stars </em>by John Green
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Between the years of 2012-2014, the book <em>The Fault in Our Stars</em> written by John Green was one of the most popular books and films for teenagers. The book was such a hit Hollywood decided to make it a film, and they did a great job sticking to the original novel. <br /><br />This novel is about two teenagers named Hazel and Augustus going through cancer and struggling to get through it until they meet each other through a support group, consisting of many other young cancer patients. My humanities moment happened in 2014 when my friend introduced to me this book. This included staying up all night, each night until I had finished reading the book so I could watch the film. At the age of 19, my dad had stage 4 Leukemia. This book always leaves me feeling emotional as it makes me think of my dad and all the battles he had to go through. Cancer is the hardest battle to fight and I’m so grateful that my dad, even though he was so close to death, continued fighting to survive. Without my dad, me or my siblings would not be here today. This novel is similar to my dad’s story because like the teenagers in the novel, they were fighting for their lives each day and going through lots of chemo and battling depression. <br /><br />To read the novel and watch the film gave me a better understanding of what my dad’s life looked like from his shoes, living his everyday life being once a cancer patient. It was laying in a hospital bed all day, eating the same foods, being sick and exhausted all the time, and taking so many medications that didn’t seem to help. It made my dad feeling depressed because he couldn’t do much from being so sick, similar to the character Hazel and her story. When my dad got sick, he lost his friends because they thought they can no longer hang around him or weren’t wanting to support him. The character Hazel had similar troubles like my dad and was always sad and alone, rereading the same book and watching the same tv shows, that is until she met Augustus from the support group that she was forced to go to because of her parents. <br /><br />If there is one gift I could give to my dad in the past, it would be to watch this film (not the story because he doesn’t like to read). I think watching this film would have gave my dad hope to know that he isn’t the only one fighting cancer and the characters Hazel and Augustus as well as millions of other teenagers in the world understand what he is going through.
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<em>The Fault in Our Stars</em> and my Dad - Living through Leukemia in my Dad's shoes
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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ffrNqDDyEgLPHj5IMLH6OMcedcAki7mNHeRVFKKol10/edit?usp=sharing
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the-fault-in-our-stars
Books & Reading
Bountiful, Utah
Cancer
Empathy
Fathers & Daughters
Film Adaptations
Green, John
Illness
Students
The Fault in Our Stars
Young Adult Literature
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Sugarcane
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Pixabay
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sugarcane
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Virginia Geographic Alliance West Indies Teacher Institute
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A week-long experiential professional development experience for teachers taking place during June 2018 in Barbados
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Andy Mink
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Caroline Bare, 38, Social Studies teacher
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June 19, 2018
Description
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My source of inspiration came from a lecture on paintings and images of slave society presented at the Barbados National Museum. The painting by Issac Sailmaker entitled "Island of Barbados" visually depicts the transformation of the island's geography due to the creation of sugar plantations in 1694. Sugar not only transformed the physical landscape of this mostly uninhabited land, but also would impact the social, political, and economic institutions that were created as a result. This painting symbolizes the totality of sugar on this small island and sets the stage for the ensuing nickname, "Britain's crowned jewel." One of the reasons I was drawn to this painting for inspiration is due to my own experiences on the island over the last week of learning and exploring. Driving through the different parishes and seeing how the landscape differs in various regions is a stark contrast to this image from 1694 showing mostly port cities and the beginning of European transformation on the interior to create space for large scale sugar farming. When looking at maps from the 18th and 19th centuries, the island of Barbados is transformed even more due to the profits and demand for sugar in a new global economy. This image is a snapshot of an island in transition, but lacks the conflict and division sugar production will create in the future. The profits from sugar will create a hierarchy between plantation owners and those working the fields and mills as slaves. Although this image depicts the beginning of British influence and domination over the island of Barbados, the narrative will continue to evolve as sugar projection reaches an all-time high and the thirst for profit will result in the dehumanization of an entire group of people.
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Transformation of an Island
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transformation-of-an-island
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Isaac Sailmaker
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The painting <em>Island of Barbados</em> by Isaac Sailmaker
Barbados
Colonialism
Exploitation
Island of Barbados
Sailmaker, Isaac
Slavery
Sugar Production
Teachers & Teaching
-
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27b1a75a83ab3fe2154e67eb6f2ecba6
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Sheet music
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Pixabay
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sheet-music
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
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graduate-student-residents-2021
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Through the National Humanities Center summer intensive program
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Megan Kitts, 25, Philosophy Ph.D. Student
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2012
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J.C. Bach's Viola Concerto in C Minor, 2nd Movement
Description
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I was around 16 years old at the time of my humanities moment. I had been playing the viola for 7 years. As usually occurred, I became bored with practicing the first movement of J.C. Bach's Viola Concerto in C minor that my teacher had given me for an upcoming recital, so I decided to skip to the next movement. The second one was not one that my teacher ever assigned her students, so I hadn't heard it before. After a somewhat cobbled together sight-reading attempt, I decided to look up a recording.
The song was hauntingly beautiful, filled with slow, elongated melodies and fast, anxious lines. I don't know what Casadesus intended to communicate with it, but, for me, it was a song about grief. The slow passages are restrained emotion, how one might feel when they are trying to keep themselves from feeling their sadness. The piece then becomes more anxious, as if unable to stop from considering what's going on. After the climax, it wanes, as if exhausted by the full cycle of the feeling. All of this was clear to me immediately upon listening.
The piece both changed the way that I played music, but also changed the way that I considered music in my life. It was what I turned to play immediately after the passing of a loved one. I played it in my senior recital. I have returned to it over and over ever since. It encouraged me to seek out musical moments in my life, and to consider the emotional and personal significance of humanities works.
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J.C. Bach and the Exhaustion of Feeling
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J.C. Bach
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bach-exhaustion-feeling
Bach, J.C.
Classical Music
Emotional Experience
Music
Music Appreciation
Teachers & Teaching
-
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James Joyce, 1915
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<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/262228106" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
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“I saw, in Stephen Dedalus, myself.”
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Beyond personally identifying with one of Joyce’s most well-known character, William Ferris points out how “Joyce keeps renewing his presence in our lives.” The continued circulation and appreciation of literature helps us draw parallels between our experiences and concerns and those of others, across time, national boundaries, and other differences.
Description
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<p>In this excerpt from a conversation with William Ferris, former Chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities, he shares how he came to see himself in Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of James Joyce’s <em>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</em>, who declares that he will fly from the nets of “nationality, language, and religion.”</p>
<p>He notes that at the time he encountered the character he and Stephen were about the same age and describes how he identified his own struggles as a young Southerner with those Dedalus experiences as a young Irishman. He goes on to discuss how the figure of Dedalus has become iconic and is used repeatedly to help discuss the struggles of young artistic spirits.<br /><br />Beyond personally identifying with one of Joyce’s most well-known character, William Ferris points out how “Joyce keeps renewing his presence in our lives.” The continued circulation and appreciation of literature helps us draw parallels between our experiences and concerns and those of others, across time, national boundaries, and other differences.</p>
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James Joyce
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William Ferris, former Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities
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william-ferris-stephen-dedalus
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<em>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</em> by James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ireland
Irish Literature
Joyce, James
Literature
Southern United States
Welty, Eudora
-
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9cafdf803f9821cbc30c651c1cc9b069
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Statues
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statues
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From one of my graduate students at Penn State (Morgane Haesen, whose "Moment" you published)
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Willa Z. Silverman, 62, Malvin E. and Lea P. Bank Professor of French and Jewish Studies, Penn State University
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Spring 2021
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<em>Night and Fog </em>(1955)
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“Nothing distinguished the gas chamber from an ordinary blockhouse,” writes Jean Cayrol in the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ iconic filmic meditation on the Shoah, Night and Fog (1956). “Inside, a fake shower room welcomed newcomers. The doors were closed. The newcomers were observed. The only sign – but you must know this (il faut le savoir) – is the ceiling worked over by fingernails. Even the concrete was torn.” At this point in the film, like an insistent investigative eye, the camera pans to the ceiling of the gas chamber, revealing the telltale scratch marks. The image of fingernails clawing into concrete in a desperate attempt for survival recurs in another work about Holocaust memory that we read this semester, Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975). Recalling an exhibit he had visited with his aunt shortly after the war – the same one, in fact, that led producers to ask Alain Resnais to create the film that would become Night and Fog -- the child survivor narrator writes: “I remember photos showing the walls of the ovens, lacerated by the fingernails of those who had been gassed.”
Il faut le savoir. The phrase has haunted me throughout the semester. You must know this. Because it happened. Because many would deny that it did, depriving the victims of dignity and history of truth. Fingernail scratches in the crematoria walls of Auschwitz, asks the neo-Nazi website The Stormer? “Jewish mythology says ‘yes.’ Science says ‘no.’” You must know this, because soon there will be no more survivors, and those still alive often find it too painful, or shameful, to share their testimony, or else they have learned to suppress it so as not to trouble others. “No one wanted my memories,” writes Birkenau survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens in But You Did Not Come Back. You must know this, because 2/3 of young Americans, according to a 2020 national poll, lack a rudimentary understanding of the Holocaust. “Where did the Holocaust happen?” educator Rhonda Fink-Whitman asks a Penn State student in her 2012 documentary, 94 Maidens. “I have no idea.” You must know this, as Cayrol writes in Night and Fog, because “war is sleeping, but with one eye always open.” As I write, genocide continues to be perpetuated against the Muslim Rohingya people by the military in Myanmar. “Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of our new executioners?”
But to know – and this is a second meaning of il faut le savoir -- one must be ‘in the know,’ know where to look, how to be on the lookout, how to decode the signs. You have to be tipped off to find the “Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation” (1962) tucked in a small square behind the behemoth of Notre-Dame Cathedral, just as you must be ‘in the know’ to be disturbed by the memorial’s identification of those deported from France as willing “martyrs” to a cause rather than victims of state persecution by both the Nazis and the Vichy regime. The French State headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain is nowhere mentioned in this memorial monument, yet it deported over 75.000 Jews from France to their deaths, along with, in smaller numbers, Roma, the disabled, Jehovah’s witnesses, gay men and lesbians, and other ‘undesirables.’ Stroll around to the main façade of Notre-Dame to contemplate the two female allegorical figures framing it; only if you’re ‘in the know’ about the anti-Semitic underpinnings of European Christianity through the mid-20th century will you understand that one figure represents the Church triumphant, while the other, with downward cast, blindfolded gaze and broken Torah tablets at her feet, symbolizes the Synagogue. As only one photograph of this event remains, you need to be on the lookout for the tiny plaque at the foot of a bustling Parisian office building marking the site of the former Vélodrome d’hiver, an indoor bicycle track where over 11,000 Jews, including over 4,000 children, were packed for several sweltering days in July 1942 before being herded to their deaths. “A peaceful landscape,” writes Cayrol, “An ordinary field with flights of crows, harvests, grass fires. An ordinary road where cars and peasants and lovers pass. An ordinary village for vacationers – with a marketplace and a steeple – Can lead all too easily to a concentration camp.” Il faut le savoir.
“Every hour of every day,” writes Hélène Berr, a young upper-class French Jewish woman who survived a year in deportation before being beaten to death in Bergen-Belsen, “there is another painful realization that other folk do not know, do not even imagine, the suffering of other men, the evil that some of them inflict. And I am still trying to make the painful effort to tell the story. Because it is a duty, it is maybe the only one I can fulfill. There are men wo know and who close their eyes, and I’ll never manage to convince people of that kind, because they are hard and selfish, and I have no authority. But people who do not know and who might have sufficient heart to understand – on those people I must have an effect.” Let us – we who in Primo Levi’s words “live safe in [our] warm houses,” armed with all we have learned this semester, make the “painful effort to the tell the story” to all those who will listen, “those with sufficient heart to understand.” Because the world must know. Yes, il faut le savoir.
Title
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“Il faut le savoir:” Reflecting on France’s Holocaust History and Memory
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Jean Cayrol, Alain Resnais
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il-faut-le-savoir
Documentary Films
Emotional Experience
Film and Movies
Historical Memory
History
History Education
Holocaust
Memorials
Memory
Teachers & Teaching
War
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Harp
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Pixabay
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harp
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
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graduate-student-residents-2021
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NHC Summer Residency
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Anushka Sen, 30, Ph.D. Candidate, teacher, emerging translator
Date
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Spring 2021
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<em>Have One on Me </em>(2010) by Joanna Newsom
Description
An account of the resource
As I considered a range of options for my Humanities Moment, I instinctively knew it would come down to music, which is the element that moves me most often and intensely in my daily life. However, my tendency to live within particular soundscapes for hours or days on end also means that my moment is entangled with longer histories and hard to pin down in time and space. If anything, the album <em>Have One on Me</em> that yielded my “moment” has taught me a different, more unbounded relationship with time. But first, a little bit of background on the artist and how I discovered her. <br /><br />I found Joanna Newsom in a Facebook post by a scholar I had met at a James Joyce summer school in Trieste, Italy. I had loved this person's academic work on literary hoaxes but as our social media afterlives showed us, our most vital point of connection was our love for women musicians with strange voices. I made it a point to check out any song he posted, and in late 2015, one of those songs turned out to be "Sapokanikan" from Newsom's latest release, <em>Divers</em>. "Sapokanikan" is notorious (within admittedly niche circles) for rhyming its titular word--an indigenous place name--with "Ozymandian"--an adjective crafted from Shelley's famous poem ("Ozymandias") about transience, infinity, and human hubris. This parallel is a neat glimpse into how the rest of the song traces the ebb and flow and layering of human histories in a single place. The audacity of it could be obnoxious, just as the music video of Newsom skipping down the streets singing straight into the camera could be precious. But none of it felt overindulgent to me. <br /><br />The density of the lyrics allowed Newsom's voice to soar, at moments to hair-raising pitches that could have come straight from her harp or accompanying strings. Her earnest playfulness presented the mythic scope of her song with a disarming wink. And so my love for Joanna Newsom sprouted, easily and effortlessly. At times, I was troubled by how her love of myth led her to paint mystical pictures of "ethnic" cultures, or to string together different cultural references a bit too lightly and whimsically for the material histories of inequity that they grazed against. Nonetheless, I found the grand scale of her work personally liberating, and she always seemed to be aware of the fragility inherent in any overinflated image--whether in the way men saw women, or civilizations saw themselves. <br /><br />But while I grew obsessed with Newsom's discography, I could never seem to get into her album <em>Have One on Me</em>. An over two hour-long triple album, it already posed a challenge to attention spans, almost testing the quality of her fans’ devotion. But a bigger problem for me was that the album seemed to lack her trademark energy and graspable forms that usually provided an entry point into her complex compositions. Unlike the sparkling and robust folk tunes of her debut, or the almost classical shifts in pace and melody in her later work, <em>Have One on Me</em> had a meandering, repetitive quality to my ears. The lyrics were devastating as usual, the singing was heartfelt, the overall sound was polished, but I failed to find that hook, that leap, that burst of vibrancy or ethereal lull that would transport me to Joanna’s universe. <br /><br />At some point in the Spring semester of 2021, I was relying desperately on music to help me complete a dissertation chapter draft while my country was being ravaged by the second wave of COVID-19 and the disregard of a cold-blooded central government. My nerves were frayed--I craved a protective cocoon of music but not one so stimulating that I would be led away from my work. <em>Have One on Me</em> suddenly seemed like a good option. It may have been my least favourite Joanna Newsom album, but it was still Joanna Newsom. The album was expansive, elegant, and my distance from it could only help my focus. It turned out to be a great choice--the intricacy of the sound became a calming swirl around me as I plunged into the depths of my writing. <br /><br />But after days of writing successfully to <em>Have One on Me</em>, something changed. The album was no longer a soothing but distant friend, no longer an amorphous mass of pretty and mysterious textures. I felt as though I had suddenly obtained the ability to see and hear at close range. Songs had intimately familiar outlines and phrases. The album wasn’t untethered, it was a deeply emotionally grounded narrative that left no stone unturned for the sake of the story that might lurk beneath. In a sense, <em>Have One on Me</em> occupies the most relatable of genres--the breakup album. But like Bjork’s <em>Vulnicura</em>, it is a breakup album that stretches and grasps and generates more than it fixes, fixates, or breaks down. The title track laughingly announces the singer’s separation from a hurtful ex-lover. “Baby Birch” mourns the loss of a baby, never held or seen. “California” makes an emphatic choice to protect the “border of… [the singer’s] heart” but still admits that the powerful habits of love wind her up like a cuckoo clock. It is easy to confuse something capacious for something overindulgent if we have been taught to trust bite-size pieces of wisdom and catharsis. <em>Have on One Me</em> was a vital corrective to those habits that I’ve acquired. <br /><br />And I could not have been more wrong about the album’s pacing--I realized that everything about it was dynamic. Some songs, like the title track, are a richly embroidered tapestry, with subtle incremental shifts in the musical pattern. “Baby Birch” starts as a slow, pained crooning and swells into a tumultuous but triumphant section with strong percussion. “Go Long,” a bewilderingly compassionate indictment of toxic masculinity, switches between a regular and a high register with an unearthly ease while the shimmering harp in the background takes over in a wordless concluding meditation. The final song, “Does Not Suffice,” imagines the ex-lover’s home slowly returning to a masculine starkness as the singer removes all her items of clothing before her departure. It is once contemptuous and empathetic, self-aggrandizing and vulnerable. The gentle, ambling melody is almost identical to an earlier song, “In California,” with a whiff of added melancholy and fewer variations this time round. The ending however, is a dark and thunderous banging on a cluster of musical instruments all at once. <br /><br />In the height of my newfound obsession with this album, I listened to it all the time--with headphones on, through my portable speakers, on my laptop speakers, and even directly through my phone. When “Does Not Suffice” drew to a close, my phone surprised me by the sheer contained violence that exploded from its inadequate sound system. As the instruments pounded away, it felt as though there was a ghost trapped in my device. I remember that visceral quality straining past technological barriers as a reminder of much energy there is in Joanna Newsom’s music, and particularly in the album that I had underestimated.
Title
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Have One on Joanna Newsom
Creator
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Joanna Newsom
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have-one-on-joanna-newsom
Aesthetics
Art
Graduate Students
Music Appreciation
Newsom, Joanna
Poetry
Self-Realization
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http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/129/fashion-fair-designer-fashions.1.jpg
3d221e5e28543419610b48f2281ca257
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Ebony Fashion Fair designer fashions, NCMA
Creator
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Olympia Friday
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Haute Couture: Fashion Fair and the Empowerment of the Black Community
Description
An account of the resource
<p>I recall flipping through <em>Ebony</em> magazine as a child in the 80s and often seeing pictures of Fashion Fair models. It didn’t dawn on me then how the power of fashion was being used to inspire an entire community. After seeing “Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair” at the North Carolina Museum of Art, it became clear to me. I developed a deeper sense of the importance of John and Eunice Johnson’s creation.</p>
<p>The Johnsons started Fashion Fair in 1958. This quote by Mr. Johnson, which was a part of the exhibit, placed Fashion Fair into greater context for me:</p>
<p>“<em>Ebony</em> was founded to testify to the possibilities of a new and different world. In a world of despair, we wanted to give hope. In a world of negative Black images, we wanted to provide positive Black images. In a world that said Blacks could do few things, we wanted to say they could do everything.” –John H. Johnson, from his autobiography, <em>Succeeding Against the Odds</em>, 1989</p>
<img width="600" height="464" src="http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/john-johnson-ebony-quote.jpg" />
<p>Fashion Fair was more than models strutting the runway in expensive designer clothing. It was an empowering and uplifting cultural force and antithetical to the negative portrayal of Blacks at the time. Fashion Fair debunked commonly held beliefs about Blacks. It showed them as beautiful, successful, glamorous, classy, and dignified. Ebony Fashion Fair ended in 2009. Yet, it cemented its place in history.</p>
Source
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<em>Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair</em>, an exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art
Creator
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John and Eunice Johnson
Date
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2017
Contributor
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Olympia Friday, Digital Engagement & Marketing Coordinator, National Humanities Center
Identifier
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fashion-fair-black-community
African American History
Art Museums
Black History
Ebony Fashion Fair
Ebony Magazine
Fashion Design
Hope
Identity
Inspiration
Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair
Johnson, Eunice
Johnson, John
North Carolina Museum of Art
Raleigh, North Carolina
-
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Title
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Car radio
Text
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Title
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My Favorite Things
Description
An account of the resource
At the age of 74, I could describe many humanities moments but this one stands out. Sometime in 1961, my brother was driving me home when I first heard Symphony Sid play John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” over the radio. I was a veteran jazz listener at that time but the sound of this recording captivated us. From the time it started, it took less than the 13 odd minutes of the performance to get home but we could not leave the car until the music was finished. Afterwards we turned off the radio and sat in silence for 5 minutes before we talked about what we had just heard.<br /><br />I was taking trumpet lessons and playing baritone horn in my high school’s concert band. I had been listening to music, including classical music, and buying jazz albums for years. High school was not the high point of my life but music had always brought me to a higher understanding of my feelings toward the world around me. It still does.
Subject
The topic of the resource
I was taking trumpet lessons and playing baritone horn in my high school’s concert band. I had been listening to music, including classical music, and buying jazz albums for years. High school was not the high point of my life but music had always brought me to a higher understanding of my feelings toward the world around me. It still does.
Source
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“My Favorite Things” by John Coltrane
Creator
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John Coltrane
Date
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1961
Contributor
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George Bailey, 74. Retired helicopter pilot (45 years). Failed musician, proficient amateur illustrator, avid sailor.
Identifier
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my-favorite-things
Black Musicians
Coltrane, John
Disc Jockeys
Helicopter Pilots
Jazz
Music
Musicians
My Favorite Things
Radio
Symphony Sid (Torin, Sid)
-
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Title
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Vegetarian Diet
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Pixabay
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vegetarian-diet
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Title
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
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Dr. Andy Mink, NHC
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Taylin Nelson, 28, doctoral student
Date
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2017
Source
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<em>Eating Animals</em>
Description
An account of the resource
I rented Jonathan Safran Foer's <em>Eating Animals</em> from the library, at a time in my life when I was searching inwards and exploring my beliefs. I would listen to the audiobook as I drove, and so it was a gradual experience that took place over a month. <br /><br />My experience listening to this book opened my eyes to something which I had subconsciously known about myself all along but had not yet acknowledged. I learned about what it means to eat animals in our industrialized, capitalistic world, and how eating meat is not intrinsically bad, but circumstantially bad when it entails the suffering of animals, the health and disparity of humans, and environmental destruction for the planet. <br /><br />This book opened my eyes to a world outside of my own, and to a conscious awareness of others, that helped me to think in different ways, and believe in a moral cause. I became a vegetarian in 2017, and have centered my academic research on meat and animal studies.
Title
A name given to the resource
This is the Ocean
Creator
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Jonathan Safran Foer
Identifier
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this-ocean
Animal Rights
Conscientious Objection
Environmental Activism
Environmental Ethics
Environmental Justice
Foer, Jonathan Safran
Vegetarianism
-
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Populibros peruanos
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populibros-peruanos
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Title
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
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NHC Graduate Student Summer Residency 2021
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Carlos A. Tello Barreda, 36, Ph.D. candidate in Native American Studies
Date
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2003-2006
Source
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<em>Yawar Fiesta</em>
Description
An account of the resource
I hadn’t noticed until now how little I remember about the time I first read <em>Yawar Fiesta</em>. I know I had already received my bachelor’s degree and was working as an engineer. Was it 12, 15 years ago? I don’t know the exact time, nor the reason I decided to pick it up. Also, no matter how hard I try to remember, I can’t picture myself in the process of actually reading the book. I just remember a feeling. The feeling of knowing that my life was not going to be the same. The feeling that things will never go back to what they were before. With a feeling like that, I guess the details are not that important. <br /><br /><em>Yawar Fiesta</em> is Jose Maria Arguedas’s first novel. Arguedas was a Peruvian anthropologist and writer. <em>Yawar Fiesta</em> narrates the intended and unintended consequences of the prohibition of a traditional Indigenous way of bullfighting by the Peruvian government, under the excuse that the practice needed to be banned to protect the “savage Indians” of an Andean town from themselves. In the story, the Native inhabitants defy the prohibition, which leads to a series of events that force all citizens of the town to challenge and question their identities, and to reconsider their connection with their Indigenous heritage. <br /><br /><em>Yawar Fiesta</em> illuminates all the complexities and contradictions of the Peruvian national identity, one that at the same time incorporates sanitized notions of “Indigenous culture” and rejects Indigenous peoples’ full membership in the Peruvian society. <br /><br />Before reading <em>Yawar Fiesta</em>, my only previous interaction with Jose Maria Arguedas’s work had been a really bad one. While in high school, I was assigned <em>Agua</em>, a collection of short stories. I couldn’t even finish it. I found it slow, and its blend of Quechua grammar and Spanish words impenetrable. I also lacked the relevant sociohistorical background to connect, as a coastal Peruvian citizen attending a private school, with these stories set in the rural Andes. Sadly, my school didn’t provide any of that background. So at the time, my conclusion was that Arguedas’s work wasn’t for me. <br /><br />When I read <em>Yawar Fiesta</em>, I realized that not only Arguedas’s work was indeed for me, but that it was exactly what I needed to rethink and reshape my identity as a Peruvian, and my ideas and attitudes about the country, and its past, present and future. It’s been more than a decade since I first read <em>Yawar Fiesta</em>, and it still feels as relevant as ever. When I decided to pursue a doctoral degree in Native American Studies, Arguedas’s work and life informed and inspired my decision. I aspire to become a scholar that shows a level of care and love for the people I work for and with as the one Arguedas’s had for his interlocutors. And I hope that my scholarship, like Arguedas’s, aids in the fight of Indigenous peoples in Peru and all over the world to dismantle the sociopolitical structures that sustain the racism that directly affects them.
Title
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El yawar punchau verdadero: The time I discovered Jose Maria Arguedas
Creator
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Jose Maria Arguedas
Identifier
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yawar-punchau-verdadero-discovered-Jose-Maria-Arguedas
Anthropology
Arguedas, Jose Maria
Identity
Indigenous Authors
Literature
Native American Studies
Peru
-
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Artificial Intelligence
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artifical-intelligence
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
Identifier
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
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NHC Graduate Student Summer Residency 2021
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Leonardo Montes Alvarez, Ph.D. candidate
Date
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May 2020
Source
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<em>Condiciones Extremas</em> by Juan B Gutierrez
Description
An account of the resource
It was an exciting discovery when I read Condiciones Extremas by Juan B. Gutiérrez. Beyond the outstanding quality of the content, this digital novel also impressed me with its use of innovative technology. New technology has always amazed me. In this case innovation in literature with AI (artificial intelligence), immediately called my attention.
At the beginning of my PHD program, my advisor asked me what I wanted to focus on. I said I wanted to innovate and attract more interest in literature. I wanted to use my studies in literature and my passion for technology to attract the interest of new generations of college students towards literature. It meant a lot to me because I realized that it could also contribute to attracting more attention to the humanities.
The impact of technology on literature has opened new opportunities to create, transmit, and access literary works. After the printing revolution, digital media reached historic levels with unprecedented global adoption and demand for information transmission. This technology has transformed contemporary literature with literary works emerging from digital environments that have adopted characteristics which make them different from printed works.
Apart from just mere text, I was amazed by literary works using hypertext or multimedia elements such as animations, audio, or video. In Condiciones Extremas, its hypertext requires readers to decide the reading path interactively in each segment. It goes beyond hypertext by applying AI that adapts the sequence of the textual segments based on the interaction of each reader.
This book changed my perspective about technology. I had a romantic view of technology in where every innovation was supposed to be beneficial. I realized that its narrative has a critical perspective on the implications of the close relationship between society and technology. Its conflicts expose an elitist use of the most advanced technological power for the benefit of the wealthier social classes at the expense of the exploitation of the less favored social classes.
Title
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Artificial Intelligence Technology in Hispanic Digital Literature
Creator
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Juan B. Gutiérrez
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artificial-intelligence-hispanic-digital-literature
Access
Artificial Intelligence
Digital Humanities
Digital Literature
Gutiérrez, Juan B.
Hispanic Literature
Hypertext
Literature
Technology
-
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Bisham Abbey
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bisham-abbey
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
Identifier
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
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NHC summer residency
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Frankie Urrutia-Smith, Graduate Student, 24
Date
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March 2019
Source
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All Saints Bisham
Description
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There she was. Powerful and maternal, she claimed her place at the head of her family, teaching from an open book while her husbands slept elsewhere. We finally "met" more than 400 years after her death and burial in this medieval church, and friends of mine who saw my pictures there wondered about my joy at standing in a tomb.
I spent several years studying the life of a 16th century English noblewoman, Lady Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell. When I finally traveled to England as a senior undergraduate researcher, I thought I knew everything there was to know about her, but I was wrong. In England, I saw how her signature changed through time, and how she forged relationships with others through physical writing. I felt her personality in the pages of documents that she wrote or dictated in a way that printed sources could not communicate. I witnessed her devotion to her family when I saw other funeral monuments she had designed. I even crept through her house while people downstairs prepared the great hall for a wedding, which her portrait would look down on as it had countless times before.
But nothing compared to the experience of looking at Elizabeth in the funeral monument of her own design. There, I finally encountered her legacy as closely as possible to the way she had intended. After 400 years of consistent flooding from the Thames, it is unlikely that her physical remains are still in the crypt or even identifiable, but it was almost as though I could feel her presence anyway.
That experience in a quiet countryside chapel has changed the way I think about how we craft our legacies, and it cemented in my mind the idea of historical subjects as people that we are just trying to get to know.
Title
A name given to the resource
Pleased to Meet You, Lady Elizabeth
Identifier
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lady-elizabeth
Creator
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Lady Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell
England
Family
Gravestones
Monuments
Nobility
Poets
Royal Courts
Women
-
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Title
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Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
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Title
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Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History!
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Title
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Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)
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Ida B. Wells (1862-1931)
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Well-Behaved Women (Me and Us: Jacqueline!)
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ad031908e8c156a2d0da8a5620c549eb
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Title
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Teacher Advisory Council
Description
An account of the resource
This collection includes contributions from the National Humanities Center's Teacher Advisory Council. The council is a 14-member board that supports the Education Programs of the National Humanities Center for a one-year term of service.
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
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Title
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Well-Behaved Women
Description
An account of the resource
My moment focuses on the fact that African American women have been using their words as Political Resistance.
The humanities contributed to this moment, because my ancestors and myself are using words to make sense of the world and our place in it.... Resisting!
Subject
The topic of the resource
The humanities contributed to this moment, because my ancestors and myself are using words to make sense of the world and our place in it.... Resisting!
Source
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Well - Behaved Women Seldom Make History
Creator
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Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Date
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It started when the first slave arrived in America and is ongoing.
Contributor
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<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/education-programs/teacher-advisory-council-2017-2018/">Jacqueline Stallworth</a>, 46 years old, High School English teacher in northern Virginia
Identifier
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well-behaved-women
African American History
African American Women Authors
Ancestors
Civil Rights
Hurston, Zora Neale
Resistance
Teachers & Teaching
Truth, Sojourner
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher
Wells, Ida B.
Women's History
-
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Zeppelin record
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zeppelin-record
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
Identifier
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
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The NHC Website and Summer Residency Orientation
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Frank Lacopo, 27, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Penn State University
Date
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High School
Source
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Led Zeppelin, "Ramble On" (1969)
Description
An account of the resource
Sometimes I wish I could say that a great novel or an experience with an especially gifted teacher or professor lit a spark for the humanities in me. Certainly, many novels and teachers planted seeds that I can identify and surely many more that I can’t. For me, that singular moment came in the form of the Led Zeppelin song “Ramble on.”
And it was in one of the moments of struggle that come more than occasionally to obsessive nerds. How could teenage me sound more like Jimmy Page on guitar? Exactly like him?
I had to understand all the people and tools who contributed to Led Zeppelin’s music. What allowed them to make the sounds they did? Jimmy Page used a Supro amplifier – all but impossible to find. A Fender Telecaster guitar – a little easier. Most of the time, I couldn’t afford the equipment, but I could afford wood and parts for a guitar that got pretty close. More opportunities to learn every intricacy that made the sounds on those albums and, particularly, on this song.
I had to learn everything.
What made them want to write that lyric? What gives this song or that album its atmosphere? Old American blues classics filled the early albums, most of them ripped off and virtually unacknowledged for decades. Better learn those blues scales! Other songs like “Stairway to Heaven” almost certainly plagiarized from the white American band Spirit, the subject of a recent lawsuit. So I had to learn everything I could about Spirit, just for context.
And then there was “Ramble On:”
Mine's a tale that can't be told, my freedom I hold dear
How years ago in days of old when magic filled the air
‘Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor, I met a girl so fair
But Gollum and the evil one crept up and slipped away with her
What?
Mordor? Gollum?
Like the Peter Jackson movie?
…Oh there are books, too.
Guess I had to read those.
How un-classically educated of me. To understand Led Zeppelin, one must understand J.R.R. Tolkien. Not the other way around.
And an entire pseudo-medieval world opened to me. From Tolkien came Beowulf. Then the German classes. The Latin classes. And a semester in Great Britain to study the Middle Ages in an appropriate setting. A senior thesis and then an article on the medieval English Church. All done with “Ramble On,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Misty Mountain Hop,” and so many other songs bouncing around in my head. Past and present came to me via a detour in the 1970s, courtesy of Atlantic Records.
To a white American kid with deep interest in the history of the “West,” it almost seemed like Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Jon Bonham were making the sounds I wanted to hear. Maybe even the sounds I was supposed to hear. Why was it so easy to hear that very mythical, very white world that resided somewhere between Tolkien’s imagination and the stage of Madison Square Garden? How could I even attempt to minimize the blatant plagiarism, often entirely uncredited from the Black artists? We all mimic, we all copy, right? The humanities, after all, demonstrate this. Tolkien ripped off Beowulf. Shakespeare could be derivative.
But for Zeppelin, how lucrative that mimicry was. Extractionary even. As I entered graduate school, I started to wonder whether I was complicit in something. The song “The Rover,” overlooked as a masterwork of the electric guitar despite being the second song on side one of the band’s most ambitious album Physical Graffiti, may be autobiographical in this sense. Written about an early modern privateering ship of the same name:
Oh how I wonder, oh how I worry, and I would dearly like to know
I've all this wonder, of earthly plunder, will it leave us anything to show?
And our time is flying, see the candle burning low
Is the new world rising, from the shambles of the old
Was this the real Led Zeppelin? The colonial plunderer masking as medieval romantic? Had I been enjoying the results of their plunder while living in a fantasy? Was Led Zeppelin, intentionally or not, telling a sad story about lies we tell ourselves as we sit atop so much plunder? Turns out asking those questions is even more uncomfortable from a neogothic university building that – like “Ramble On,” represents and contains some gilded version of a pure Western past full of wonder, excellence, passion, and even glorious danger. Was this how Led Zeppelin seemed easily to contribute to my identity while I had to investigate intentionally Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Otis Rush, whose songs and ideas I was really hearing under Zeppelin’s gilded, white, commercial veneer? Gollum and Gandalf were out in the open and yet fictional. The real person Howlin’ Wolf was somehow silent despite his very name, which demands explicitly to be heard.
My humanities moment, hearing and wondering about the lyrics to “Ramble On” was a “turning point,” to use a tired historian’s phrase. But my memory of that moment and my recurring reflection on it have taught me more than any single point in time ever could. Frankly, humanities moments can occlude as much as they illuminate. Unqualified enthusiasm for anything is rarely a Good Thing, and any feeling of rootedness in a romanticized version of the Middle Ages while selectively disregarding the labor and the accomplishments of nonwhite artists certainly falls on the more dangerous end of a spectrum. Humanities moments can be dangerous. They can distort and mislead. But they can be revisited through the texts that sparked them and through memory itself. They must be criticized. They have to be questioned. Only then can we learn from them. They can remain a source of inspiration, but never as simple, pure, mythical as at the instance of their occurrence.
Many times I've lied, and many times I've listened
Many times I've wondered how much there is to know
Title
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Ramble On
Identifier
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ramble-on-zeppelin
Creator
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Led Zeppelin
Artistic Inspiration
Led Zeppelin
Music
Song Lyrics
Songs
-
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Title
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Lonestar
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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Title
A name given to the resource
My Front Porch Looking In
Description
An account of the resource
I was around seven years old. My dad and I were in the car when the song came on. "My Front Porch Looking In" by the band Lonestar was my favorite song and I knew every word. I loved singing the song at the top of my lungs every time it came on. Today though, I stayed quiet. I had just witnessed yet another argument between my parents and my dad had taken me for a drive around town to cool off. He looked over at me with a confused expression when he saw I wasn't singing. All of a sudden he started singing the song as loud as possible and started to sway back and forth. He smiled and nudged my arm and soon enough I was grinning and singing along. This was the first time that music helped me to cope with a difficult situation. Since that day, I have turned to music as a sort of therapy to help me get through any rough time and the power of music has never failed me.
Music helped transform my understanding of the world. There is a song for any emotion and the song can either exacerbate an existing emotion or help change the way you are feeling. It can cheer you up or allow you to wallow in whatever you are feeling but at the end of the day the fact that music can make you feel something is where its power comes from.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Music helped transform my understanding of the world. There is a song for any emotion and the song can either exacerbate an existing emotion or help change the way you are feeling. It can cheer you up or allow you to wallow in whatever you are feeling but at the end of the day the fact that music can make you feel something is where its power comes from.
Source
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"My Front Porch Looking In" by Lonestar
Creator
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Lonestar
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2005
Contributor
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Zachary Fine, 19, Student
Identifier
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my-front-porch-looking-in
Emotional Experience
Families
Fathers & Sons
Lonestar
Music
My Front Porch Looking In
Singing
Students
-
http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/479/sunset-2180346_640.jpg
238bc0d6fd940dfc36be5f824fb87a0b
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
The Sun
Source
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Pixabay
Identifier
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sun
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Student Residents 2021
Identifier
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Referrer
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2021 NHC Summer Graduate Student Residency
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Contributor
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Bridget H., Ph.D. student
Date
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1988-1992
Source
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<em>A Raisin in the Sun</em>
Description
An account of the resource
The sixth grade stands out for me as one of those important milestones in life. As an adult, I have numerous precise moments of recollection where a memory is so vivid it feels as if I can recall every word and emotion. Our school was a small neighborhood Catholic school with a tragic past. In the late 1950s, the school burned down, and ninety-five people lost their lives. <br /><br />My experience as one of the few kids in the neighborhood who did not attend public school was nuanced. I never thought much about my identity outside of being the girl who went to Catholic school. My neighborhood was majority Latino and Black, and Chicago was and remains a largely segregated city. I saw white people at school and on television and Brown and Black people in my everyday life. I never noticed that the people I watched on tv shows and working in my small Catholic school did not represent my life or the lives of the people I knew. <br /><br />That all changed when Mrs. Maureen Hart started her teaching career in my sixth-grade class. I could share countless stories about Mrs. Hart's dedication to teaching and her desire to really make a difference in the lives of her students. Still, this particular moment is about our sixth-grade production of <em>A Raisin in the Sun</em>. We spent weeks preparing. We watched the 1961 movie adaptation, we read the script, and we designed the set. We learned all about Lorraine Hansberry and her groundbreaking accomplishments. We learned that the original play was set in Chicago and that Hansberry herself was a Chicagoan. The information made our production even more important. After all, we had to do justice to Chicago's own playwright. <br /><br />Studying and preparing for that play brought a profound sense of pride and ownership. I fell in love with the characters and all of their imperfections. It was the first time I experienced black characters who were flawed and proud on paper and in film. The struggles of the world around them were not the focus of the story. Family and kinship were central to the plot. When I finished the play, I clearly remembered a profound sense of knowing that I had a place in the world. My stories, although not heroic or regal, mattered and was worthy of praise and notoriety.
Title
A name given to the resource
Why Representation Matters
Creator
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Lorraine Hansberry
Identifier
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why-representation-matters
A Raisin in the Sun
African American Authors
African American Literature
African American Women Authors
Chicago, IL
Family
Hansberry, Lorraine
Kinship
Representation
Teachers & Teaching
Theater and Drama
-
http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/455/cubes-447703_640.jpg
b023cc2d689cb2b98b64b1c5fd3144ad
Dublin Core
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Title
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Abstract Cubes
Source
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Pixabay
Identifier
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abstract-cubes
Dublin Core
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Title
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
Identifier
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Referrer
For internal use only, for tracking and metrics.
NHC GSSR
Dublin Core
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Contributor
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Madeline Krumel, 24, Ph.D. Student
Date
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June 2021
Source
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"Baby, Baby" by Louisa Chase (1991). Etching on aquatint.
Description
An account of the resource
This summer, I am working with the Syracuse University Art Museum to create English-specific teaching resources. The goal is to make the museum's collections more accessible to instructors for both teaching and research purposes. The job came with the underlying assumption that artwork is a valuable tool for all kinds of academic or humanistic endeavors: close reading, interpretation, question-asking, theory application, etc. <br /><br />As I dug around in the collection, I came across a piece by Louisa Chase, "Baby, Baby" (1991) and had a breakthrough moment. The abstract work, and Chase generally, uses geometric shapes to shadow or mimic forms--in this case, rectangles and squares to mimic a baby--and chaotic, heavy lines to disrupt the image. The work is striking in itself, but I was inspired by the way in which it perfectly represents the Lacanian idea of the "Mirror Stage." <br /><br />A professor I work closely with describes pre-Mirror Stage identity as the formless, wild, confusing, cloudy, and chaotic experiences of an infant's sense of "self." And Chase's work shows that exactly, without the use of so-called "high theory." I was excited to show my professor, who was equally excited, and I went on to develop an entire module on the "Mirror Stage" and Identity out of paintings, photographs, cartoons, and other artworks of diverse mediums. <br /><br />This module, once completed, will hopefully help to illuminate Lacan's theory by showing how humans find (or construct) their identity via images, representations, objects, and other things on the outside. I'm excited to continue to research the collection this summer to identify other artworks that can help students and scholars achieve understanding, find inspiration, and communicate ideas.
Title
A name given to the resource
A Painting, A Baby, and Jacques Lacan Walk into a Syllabus...
Creator
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Louisa Chase
Identifier
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painting-baby-jacques-lacan-walk-syllabus
Art
Chase, Louisa
Identity
Lacan, Jacques
Museum Curatorship
Museums
Psychoanalysis
Teachers & Teaching
-
http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/7/101/poetry-960x590.jpg
1158bf248d7818be4b59d86aca3c9c86
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Writing poetry
Dublin Core
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Title
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#Humanitiesinclass
Description
An account of the resource
This collection includes contributions from members of the National Humanities Center's education project Humanities in Class. The project aims to develop a deeper portfolio of curricular materials and help set standards for humanities education that highlight differences among humanities disciplines.
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
The Perfect Invitation
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Hearing Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me” at a celebration of her work is the Humanities Moment that offered both comfort and a model for how to navigate life as a Black academic. I was a new English professor and was unprepared for the isolation I felt in the academy when a senior colleague invited me to the Clifton event. The evening was packed with more dazzling poets than I can remember, and I really couldn’t take it in. I still don’t remember much about it except hearing this poem and the story behind it.</p>
<p>Clifton had been named a distinguished professor of the arts and because she didn’t have all of the right credentials a man in the office next to hers didn’t think she deserved the honor and took time out of his day to tell her so. The poem is her response. The whole of that moment was affirming, not just the poem but the reason it came to me. More than affirming me, it showed me how to live this life of the mind—to do the work with fierce joy and to invite students, colleagues, and my communities to celebrate it with me.<br /><br />The whole of that poem was me. It “affirmed” my lived experience. Poems do that every day. They clarify a feeling, give us a glimpse into ourselves or, if we’re paying attention, into some other person or place. And they can show us how to live.</p>
<p>Hearing poets talk about their work is another experience all together. Clifton was being celebrated by writers like Toni Morrison and Sharon Olds that evening, and hearing that story from this dazzling artist in the company of her peers not only inspired me personally but also helped me remember that in the midst of all the research and interpretative work I do, it’s the art and the community around it that matters. The structure of the poem, with its repeated call to “come celebrate,” reminds me that we have to remain open, regularly invite people to join us.</p>
Subject
The topic of the resource
<p>The whole of that poem was me. It “affirmed” my lived experience. Poems do that every day. They clarify a feeling, give us a glimpse into ourselves or, if we’re paying attention, into some other person or place. And they can show us how to live.</p>
<p>Hearing poets talk about their work is another experience all together. Clifton was being celebrated by writers like Toni Morrison and Sharon Olds that evening, and hearing that story from this dazzling artist in the company of her peers not only inspired me personally but also helped me remember that in the midst of all the research and interpretative work I do, it’s the art and the community around it that matters. The structure of the poem, with its repeated call to “come celebrate,” reminds me that we have to remain open, regularly invite people to join us.</p>
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
“won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton
Creator
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Lucille Clifton
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2005 (ish)
Contributor
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<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/education-programs/humanities-in-class-guide-thinking-learning-in-humanities/">Patricia Matthew</a>, 49, English professor living in Brooklyn, New York
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
the-perfect-invitation
Clifton, Lucille
Community
Literature
Morrison, Toni
Olds, Sharon
Poetry
Professors
Vocation
Women of Color
won't you celebrate with me
-
http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/10/166/hamilton-marquee.jpg
1ad061e30103dc6033b12d574bf0db6a
Dublin Core
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Title
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“Hamilton, an American Musical”
Dublin Core
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Title
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National Humanities Center Board Members
Description
An account of the resource
This collection includes contributions from the distinguished board of trustees of the National Humanities Center
Moving Image
A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation.
Player
html for embedded player to stream media content
<iframe width="640" height="480" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/262261026" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Dublin Core
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Title
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<em>Hamilton</em> and the Performance of Poetry
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Thomas Scherer describes two related encounters which speak to the power of hearing poetry performed aloud. The first is an explanatory talk and poetry reading by the great literary scholar M. H. Abrams at the National Humanities Center; the second is hearing Lin-Manuel Miranda discuss his award-winning rap musical, <em>Hamilton</em>.</p>
<p>Across generations, cultural divides, venues, and artistic voices, the power of lyric poetry to capture and convey powerful feeling is undeniable. And when poetry is performed and embodied, “brought to life” if you will, its capacity to create change is palpable.</p>
Creator
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M. H. Abrams, Lin-Manuel Miranda
Contributor
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Thomas Scherer, Consultant, Spencer Capital Holdings
Identifier
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thomas-scherer-abrams-hamilton-poetry
Source
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Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical <em>Hamilton</em>; M.H. Abrams' <em>The Mirror and the Lamp</em>
Abrams, M.H.
Chernow, Ron
Drama
Hamilton, Alexander
Hamilton: An American Musical
Hip-Hop
History
Literature
Miranda, Lin-Manuel
Music
New York, New York
Performing Arts
Poetry
Politics
Popular Culture
Storytelling
The Mirror and the Lamp
United States History
-
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Title
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Handmaids' Protest
Photo credit: Ana Clara Nicola
Creator
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Ana Clara Nicola
Identifier
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handmaids-protest
Dublin Core
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Title
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
Identifier
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Referrer
For internal use only, for tracking and metrics.
NHC Virtual Graduate Student Residency 2021
Dublin Core
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Contributor
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Clara Bergamini, 27, graduate student
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<em>The Handmaid's Tale</em>
Description
An account of the resource
One of my most memorable humanities moments came during a period of my life where I was not enrolled in any academic institution, but instead working full-time in a secretarial position in the private sector. It was during this time, shortly after President Donald Trump’s election, that I first read Margaret Atwood’s <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em>. Even during my undergraduate education, I had been minimally exposed to feminist critiques and gender studies, despite receiving both an anthropology and a humanities degree. For much of my own life I had done my best to ignore the way in which being a woman affected the way I moved through the world, but as I read through <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> I experienced a fundamental shift in how I viewed myself and society within the United States. <br /><br />For those of you who are unfamiliar with the book, <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> is a dystopian novel that takes place in a United States that has been taken over by a new state called Gilead. In this dystopian world, the birth rate has plummeted and fertility is rare among women globally. Part of Gilead’s intention in taking over the United States was done for the sake of taking control of women’s reproductive capacity in order to maximize the potential of any and all fertile women by making them sex slaves to the most politically powerful men in the country. <br /><br />Gilead is a strictly hierarchical structure in which men occupy all political positions of power and women serve exclusively in domestic or sexual roles. The only exceptions to these assigned positions are women deemed as “unwomen,” who are sent to work and die in radioactive wastelands. To be deemed an “unwoman,” a woman would first need to be infertile and secondly would have been someone whose identity put them in conflict with Gilead’s ideals, such as an academic in the humanities. <br /><br />The book’s primary plot follows the life of Offred, who was a “handmaid,” a woman selected as a sex slave because of her ability to bear children. As a read through Offred’s harrowing story I began to feel overwhelmingly vulnerable to social and political changes happening around me in the United States. Suddenly my identity as a woman was something I needed to contend with and think about constantly in my understanding of how I operated within society. <br /><br />Although I had been reminded repeatedly in college about women’s absence in places of power and in our understanding of history, it was not until reading <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> that I learned to appreciate the implications of these absences. Something about the horror and vulnerability I felt from reading the book made issues relating to gender feel far more pressing then they ever had before. Instead of trying to push against gender inequalities and sexism by ignoring it, I began treating gender as an essential part to every story in history and society at large.
Title
A name given to the resource
Reflecting on Reality Through Fiction
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Margaret Atwood
Identifier
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reflecting-reality-through-fiction
Atwood, Margaret
Dystopian Fiction
Gender Inequality
Handmaid's Tale
Literature
Literature Appreciation
Self-Realization
Women's and Gender Studies
-
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2750babc5f6e5f99c306fd63867fd977
Dublin Core
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Title
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Runnel Walk
Identifier
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runnel-walk
Dublin Core
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Title
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
Identifier
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Referrer
For internal use only, for tracking and metrics.
NHC Graduate Student Virtual Summer Residency
Dublin Core
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Contributor
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Genevieve Guzmán, 37, PhD student
Date
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June 2021
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<em>W;t</em>
Description
An account of the resource
Late this spring, my foster dog Sally unexpectedly died. I should’ve known she had cancer, but I not a veterinarian, and I didn’t think to apply Occam’s razor to the growing list of her ailments. She came to me rotund with extra weight, and over the course of eight months, lost so much that her beautiful tawny fur hung off her in ripples. She started to stumble into walls, and the short trip to the front yard left her breathless. One Sunday in May, she had a seizure, and I knew something was terribly wrong. All the way to the emergency room, her heart beat steadily under my palm, but within the hour, the critical care vet had diagnosed anemia, severe muscle wasting, and metastatic cancer. I was bereft. I let her go. <br /><br />I’ve had chronic fatigue syndrome for over fifteen years, and for my comprehensive exams in English literature, I put together a list of twentieth-century illness literature. It’s not a death list, but narratives in the cancer section often end with that unauthorized coda. I had assumed that <em>W;t</em>, Margaret Edson’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, was autobiographical and thus a story of survival, but it is completely fictional, a composite of the playwright’s work in the cancer and AIDS unit of a research hospital while she was in college. The action follows Donne scholar and university professor Vivian Bearing as she enrolls in experimental chemotherapy for stage IV ovarian cancer. From her sick bed in the hospital, Vivian leads us through an analysis of Donne’s <em>Holy Sonnets</em> until she can take us no farther, and then the research intern and head nurse take over to close out the play.<br /><br />Since Sally passed, the netherworld of death has hovered very close, a ghostly afterimage blurring my otherwise vivid existence. I can’t decide which plane of reality is more real: that of life or of death. Not unlike Donne and Vivian, I can’t reckon with the dull, mad fact of absolute oblivion; really I can only handle the relative truth that for now, I must live without my dog. In its split-stage conclusion, <em>W;t</em> poignantly captures this paradox of the human condition. On the spiritual plane, as Vivian’s life slips away, she steps out of bed, disrobing from her hospital gown and bracelet, to reach for the light shining above her; on the physical plane, the research intern confronts his unexpected grief at her loss when he forgets her do-not-resuscitate order and calls in the code team to revive her. The team scoffs at his amateur error and leaves; meanwhile, Vivian has transcended to Donne’s afterlife, wherever it is. I admire this scene for its brilliant use of the dramatic format and Edson’s graceful display of how life goes on even as it ends.
Title
A name given to the resource
Bright Sun Before Nightfall
Identifier
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bright-sun-nightfall
Creator
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Margaret Edson
Cancer
Death
Donne, John
Drama
Edson, Margaret
Grief
-
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Dublin Core
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Title
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West End
Identifier
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west-end
Dublin Core
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Title
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Referrer
For internal use only, for tracking and metrics.
I learned of Humanities Moments from the NHC Summery Residency.
Dublin Core
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Contributor
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Ari Green, 27, Doctoral Student and Archival Processing Assistant
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
"Inner City Blues"
Description
An account of the resource
My humanities moment comes in the form a song called "Inner City Blues," by Marvin Gaye. The song was released in 1971 and it was a vocal illustration of the widening gap of inequality, racial instability, and social hardship endured by Black Americans in urban cities. <br /><br />I had heard the popular songs by Gaye before, but I had never really listened to his catalog in full. So when I finally heard "Inner City Blues," I immediately knew what he was talking about because I was able to witness similar things in my hometown, I just did not have the words. But this song helped me put my hometown into perspective and look deeper into the history of Sacramento (California). This song inspired my master's thesis on displacement and gentrification in Sacramento. And it helped be further understand the place I come from. "Inner City Blues" also inspired me to develop a travel exhibit that depicts change over time in Sacramento throughout all of its' cycles of rebirth, death, and redevelopment as a city.
Title
A name given to the resource
A History of Redevelopments
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Marvin Gaye
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
history-redevelopments
African American History
African American Musicians
Black Musicians
California
Music
Sacramento, CA
Urban Life in Music
-
http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/452/sunset-2297961_640.jpg
60136474b4e7c599ec3d6f11914da978
Dublin Core
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Title
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Sunrise
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
sunrise
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Pixabay
Dublin Core
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Title
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
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As a Summer Residency Participant
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Nauff Zakaria, 37, Ph.D. Candidate
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"Still I Rise"
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I have so many fond childhood memories of the Black church in which I grew up. My mother was a founding member of the church, and she was responsible for producing the annual Black History Program every February; this program showcased youth and adult members while also offering rich and detailed information about African American history.
Every year a participant was chosen to recite the Maya Angelou poem, "Still I Rise." Thus, from my early years, I heard this poem regularly during rehearsals and recited beautifully during the annual program. As I reflect back on my personal Humanities Moment, this poem deeply resonates with me. In my youth, I was completely unaware of the impact that this poem would make on the rest of my life. Nevertheless, Angelou’s words have shaped me in ways that I had not even realized until I contemplated my personal humanities moment.
As a Black woman, I have encountered numerous moments that caused me to question my abilities, my worth, and my place in the academy. Yet, the words of this poem constantly remind me that I can, and I will rise above any obstacle that is presented because I possess all the gifts that my ancestors gave.
I read and re-read this poem often and each time that I do, I find such a sense of comfort. The power of Angelou’s words are an ongoing source of strength. The opening words of the piece set a tone of resilience despite unwarranted abuse. Angelou follows by questioning the unexplainable mistreatment of Black women based on the unspoken confidence we hold.
The comparison of herself to celestial beings such as the moon and the sun invoke within me a sense of power and inherent greatness. This has bolstered me in so many situations in which I was made to feel inherently less than those around me. The poem continues to affirm that no matter the shooting of words and the cutting of eyes that I may be forced to endure, I, like air, will always rise. This poem confirms to me that I carry with me a deep-rooted past that holds so much blood, so many tears, and an innumerable number of sacrifices – yet, still I rise.
I stand on the shoulders of giants that have never received their rightful praise. Hence, I am the living and ongoing extension of their legacy I am the hope and dream of the slave; I am living my ancestors’ wildest dreams, therefore still I rise.
Title
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Still I Rise
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Maya Angelou
Identifier
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still-i-rise
African American History
African American Literature
Angelou, Maya
Black History
Poetry
Resilience