"Dublin Core:Title","Dublin Core:Subject","Dublin Core:Description","Dublin Core:Creator","Dublin Core:Source","Dublin Core:Publisher","Dublin Core:Date","Dublin Core:Contributor","Dublin Core:Rights","Dublin Core:Relation","Dublin Core:Format","Dublin Core:Language","Dublin Core:Type","Dublin Core:Identifier","Dublin Core:Coverage","Item Type Metadata:Text","Item Type Metadata:Interviewer","Item Type Metadata:Interviewee","Item Type Metadata:Location","Item Type Metadata:Transcription","Item Type Metadata:Local URL","Item Type Metadata:Original Format","Item Type Metadata:Physical Dimensions","Item Type Metadata:Duration","Item Type Metadata:Compression","Item Type Metadata:Producer","Item Type Metadata:Director","Item Type Metadata:Bit Rate/Frequency","Item Type Metadata:Time Summary","Item Type Metadata:Email Body","Item Type Metadata:Subject Line","Item Type Metadata:From","Item Type Metadata:To","Item Type Metadata:CC","Item Type Metadata:BCC","Item Type Metadata:Number of Attachments","Item Type Metadata:Standards","Item Type Metadata:Objectives","Item Type Metadata:Materials","Item Type Metadata:Lesson Plan Text","Item Type Metadata:URL","Item Type Metadata:Event Type","Item Type Metadata:Participants","Item Type Metadata:Birth Date","Item Type Metadata:Birthplace","Item Type Metadata:Death Date","Item Type Metadata:Occupation","Item Type Metadata:Biographical Text","Item Type Metadata:Bibliography","Item Type Metadata:Player","Item Type Metadata:Imported Thumbnail","Item Type Metadata:Referrer",tags,file,itemType,collection,public,featured
"Discovering Contested Territory Through Vietnamese Folk Poetry",,"Until this summer institute, I had never heard of the Vietnamese folk poetry known as ca dao. To be honest, I had never even thought of Vietnamese people having a poetic tradition at all. I, like so many other Americans, had relegated Vietnam to an inert location on a map or a tidy historical category. I could barely conceive of a Vietnam beyond the context of American military intervention. Even as we learned about the legacies of European colonialism in the initial seminars, I still saw Vietnam as an almost passive landscape trodden over by successive waves of foreign invaders. In effect, I had made Vietnam a victim in its own story. That changed for me when I heard professor and poet John Balaban talk about his experience collecting and publishing for the first time the oral poetry of Vietnamese farmers. Balaban spoke of an ancient people, full of history, full of passion, and full of pride, inundated by the monsoons that swept away the architectural vestiges of power that we in the “West” have come to rely on so heavily for our historical identity. What was left was a long, beautiful tradition of oral history preserved in the daily life of simple farmers. As Balaban eloquently writes in Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry, poetry flourished “in villages where the lone singer can hear his or her voice against the drone of crickets, the slap of water, or the rustling of banana leaves in the wind (p. 2). This line jolted me out of my facile characterization of Vietnam and its people. Long before the French cast their colonizing net over the people of Vietnam, long before the Americans stumbled into their disastrous war, long before there even was a place called Vietnam, a lone singer could hear her voice “against the drone of crickets, the slap of water, or the rustling of banana leaves in the wind.” The theme of our institute was “Contested Territory: America’s Role in Southeast Asia.” At first glance, I assumed that we would be discussing America’s involvement in the so-called Vietnam War of the twentieth century; after two weeks of intense study, I have realized that I fundamentally misread the title of this institute. To study contested territory is not to examine how America and the Viet Cong fought bitterly over this hill or that, but rather to place America in the context of an ancient regional story that is crowded with diversity and life. “America’s Role in Southeast Asia” says nothing of dominance or destiny – it was my enculturation as an American that read into it such a teleological narrative. Contested territory, like so much else, starts, and perhaps ends, in the mind.",,"Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry by John Balaban",,"Wednesday, July 18th, 2018","Kevin Shuford",,,,,,discovering-contested-territory-through-vietnamese-folk-poetry,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"The National Humanities Center","Colonialism,History,Oral Tradition,Poetry,Vietnam,Vietnam War (1961-1975)",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/13/213/the-mother-1505000_960_720.jpg,Text,"Contested Territory: America’s Role in Southeast Asia, 1945–75",1,0
"Richard Wright's Native Son",,"I first encountered Richard Wright's Native Son from an admittedly privileged point of view. I included it as part of the comprehensive exams required for my PhD in English literature. I had read Wright's Black Boy, so I was acquainted with his style and profound depiction of the American south.
Wright is a major literary figure, so of course he belonged on an exam list. But I couldn't have been prepared for Native Son's captivating, visceral portrayal of Bigger Thomas's plight. Wright depicts the events that surround and subdue Bigger Thomas in a way that illuminates how extant societal structures continually oppress and disadvantage young black American men. The sequence of seemingly unstoppable and harrowing events that snowball as the novel progresses offered me unprecedented access into a world of experience that I, a white male, could never know otherwise.
Together with Black Boy, Native Son shows how outmoded racist ideologies inform many facets of America's southern and northern communities. Experiencing it was not a happy moment, but a moment that remains with me each day as I and so many others do what we can to reckon with racial injustice in our country.","Richard Wright","Native Son",,2018,"Matt Phillips, English Lecturer ",,,,,,wright-native-son,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC GSSR","Literature,Native Son,Privilege,Racial Justice,Wright, Richard",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/502/7222967796_a8e3815f98_o.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Humanities Moment(s)",,"During my hours of online teaching this year, I have repeatedly tried to bring myself back to my first encounters with the Humanities classroom. As an enthusiastic first-year student in comparative literature, I was excited to learn about art and culture from authors and specialists in cultural history and to be trained in the study of specific authors, styles, and genres.
I had always been drawn to folklore and been curious about how narratives helped to make sense of the world. My learning had at least always been aided by narrative, the more vivid the details the better. For example, it was much easier to remember geographical information, say the name of the farm, Miklibær, if you knew the 19th-century story of the ghost, Sólveig who haunted the local priest, Oddur. Or the name of the region Ódáðahraun if you knew the lullaby ""Sofðu unga ástin mín"" about the mother who had fled poverty into the dangerous highlands and was singing to her child in hiding.
When I made it to the humanities classroom it took me by surprise how it was not simply a place where meaning was mediated but a place in which I was trained to investigate how “meaning” takes place. I was both exhausted and thrilled by invitations to investigate how meaning is grounded in culture, relations, histories, and language in all its shapes and forms. In one of my first assignments in a class on Icelandic poetry, I received a comment from a teacher encouraging me to go “deeper” with my interpretation. She encouraged me to follow my own analysis, to try out what felt like a radical idea at the risk of being “incorrect”. Her comments were probably standard advice she gave to all her students, something she wrote on the endless papers that needed grading but for me, it was a formative moment of recognition of my voice and ideas.
While the content of the poem escapes me (I think it was about feminism and potatoes) I can recall the feeling of that instructive moment and its effect on my journey as a reader and thinker lingers. Still to this day I remember the thrill of literary analysis, how we followed the teacher as she dissected poems, plays, and novels and somehow she made the students feel like they were necessary contributors to the study. Students brought different insights to the discussion and the teacher showed us how to see surprising connections between cultural texts. It felt like the possibility of meaning was both grounded in the teacher’s scholarship but also the exchange between the people gathered in the room. Through this process, the authority of knowledge started to feel slippery, which was a powerful exchange, especially in a university setting. It felt to me that the collective search for the answer to our questions required vulnerability from the teacher but also every student willing to participate in the conversation. It felt like we were not only discussing literary materials but also always debating how we should discuss them. What do we see on the page? What is missing? Where do we begin in our interpretation? With the author? Her environment? Essentially, how do we see? But also, how did the text even make it to us, the readers? Who preserved it? Why does that matter?
I specifically remember how powerful it was to encounter feminist analysis, postcolonial and critical race theory, and to have access to new vocabularies to talk about power relations across time and space. The vocabulary of their insight even brought me closer to my original fascination with folklore, and I began to see the stories of my childhood not just as entertainment but as markers of power. Why were there so many ghost stories of young poor women that were haunting men of a higher class and stature? Could these stories tell us something about how colonialism conditioned gender and class relations in 19th century Iceland?
In these encounters with the approaches of the humanities, or ""humanities moments"" it felt like we in the class were not just discussing an individual poem or story but our relations to, well everything. These memories of deep learning in the classroom continue to inspire my own practice of teaching. And while ""thrill"" is not necessarily an apt description for every one of my own classes the possibility of these humanities moments is something that continues to inspire me.",,,,,"Sólveig Ásta Sigurðardóttir, 31, Ph.D. candidate ",,,,,,humanities-moments,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"National Humanities Center","Comparative Literature,Discovery,Feminism,Folklore,Humanities Education,Icelandic Literature,Learning,Relationality,Teachers & Teaching",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/473/classroom-2787754_640.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Why Americans in Indochina Wars?",,"I misunderstood the Geneva Accords and the reasons behind American involvement in Vietnam. I knew it was in the context of the Cold War but I did not understand why it had to happen and was I to teach a war or a conflict? After Pierre Asselin spoke on the subject and shared a similar map I understood that context was critical and that this was a war for the Vietnamese and a conflict the Americans could not politically shy away from.
The map chosen is significant as it is a Western perspective of a nation with delineations assigned by outsiders. Questions emerged. Where is Vietnam? Who is Vietnam? How could this map possibly tell me the answers.
It was in viewing this map and reflecting on the conversations and lectures from the seminar that I better understand this was a complex situation for a diverse group of people who had to answer difficult questions in the context of the Cold War. Who you claimed to be determined if you were a friend or foe of the United States. If a friend threatened to fall to our enemy, what choice did we have but to act in order to save an ally. As France used the Cold War to gain American support, the North Vietnamese used our own words to defend its independence. It was a time for hard choices, and we made ours: to defend democracy from tyranny of communism.
This moment in history resonated with me because I walked away finally feeling like I understood what various peoples of Vietnam were fighting for and how the United States fit into the narrative.
",,,,"July 1954","Kate Cruze, 35, History Teacher, Greensboro NC",,,,,,why-americans-in-indochina-wars,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"National Humanities Center Summer Seminar","History,Teachers & Teaching,Vietnam,Vietnam War (1961-1975)",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/13/200/French_Indochina_post_partition.png,"Still Image","Contested Territory: America’s Role in Southeast Asia, 1945–75",1,0
"Live with a Humanities Mindset!",,"As a society we are so often encouraged to go about our days in such a way that builds our own futures. This is great and all, but we need to think of the effects of always thinking of ourselves. This standard attitude of underhanded selfishness is so prevalent that seeing a person take the time to recognize the future of another individual or group of individuals and actually take action to improve the future of that or those individual(s) has been given a series of special names: charity, or donation, or social service, or community service. Why not make it a part of every day to chase our own dreams at the same time as fighting for futures beyond our own?",,,,,"Kenneth, 20, student at Texas A&M University",,,,,,live-with-a-humanities-mindset,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Generosity,Students,Texas A&M University",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/152/pocket-watch.jpg,Text,,1,0
"Understanding History as Gossip",,"
Author, educational advocate, and entrepreneur David Bruce Smith discusses a transformational moment in his education, during which a high school teacher showed him the revelatory truth that history, at its core, is a collection of stories and gossip. Smith believes strongly that by presenting history to students as a series of exciting and illuminating stories, we can cultivate a more widespread appreciation for—and understanding of—history’s importance in the next generation of learners.
Curator's note: The Grateful American™ Foundation is dedicated to restoring enthusiasm in American history for kids and adults. Smith holds a bachelor’s degree in American Literature from George Washington University, and a master’s in Journalism from New York University. During the past 20 years he has been a real estate executive and the editor-in-chief/publisher of Crystal City Magazine. He is the author of 11 books, including his most recent title, American Hero: John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States. The Grateful American Book Series for children, featuring historic couples that were partnerships, debuts in the fall with Abigail and John—a joint biography of the Adams's.
",,,,,"David Bruce Smith, Founding Father of the Grateful American™ Foundation",,,,,,david-bruce-smith-history,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,"Heidi Camp","History,Teachers & Teaching",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/296/Washington_Crossing_the_Delaware.jpg,"Moving Image",,1,0 "A Mountain of Faith",,"It was the middle of nowhere—nothing but sand, the occasional old car or rusted out piece of machinery, a strange lake known as the Salton Sea, and in the distance a rising mound of color that glimmered in the desert sun. In 2010, with encouragement from my religion professor, my mother and I quite literally drove across the country, roughly 2600 miles to Salvation Mountain, a mound of colorful paint that displayed biblical and religious messages. Bible verses accompanied images of bluebirds, flowers and waterfalls, all molded out of a mixture of clay and straw. This visit proved well worth the journey as it helped me to jump into ethnographic fieldwork while also allowing me to experience my first prominent ‘humanities moment.’ Rising 50 feet high and spanning 150 feet wide, the Dr. Seuss-like whimsical creation was made entirely by hand and proved to be as unique as its creator, Leonard Knight, an elderly man who dedicated his life to building this mountain in an effort to proclaim God’s love. Leonard was as kind hearted and gentle spirited as I had imagined. He lived at the mountain staying primarily in an old shaded hammock. A couple people who would check on Leonard over the years explained that he spent his days scavenging the dump for old building materials that he could use to add to his mountain. Along the way, he would often pick up something to eat. Salvaging car doors, windows, ladders, and buckets, Leonard incorporated anything he could find into his masterpiece. Over time, he built it up—adding new sections like a makeshift trophy room that contained local plaques he received or the ‘yellow brick road’ that consisted of a painted yellow stairway to the top. Showing us around, Leonard emphasized the reason for building the mountain: he wanted to tell the whole world that God is Love. He explained, “people got too complicated with love. Just keep it simple.” While his mountain displayed bible verses like the Lord’s Prayer and proclamations like “Jesus loves you,” perhaps above all Salvation Mountain acted as a direct representation of one man’s personal faith and larger understanding of the world around him. The mountain embodied a lived religion that ventured beyond static scriptures into the dry heat and sun-worn desert landscape of California. As an undergraduate, I understood religion within a sociological lens. It could help organize groups, driving and inspiring a range of outlooks and perspectives. But it was also magical, evoking a sense of wonder and awe. Like other humanities, religion helps us to explore and think critically about the human experience while deeply tugging at our emotions. Talking with Leonard a man who lived off the grid in a hammock in the desert, he whole-heartedly believed in the power of love and set out to embody such a love through the best way he could: a large colorful mountain. Of the handful of visitors I met that day, Leonard was the only person who had any strong ties to religion. Though his proclamation seemed apart from the views of those who stumbled upon the creation and an anomaly in a seemingly ‘middle of nowhere’ location, Salvation Mountain reveals the rich life and prevalence of religious thought that exists in marginalized places. While faith is normally looked at in the grandeur of cathedrals, churches, mosques, and temples, or even the beauty and solace of redwood forests, canyon lands, and ocean horizons, Salvation Mountain’s appearance on the margins of town and society show that even in the most unlikely of places, religion can drive conversation, thought, and action. It reveals the complexity and power that religion can have, even when its just one person calling out in the desolate desert. ",,,,2010,"Victoria Machado, 30, PhD Candidate in Religion & Nature / Writing Instructor at the University of Florida ",,,,,,mountain-of-faith,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"National Humanities Center Summer 2020 Graduate Student Residency ","Architecture,Art,Bible,Cultural Awareness,Faith,Religion,Religious Studies,Sociology",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/17/402/intro.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2020",1,0 Homegrown,,"My wanderlust took me to many places around the world where I experienced humanities moments at nearly every turn, but my hometown is where my relationship with the humanities was born. My childhood in a small town in New Hampshire was steeped in history. Impressive 19th century buildings and covered bridges painted the backdrop of my formative years and the hours of my days were measured by the ringing of Revere bells. Sarah Josepha Hale also hailed from the same town. Hale wrote, published, and advocated for women’s education, but is most commonly known for her nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Our lives were separated by over a century, but our childhood homes were only separated by a driveway and as a result she often came to my mind. Hale’s life sparked my curiosity about what role women played in American history and how they influenced their world despite the restrictions society placed on them. The constant reminder that women do make history helped foster my interest in the humanities. ",,,,,"Carey Kelley, 44, Ph.D. candidate, University of Missouri ",,,,,,homegrown,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,NHC,"American history,History,New Hampshire,Songs,Women's Rights",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/474/HM_American_Flag_Image.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0 """The Town that Freedom Built"": Preserving Zora Neale Hurston's Eatonville",,"This plaque, and several others, are sprinkled throughout Eatonville, Florida to guide a walking tour of America's first legally established self-governing all-African American municipality. Eatonville was established in 1887. The town gained popularity from its depiction in Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, went to college expecting to become a doctor, but taking a course on religious ethics and moral issues shifted his direction. To him, the humanities allow us to be introspective and to understand our lives from a larger point of view, which leads to a more revealing and enriching human experience.
To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit California Humanities: We Are the Humanities.
",,,"California Humanities",,"Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation","Standard YouTube License",,,,,larry-kramer-deciding-not-to-be-a-doctor,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"College Students,Communication,Critical Thinking,Ethics,Introspection,Psychology,Religious Studies,Vocation,Writing",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/5/55/Religious_symbols.jpg,"Moving Image","California Humanities: “We Are the Humanities”",1,0 "The world we live in isn't as big as you may think",,"On Tuesday February 6th of 2018, I watched SpaceX launch Falcon Heavy and successfully land two of its boosters. This launch was inspiring to many people because it was the first rocket launched capable of reaching Mars. The fact that Musk choose to launch his personal Tesla Roadster as a deadweight payload was a truly remarkable sight. The world was shown video footage of an already revolutionary electric car soaring above the atmosphere on a rocket developed by a wildly successful private space company. However, this was very touching to me for a different reason. The last time the world experienced this level of competition over space exploration was the cold war. This race granted us a variety of technological innovations that helped the quality of life of citizens all over the globe including braces, smoke detectors, freeze dried food, and water purifiers just to name a few. These are great products but it is saddening to know that they were only possible due to a huge conflict between world superpowers where disputes between politicians put millions of innocent lives at risk. The world we live in is full of conflict and competition. Tensions are high between the citizens of our nation and it is easy to feel like the world is very divided. I want to see a generation that focuses on bringing people together and fighting to improve everybody's quality of life rather than focusing on distances and widening cultural divides. Seeing a dummy in an electric car soaring through the atmosphere instead of a nuclear warhead hit me with a wave of emotion. The blue sphere in the background was mesmerizing- you cannot see borders, buildings, populations, or the small parts of life we become accustomed to. The only sight is the entirety of our world. Just a small orb containing every human, every home, every life on earth together. Space exploration not only allocated money toward research and science rather than war and hate, but it brings the human race together in a way that nothing else can do. I truly feel like my life has changed since seeing this. Whether I am driving around or standing in line among strangers I feel more care and respect for those around me. I know that I am a very insignificant part of our entire world and I feel more connected to those around me rather than living life looking for differences. Some may argue that we should focus on problems here on Earth but I think that space exploration brings us the innovations we did not know we needed here in the first place. In addition to that, I have never felt as connected to the rest of the world as I do now after seeing the February 6th launch. I think it is time we focus less on being citizens of our divided nations and put more effort into becoming citizens of this planet we share.",SpaceX,"Falcon Heavy launch",,"February 6th, 2018","George, 21, student",,,,,,world-isnt-as-big-as-you-think,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Cold War,Earth,Electric Cars,Falcon Heavy,Human Beings,Humanity,Interstellar Travel,Musk, Elon,Space Flight,Space Tourism,SpaceX,Students,Technology,Tesla Automobiles,World Citizenship",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/132/08teslaroadster1.jpg,Text,,1,0 "Scotland the Brave and The Flower of Scotland: A Wee Moment with Huge Impact",,"We tend to remember ""firsts"" in our lives. Hopefully we recognize the importance and value of experiences as we live through them. My first travel overseas was as an undergraduate on a semester study abroad to Stirling University in Scotland. It was absolute magic! All the experiences associated with travel - language, food, smells, conversation, relationships, sounds - were amplified because it was my first experience like this. I recall the side trips to Orkney, Portree, London, Bath, and Edinburgh equally to the moments on campus as a student studying history and education in another nation. In Scotland I discovered soccer, Caravaggio, William Wallace, scotch, hiking, history, music, other people and, most importantly, my self. Traveling overseas as a student is an experience that is hard to replicate in another part of your life. I tried, by working in another country for six years, but the student experience provides a unique moment in time that can't fully be recreated later. I encourage students in college to make this experience of their college career. Some fear they will be missing something by leaving. You won't. And I remember that semester as if it happened yesterday and is happening now.",,"Stirling, Scotland",,1994,"Craig Perrier, 48, Social Studies Curriculum Specialist and Adjunct",,,,,,scotland-brave-flower-scotland,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC Advisory Board ","Discovery,Scotland,Self-Realization,Study Abroad,Travel",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/4/525/Stirling_U.png,Text,Educators,1,0 "Censoring Slaughterhouse-Five",,"In this excerpt of a talk given at the National Humanities Center, Robert D. Newman discusses an exemplary humanities moment, when Kurt Vonnegut responded to the banning and burning of Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five by school officials in Drake, North Dakota in 1973. Newman notes that this series of historical events involving the kinds of literature we read and teach “reveals the enduring truths in a democratic culture.”",,"A letter written by Kurt Vonnegut about the censorship of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five",,1973,"Robert D. Newman, President and Director, National Humanities Center",,,,,,robert-newman-vonnegut-censorship,,,,,,"...on December 8th in 1973 when school officials in Drake, North Dakota, burned copies of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Kurt Vonnegut, of course, had served in World War II. He was captured by the Germans, held as a prisoner in Dresden when the Allies bombed the city.
For years, he tried to find a way to tell his story. And meanwhile, he went to graduate school in anthropology. He worked at General Electric. He got married, had three kids, adopted three more, and struggled to find his voice as a writer. But he finally wrote his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, which was published in 1969, and it was extremely popular, and for the most part, it got great reviews. But it was banned many times for being obscene, for being violent, for being unpatriotic.
In 1973, there was a 26-year-old high-school English teacher who assigned Slaughterhouse-Five to his students, and most of them loved it. They thought it was the best book they’d ever read. But one student complained to her mom about the obscene language, and the mother took it to the principal, and the school board voted that it should not only be confiscated from the students, who were only a third of the way through the book, but it should be burned. And many of the students didn’t want to give up their books. So the school searched all of their lockers and took them and threw the books into the school’s furnace, and while they were at it, the school board also decided to burn Deliverance by James Dickey, and a short story anthology.
Now, Kurt Vonnegut got wind of this, and he wrote a letter to one of the members of the school board, and the letter said, “Dear Mr. McCarthy, I’m writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I’m among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school. If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It’s true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That’s because people speak coarsely in real life. If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the education of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books—books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive. Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.”
Vonnegut’s letter, to which the school board did not respond, I want to argue stands as a humanities moment. These are profound moments that reveal the depths and the aspirations and the enduring human truths in a democratic culture. They stand against the cartoonish fears, the threats, the Mickey Mouse moments and appeals to our worst natures, that often pervade daily information flow and discourse.
Today, of course, we have people running for president who don’t believe in evolution, who don’t believe in global warming, who say they support gay people as long as they don’t practice being gay. They might as well also say they support squirrels as long as they don’t gather acorns for the winter, and trees as long as they stop shedding leaves for the fall.
When I was chair of English at the University of South Carolina in the late ’90s, I used to schedule myself routinely to teach freshman composition, and I would say to the other full professors, if I can do it, so can you. And one semester, I was using Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus as one of our texts, and it’s a very powerful story, as you probably know, in which Spiegelman discusses his relationship with his father, who was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, and in which the Nazis are depicted as cats and the Jews as mice.
On the first day we began discussing the text, I soon realized that many of the students only had a vague understanding of the Holocaust and were unable to place it precisely in history. And they lacked knowledge of its politics or its consequences. And like a truly hip instructor of the era, in the late ’90s, I asked them to research it on the Internet for our next class meeting and to bring in a couple of sources that they investigated. And in the next class, I was absolutely stupefied that literally half had brought in Holocaust denial sites as their sources of information. And they had trouble understanding my consternation when I denounced these sites.
So I want to be clear that I don’t fault the students for this so much as to point to a prevailing and growing issue that we’re all facing—of information literacy—that I believe it’s incumbent upon us to address. We witnessed the democratization of information. We witnessed its prevalence, its accessibility that’s unprecedented in history. But many have difficulty validating or effectively utilizing the information available to them. To extend the computer analogy, it’s as if we had an enormous hard drive, and there is no processor for it.
Through teaching, and citing, and recognizing, and creating humanities moments, we elevate both information and ethical literacy. These are the cornerstones of social justice and of a truly democratic culture. And such education is the backbone of our defense against the terrorism of cartoonish ignorance and the lackadaisical acceptance of it, which is a slippery slope to the barbaric erosion of healthy questioning and the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Book Burning,Books & Reading,Democracy,Drake, North Dakota,Letter Writing,Literature,Slaughterhouse-Five,Vonnegut, Kurt,World War II (1939-1945)",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/2/12/Slaughterhouse-Five.png,Sound,"Robert D. Newman ",1,0 "On This Side of Paradise",,"Mike Rizer used to avoid reading at any cost, even buying CliffsNotes when necessary. But in his sophomore year of college, Ernest Hemingway changed all that. Since then, he hasn’t stopped reading. In the professional realm of finance, Rizer finds that avid reading makes for good storytelling. Good storytelling makes for better leadership, communication, and critical thinking. “You can give people data, but they remember the story,” he says. Rizer found The Lost Generation, and the discovery changed his life. ",,"The literature of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald",,,"Mike Rizer, Executive Vice President and Director, Community Relations, Wells Fargo Bank",,,,,,rizer-reading-hemingway,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,"Heidi Camp","Books & Reading,Business Leaders,Fitzgerald, F. Scott,Hemingway, Ernest",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/194/hemingway-900x562.jpg,"Moving Image",,1,0 "When Breath Becomes Air","What makes life worth living in the face of death? How do you handle the loss of all you’ve dreamed and what do you hope for when the future you’ve imagined is no longer possible? These are some of the questions with which Paul Kalanithi wrestles and for which he realizes his medical training offers few, if any, answers. When preparing to go to the hospital, he writes of packing three books: C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, telling his wife, “I need to make sense of my cancer through literature.” His decision to write the memoir of his decline also served as an exercise in understanding.","Just as he was completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. When Breath Becomes Air, the memoir Kalanithi wrote in the midst of his illness, traces his journey from brilliant medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” to his life as a patient and new father faced with his own mortality. As his body declines, his spirit expands. “Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life,” he writes, “hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”Robert D. Newman: Can you give us an example of a Humanities Moment for you, where you became a vessel for the tradition of the humanities somehow, that it flows through you and enables you to create something new and wonderful?
Jonathan Lethem: Well, I’m going to pick something that may seem a little odd in this context, because it’s normally regarded as a sort of disposable item, but there was a comic book when I was a kid that I was obsessed with called Omega the Unknown. And it was a very strange and awkward comic book, in some ways it was unfinished. It only lasted for ten issues, and it started to map out a really marvelous, ambitious story, but it ground to a halt almost as if it didn’t know how to continue.
Of course, it was also a commercial flop. And at this time, there were very few people working seriously with the iconography of superheroes to make anything that anyone regarded as particularly worth preserving or talking about. They were sort of dime-store items. And ten, fifteen, twenty years later, you had creators like Alan Moore come along or Art Spiegelman, really remarkable creators, Lynda Barry and Dan Clowes, who renewed the sense—or in some ways opened up for many people for the first time—the sense that actually graphic literature could be literature, that it was of lasting value, and that the form had innate properties that were not only interesting, but they conveyed a unique power, and in the right hands they could become true art.
And I guess I was primed, I was predisposed to respond to this assertion. And so I was very welcoming, I was very excited at the way that book stores and librarians and critics began to embrace the power of this form. And so, then, in a kind of wonderful—I won't call it ironic, I guess I will just say, kind of sweet full circle opportunity—Marvel Comics came to me and asked me to write something for them. The people working in the traditional comic book industry had read Michael Chabon’s novel, and they read my novel, and realized, well, novelists are kind of warming up to us, what if we try to bring them in, into the fold? And so I was asked which character out of all of Marvel’s would I like to write, and I think they might have been expecting me to latch on to Spiderman or some other totem in the culture, some other major figure, but I said, “Well, what about Omega the Unknown?” And I got to go back and sort of reconstruct this lost character who had been more or less forgotten, even by the tradition that had given rise to him.
And so I wrote a limited series that was bound and published in hard cover as a kind of graphic novel about Omega the Unknown, who had spoken to me and stirred me in this way that was sort of ahead of its time, because I felt that what those issues had suggested to me was the kind of artistic possibility that I’d seen fulfilled in these later examples, and so I tried to bring Omega and his awkward little story into a kind of fulfillment in turn.
",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Books & Reading,Comic Books,Fiction,Graphic Novels,Marvel Universe,Omega the Unknown,Superheroes,Writers","http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/14/superheroes-534104_960_720.jpg,http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/14/Omega_the_Unknown_1.jpg",Sound,,1,0 "To See Myself ",,"My humanities moment is a novel that changed my life and informed my path as an educator and researcher. But before I expound upon it, I need to tell you my story. I was born in Brazil as the only child of my Nigerian mother, who migrated to complete her undergraduate studies. Because of that, I constantly felt like I was living in-between, bridging the gap between Brazil and Nigeria. As I grew up, I struggled to find a sense of belonging, trying to conflate the Brazilian culture I learned at school with my Nigerian upbringing at home and fully identifying with neither. I was the other, a native foreigner.
To appease my ever-growing alienation, I plunged into literature, film, and music, anything that I could hold onto to calm my disquietude. Yet, I did not know at the time that I yearned to better understand who I was by seeing myself through the worlds of others. This unconscious search led me to study English and Portuguese language and literature at the Federal University of Bahia. However, as an undergrad, I did not search for myself as much. I still maintained this unbreakable connection between my subjectivity and literature, but, at the same time, I read more as an observer than a participant. Throughout most of my formal education, white authors, both from Brazil and Europe, represented the standard in literary studies, while Black authors, albeit abundant, were rarely mentioned.
Things changed when in 2016 I decided to read the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I had already watched her famous Ted Talks “The Danger of a Single Story” and “We Should All Be Feminists”, and I got curious to read her work. This was the moment. Ifemelu’s journey as a Black Nigerian immigrant in the United States enthralled, moved, and inspired me. Adichie’s intricate and poignant representation of Black people in the U.S., the U.K., and Nigeria veered from the stereotypically negative and dehumanizing portrayals of Black people I was used to seeing in the media. In the novel, Adichie explores several facets of Black experiences, and I still remember that reading it felt like finally arriving home after spending your entire life squinting at the horizon, wondering if you would ever reach your destination. After years searching, I saw myself through the writing of someone who looked like me.
Nonetheless, I was not satisfied. I started reading Chinua Achebe, Sefi Atta, Wole Soyinka, and decided to translate this hunger for self-representation into a research project for graduate school. In 2018, I started following Ifemelu’s path as an immigrant in the U.S. to continue this intellectual and subjective query about the diversity of Black experiences across the world. I had found my home in African literatures and decided to never leave. I wanted to get closer to a mirror that had always been turned the other way, a lack of seeing that confined me to the role of the other. I wanted to stay, to sink “roots in without the constant urge to tug them out and shake off the soil” (Adichie 7).
Eventually, my research and teaching started to overlap. Curiosity prompted me to seek literature and film in which students who were also considered the other could see themselves represented as well. For students who were used to seeing themselves represented in all spheres of life, I also introduced them to works from diverse authors in order for them to move the mirror, look around, and get in contact with different realities and worldviews. These carefully devised choices of the texts I teach have turned my classrooms into safe spaces where diversity is the norm, and all students are heard and included.
Therefore, teaching African narratives about Black immigrants irreversibly converged my teaching philosophy and research. People still ask me nowadays which culture I identify with the most or even suggest that one day I will finally decide which country I consider to be my home. I never know how to answer this question because it is hard to convey what growing up in the diaspora is like. At least for now, I can say that every time I read Americanah again it takes me back to when this journey started, and I am excited to see where it will lead me.
",,"Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie",,2016,"Cristovao Nwachukwu, 27, Graduate Teaching Assistant ",,,,,,to-see-myself,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"From the National Humanities Center Virtual Winter Residency ","African Literature,Books & Reading,Diaspora,Ngozi Adichie, Chimamanda,Race Identity,Self-Realization,Teachers & Teaching",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/17/422/7ee490b3d5fc8ea51a5b956d4befdac6.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2020",1,0 "Chicano Park",,"I had been in San Diego for less than a week and was still unsure of bus routes. Having successfully navigated the trolley-to-bus transfer from La Mesa to the Gaslight District downtown, I figured I was close enough to walk. If it were a different day I would welcome any unexpected detours as a result of getting on the wrong bus, but today I was headed somewhere specific. It was July, Saturday, and sunny. I walked southwest from downtown heading toward Barrio Logan. A historically working class Mexican and Mexican American neighborhood in the city, Barrio Logan is home to Chicano Park. Chicano Park is located under the Coronado Bridge and contains over 70 outdoor murals that decorate the pillars that support the bridge. Chicano Park came into existence in April 1970 when neighborhood activists occupied the then vacant space under the bridge. The bridge was built around three years earlier, displacing thousands of residents in the process. Though the vacant space under the bridge was originally set to be the site of a highway patrol station, community activists instead demanded that the site be turned into a public park. After months of struggle, the city ceded to the community activists’ demands and designated the site a park. Soon thereafter local residents began calling the space Chicano Park. The name Chicano Park reflected not only how Barrio Logan was a predominantly Mexican and Mexican American neighborhood, but also how those involved with the takeover supported El Movimiento, the civil rights movement in the U.S. that focused on those of Mexican descent. Activists who participated in El Movimiento regularly identified themselves as Chicanas and Chicanos. Since the 1970s artists like Victor Ochoa, Yolanda Lopez, and Salvador Torres have painted murals dedicated to Mexican and Mexican American culture and history on the bridge’s bare pillars. Popular murals painted in the 1970s include Historical Mural, Quetzalcóatl, and Birth of La Raza. Much like the name of the park, artists found inspiration in El Movimiento’s goals of eradicating ethnoracial discrimination and used the bridge’s pillars to present positive renderings of those of Mexican descent. Also starting in the 1970s, a festival, or Chicano Park Day, is held each April commemorating the day community residents occupied the land under the bridge, reinforcing the park’s continued importance to the local community. After around a half hour of walking toward the park, colorful pillars broke into view. I entered the park and saw people walking among the pillars taking photos of the murals and reading the walls. People sat on steps of the green, red, and white painted kiosko situated near the center of the park. As I walked around taking my own photos a man in his mid-20s approached me and we began to talk. Learning that I was not a local, he began running through aspects of the park’s history. While I would later tell him that I was writing about Chicano Park in my dissertation, I initially kept this information to myself. I was more interested in hearing about how he spoke of the park. As he talked he braided the park’s history and importance to the community with the park’s significance in his own life. We stayed in the park and talked for hours while he guided me from pillar to pillar discussing the murals. My “Humanities Moment” is therefore the confluence of walking to the park, seeing the pillars for the first time, and listening to a man – now a friend – talk about the importance of Chicano Park in his life and to the community. Chicano Park is representative of Mexican and Mexican American activism, culture, and history in the U.S. and reveals the power of community to determine the shape of its immediate surroundings. As my friend also demonstrated, Chicano Park is deeply personal and holds layers of meaning for community residents and those who visit the park. ",,"My visit to Chicano Park in San Diego, California ",,2017,"Sean Ettinger, 28, PhD Candidate in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign",,,,,,chicano-park,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"During the National Humanities Center VGSSR2020","Activism,Artists,Communication,Community,Cultural History,History,Public Spaces,San Diego, California",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/17/401/73849b6c02430c12b5db2964049f4acb.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2020",1,0 "Transformative Literature",,"David Denby discusses works of literature that influenced his thinking as a child and as a teenager. Looking back, these books transformed the reader that he is today. ",,"A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain; Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dovstoyevsky",,,"David Denby, author, journalist, film critic",,,,,,david-denby-transformative-literature,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"A Tale of Two Cities,Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,Books & Reading,Crime and Punishment,Dickens, Charles,Dovstoyevsky, Fyodor,Literature,Oliver Twist,Twain, Mark,Writers",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/1/1/hf-cover.jpg,"Moving Image","David Denby",1,0