What Does It Mean to Be Southern?
Community college teacher Julie Mullis describes how a classroom experience with students from diverse backgrounds and perspectives created a memorable and “multi-colored” sense of place and belonging. The conversations and debates that took place in a Humanities 122 class illuminated a profound truth for Mullis and her students: “we all had this common strand of humanity to us, no matter where we came from or how we grew up.” By considering a single topic—Southern culture—from a variety of perspectives, the classroom opened up a space for its diverse learners to celebrate both similarities and differences.
Julie Mullis, Wilkes Community College
what-does-it-mean-to-be-southern
From the Silk Road to the National Mall
Stephen Kidd explains how his involvement with several projects during his time at the Smithsonian illuminated the powerful role of the humanities in cultivating cross-cultural community. One project, which focused on food cultures, celebrated culinary legacies as the owner of a New York Jewish delicatessen passed down the business to an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. Another project considered how the AIDS quilt fostered a sense of community in the midst of a public health crisis. Finally, in 2002 the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which centered on the Silk Road, attracted a multitude of international participants from countries in the Middle East and Central Asia. In the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, over one million guests converged on the National Mall to engage with and learn from each other, helping bridge cultures in the shadow of violence.
2002
Stephen Kidd, Executive Director, National Humanities Alliance
stephen-kidd-silk-road-national-mall
Madonna’s Mandorla
While acting as a teaching assistant for a large art appreciation course, Caroline Jones witnessed a student’s curiosity about a painting of the Madonna. Such symbols, so pervasive and recognizable in Western culture, she realized, are not as simple and self-contained as they may seem to some of us. The experience helped her to see that even familiar objects are best considered through multiple frames, and that all parts of the humanities—including art history, religion, and history—are made more robust when put into a dialogue with one another.
<a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/meet-the-fellows/caroline-a-jones/">Caroline A. Jones</a>, professor of art history at MIT
madonnas-mandorla
From a Cultural Perspective
In this audio recording, graduate student Margherita Berti describes how an ordinary encounter while studying abroad gave her a new outlook on cultural differences, practices, and perspectives.
Living in a new culture
2008
Margherita Berti, PhD Student
cultural-perspective
The Power Public Knowledge has for the Humanities
I grew up an hour and a half northwest of San Antonio, Texas in a small, rural town called Medina. Medina is home to one school (K-12 campus), about five stop signs, one gas station, two restaurants, and three churches. When I was younger, the town had a population of about three hundred people, while others lived ‘out of town’ on ranches, plots of land, or small trailer park communities. The school district, which spans approximately sixty miles of rural land in each direction, has anywhere between two hundred and fifty students to three hundred students (K-12).
The school had a football field, one un-air-conditioned gym, a bus barn/weight room, two halls for high school classes, one hall for junior high classes, and another for elementary school classes. The cafeteria, library, and work out facilities were shared by all. The school library had one room for elementary students, one room for junior high students, and about six shelves for high school students. Needless to say, the library, despite their best efforts, was woefully lacking. Outside of the school library, the closest library was a forty-minute drive and one town over. However, because we were not residents of that county, we were unable to check books out. Medina was, among other things, book-poor.
This changed in 2001 when a group of community members came together and raised the funds to build the Medina Community Library. The library had computers for those who otherwise wouldn’t have access to the internet, which was still largely unavailable in rural areas or was so outrageously expensive as to be unavailable, it had movies so people wouldn’t have to drive forty minutes to the Blockbuster a town over, and they had twice as many books as the school library.
Texas has an interesting history when it comes to public libraries, especially considering the state’s general aversion to public, non-commercial spaces (consider the lack of public land, public transport, and bikeable/ walkable spaces in Texas cities compared to other states and cities of similar populations and demographics). The frontier mindset of Texas influenced the prioritization of the accumulation of wealth while deprioritizing that which was not deemed essential to accumulating that wealth, such as non-commercial spaces for the public and acquiring non-technical knowledge (like the humanities). Consider, for instance, that Harvard University was founded some sixteen years after the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock, but it took eighty years before Texas’s first public library[1] was founded.[2] While there are many other factors as to why the humanities have been decentralized and deprioritized (the frontier mindset is not the only factor by any means), I do think that the frontier mindset certainly contributed to the disparity of public libraries in the region I grew up (Notably, Medina’s county seat is nicknamed the Cowboy Capital of the World and it is not uncommon to see someone order a Cherry Limeade on horseback from the local Sonic Drive-In).
When the Medina Public Library opened I was finally given easy access to literature. My mother began volunteering at the library once a week after she got off work from her full-time job. These days I would wander the stacks choosing books I was interested in. I would sit on the floor and read for hours while my mom worked. Often when we think of a moment that inspired us to pursue the work we do in the humanities, we think of a book, a series, an author, an artifact, or a place with historical or religious significance. I have no singular thing that revealed to me the importance of the humanities. Instead, my humanities moment was the gift of public knowledge. The Medina Public Library, while it is still woefully inadequate compared to many other public libraries, was a democratic endeavor to provide my community with equal access to knowledge about other places, worlds, people, and experiences beyond our county. Instead of forefronting economic production, as the frontier mindset would mandate, the library instead fostered the circulation of knowledge and equitable community care.
[1] This is a debated topic. There are three different public libraries that lay claim to this title, but all claim their opening around the 1900s.
[2] See Texas Land Ethics by Pete A.Y. Gunter and Max Oelschlaeger (25-6).
Public Library
Childhood
Chaney Hill, 25, PhD Graduate student in English, Literature at Rice University
power-public-knowledge-for-humanities
Photographing Rome
When I was 5 years old, my family and I gathered around the Christmas tree bright and early on Christmas morning. I was more than excited when I unwrapped a small handheld camera that was pink and orange, and about half the size of a dollar bill. The screen on the camera was less than half an inch wide and tall, and the camera could only hold about 3 photos at a time. Still, I was ecstatic. I would walk around the house and take pictures of my family, and then delete them right away so I could take a couple more. This planted the roots for my love of photography. On a trip to Italy, that love blossomed.
Around the time I was ten years old, my family and I decided to stop doing presents for Christmas and take vacations instead. This became one of my favorite traditions very quickly. In 2018, we took our first trip to Europe. We spent a majority of the time in Italy, specifically the Rome region. We decided to stay around there because the art and architecture was inspiring. Before the trip, I decided to purchase my first DSLR camera. I practiced using it for the weeks leading up to the trip, but the trip felt like some kind of final exam. It felt like a test that I had been studying for for weeks, and this was my chance to prove my knowledge.
I fell in love with Italy after one day of being there. The pasta and gelato was definitely a factor, but there was something about the energy and the culture that really just changed me as a person. It was my first big exposure to a country outside of North America. Every day we were there was a learning experience, but I didn’t want to let the time just slip through my fingers. I knew at this moment that this was my test. Yes, it was a test I assigned to myself. But I knew that I had to find a way to capture the feeling I was experiencing over there.
Less than a week into our trip, we decided to take a tour called “Rome in a Day”. We started at a small coffee shop in the shadows of the Colosseum. We walked around and through all of the big architectural landmarks. We would spend about an hour at each location, then leave to check out a new city, museum, or town square that was historically famous. There was something humbling, grounding, and almost magical about being right next to the Colosseum. I had seen it in photos, but the photos were nothing like what I experienced.
So I pulled out my camera, adjusted the settings, and began trying to recreate the scene exactly as I was experiencing it. I did this at every structure or town that we went to. I wanted to focus on getting everything from my perspective, because it was a powerful experience to me. Being in a country where they don’t speak English, and my Italian was far from understandable, it was comforting to see everyone taking photos from different places. While everyone’s photos would turn out different, it felt unifying to know that we were all connecting through the click of our cameras. We all had one thing in common, and that was that we never wanted to forget that moment.
Throughout the rest of the trip I continued to take many many photos. At the end of each day, I would go back to our house and spend hours looking at them and editing them. The photos I took in Rome are still some of my favorites to this day, and I could say the same about that vacation. Rome was magical. Photographing it was even more magical.
Rome, Italy
December 2018
Hayley Susov, HS Senior
photographing-rome
A Sword From Italy by Way of Alexandria
It was not my first time in The City, but it was my first time visiting the Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's reputation stretched out wide before it for a young man from the West Coast. I had long been interested in art, and I knew that the Met had one of the best collections in the world. I had missed a previous opportunity to go a few years back, and I wasn't going to do so again. My sister, a friend, and I took a train up to Fifth Avenue, and soon were outside the museum's broad, colonnaded entrance.
My interest in the medieval period had only recently begun at that point. When I saw in the catalogue that the museum had an extensive collection of European arms and armor, I couldn't resist. We walked through the classical Egyptian section, admiring the tiny-carved Lapis lazuli figures. We paused for pictures amid the ruins of the Temple of Dendur, which stood in the middle of a small reflecting pool. Beyond that, we finally entered the arms and armor section.
Amid all the impressive examples of late medieval and early-modern craftsmanship, one piece in particular stood out to me. It was a large sword with a broad, angular blade (see attached picture of the same sword in the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was on loan in early 2020). The surface, while pitted slightly, was remarkably unmarred and smooth other than an inscription near the hilt written in Arabic. The sword as a whole had a simple elegance. Though the crossguard had little horn-like curls at the ends, it was otherwise unadorned. It had the appearance of a practical tool, precise and deliberate. It looked heavy but somehow also quick.
I was intrigued. I began asking all sorts of questions about the sword: Where had it come from? Who made it? Why was there an Arabic inscription on what was clearly a western European sword? Searching for those answers gave me my first taste of the interconnected Mediterranean world which would later become my obsession. The sword is thought to have been made in Italy, either in Brescia or Milan. From there, it was taken to the isle of Cyprus, at the time ruled by the Lusignan Kings, successors to the long-lost Crusader States. Then, sometime around 1419, it was presented as part of a diplomatic gift from Cyprus (along with many other weapons) to Sultan Shaykh al-Mahmudi, whose name is contained in the inscription. The sword, and many others like it, are one of many pieces of physical evidence for the extensive networks of connection which joined the various corners of the Mediterranean together in the medieval and early-modern world.
Though I have never handled the original (or its twin, rediscovered in Texas in 2014 by Sotheby's), I have had the opportunity to handle a modern reproduction which was made based on detailed measurements and mimics the sword almost exactly. It is a marvel of engineering. The sword's geometry and design makes it wonderfully balanced, so that, though it weighs almost 4 lbs (which is very heavy for a sword of this type), it feels light enough to wield in one hand. The tremendous skill which would have gone into the design and fabrication of that weapon made me question my received wisdom about the superiority of the modern world, and eventually to question the very meaning of "modern" at all.
The questions that this sword inspired have had long-lasting effects on the course of my continuing academic study and interest in the middle ages, and it is still an inspiration to me today.
A visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
2012
Thomas Morin, 32, Historian
sword-from-italy
Learning to Differentiate
I grew up in suburban Ohio and I knew from an early age that I wanted to experience more of the world than the mall. In high school, I applied for a student exchange program and desperately wanted to go to Argentina. Surprise -- I was accepted into the program, but selected for Japan. Not just Japan, but a very (very) small town in rural southern Japan. I was the first foreigner that most of the residents of Ogi (the name of the town) had ever seen and I literally could stop traffic while bicycling to school each morning. I certainly wasn't in Ohio anymore.
In the course of the school year that I spent in Japan, I attended school in an unheated, uninsulated school building in which students learned by listening and repeating what the teacher told them; no room for creative thought. I witnessed a student who had dozed off in classics class (learning 1,000 year old poetry written in archaic Japanese) get hit by the teacher with a book to the head -- and no one said anything. I lived in the home of a local sake producer who grew the rice and made the barrels used to age the sake. I attended a Shinto wedding and a Buddhist funeral. I learned how to participate in a tea ceremony, how to create ink paintings, and how to avoid getting hit too hard in kendo class.
It was all strange and difficult and hard to understand until that one day that I came face-to-face with a lesson in stereotyping and sweeping generalizations. Coming back from the movies with my friends, one of them asked me casually how I was able to differentiate amongst my friends in the United States. I was taken aback and, at first, thought I misunderstood the question, but no, my Japanese friends thought "we" all looked alike -- tall, blond, and blue-eyed! (I am tall, but not blond and my eyes are hazel colored.) And, there, on the other side of the world at the young age of 17, I learned that we are all very much alike in our prejudices and that to truly know another person means to get beyond the physical characteristics and meet the person on the inside.
Exchange Student Program
1975
Jim Wagner, 64, History Teacher
learning-differentiate