Reading St. Augustine’s <em>Confessions</em> in Latin
<p>“It is difficult to translate the beauty of Latin easily into English. There’s something about the relationship between Augustine’s words and the meaning of what he’s saying that is more powerful and profound when read in their original language.</p>
<p>“This insight — about the relationship between words, and rhythm, and sound, and meaning — has been important to me over the years, especially as it has encouraged me to consider the variety of ways in which ideas are expressed in different contexts and across time and to recognize the distinctions those differences create in my view of the world.</p>
<p>“The value of theological, philosophical, literary inquiry — humanistic inquiry — is that it helps us to make sense of things in ways that were not available to us before.”</p>
<p>Carol Quillen describes how, growing up, her initial insights and perceptions came from what she calls promiscuous reading — reading anything and everything and then finding connections among these very different texts. She consumed Augustine’s <em>Confessions</em>, in the original Latin, which captures and conveys meaning differently than English and enabled her both to grasp and question the complex ways in which language represents reality.</p>
<p>These differences in language, like reading, reveal different ways of seeing the world, and by learning about and seeing them, we create possibilities for ourselves.<br /><br />Quillen says, “This insight — about the relationship between words, and rhythm, and sound, and meaning — has been important to me over the years, especially as it has encouraged me to consider the variety of ways in which ideas are expressed in different contexts and across time and to recognize the distinctions those differences create in my view of the world. The value of theological, philosophical, literary inquiry — humanistic inquiry — is that it helps us to make sense of things in ways that were not available to us before.”</p>
Augustine of Hippo
<em>Confessions</em> by Augustine
<a href="https://www.davidson.edu/about/college-leadership/president/biography">Carol Quillen</a>, President, Davidson College
carol-quillen-reading-augustine-in-latin
Inspirational Literature
In this video Marlene Daut describes how teaching literature to college students enables them to both understand their lives and history better, as well as be inspired regarding their possible futures.
<a href="http://www.haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com/">Marlene Daut</a>, Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies, University of Virginia
marlene-daut-inspirational-literature
The First Book I Ever Checked Out of a Library
Formative experiences with the humanities have the power to shape our lives, returning to us again and again, to intrigue and inspire. And, from the distance provided by age, experience, and deeper knowledge we sometimes come to appreciate those subjects — for instance the life of a remarkable woman like Joan of Arc — in new and more meaningful ways that continue to challenge and fascinate.
<p>In this video, Joan Hinde Stewart recalls the first book she ever checked out of a library — a biography of Joan of Arc — a memory triggered by an experience in her sixties. She describes the fascination she felt about Joan of Arc from an early age and the conflict she felt about reading this biography, as it was unsanctioned by the Catholic church.</p>
<p>As she notes, however, “I became positively besotted with The Maid of Orleans. I could do nothing but think about Joan. That’s the way she is. She grabs you, and no matter how well you know the story you keep hoping — I keep hoping — that it will turn out differently.”</p>
A biography of Joan of Arc
Joan Hinde Stewart, President Emerita, Hamilton College
joan-stewart-first-library-book
What Happens When We Share Our Stories?
Teacher Theresa Pierce discusses how the accumulation and sharing of personal narratives help generate individual moments of realization among students as they also help build a sense of community. <br /><br />Books, maps, and works of art consistently facilitate connection and shared experiences among Pierce’s diverse group of students. For example, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic autobiography <em>Persepolis</em> moved one young woman to reflect on her own family’s narrative. This communal sharing of stories helps Pierce’s students to realize that the world “isn’t a bubble” but a “huge interconnected thing.”
<em>Persepolis</em> by Marjane Satrapi
Theresa Pierce, Rowan County Early College
sharing-stories-fostering-understanding
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
Studying the Jacobins and Rethinking my Political Leanings
My humanities moment came in preparing to teach a course on the French Revolution. I am by training a Byzantinist and medievalist, but got my job as a world history teacher. To fill in the gap and also since I could read French, the acting department chair gave me the job of teaching the French Revolution, even though I had gotten a D in that subject at Haverford College. So I did some background reading, and one of the things that I remember was the wild statements of Jacobin party leaders in their attempts to bring virtue to the French Republic, and their moralizing about the old Regime and the evils of the Church – I remember one document in which the Jacobin speaker raged on about the black deeds of the Spanish Inquisition. As I was preparing my lecture, I realized that the Spanish Inquisition executed approximately 3000 people in 300 years, and most of those were under Ferdinand and Isabella in their attempts to unify the kingdom. The Jacobins executed 40,000 people in a year. I had always been an American liberal until that moment. I did not change immediately, but the increasing shrill tone of progressives – the hatred that is displayed against people like Kelly Anne Conway – remind me of Robespierre.
Tim Miller, Salisbury University
studying-jacobins
An Unexpected Insight
Mr. Harvey was the most outstanding, demanding and humane teacher I studied with during my four years of high school. His course in world history first opened my eyes to the excitement of historical studies, to discussing the interpretation and meaning of historical developments, to independent and critical thinking, and to the challenge of writing [my historical essays] well. He would write copious comments on my papers, counseling me, e.g., to choose words wisely, especially verbs — remember what Voltaire said, he reminded us: “the verb is the soul of the sentence.” Receiving this recognition from him was so unexpected and so wonderful; the way I felt you might have thought I had won a Nobel Prize. And as part of this gift, he offered his final unexpected insight, with that quote from John Dos Passos. He was sharing another idea, giving me yet another view — a long and capacious view — of how and why the study of history is so valuable and important.
<p>At the end of my sophomore year in high school, during the awards ceremony in June, I received my varsity letter for playing football. And then my history teacher, Mr. Harvey, got up and gave three academic awards. To my complete surprise, I received one of those prizes. It was a book of <em>Plutarch’s Lives</em>, which was inscribed to me in part as follows: “This book ... represents his persistent toil toward clear, precise and meaningful expression in history at the Paris American High School.”</p>
<p>In addition, Mr. Harvey had also written the following quotation on the inside cover of the book, for me to ponder: “In times of danger and change when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present.” –John Dos Passos<br /><br />Mr. Harvey was the most outstanding, demanding and humane teacher I studied with during my four years of high school. His course in world history first opened my eyes to the excitement of historical studies, to discussing the interpretation and meaning of historical developments, to independent and critical thinking, and to the challenge of writing [my historical essays] well. He would write copious comments on my papers, counseling me, e.g., to choose words wisely, especially verbs — remember what Voltaire said, he reminded us: “the verb is the soul of the sentence.” Receiving this recognition from him was so unexpected and so wonderful; the way I felt you might have thought I had won a Nobel Prize. And as part of this gift, he offered his final unexpected insight, with that quote from John Dos Passos. He was sharing another idea, giving me yet another view — a long and capacious view — of how and why the study of history is so valuable and important.</p>
<em>Plutarch's Lives</em>
June 1, 1956
Jaroslav Folda, N. Ferebee Taylor Professor emeritus, UNC
unexpected-insight
Harmonia est discordia concors: A Paean to Choral Singing
<p>According to the ancient Greeks, harmony is discord rendered concordant, a concept that applied not just to music but everything from the order of the cosmos to human relationships. I have always loved this idea for two reasons: it was predicated not on the absence or erasure of difference, but the reconciliation of it; and it was perfectly embodied in the activity that had occupied a significant part of my career as a college music professor and conductor—choral singing. Upon my retirement, alumni of my choral group from across the decades returned to campus to join current members for the final concert of my career, a performance of the sublime Duruflé <em>Requiem</em>. As the events of that concert unfolded, including something extraordinary and unexpected, I was moved to reflect upon the nature of harmony, and the power of collective singing.</p>
<p>Like many humanities moments, mine was the culmination of many moments that had accumulated over the years, and that suddenly came together under special circumstances that gave focus and meaning. When students I had always known only as 18–22 year olds returned for my retirement concert as adults in their 30s and 40s to sing, I realized that across all these years, in the course of the inglorious and often frustrating work of learning parts, shaping phrases, sharpening rhythms, and tuning chords, we had been engaged in the most deeply human of activities—forging concord out of discord, all the while participating in something that was both greater than ourselves, but also affirming of that most individual aspect of our humanity, our voice. Choral singing, like all harmonious human activity, thrived not on sameness, but on difference, willingly and lovingly brought together and reconciled.</p>
Maurice Duruflé's Requiem
Spring 2016
<a href="http://dickinson.academia.edu/BlakeWilson">Blake Wilson</a>, Dickinson College
harmonia-est-discordia-concors
A Lifelong Passion and Appreciation for History
Vinson describes how a knowledge of local history—in this case, Mount Rushmore—transformed his understanding of the world around him. His mother, an elementary school teacher, would read her son stories of the monument’s construction, instilling a lifelong passion for history. Vinson goes on to explain how history provides a “much greater context to the things happening in our daily lives.”
Ben Vinson III reflects on how an appreciation for history can enrich our understanding of what he calls the “depth to our days.” Specifically, he recalls how the story of Mount Rushmore’s construction kindled his boyhood imagination growing up in South Dakota. His mother, an elementary school teacher, would read her son stories of the monument’s construction, instilling a lifelong passion for history. Vinson goes on to explain how history provides a “much greater context to the things happening in our daily lives.”
A story about the construction of Mount Rushmore
Ben Vinson III, Provost and Executive Vice President of Case Western Reserve University
ben-vinson-lifelong-passion-appreciation-history
Meeting the last man on planet earth who could speak Latin
This moment impressed on me more clearly than ever that language is a function of individuals. The warmth, respect, and sense of fun that Fr. Foster radiated--especially toward me, a bumbling college student of no special experience in Latin--was crucial in undercutting his words. You cannot learn a language without getting to know a great deal about your teacher or students. Speaking a language is scary. Those of us who teach foreign languages have an awesome responsibility, and the power, to set our students at ease.
And with a single sentence, he taught me an unforgettable lesson in how to answer a question in exactly the right way.
A single question changed the course of my life.
When I first began studying Latin in 1996, it was a dead language, no doubt about it. It was pointless to try to speak it; everyone agreed the grammar was just too hard.
Legend had it, though, that a single man—a priest, somewhere in Rome, Italy—could do it. The last man alive who could speak Latin! I had to find him.
And after endless blind turns, I did. It was spring 1997, and I was spending the semester abroad in Rome.
I got up very early one morning because the immortal Reginald Foster—papal secretary of Latin to four popes—agreed to stop by on his way to work at the Vatican.
Not knowing what to expect, I opened the classroom door to find a man dressed as if he’d come to repair the dishwasher. He was sitting down and smiling widely.
“Can you really speak Latin?” I whispered, terrified.
He grinned wider and shot back, “Quid, tu censes me heri natum esse?” (“What, do you think I was born yesterday?”)
That did it. That absurd outfit, that warm grin, that exuberant and virtuoso reply—that all settled it. I’d found my guru.
This moment impressed on me more clearly than ever that language is a function of individuals. The warmth, respect, and sense of fun that Fr. Foster radiated--especially toward me, a bumbling college student of no special experience in Latin--was crucial in undercutting his words. You cannot learn a language without getting to know a great deal about your teacher or students. Speaking a language is scary. Those of us who teach foreign languages have an awesome responsibility, and the power, to set our students at ease.
And with a single sentence, he taught me an unforgettable lesson in how to answer a question in exactly the right way.
Spring 1997
<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/humanities-in-class-guide-thinking-learning-in-humanities/">Michael Fontaine,</a> 40, professor of classics at Cornell University
meeting-last-man-on-planet-earth
Resilience, Humility, and Picnics
<p>I like picnics. Picnics take us outside, to share food with people we like. Those are my three favorite things, and picnics offer all three with a minimum of fuss or cost.</p>
<p>Every picnic is a special occasion. But one stands out because it showed me how much we can learn from deeply observing the world around us. Such observation joins us to the experiences of those who have come before, and perhaps even see through their eyes. It is a humanities experience.</p>
<p>One summer day, to celebrate a birthday, my spouse and I packed up our little girls and went to California’s China Camp State Park for a picnic. China Camp is a few hundred acres of oak savannah and salt marshes on the Marin County shoreline of San Francisco Bay. It is a humble place, just a few buildings clustered around an old pier, but the sheltered cove offers one of the few calm wading beaches in San Francisco Bay. Settled at the lone picnic table under a feral plum tree buzzing with bees, we ate our food and then played with our toddlers on the gravelly shore.</p>
<p>But it wasn’t gravel, we soon realized. It was shell. Much of the beach was composed of tiny, sharp oyster shells of the California oyster, <em>Ostrea lurida</em>. Long thought functionally extinct, the bay’s native oyster still flourished on the Marin Shore and across the bay near the Chevron oil refinery. This humble state park, named for the Chinese shrimp fishermen who lived and worked here in the 19th and 20th centuries, represented not only a physical reminder of these men’s presence, but also the bounty of fish and shellfish that fed Californians for more than a century.</p>
<p>For me the picnic brought an epiphany. San Francisco Bay is not only the battered, polluted remnant of a majestic natural resource, as environmentalists often see it. It continues to be the living, thriving host to the West’s most productive wetlands and California’s green heart. The water that circulates through the bay sustains both the human and nonhuman communities of the region. The shell, and its place, tell an environmental history. They reveal the interdependence of humanity and nonhuman nature. What looks like a purely cultural space turns out to be full of nature. And what looks like a purely natural space turns out to be full of culture. San Francisco Bay, like the oyster and China Camp State Park, is a hybrid of human labor and natural forces.</p>
<p>I am not trying to be nostalgic. Such hybrids are not always peaceful, just, or safe. Indeed the Chevron refinery does more than shelter a threatened native species. The neighboring community, which is mostly nonwhite and disproportionately low-income, suffers from the presence of the refinery. The refinery site is the continuing site of contamination, illness, and hazardous exposure and a textbook case in environmental injustice. Living well with nature requires sharing the risks of our industrial society, not just dumping them on the vulnerable.</p>
<p>My “humanities moment,” then, is an oyster shell I found in an unlikely urban setting. The shell and its place taught me a lesson about nature’s resilience, about memory, and the imperative for social justice. All three are elements I associate with the humanities.</p>
San Francisco Bay
San Francisco Bay
May 2004
<a href="https://history.ncsu.edu/people/faculty_staff/mmbooker">Matthew Booker</a>, associate professor of American environmental history, North Carolina State University
resilience-humility-picnics
Origin Stories: Or, Making Sense of Surprises in the Family Tree
My Humanities Moment happened when my husband and I received the results of the genetic testing kits we’d ordered. The stories that my husband’s DNA told matched up pretty closely with his family’s history, but mine delivered some surprises. In addition to indicating a lot of northwestern European and Central European ancestors, which I expected, my report pointed to Scandinavian, West African, and North African ancestors! This all came as news to my whole family. We wondered: how did these encounters happen? What were the circumstances under which these distant and diverse relatives met? The map that accompanied my DNA results was particularly striking to me. I was amazed to see how my ancestors emerged over the course of the last several centuries from that violent, complex, and fascinating region of interaction that stretched up from the west coast of Africa, across the Strait of Gibraltar, through Iberia into northern, central, and eastern Europe. My humanities moment came when I realized that although I may never know the details of my ancestors’ travels, I can indeed explain a lot of the context behind that map of my family’s origins. The migrations, the wars, the famine and curiosity and opportunities that pushed people out of one territory and into the next: I know those stories, because I am a historian! Trained in the history of the Atlantic world and now a university professor of world history, I rely on the humanities to help my students and myself interpret the past. Science can tell us a lot, but so can history. Data means little if we don’t know the context—the stories and histories—behind it. Humanities and the sciences can and should work hand in hand in our efforts to understand and explain the world we live in and our shared past.
<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/humanities-in-class-guide-thinking-learning-in-humanities/">Molly A. Warsh</a>, Assistant Professor of World History, University of Pittsburgh
making-sense-family-trees
Visiting the Art Museum
On a school trip from suburban New Jersey when I was in second grade, I could take on the role of Claudia, admiring the works of art on display but also wondering: who made this? Why? How did it come to be here? These questions helped me realize from a young age the enormous potential of the experience of a work of art—to fascinate personally but also to open up a window onto the past. All of this activated by the curiosity to know more about what is staring you in the face.
My family always visited art museums when I was a child. I’m not quite sure why, as we never talked about the art, and I wondered, in secret, what exactly we were supposed to be doing there. When I was about eight years old, I read a book that answered that question: <em>From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler</em> by E. L. Konigsburg. It is the story of two children—a brother and a sister—who run away from home to solve the mystery of a sculpture: was it a long-lost work by Michelangelo? They hide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, borrowing coins from the fountain to buy food, sleeping in a magnificent bed in a period room, and blending in with school groups. More importantly, the sister Claudia is entranced by the Renaissance sculpture of an angel then on display at the museum, and she is determined to get to the bottom of the question of authorship: is it really a Michelangelo? And, if so, how did it end up in the museum?<br /><br />On a school trip from suburban New Jersey when I was in second grade, I could take on the role of Claudia, admiring the works of art on display but also wondering: who made this? Why? How did it come to be here? These questions helped me realize from a young age the enormous potential of the experience of a work of art—to fascinate personally but also to open up a window onto the past. All of this activated by the curiosity to know more about what is staring you in the face.
E. L. Konigsburg
<em>From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler</em> by E. L. Konigsburg
1984
<a href="https://mornaoneill.wordpress.com/">Morna O’Neill</a>, age 41, art history professor
visiting-the-art-museum
The Perfect Invitation
<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>
<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>
Lucille Clifton
“won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton
2005 (ish)
<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
the-perfect-invitation
Human Ecology of Health
While my background in the humanities spans numerous perspectives, putting the various disciplinary puzzle pieces together in an applied manner hadn’t occurred. On the flight back to the United States, I began to recognize what is more formally referred to as the human ecology of health that examines aspects of population, habitat, and behavior. The clinic physician and accompanying nurses had medical training that allows them to understand disease pathogens, prescribe medicines and suture wounds. Yet they didn’t understand daily lives of the people they served. The community health worker, by contrast, was trusted and accepted by the community. She knew how to communicate to them and understand their body language. It was if a light bulb had been turned on in my head in which I realized that no single discipline had a monopoly on understanding. Solving problems that I had just observed in Bolivia were no longer a theoretical exercise, but I now realized that both breadth and depth in the liberal arts were needed to address real world problems.
Walking the cobble-stone streets of a Bolivian village, I witnessed how a new clinic in a medically underserved area hadn’t made much of an impact. I was visiting a remote outpost to better understand the challenges in promoting health in poor Latin American communities. People come here only as a last resort because of the relative high costs and they are suspicious and reluctant to enter a facility staffed by foreigners. Only two came to see the doctor during the three days we were there. Likewise, latrines build by the clinic hadn’t improved sanitation because nobody uses them for cultural reasons.
By contrast, in another rural area, a woman with less than a fourth grade education has had a great impact as community health promoter. Because she grew up in the village, she is trusted and understands the problems the people face. Every 15 minutes it seemed liked another person up at her door, quite a contrast to the clinic. No outbreaks of childhood diseases have occurred since she began inoculating children. While limited in formal medical education, she has been trained to understand the importance of clean water and sanitation. More importantly, she had empowered other people in ways to improve their health.
Witnessing both projects created dissonance. While medical knowledge is necessary, more is required. I kept asking myself if the clinic was really addressing the needs of the underprivileged.
While my background in the humanities spans numerous perspectives, putting the various disciplinary puzzle pieces together in an applied manner hadn’t occurred. On the flight back to the United States, I began to recognize what is more formally referred to as the human ecology of health that examines aspects of population, habitat, and behavior. The clinic physician and accompanying nurses had medical training that allows them to understand disease pathogens, prescribe medicines and suture wounds. Yet they didn’t understand daily lives of the people they served. The community health worker, by contrast, was trusted and accepted by the community. She knew how to communicate to them and understand their body language. It was if a light bulb had been turned on in my head in which I realized that no single discipline had a monopoly on understanding. Solving problems that I had just observed in Bolivia were no longer a theoretical exercise, but I now realized that both breadth and depth in the liberal arts were needed to address real world problems.
1989
<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/education-programs/humanities-in-class-guide-thinking-learning-in-humanities/">Edward Kinman</a>, age 59, Professor of Geography and Coordinator of the Virginia Geographic Alliance
human-ecology-of-health
The Virginia State Capitol: Past and Present
An architectural design conveys the meaning or purpose of a building. The designer want us to experience something when we see, enter, or tour a building. But it strikes me that the architecture itself can have many meanings and that historical events and people who live and work in buildings can transform their original intent. The humanities should teach us to appreciate architecture and understand the meaning of public buildings, but they also give us the tools to see beyond the edifice, the structure, the artistic beauty. When we look beyond the purpose of the building to the people inside, we are likely to find a new and different meaning and purpose.
I had been to the Virginia State Capitol many times since I moved to Richmond in 1989. I’ve viewed proceedings in the House and Senate chambers, held meetings for students, given several lectures in the meeting rooms, and toured the building with family, friends, and students. Yet, until I took part in the Humanities in Class project with the National Humanities Center, I had not thought carefully about why the building was so important, both to me and to the people of Virginia. Just recently I visited the Capitol with a group of students and as I looked up at huge white columns and wandered through the building, I began to think more deeply about the transformative nature of this place. I looked past the architecture, the museum pieces and the contemporary issues debated in the General Assembly to the problem of race in the history of Virginia. I also began to think of its ability to transform the lives of my students.
An architectural design conveys the meaning or purpose of a building. The designer want us to experience something when we see, enter, or tour a building. But it strikes me that the architecture itself can have many meanings and that historical events and people who live and work in buildings can transform their original intent. The humanities should teach us to appreciate architecture and understand the meaning of public buildings, but they also give us the tools to see beyond the edifice, the structure, the artistic beauty. When we look beyond the purpose of the building to the people inside, we are likely to find a new and different meaning and purpose.
Thomas Jefferson with Charles-Louis Clerriseau
The Virginia State Capitol
July 2017
<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/humanities-in-class-guide-thinking-learning-in-humanities/">Daniel J. Palazzolo</a>, 56, professor of political science at the University of Richmond
virginia-state-capitol-past-present
Story-Making and the Fault Lines of American Capitalism
This documentary film prompted historian Edward Balleisen to reflect on the powerful and protean role of storytelling in the American imagination, specifically in the realm of modern capitalism. An appreciation of the humanities may provide us with a deeper understanding of the shape-shifting role that stories play in the economic realm. This understanding, in turn, may serve as a compass as we, in Balleisen’s words, “navigate” the world around us.
<p>Several weeks ago I had occasion to watch the new documentary, <em>Betting on Zero</em>. This fascinating film presents several interlinked stories, all related to the founding and growth of Herbalife, a multi-level-marketing company that sells nutritional supplements, weight loss concoctions, and the “business opportunity” to distribute these products. Among the narrative threads:</p>
<ul>
<li>the basic business model of this enterprise, which depends on the perpetual recruitment of new salespeople (this task is facilitated by revival-style meetings in which the company’s leading pitchmen and women preach a prosperity ethos, a faith that identification with the company and enthusiastic hard work will generate product sales and recruitment of new sellers, regardless of one’s background);</li>
<li>Herbalife’s subsidiary strategies of sponsoring sports teams and paying for a wide array of celebrity endorsements;</li>
<li>the attractiveness of Herbalife’s prosperity gospel to immigrant communities in the US, and especially Latinos;</li>
<li>increasing suspicions among journalists and some members of the investment community about Herbalife’s business practices, which have struck many who have examined the company closely as akin to a pyramid scheme;</li>
<li>a now five-year-long effort by a prominent hedge fund investor, Bill Ackman, to short Herbalife stock (convinced by intensive research that the company’s pyramid-like dependence on the recruitment of new sales agents doomed it to eventual collapse, Ackman not only bet hundreds of millions of dollars against Herbalife, but orchestrated a series of public attacks on the company’s methods and valuation);</li>
<li>the vigorous defense of Herbalife by its executives, including its longtime CEO Mark Johnson, along with billionaire investor and long-time Ackman nemesis Carl Icahn;</li>
<li>growing opposition to Herbalife by some activists within Latino communities, such as Chicagoan Julie Contreras, along with disgruntled former sales agents who felt they had been ripped off, culminating in public campaigns and lawsuits; and</li>
<li><span>a slew of investigations by regulatory authorities, including a Federal Trade Commission inquiry that led to a 2016 settlement with Herbalife, imposing a $200 million fine on the company and requiring far-reaching reform of its business practices in the US;</span></li>
<li>the extraordinary growth of Herbalife abroad, especially in the gargantuan markets of India and China, which may blunt the impact of the FTC settlement.</li>
</ul>
<p>At issue in <em>Betting on Zero</em> is the primary question of which story about Herbalife would stick, whether with its sales agents, throughout the communities in which it operated, within the financial markets, or in courtrooms and regulatory agencies. What would become the prevalent, even official story about Herbalife’s purposes, practices, and impacts? Was the firm a vehicle for social and economic uplift, a mechanism for individuals with minimal education and social capital to build a proprietary business that would deliver the American dream, even make them wealthy? Or was it an especially cruel confidence game that separated the vast majority of its sellers from initial capital investments, and, even worse, turned them into recruiters who ensnared fellow community members in a losing proposition? This debate has been and remains a hotly contested one.</p>
<p>After watching this cinematic engagement with a contentious recent episode in the annals of American consumer capitalism, I found myself coming back again and again to a single scene. A few years into the battle waged by Bill Ackman, the camera zooms in on Herbalife CEO Mark Johnson as he addresses a sports stadium filled with Herbalife acolytes. Portraying the company as inevitably beset by establishment naysayers out to destroy Herbalife and the avenues of opportunity that it provided, Johnson proclaimed that he and the Herbalife family would fend off its enemies. The multi-level marketing firm, Johnson explained, would always “seize the narrative.” That might mean shining the public spotlight on hardworking, charismatic Herbalifers who had recruited so many other sales agents that they had ascended into the company’s Millionaire Team. Or proclaiming that in the household where Johnson was raised, the abiding parental message stressed the importance of “integrity” to sustain “trust.” Or reframing the motives of a financial operator like Ackman, implying that his short position undercut any arguments or analysis that he might put forward about the company’s mode of operations. Johnson offered a brash forecast of narrative dominance—that Herbalife would identify the narrative high ground, occupy it, and hold it against all comers.</p>
<p>This declaration struck me so forcibly in part because one rarely sees such candor about the role of stories and story-telling in the hurly burly world of American capitalism. Surrounded by insiders, Johnson was willing to pull back the curtain on how corporations approach public relations in the broadest sense—not just through the messages of advertisements and endorsements, but through the wider management of reputation and popular belief.</p>
<p>The comment from Johnson also resonated for me because it encapsulates so much of my own work as a historian of American law, policy, and business culture. For a quarter-century, I’ve been writing about fault-lines in American capitalism, the zones of instability created by an economic system depending on widespread trust in economic counterparties. For much of the 1990s, I focused on the legal, social, economic, and cultural problems posed by business failure in the nineteenth-century—those dislocating moments when the era’s firms could not pay their debts. Since then, I have been wrestling with the American flim-flam man (and woman), chasing after alleged and actual business frauds from the early nineteenth-century to the present, as well as investigating the shifting institutional responses to the problem of marketplace deceptions.</p>
<p>Stories, of course, help to grease the wheels of modern capitalism. Would be entrepreneurs construct them as they seek to persuade friends and relatives, banks, or venture capital firms to supply them with the funds they need to launch businesses. Advertisers dream up fantasies to convince consumers that some good or service truly offers a crucial need or fulfills some deeply felt want. Even without the prompting of some crisis or scandal, corporate public relations departments construct tales about corporate origins and the essential elements of a firm’s business culture, all to foster employees’ identification with their employer and customers’ identification with the firm’s products or services. In recent decades, business executives have spun yarns about their heroic contributions to financial results to justify gargantuan pay packages. For more than a century now, societies have also confronted a host of meta-stories about the workings of capitalism, such as descriptions (or forecasts) of the business cycle’s predictable arc, moving from growth to boom to bust and recession.</p>
<p>Hardly any of this story-making and telling goes uncontested. Savvy investors and lenders do not uncritically embrace the projections of those who seek after capital and credit. In competitive markets, firms challenge each other’s marketing narratives, as do consumer watchdogs and the business press. Labor unions usually offer a very different take on a company’s history and practices from that laid out by management. The same surely goes for social activists and journalistic muckrakers who seek to expose the negative consequences of corporate activity, whether for workers, consumers, or the environment. At least occasionally, stockholders express qualms about the munificence of executive compensation. And even if there is broad consensus about how to describe the business cycle, politicians and pundits hardly have achieved consensus about how much government can or should seek to moderate its swings. These opposing groups usually tell very different stories about the impacts of counter-cyclical monetary and fiscal policy.</p>
<p>The business narratives prompted by moments of failure or alleged deception tend to have an especially great urgency about them. For the proprietors, managers, and operators caught in the eye of a given storm, they involve questions of social standing, legitimacy, legal liability, economic future, even personal honor. They turn on interpretations of personal motivation, as well as understandings of the social norms, cultural values, and legal standards that structure economic exchange. And they have a collective dimension. As individual stories of bankruptcy and fraud multiply in a given era, they draw on prevailing macro-stories with familiar plotlines. As those macro-stories evolve in new circumstances, they can also help to establish reform agendas that seek to reconfigure social norms, cultural values, and legal standards.</p>
<p>To make these rather abstract points more concrete, consider the following primary sources, each involving a determined effort to “seize the narrative” about a specific enterprise facing existential threats.</p>
<p>The first source comes from a New York City bankruptcy case under the 1841 National Bankruptcy Act, the subject of my first book, <em>Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America</em> (2001). This short-lived legislation (Congress repealed it in 1843, just thirteen months after it went into operation) gave individuals the chance to petition for a discharge from their debts. Doing so required that petitioners offer a comprehensive list of their assets (most of which they would have to surrender to the federal court where they applied for relief) and their debts (which, if they successfully navigated the legal proceedings, they would no longer have to pay). One can infer a story of failure from this snapshot of property holdings and financial obligations, but such fragmentary evidence poses lots of interpretive challenges. One can of course dig for other relevant evidence about specific paths to insolvency. Occasionally, moreover, petitioners voluntarily offered a fuller account of their troubles as part of their bankruptcy filings. Such moves represented, at least in part, attempts to take out insurance against any counter-stories from creditors, who possessed the right to lodge formal objections to the granting of a bankruptcy discharge, or against eventual misconceptions by lawyers and the judiciary.</p>
<p>The document in question comes from the voluntary <a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/site-dev/wp-content/uploads/pattison-bankruptcy-petition.pdf" title="Pattison bankruptcy petition">bankruptcy petition of Granville Sharpe Pattison</a>, a New York City physician who found himself ensnared in complex and allegedly fraudulent land deals during the “mania” of the mid-1830s. Not content to offer up just a list of assets and debts, Pattison offered a detailed story that placed his insolvency in the context of the general asset craze that took hold in the run-up to the Panic of 1837. Describing himself as “excited by the spirit of speculation,” the doctor recounted his eager purchases of Illinois town lots and stock in a copper mining company on the basis of false claims about their value. Sometimes he paid by liquidating other assets. More frequently, amid the heady atmosphere of boom times, the transactions rested on his mere promises to pay in the future.</p>
<p>Pattison further explained that he could not raise challenge the legality of his debts in court, because the sellers had immediately transferred his obligations to “innocent third parties.” He also assured the court that he had never indulged in any “extravagance, having always lived within his income.”</p>
<p>Most importantly, Pattison insisted that he might have avoided insolvency had he been willing to look out only for himself, since he subsequently sold most of the property “to English capitalists at immense advances.” But once he discovered that the sales rested on outright misrepresentations, he claimed that “he spontaneously cancelled all the contracts of sale ... without having been asked to do so,” despite the fact that doing so left him unable to make good on his own debts. As Pattison described his thinking, he would rather “be a Bankrupt in fortune” than allow “the shadow of a suspicion ... [to] rest on the uprightness and rectitude of his character.” Even the handwriting that produced this self-exoneration told a story of sorts, conveying a firm, clear penmanship that invited trust from readers.</p>
<p>The next two sources come from twentieth-century entrepreneurs who confronted highly publicized allegations of business fraud, each of whom received some attention in my most recent book, <em>Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff</em>. Edward Lewis, a key figure in Chapter Six of <em>Fraud</em>, developed a cluster of businesses from his early twentieth-century base outside Saint Louis, including a subscription magazine that targeted rural women, a mail order bank, and a correspondence university. His legal troubles began with administrative fraud orders that damaged his core businesses and eventually led to criminal mail fraud proceedings. Glenn W. Turner, who makes a cameo appearance in Chapter Ten of <em>Fraud</em>, ran multi-level marketing schemes in the early 1970s that offered self-help literature/records and cosmetics, as well as opportunities to make income through recruitment of sales agents. His businesses attracted civil actions by a slew of state Attorneys General, as well as the Federal Trade Commission.</p>
<p><a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/site-dev/wp-content/uploads/order-number-ten-excerpt.pdf" title="Lewis, Order Number Ten, excerpt"></a> Though separated by more than six decades and pursuing different businesses, the two businessmen adopted similar strategies in the effort to shape public perceptions and deflect allegations off fraudulent behavior. Lewis vigorously defended himself through his magazine, political and journalistic allies, and an eventual book, published in 1911, <em>Order Number Ten: Being Cursory Comments on Some of the Effects of the Great American Fraud Order</em>, which collected a series of editorials from Lewis’s <em>Woman’s Magazine</em>. I include here <a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/site-dev/wp-content/uploads/order-number-ten-excerpt.pdf" title="Lewis, Order Number Ten, excerpt">the text of the fraud order against Lewis</a> that he placed at the beginning of the volume, the publisher’s preface, Lewis’s “Introductory,” one illustration conveying popular skepticism toward new ideas, his “Afterthoughts,” and a hard-sell recruiting plea at the back of the volume for book agents to market a related volume. These excerpts hit many recurring themes in the narratives offered up by alleged fraudsters: the difficulty of distinguishing economic deception from enthusiastic promotion at the forefront of innovation; the tendency of powerful, entrenched interests—in this case, the Post Office—to discredit competitors that threatened their position; and declarations of deep affection for those investors and customers who stood by him despite unjust persecution.</p>
<p><a href="http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/fullsize/glenn-turner-better-your-best-1000.jpg" title="Turner, Better Your Best"></a> Glenn W. Turner similarly expended considerable effort to convince the public that he, in the words of his authorized biographer, was a “saint” rather than a “con man.” I offer here <a href="http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/fullsize/glenn-turner-better-your-best-1000.jpg" title="Turner, Better Your Best">the text from the back cover of Turner’s 1975 promotional album</a>, “Glenn W. Turner SPEAKS OUT: ‘You Can Better Your Best.’” In this concise marketing pitch, Turner put forward a common rendering from American entrepreneurs of all stripes—the remarkable rise from difficult circumstances—as well as the persistent theme of uplift through a mutualistic sharing of opportunity to others who lack advantages.</p>
<p>The authors of these such stories themselves depended deeply on humanistic modes of thought and action. They put forward arguments, evoked sentiments, and sought to influence public opinion and/or official decision-making through personal accounts that drew on widely shared metaphors, tropes, and narrative arcs. For Granville Sharpe Pattison, the voluntary narrative of honorable failure may not have been necessary, since no creditors appeared to challenge his version of events. For both Edward Lewis and Glenn Tucker, tales of innovative striving helped their inveterate investors and customers keep the faith, but lacked punch with officialdom. Each had business empires upended as a result of legal actions; each ended up doing stints in jail as a result of criminal fraud convictions.</p>
<p>We are storytellers and consumers of stories, all of us, and not just in the realm of culture or family or other social relations or politics, but also in our economic and legal lives. The sharpest conflicts within modern capitalism turn in large measure on contending efforts to seize the narrative. Granville Sharpe Pattison, Edward Lewis, Glenn Turner, Michael Johnson, Julie Contreras, Bill Ackman and countless others have crafted stories in order to shape agendas, define the realm of the possible, assign blame or credit, justify or undermine, move themselves and others to action. These endeavors may not accord with all or even most of the relevant facts. They do not always manage to attain the highest narrative ground, nor hold it against all the counter-stories pressing up the slopes of our collective culture. But they reflect our essential nature as story-making, story-telling, and story-craving beings, who inevitably construct narratives to render our world intelligible.</p>
<p>This basic humanistic insight is crucial for clear-eyed understandings of how modern societies have handled thorny problems such as bankruptcy or business fraud. Indeed, this insight is crucial for making sense of wider questions about how modern capitalism works, who enjoys the fruits of its bounty, who has to bear its risks and costs, and how its mechanics and outcomes accord with our sense of justice.</p>
<p>Recognition of this essential perspective also can make us savvier consumers and investors, more thoughtful workers, professionals, managers, owners, and retirees, and more deliberative citizens. If we understand the ubiquity and power of stories in the economic realm, we will be better armed to identify them, to evaluate their basis in fact, and to appreciate their emotional pull. And that level of understanding can only help us as we navigate the complexities of a capitalist society.</p>
<p>For those interested in additional reading about story-making and its impact on how we make sense of the history of economic life (and the past, present, and future more generally), see:</p>
<ul>
<li>William Cronon, “<a href="http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/cronon_place_for_stories_1991.pdf">A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative</a>,” <i>Journal of American History </i> 78 (1992): 1347-76.</li>
<li>Per Hansen, “<a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/572609/pdf">From Finance Capitalism to Financialization: A Cultural and Narrative Perspective on 150 Years of Financial History</a>,” <i>Enterprise & Society</i> 15 (2014): 605-42.</li>
<li>Frederick Mayer, <i><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/narrative-politics-9780199324460?cc=us&lang=en&">Narrative Politics: Stories and Collective Action</a></i> (New York, 2014).</li>
</ul>
Ted Braun
<em>Betting on Zero</em>
June 9, 2017
Edward J. Balleisen, professor of history at Duke University
balleisen-story-making-fault-lines-american-capitalism
<em>The Jungle</em>: Personalizing the Historical Struggle of Workers
Sinclair famously quipped that he “aimed for the public’s heart” but accidentally “hit it in the stomach.” His novel hit Shedd in both places. <em>The Jungle</em> personalized the hopes and struggles of those living in the era that she would eventually study as a modern U.S. historian. Sinclair’s story prompted her to seek answers to questions: How did this novel prompt policy change? How did it capture the struggles of historical actors and immigrants in the early 20th century? What other novels did Sinclair write? What institutional structures need reform in order to be more just?
<span><span>An early encounter with muckraking American novelist Upton Sinclair’s </span><em>The Jungle </em><span>exposed Kristen Shedd to issues surrounding human rights and animal rights in the early 20</span><span>th</span><span> century. For Shedd, the 1906 novel exposed the intersections of fiction, policy, history, and social justice. Sinclair’s story prompted her to seek answers to questions: How did this novel prompt policy change? How did it capture the struggles of historical actors and immigrants in the early 20th century? What other novels did Sinclair write? What institutional structures need reform in order to be more just?</span></span>
<em>The Jungle</em> by Upton Sinclair
Kristen Shedd, Fullerton College & The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress
shedd-jungle-personalizing-history
History, (Re)imagined
This encounter with Anderson’s scholarship inspired Knirim to reevaluate the meaning of truth, “proof,” and imagination in the study of history. In the absence of time machines, imagination—combined with rigorous scholarship, of course—can enable us to travel to certain moments in the past. Or at least come closer to the past than we were before.
Benedict Anderson’s <em>Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism</em> compelled Alexander Knirim, then a young historian, to re-think the role of imagination in history. Knirim recounts how his original misunderstanding, that we can reconstruct historic truth, was challenged by Anderson’s book and evolved into an appreciation of Anderson’s exegesis.
<em>Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism</em> by Benedict Anderson
Alexander Knirim, Bayreuth University & The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress
knirim-history-reimagined
The Transformative Power of Dialogue
Growing up in a very small town that once had the most churches per capita in the country, Catherine Newell was around many people who were believers. Moving away from her hometown, she encountered a more religiously diverse environment, opening her mind to other possibilities. During her final term in college, she stumbled into a Rabbinic Judaism class. While the texts ignited her intellect, it was the class dialogue that moved her in a profound way. Now a professor of religious studies herself, Newell reflects on how the class offered an ideal model of collective academic inquiry: respectful and passionate dialogue.
Catherine Newell, assistant professor of religious studies, University of Miami & The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress
newell-transformative-power-dialogue
Solving the “Very Complicated Puzzle” of How Humanity Lives
<p>As a 21-year-old senior in college, Nancy Hirschmann encountered—and was forever changed by—German philosopher Hegel’s notoriously difficult passages in <em>The Phenomenology of Spirit</em>. Suddenly, she “broke through the wall” of the concept of the “master-slave dialectic” and its notion of consciousness and recognition. The act of reading a text, deciphering it, and understanding how it translates into a significant meaning kindled Hirschmann’s engagement with political theory.</p>
<p>For Hirschmann, grappling with Hegel’s work was like “solving a very complicated puzzle.” The formative experience of writing her college term paper (one of her proudest written accomplishments) led her to pursue an academic career as a political theorist.<span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span></p>
<em>The Phenomenology of Spirit</em> by Hegel
<a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/meet-the-fellows/nancy-j-hirschmann/">Nancy J. Hirschmann</a>, p<span>rofessor of political science, </span>University of Pennsylvania
hirschmann-very-complicated-puzzle
On the Anxiety of Influence
<p>In this account, William Leuchtenburg shares the story of a seemingly routine exchange with literary scholars in the late 1970s which spurred him to new insights about the ways iconic figures from the past influence those who succeed them, whether they be poets, or composers, or U.S. presidents. Eventually, he would share these insights in his major work on presidential legacies, <em>In The Shadow of FDR</em>.</p>
<p>Already an accomplished political historian at the time of this moment, Leuchtenburg demonstrates how the questions and ways of seeing in other humanities fields led him to analogous realizations about his own research.</p>
1980
<a href="https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential-addresses/william-e-leuchtenburg">William Leuchtenburg</a>, William Rand Kenan Jr. professor emeritus of history, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
william-leuchtenburg-anxiety-of-influence
Where Dreams Were Made and Humanistic Visions Forged
Throughout their son’s childhood, Stephen Hall’s parents, both children of sharecroppers, crafted a “deeply humanistic perch” from which he could “view the world.” Though possessing none of the benefits of class or race privilege, they harnessed the power of the book, searching for what historian Isabel Wilkerson has called “the light of other suns” in the “recesses of their minds.” Their personal library—including the Bible, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Great Books—stoked young Hall’s imagination. The harmonies of musicians, such as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, played alongside images of athletes like Muhammad Ali. The ritual of accompanying his parents to vote in local, state, and national elections deepened a conviction: being humanistic entails civic engagement.
<a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/meet-the-fellows/stephen-g-hall/">Stephen G. Hall</a>, Alcorn State University
hall-humanistic-visions
Finding Freedom from the Familiar
<p>In 1979, at age 16, Hollis Robbins found herself enrolled at John Hopkins University. Though she was there as part of a program for girls who excelled in math, she signed up for a humanities lecture class. In that day’s class, drawing upon the epic of Gilgamesh, a guest lecturer expounded on the theory of “mimetic desire,” or the idea that we borrow our desires from other people. Unbeknownst to her, the speaker was none other than famed anthropological philosopher René Girard. Yet, Hollis disagreed. In her opinion, culled from reading stories such as those of Herman Melville and Charles Dickens, people actually like “very strange things.” They are drawn to things that are different from themselves.</p>
<p>Today, as a professor of literature, her conviction holds strong, supported by experiences such as teaching Melville’s <em>Moby-Dick</em>. She finds that contrary to present-day despair about their “slow attention spans,” students want to reach across centuries to worlds unfamiliar from their own.</p>
Epic of Gilgamesh; the philosophy of René Girard; Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
1979
<a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/meet-the-fellows/hollis-robbins/">Hollis Robbins</a>, Johns Hopkins University
robbins-finding-freedom-from-familiar
Sometimes You Just Need to Keep Reading
<p>Growing up in the mid-1960s as a white girl in Tuskegee, Alabama, Mab Segrest attended a segregated private school that her parents had helped found in response to a court order years earlier to integrate public high schools. In the shadows of governor George Wallace’s racist violence, history had “come to [her] front door.” Seeking a better understanding of the U.S. South, she found William Faulkner’s <em>The Sound and the Fury</em> in the local library. Perplexed by the interior monologue of its opening pages, she forged ahead in grappling with the famed Southern writer’s dizzying language. Around page 105, a revelation rewarded her persistence: she had been reading from the point of view of cognitively impaired Benjy, the “idiot.”</p>
<p>Years later, while a graduate student in Duke’s English department, a time during which she eventually came out as a lesbian, she explored the contents of the Intimate Bookshop in the next town over, Chapel Hill. A question in a book called <em>Sappho Was a Right-On Woman</em> transformed her worldview: “What causes heterosexuality?” By shifting the query from <em>homo</em>sexuality to <em>hetero</em>sexuality, the question was a “revelation” for Segrest.</p>
<p>By continuing to dwell on Faulkner’s novel, Segrest learned the value of perseverance: “Sometimes you just need to keep reading.” In grappling with the queries of a feminist text (“what causes heterosexuality?”), she realized that “how you ask the questions makes a really big difference.” Texts, arguments, and how people struggle with what it means to be human can be “liberatory or revelatory,” whether for a young girl in the midst of an apartheid system or for a lesbian woman in a homophobic society. Together, these humanities moments bookend Segrest’s personal and intellectual formation and her understanding of the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender.</p>
mid-1960s
<a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/meet-the-fellows/mab-segrest/">Mab Segrest</a>, Professor Emerita, Connecticut College
segrest-sometimes-you-just-need-to-keep-reading
Set On a Path by Socrates
As a college freshman, Thérèse Cory encountered Plato’s Socratic dialogue <em>Euthyphro</em> for the first time. Reading Socrates’ exhortations for Euthyphro—a man bringing charges of murder against his father—to articulate a clear and universal definition of piety, Cory realized the extent to which many of us take key terms and ideas for granted. The story ignited her belief that we must discuss and understand one another’s conceptual perspectives in order to live harmoniously together. This intellectual commitment set Cory on her path to become a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
<a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/meet-the-fellows/therese-scarpelli-cory/">Thérèse Cory</a>, associate professor of philosophy at Notre Dame University
set-on-a-path-by-socrates
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
Chronicling a Summer in Cinéma Vérité
For Peter Galison, an influential moment was seeing a film made in 1961 by an anthropologist and a sociologist, featuring a series of estival interviews with people on the sidewalks of France. With its innovations in sound technology, <em>Chronicle of a Summer</em> opened Galison’s eyes to the possibilities of documentary film. The film illuminated the interplay between image and text, revealing how the humanities can “open up a world.”
<em>Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d'un été)</em>
<a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/meet-the-fellows/peter-galison/">Peter Galison</a>, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard University
peter-galison-chronicling-a-summer-in-cinema-verite
Contingent Bodies: Encountering The DisAbility Project
<span>Ann Fox describes her first encounter with The DisAbility Project, a St. Louis-based performance group. Humor, skits, and monologues reflecting the experiences of disabled people helped her understand disability politics, and realize the pleasure and creativity possible in bodily variation.</span> <br /><br />Curator’s note: Read Ann Fox’s essay, <a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/site-dev/wp-content/uploads/fox-claiming-identity.pdf">“To Be Rather than To Seem: Claiming Identity in Art, Curation, and Culture.”</a> It discusses the intersections of art and disability studies that accompanied the National Humanities Center’s exhibit, <em>Esse Quam Videri</em>.
The DisAbility Project
Ann Fox, professor of English at Davidson College
contingent-bodies-disability-project
Genre: Control or Chaos
<p>This episode of <i>Westworld</i> had me at its title, "Genre." I have been thinking about genre as part of my academic work since my dissertation, which became my first book, on contemporary (post-1980) neodomestic fiction, and most recently in my work on the contemporary (post-1970) American adrenaline narrative. So, as I sought a moment of escape from home and work via immersion in the alternate reality of a popular television series, my work and entertainment worlds—as so often happens in the humanities—collided.</p>
<p>While the shift from thinking about the American home to extreme sports to a futuristic world may initially strike one as nonsequiturs, our current social distancing reality highlights the distinct and blurred lines between such genres. Our lives are shaped by shifting and competing narratives about home, risk, and our control or lack of control of the future. We engage narrative—via family stories, the news, fiction—to make sense of the chaos. Yet, as the episode from <i>Westworld</i> demonstrates, knowledge may also produce panic, if not pandemonium. Laurence Gonzales in <i>Deep Survival</i> claims, "We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel" (64). This is the power and danger of narrative.</p>
<i>Westworld</i>, Season Three, Episode 5, Genre
April 12, 2020
Kristin Jacobson, Professor of American Literature, Stockton University
genre-control-chaos