Southern History, Turned Upside Down
J. Porter Durham, Jr. grew up in the segregated South during a time when public Ku Klux Klan sightings were not uncommon. In this video, Durham describes how a history class at Duke University taught by Lawrence Goodwyn upended his worldview. Professor Goodwyn’s book, <em>The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America</em>, transfigured Durham’s understanding of his local and familial history. For the first time, he was “forced to think anew.”
J. Porter Durham, Jr., General Counsel and Chief Operating Officer, Global Endowment Management, LP
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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
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The Day My Interest in Race in America Was Born
In this video submission, Ken Burns recounts how formative experiences, both deeply personal and as a young person growing up in the midst of the Civil Rights era, have shaped his perspective on American history and have informed nearly all his documentary projects.
Trying to make sense of his own individual story within the nation’s collective reckoning with race, Burns reflects on how “we human beings seek always to find some frame to understand things.” The humanities, he continues, facilitate our finding “some meaning in it all precisely because of our inevitable mortality.” He believes that the work of history, particularly biography, helps us to organize our stories, and perhaps even to divine “the way that human beings are.” Whether unsettling or inspirational, history always proves useful.
1963
Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker
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