<em>Feeling</em> the American Revolution
History teacher Steve Oreskovic discusses how he gets his students to empathize with the feelings of injustice among colonists in the run up to the American Revolution, helping them gain a richer context for learning about history.
Through the practice of experiential learning—a simulation of a tax on school supplies—Oreskovic created an opportunity for his students to imagine the lived realities of American colonists. In doing so, he drew parallels with the Stamp Act imposed by the English government in 1765. The experiential activity “really gets them into the why,” he explains. By reflecting on the internal feeling of injustice, his students gained a richer understanding of the past that transcends the mere knowing of dates, names, and places.
Steve Oreskovic, Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District
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<em>Hamilton</em> and the Performance of Poetry
<p>Thomas Scherer describes two related encounters which speak to the power of hearing poetry performed aloud. The first is an explanatory talk and poetry reading by the great literary scholar M. H. Abrams at the National Humanities Center; the second is hearing Lin-Manuel Miranda discuss his award-winning rap musical, <em>Hamilton</em>.</p>
<p>Across generations, cultural divides, venues, and artistic voices, the power of lyric poetry to capture and convey powerful feeling is undeniable. And when poetry is performed and embodied, “brought to life” if you will, its capacity to create change is palpable.</p>
M. H. Abrams, Lin-Manuel Miranda
Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical <em>Hamilton</em>; M.H. Abrams' <em>The Mirror and the Lamp</em>
Thomas Scherer, Consultant, Spencer Capital Holdings
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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
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Abigail Adams Stands Up for “Ladies”
Whenever I get discouraged about the struggle for equal rights for women, I remember all the women (and men) who’ve been fighting for those rights in the U.S. throughout our country’s history. Reading the letters written between Abigail Adams and her husband John, I’m reminded just how far we’ve come.
In a time when wives were treated like property, Abigail Adams insisted that her husband “Remember the Ladies” when writing the laws of the country and warning him, that “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” Full text of some of her letters can be found at http://americainclass.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/AAdams-StudentVersion.pdf
Adams, Abigail
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Answering the Question “Who Are We?”
In this short video, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns recalls having Robert Penn Warren read a passage from his novel <em>All the King’s Men</em> during the production of the Huey Long portion of his documentary series “Ken Burns’ America.” He notes that it is voices like Warren’s that have helped animate his work, bringing to life his own journey and that which he has tried to share through his films.<br /><br />For Burns, this particular passage from <i>All the King’s Men</i>—about dirt, creation, and man’s place and purpose on Earth—is a “wonderfully existential statement” that excavates the “emotional archaeology” of humanity. Warren’s writing serves as a compass that can help navigate what Burns calls “the specific gravity of our own self-destructive impulses.” In spite of the diverse range of his film topics, they are all united by a simple question: as Americans, who are we?
<em>All the King's Men</em> by Robert Penn Warren
1986
Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker
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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
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
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Placing Our Family in the Story of America
<p>Actor John Cho shares how the humanities reveal answers to the most important questions in life. He notes his fondness of reading and how, during his childhood, the <em>Little House on the Prairie</em> books helped him process and understand his family’s place in America.</p>
<p>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 <a title="California Humanities: We Are the Humanities" href="http://calhum.org/about/we-are-the-humanities" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">California Humanities: We Are the Humanities</a>.</p>
<em>Little House on the Prairie</em> by Laura Ingalls Wilder
California Humanities
John Cho, actor
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms">Standard YouTube License</a>
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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
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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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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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Why We Always Come Back to Abraham Lincoln
Ken Burns describes how lines from a historic speech given by 29-year-old Abraham Lincoln have “haunted and inspired” him for nearly 40 years. Expanding on what is revealed in those sentences, Burns discusses how they speak not only to Lincoln’s basic character and optimism, qualities that proved essential to his presidency. He goes on to note that Lincoln’s words, here and elsewhere, are suggestive of what is best in the American character.<br /><br />“A handful of sentences” from Lincoln’s 1838 Springfield speech on national security left a deep imprint on the filmmaker’s own philosophy. For Burns, Lincoln’s narrative illustrates how, as a nation, we are “still stitched together by words and, most important, their dangerous progeny, ideas.” Time and again, Lincoln’s eloquence and vision has guided Burns as he enlists documentary film to tell the story of the United States and its citizens.
Abraham Lincoln's 1838 speech on national security delivered in Springfield, Illinois
Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker
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