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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A Requirement I Started to Love
To get an ALP (Arts, Literature, & Philosophy) credit I took an English class about books and short stories that were turned into movies. What I thought would be a fun, lighthearted class, led to an immense appreciation of the details that authors and directors choose to include in their work (while being fun of course). Anything I watch now causes me to think about the choices behind every aspect of production and allows me to explore a creative side that I never thought I would be interested in.
The works we read and watched all caused me to consider the different perspectives of the characters but also of the authors and directors that have to portray their message through techniques.
Alice Walker, Mario Puzo, Annie Proulx, Tod Robbins
<em>The Color Purple</em>, <em>The Godfather</em>, <em>Brokeback Mountain</em>, "Spurs"
Fall 2017
Liv McKinney, Duke '20, Biology Major
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It’s the Little Things
There is a distinct moment I remember from my high school days that, while seemingly insignificant, is the reason I have always valued the humanities and humanities courses throughout my college experience. I was walking to a restaurant to meet a friend for lunch nearby my high school when a Taiwanese couple stopped me and asked for directions to a famous pond nearby. I could tell that they could not understand my instructions, so I tried my best to tell them the directions in Chinese, given my limited knowledge studying Chinese in school. Afterwards, they were very appreciative, smiled, and gave me a nod before being on their way, but this small moment made me recognize that the skills I was learning in my math, science, and computer science courses, while valuable, would rarely grant me such an experience.
My knowledge of Chinese, a foreign language and therefore a part of the humanities, was necessary for this moment to be memorable. If I had been unable to help the couple, I would have been disappointed with myself.
Spring 2014
Soravit Sophastienphong, 21, Undergraduate at Duke University
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Only Connect
This was a major humanities moment for me because it gave me the answer to a question I had been pondering for over fifty years. Why did I have the feeling, however vague, that the courses in the humanities I had taken when I was a student at Duke University somehow helped me in every volunteer leadership role I had ever undertaken — whether it was starting a job training program for high school drop-outs, or helping start a history museum, or serving on a community foundation? The professor’s tenth point, “Only Connect,” had answered my question. What a gratifying humanities moment.
Over the years I have been blessed by many humanities moments, but there is one that I especially cherish. Some fifteen years ago, I happened upon an article in <em>The American Scholar</em> written by a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who put forth the ten qualities he believed a person would acquire from having a solid liberal arts education. It was the tenth quality on his list that got me. It was “Only Connect,” two words taken from a work by E. M. Forster. By this, the professor meant that a liberal arts education enables a person to have the freedom to connect — with different ideas, with different people, with different possibilities. It gives us, he wrote, the wisdom and the desire to connect with the human community.<br /><br />This was a major humanities moment for me because it gave me the answer to a question I had been pondering for over fifty years. Why did I have the feeling, however vague, that the courses in the humanities I had taken when I was a student at Duke University somehow helped me in every volunteer leadership role I had ever undertaken — whether it was starting a job training program for high school drop-outs, or helping start a history museum, or serving on a community foundation? The professor’s tenth point, “Only Connect,” had answered my question. What a gratifying humanities moment.
An article quoting author E.M. Forster in <em>The American Scholar</em>
Sally Dalton Robinson
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