Preserving Tradition and Embracing Change
This was my fourth trip to Georgia since 2016 and each trip I have noticed a slow-and-steady increase in the amount of "western" influence in the city. From one year to the next, hotels- huge skyscrapers in a city of modestly tall buildings- are being built with seemingly no regard for the traditional architecture of the ancient city. To me (and truthfully, many of my Georgian friends share similar sentiments), these buildings are massive eyesores that break-up a beautiful, low cityscape that is not only the view from the balcony of the house in which we stay, but also seen from all over the city. This has an impact on me because I contextualize the city's expansion and economic growth within the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago. Since the collapse, this small but vivacious country has seen civil war, invasions and annexations from foreign adversaries, and a multitude of diplomatic relationships developed with countries both previously in and out of the Soviet bloc. The context and the subsequent developments have ushered in a new era in Georgia- one where there are no foreign powers at the helm of their government. One in which Georgia is in control of their own future for the first time in a long time.
As you travel in the city and beyond, you can see a host of influences from the Soviet era and of western countries. However, what remains clear is a strong Georgian tradition. You can travel in Tbilisi or even venture out into more rural villages and find feasts, toasts, celebrations, similar driving patterns, urban planning, architectural influences and more. All of this is to say that the architecture of their capital is one example of the tension between preserving tradition in Georgia and in welcoming innovation and change into the fold. You see it in other ways, too: social developments, cultural developments, and even the fact that the Georgian alphabet, spoken and written language is almost completely isolated to this small country of about 3.5 million people, with most people speaking at least one other language, sometimes even two or three. I feel as though I am witnessing a critical point in the development of the modern state of Georgia.
This beautiful country has welcomed me several times in the past five years with warm hospitality, friendship, delicious food, unique and incomparable experiences, all within a changing physical and cultural landscape. I have learned an immense amount about different subcultures of Georgians, what the people as a collective share and cherish, and how they've fought for their independence as a nation and a people. Their traditions are cherished, yet they are turning a new page and ushering themselves into a more modern era. I look forward to seeing the continued preservation of the traditions while also seeing the innovations they welcome.
Architecture in Tbilisi, Georgia
Summer 2021
Maggie, 29, High School Social Studies teacher
preserving-tradition-embracing-change
When <em>Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?</em> Is More Than a Trivia Question
In the summer of 2006, my best friend and I stumbled upon a book called, <em>Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb</em>. The book summarizes the post-presidential lives of the American Presidents, details their passing and funerals, and finishes with a commentary on each. After reviewing how close many of them were to our apartment in Virginia, we decided to embark on a pilgrimage to the burial sites. What followed has been a decade plus journey throughout the country to the biggest of big cities, New York, to the smallest of small towns, Plymouth Notch, to visit these final resting places. <br /><br />Each site, like the president memorialized is unique in its own way. Some presidents, like Lincoln, have giant memorials that match their legacies where others, like Coolidge, are the definition of unpretentious. Some, like Washington, are on sprawling plantations. Others, like Van Buren, are in rural cemeteries. This is a testament to the impact that power and privilege play even in death. <br /><br />Traipsing through countless cemeteries, I have often reflected on the role that memory and memorialization play in our lives. Mixed in with some presidents are people whose stories have long been forgotten or, perhaps worse, were never even told. I wonder: Who are these people? Why are they buried here? What was their life like? Thankfully public historians are actively seeking to rectify this. <br /><br />When I mention my macabre hobby I inevitably get asked, "Why?" The easy answer is that it blends my interest in the presidency and my love of travel. The more philosophical answer? I suppose there is a particular unexpectedness of observing the humanities in a cemetery, yet what is more universally human then death? For it is on these trips with my best friend, other friends, family, and my wife that I have felt the greatest connection to people. Be it laughing with friends on a car trip, eating and connecting with the local townspeople, or meeting and reflecting with other history aficionados. <br /><br />So who is buried in Grant's tomb? Well, not even Ulysses Grant as he is interred above ground.
Brian Lamb
<em>Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?: A Tour of Presidential Gravesites</em>
Summer 2006
Bradley T. Swain, 38, Social Studies Teacher at West Springfield High School
buried-grant-tomb-more-than-trivia-question
A Trip to Antietam National Battlefield
When I was ten years old my family took a day trip to visit the Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg, Maryland. This family activity was the idea of my father, a Civil War enthusiast with a lifelong passion for history. As a ten-year-old, I was excited to just go somewhere different and see something new, but I lacked a genuine appreciation for the significance of the battlefield and the importance of this place to American history. Towards the back of line, at the beginning of the tour, I walked with my dad and by chance happened to kick up a small section of dirt in which I noticed a small dark grey object amidst the footpath. It was an actual Civil War bullet from the battle that I stumbled upon by pure luck and good fortune. I was pumped, but my dad was thrilled beyond belief, if not a little jealous. Sharing in his excitement, this was a moment when history truly came alive for me. I was immediately hooked. Here I was at a real Civil War battlefield, with a real Civil War bullet, and participating in a real historical discovery with my dad! Even at a young age I was interested in history, and enjoyed reading, but this Humanities Moment intensified that connection and inspired a lifelong passion for history and learning. I left Antietam with a new understanding of how the importance of past, place, and shared experience can truly be a powerful force to bring people together, and I still have the bullet too.
U.S. National Park Service
Antietam National Battlefield
1998
Jeff Vande Sande, 32, High School History Teacher
trip-antietam-national-battlefield
<em>People of the Book </em>Reminds Me Why I Love the Humanities
I read <em>People of the Book</em> by Geraldine Brooks a few days ago and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. This book combined many of my loves: reading, historical fiction, and stories of survival and humanity.<br /><br />As a history teacher, with two young kids, I don't get much time to read for pleasure during the year. And this past year of the pandemic was the hardest of my career and I had even less time for reading. I have been so happy to slow down and relax this summer and to escape into the world of this book that was so captivating. <br /><br />This book had been sitting on my nightstand for months and once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. It was such a powerful novel about imagined and embellished stories about a real live artifact, the Sarajevo Haggadah. The stories that the author created felt so real and I grew so attached to the people who helped protect this book. I learned so much about history and religion that I didn't know before. I also learned so much about the human condition. <br /><br />This is why I love my job. You can always learn more. I was so inspired by this book to keep reading others and keep learning more. I can't wait to travel and eventually see the real Haggadah. I want to share its story and hope others will get the opportunity to read this book!
Geraldine Brooks
<em>People of the Book</em>
July 2021
Natalie Hanson, 36, History Teacher
people-book-reminds-love-humanities
Homegrown
My wanderlust took me to many places around the world where I experienced humanities moments at nearly every turn, but my hometown is where my relationship with the humanities was born.
My childhood in a small town in New Hampshire was steeped in history. Impressive 19th century buildings and covered bridges painted the backdrop of my formative years and the hours of my days were measured by the ringing of Revere bells.
Sarah Josepha Hale also hailed from the same town. Hale wrote, published, and advocated for women’s education, but is most commonly known for her nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Our lives were separated by over a century, but our childhood homes were only separated by a driveway and as a result she often came to my mind.
Hale’s life sparked my curiosity about what role women played in American history and how they influenced their world despite the restrictions society placed on them. The constant reminder that women do make history helped foster my interest in the humanities.
Carey Kelley, 44, Ph.D. candidate, University of Missouri
homegrown
St Cuthbert: Just One Voice in a Silent Crowd
In the summer of 2017 I was visiting my family in the northeast of the UK as I prepared to begin my Ph.D. in the United States. I had been out of academia for a few years and was eager to get back to working on my passion - the literature of early medieval England. As luck would have it, in that same year Durham Cathedral had launched a new exhibition of the relics of the Anglo-Saxon hermit and bishop, St Cuthbert. After some convincing, my parents and I went up to Durham for the day and my father and I came face-to-face with the incredible trove. <br /><br />Cuthbert lived in the 7th century and, despite the vast chasm of time between him and us, we know a surprising amount about him. Thanks to the work of the Venerable Bede and his 'Life of St Cuthbert,' his piety and asceticism are well-documented. He lived through the Synod of Whitby in 664, a turning point in Christian history in Britain. He spent many of his years at the monastery of Lindisfarne, and in 676 he moved to isolated Farne Island to live out the rest of his days in religious contemplation as a simple hermit. <br /><br />Thirteen centuries had elapsed between his death and my visit to Durham Cathedral. His life and works are still remembered. They factor heavily in my research. Yet despite his renown, the collection of 'relics' is meagre. Only a handful of items (most famously his coffin, his cruciform pendant, and his comb) survive to us. Standing in that undercroft, I was reminded how little of the past survives to us. Cuthbert was one of the lucky ones who was able to pass something of himself down to us. How many thousands of people, how many millions of artefacts, have been lost to time? In so many ways, the history of early Britain is a patchwork of fragmentary texts, muddy foundations, and shattered objects. As a researcher, I have to be diligent and avoid the traps of generalising the period and its inhabitants. But we are still discovering things every year, and we are still adding to that patchwork of history.
Treasures of St. Cuthbert, Durham Cathedral.
July 2018
Will Beattie, 29, Graduate Student
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A Sword From Italy by Way of Alexandria
It was not my first time in The City, but it was my first time visiting the Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's reputation stretched out wide before it for a young man from the West Coast. I had long been interested in art, and I knew that the Met had one of the best collections in the world. I had missed a previous opportunity to go a few years back, and I wasn't going to do so again. My sister, a friend, and I took a train up to Fifth Avenue, and soon were outside the museum's broad, colonnaded entrance.
My interest in the medieval period had only recently begun at that point. When I saw in the catalogue that the museum had an extensive collection of European arms and armor, I couldn't resist. We walked through the classical Egyptian section, admiring the tiny-carved Lapis lazuli figures. We paused for pictures amid the ruins of the Temple of Dendur, which stood in the middle of a small reflecting pool. Beyond that, we finally entered the arms and armor section.
Amid all the impressive examples of late medieval and early-modern craftsmanship, one piece in particular stood out to me. It was a large sword with a broad, angular blade (see attached picture of the same sword in the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was on loan in early 2020). The surface, while pitted slightly, was remarkably unmarred and smooth other than an inscription near the hilt written in Arabic. The sword as a whole had a simple elegance. Though the crossguard had little horn-like curls at the ends, it was otherwise unadorned. It had the appearance of a practical tool, precise and deliberate. It looked heavy but somehow also quick.
I was intrigued. I began asking all sorts of questions about the sword: Where had it come from? Who made it? Why was there an Arabic inscription on what was clearly a western European sword? Searching for those answers gave me my first taste of the interconnected Mediterranean world which would later become my obsession. The sword is thought to have been made in Italy, either in Brescia or Milan. From there, it was taken to the isle of Cyprus, at the time ruled by the Lusignan Kings, successors to the long-lost Crusader States. Then, sometime around 1419, it was presented as part of a diplomatic gift from Cyprus (along with many other weapons) to Sultan Shaykh al-Mahmudi, whose name is contained in the inscription. The sword, and many others like it, are one of many pieces of physical evidence for the extensive networks of connection which joined the various corners of the Mediterranean together in the medieval and early-modern world.
Though I have never handled the original (or its twin, rediscovered in Texas in 2014 by Sotheby's), I have had the opportunity to handle a modern reproduction which was made based on detailed measurements and mimics the sword almost exactly. It is a marvel of engineering. The sword's geometry and design makes it wonderfully balanced, so that, though it weighs almost 4 lbs (which is very heavy for a sword of this type), it feels light enough to wield in one hand. The tremendous skill which would have gone into the design and fabrication of that weapon made me question my received wisdom about the superiority of the modern world, and eventually to question the very meaning of "modern" at all.
The questions that this sword inspired have had long-lasting effects on the course of my continuing academic study and interest in the middle ages, and it is still an inspiration to me today.
A visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
2012
Thomas Morin, 32, Historian
sword-from-italy
A Play and New Perspectives
In the summer of 2018, I took a trip to England where I had the opportunity to truly explore the city of London for the first time. One night during my stay, I visited the National Theatre where I saw the play <em>Translations</em> by Brian Friel. <br /><br />Set in a small Irish town in the 1830s, the show follows the story of a rural headmaster and his sons. One son helps his father educate members of their rural community while the other joins British Royal Engineers to anglicize maps of Ireland. During this time, British officials sought to replace traditional Gaelic names with British equivalents, asserting the Empire's control over Ireland's past and their future. The show touches on the importance of language and culture by shifting back and forth between the perspectives of the British Engineers and the Irish community, allowing the audience to see the story from both sides. The different characters were unable to communicate with those who did not speak their native language, leading to intensified tension and frustration. <br /><br />As I watched the actors portray this story, I found that everything about the play- the book, the acting, the direction- forced the audience to reckon with the detrimental realities of the past and empathize with the Irish communities and the British officials that the fictional characters were based upon. As a member of the audience, I felt the frustration of the Irish community members; I felt their pain as they watched the names of their roads, lakes, and buildings being replaced; I felt satisfaction as the community joined together to resist the infiltration of British authorities and protest colonialism. The play also emphasized the perspective of the British soldiers sent to the town to serve their empire and the feeling of obligation and duty that accompanied their actions. <br /><br />To me, one of the most important aspects of the humanities is being able to invite an audience, a reader, a listener to experience a perspective that is different from their own and potentially alter the way they view the world. The play I watched that night in 2018 exemplifies this purpose as it presented an important story, based on true events from the past, in a way that encouraged audience members to suspend their biases and think about life through a different point of view. As a budding historian, <em>Translations</em> encouraged me to find and highlight historic moments in a similar way within my own work.
Brian Friel
<em>Translations</em>
Summer 2018
E.N.K. Robbins, 26, Ph.D. Candidate
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<em>A Touch of Green</em>
While doing research in Nanjing, the capital city of Jiangsu province in China, I made a visit to a local neighborhood called Dafang Lane. There's no famous tourist spot here, but I was drawn to it by a Taiwanese TV series that I watched years ago -- <em>A Touch of Green</em>. <br /><br /><em>A Touch of Green</em> is a 2015 TV series that is based on a novella of the same name by Pai Hsien-Yung, a phenomenal Chinese writer. The story unfolds the life of three Republic of China Air Force pilots and their wives from the Chinese Civil War period (1945-1949) to the White Terror period (1949 to 1987) in Taiwan. The story is not an ode to China's revolutionary past, but rather to the tumultuous and miserable lives of ordinary Chinese people who left their homeland and migrated to a new island after the KMT lost the Civil War in 1949. It is not centered on the bravery of the pilots or the strength of their wives. Instead, the drama portrays their anxiety and weariness over the war, their helplessness when confronting fate and history, and their grief over their loved ones' deaths. It touched me because it transcends macro-historical frameworks and narrates the bond, love, pain, and survival hardship of an ordinary group of people. <br /><br />In the original novella, Dafang Lane is the military dependents’ village where the wives of the pilots resided. The old buildings still exist today, and there is a brief introduction on the wall explaining that they were constructed in the 1930s and are now protected historical sites in Nanjing. I walked around Dafang Lane, as if I was walking down the memory lane of modern Chinese history. The dripping sound of life echoed here, as I imagined how the wives of the pilots anxiously awaited their husbands' safe landing or their deaths. For me, the Dafang Lane is not just a place; it's also a humanities moment that intertwines the TV drama, the novella, and the untold history of a group of pilots and their families.
<em>A Touch of Green </em>(television series and novella by Pai Hsien-Yung)
May 2021
Jinghong Zhang, 26, history Ph.D. student
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“Il faut le savoir:” Reflecting on France’s Holocaust History and Memory
“Nothing distinguished the gas chamber from an ordinary blockhouse,” writes Jean Cayrol in the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ iconic filmic meditation on the Shoah, Night and Fog (1956). “Inside, a fake shower room welcomed newcomers. The doors were closed. The newcomers were observed. The only sign – but you must know this (il faut le savoir) – is the ceiling worked over by fingernails. Even the concrete was torn.” At this point in the film, like an insistent investigative eye, the camera pans to the ceiling of the gas chamber, revealing the telltale scratch marks. The image of fingernails clawing into concrete in a desperate attempt for survival recurs in another work about Holocaust memory that we read this semester, Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975). Recalling an exhibit he had visited with his aunt shortly after the war – the same one, in fact, that led producers to ask Alain Resnais to create the film that would become Night and Fog -- the child survivor narrator writes: “I remember photos showing the walls of the ovens, lacerated by the fingernails of those who had been gassed.”
Il faut le savoir. The phrase has haunted me throughout the semester. You must know this. Because it happened. Because many would deny that it did, depriving the victims of dignity and history of truth. Fingernail scratches in the crematoria walls of Auschwitz, asks the neo-Nazi website The Stormer? “Jewish mythology says ‘yes.’ Science says ‘no.’” You must know this, because soon there will be no more survivors, and those still alive often find it too painful, or shameful, to share their testimony, or else they have learned to suppress it so as not to trouble others. “No one wanted my memories,” writes Birkenau survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens in But You Did Not Come Back. You must know this, because 2/3 of young Americans, according to a 2020 national poll, lack a rudimentary understanding of the Holocaust. “Where did the Holocaust happen?” educator Rhonda Fink-Whitman asks a Penn State student in her 2012 documentary, 94 Maidens. “I have no idea.” You must know this, as Cayrol writes in Night and Fog, because “war is sleeping, but with one eye always open.” As I write, genocide continues to be perpetuated against the Muslim Rohingya people by the military in Myanmar. “Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of our new executioners?”
But to know – and this is a second meaning of il faut le savoir -- one must be ‘in the know,’ know where to look, how to be on the lookout, how to decode the signs. You have to be tipped off to find the “Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation” (1962) tucked in a small square behind the behemoth of Notre-Dame Cathedral, just as you must be ‘in the know’ to be disturbed by the memorial’s identification of those deported from France as willing “martyrs” to a cause rather than victims of state persecution by both the Nazis and the Vichy regime. The French State headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain is nowhere mentioned in this memorial monument, yet it deported over 75.000 Jews from France to their deaths, along with, in smaller numbers, Roma, the disabled, Jehovah’s witnesses, gay men and lesbians, and other ‘undesirables.’ Stroll around to the main façade of Notre-Dame to contemplate the two female allegorical figures framing it; only if you’re ‘in the know’ about the anti-Semitic underpinnings of European Christianity through the mid-20th century will you understand that one figure represents the Church triumphant, while the other, with downward cast, blindfolded gaze and broken Torah tablets at her feet, symbolizes the Synagogue. As only one photograph of this event remains, you need to be on the lookout for the tiny plaque at the foot of a bustling Parisian office building marking the site of the former Vélodrome d’hiver, an indoor bicycle track where over 11,000 Jews, including over 4,000 children, were packed for several sweltering days in July 1942 before being herded to their deaths. “A peaceful landscape,” writes Cayrol, “An ordinary field with flights of crows, harvests, grass fires. An ordinary road where cars and peasants and lovers pass. An ordinary village for vacationers – with a marketplace and a steeple – Can lead all too easily to a concentration camp.” Il faut le savoir.
“Every hour of every day,” writes Hélène Berr, a young upper-class French Jewish woman who survived a year in deportation before being beaten to death in Bergen-Belsen, “there is another painful realization that other folk do not know, do not even imagine, the suffering of other men, the evil that some of them inflict. And I am still trying to make the painful effort to tell the story. Because it is a duty, it is maybe the only one I can fulfill. There are men wo know and who close their eyes, and I’ll never manage to convince people of that kind, because they are hard and selfish, and I have no authority. But people who do not know and who might have sufficient heart to understand – on those people I must have an effect.” Let us – we who in Primo Levi’s words “live safe in [our] warm houses,” armed with all we have learned this semester, make the “painful effort to the tell the story” to all those who will listen, “those with sufficient heart to understand.” Because the world must know. Yes, il faut le savoir.
Jean Cayrol, Alain Resnais
<em>Night and Fog </em>(1955)
Spring 2021
Willa Z. Silverman, 62, Malvin E. and Lea P. Bank Professor of French and Jewish Studies, Penn State University
il-faut-le-savoir
Beowulf Brought Me to Medieval Studies
Looking back, I can pinpoint many moments that poignantly mark my path toward medieval studies, but reading <em>Beowulf</em> was the moment that rendered all the moments before it visible. I have loved literature all my life, a statement that is perhaps unsurprising from someone who has dedicated herself to studying and teaching literature. My entrance into academia, however, was not a conventional one. I was a non-traditional undergraduate, returning to college in my late twenties to complete my degree in English and Secondary Education. While at Western State Colorado University, I fell in love with the intellectual labor of literary analysis, with the conversations about literature happening in the classroom, with the mentorship I received from my professors and also provided as a teaching assistant. I began to realize that my desire to be both a teacher and a life-long student of literature could be fulfilled by pursuing an academic career but remained undecided about an area of concentration. <br /><br />When I read <em>Beowulf</em> in my fourth semester, my experience was the epitome of an epiphany. I have never been so captivated by a text; I was absolutely immersed in it. Every memory that I would now include on a timeline tracing my trajectory into academia and, specifically, my specialization in medieval literature was illuminated while reading that poem. It became a part of me. It is a part of me. <br /><br />Most often, I work on Middle English texts. The thesis I wrote as a Master of Arts student at Oregon State University focused on two of Chaucer’s <em>Canterbury Tales</em>. The dissertation I’m currently writing as a doctoral candidate at the University of Notre Dame examines late Medieval English texts. But <em>Beowulf</em> is never far from my mind and always close to my heart. When I finally had the great fortune to see the only surviving manuscript containing the text that changed my life, I spent a long while admiring the rather unassuming artifact. While other visitors wandered past it for its plainness, I paid homage to the object that brought me to a place I never imagined I would be.
Dated to the late tenth or early eleventh century, Beowulf is the longest epic poem written Old English. The narrative tells the story of the warrior Beowulf in 3,182 alliterative lines and recounts his battles with Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon who ultimately brings about his demise. It survives in a single manuscript known as the Nowell Codex, part of the bound volume Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, which is housed at the British Library in London. The volume suffered substantial damage from a fire in the 1700s, so it is very fragile in addition to being very precious as one of the four major manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Fall 2013
Emily McLemore, Ph.D. Candidate in English, University of Notre Dame
beowulf-brought-me-to-medieval-studies
The “Infinitely Human”: Life Writings, Locks of Hair and Lived History
Like fellow humanists, I struggled to pick a single moment to describe and share with you. However, while delving into my corpus (life writings – mostly diaries, autobiographies and memoirs - from the Franco-German borderland, Alsace-Lorraine, at the turn of the twentieth century), I am reminded of a unique moment I experienced when I discovered these documents in the archives.
In May 2018, the week after finishing my first year of the PhD program in the French and Francophone Studies Department at Penn State, I set out on my first archival trip to Strasbourg, France. Once in the archives, my curiosity and intellect were quickly at odds with my limited resources and time. In most French departmental archives, researchers are allowed to order and go through eight archival boxes per day. They usually contain part of a collection, and can range from several pieces of paper to several hundred documents. Moreover, not all boxes are described in the archive’s “finding aid” or databases. The nature of their contents sometimes requires an educated guess based on the limited information available to you. As such, with only a month in France, my research choices needed to be strategic: I had to single out the boxes I believed would contain the best documents to help in my research. One collection in particular piqued my curiosity as the archivists Virginie Godar-Lejeune and Marie-Ange Glessgen described it as having an “infinitely human quality.” While these writings fell out of my delineated period of study, I nonetheless decided to follow my dissertation committee’s advice to “listen” to the archives, indeed to avail myself of what Alsatian-Lorrainers had deposited at the archives instead of narrowly executing the search for my anticipated corpus: I requested the boxes in question.
After weeks of mechanically opening hundreds of envelopes and finding papers, postcards or greeting cards, I was quite taken aback when my fingers touched locks of hair. In addition to entire life papers (birth, marriage and death certificates, school grade reports, passports, and photographs), the boxes included locks of hair of every family member. Although I was aware of the practice of collecting children’s or spouses’ hair, I had quite a visceral reaction to seeing and touching it firsthand. The Lambs’ family archives almost systematically included such documents and objects for most family members between 1790 and 1936. The breadth of these documents spoke to the Lambs’ commitment to passing on their history: a small family of modest background in the industrial landscape of Strasbourg, France at the turn of the twentieth century. The intimacy of the objects included illustrated the family’s need to preserve their loved one’s memory. I spent the rest of the day reading through the entire family’s collection, learning about the parents’ love for their children, as well as their fear of losing them to wars and subsequent political instability in the region at that time.
As a doctoral candidate, it can prove difficult to project yourself as a researcher who can meaningfully contribute to the world around you. This experience made me realize my role as a historian, specifically, as a link in the chain of “passeuses de memoire,” or living historians. While this collection is not featured in my dissertation, it has instilled in me a sense of responsibility to preserve and make available the life writings of ordinary people, which constitute my corpus. Literally touched by the history of the Lambs family, I felt compelled to pass on their history and memory as a means of understanding larger historical conjunctures. To this end, I assign some of their letters to students in French history courses to teach how individuals lived through the vicissitudes of Alsace-Lorraine’s history.
The picture shows the lock of hair and passport photo of Emilie Lorentz-Lambs (1869-1929). The family’s archives (17J) reside at the Departmental Archives of the Bas-Rhin in Strasbourg, France. The collection is freely communicable and under no copyright laws.
May 2018
Morgane Haesen, 28, PhD candidate (French and Francophone Studies), Penn State University
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How Maps of Time Made me Rethink the Significance of Education
My Humanities Moment was when I first read David Christian's Maps of Time during my 2nd year of grad school. It made me interested in some of the big questions that I have never thought are important and compelled me to converse about these topics with others and to converse with them well. There are two major academic challenges that I faced which were what makes humanities education meaningful? How can I attract an audience to listen to my expertise?
The book helped me overcome these two challenges by convincing me that whatever disciplines we work on, it always boils down to the fundamental big questions that are of concern to us all. It teaches me how to use metaphor and how to reach out to a wider audience. As a scholar of Chinese history, I always thought that only historians (indeed only Chinese historians) will ever be interested in what I have to say. But this book changed my mindset and made me realize that I was the one who was locking up the door not my audience.
It is up to us as humanities scholars to demonstrate why any knowledge or skills passed down are worth learning about. I was overwhelmed by the ability of the author to do interdisciplinary research. It is true that in his discussion of the origin of the universe and humanity, Christian is not an expert in math, science, geology, history, anthropology, etc. But what is valuable and worth keeping in mind is that this is the right approach to do humanities research because the questions come first and our ego and pride come last.
Maps of Time
Jiajun Zou, 25, Graduate Student
how-maps-of-time-made-me-rethink-education
Chicano Park
I had been in San Diego for less than a week and was still unsure of bus routes. Having successfully navigated the trolley-to-bus transfer from La Mesa to the Gaslight District downtown, I figured I was close enough to walk. If it were a different day I would welcome any unexpected detours as a result of getting on the wrong bus, but today I was headed somewhere specific.
It was July, Saturday, and sunny. I walked southwest from downtown heading toward Barrio Logan. A historically working class Mexican and Mexican American neighborhood in the city, Barrio Logan is home to Chicano Park. Chicano Park is located under the Coronado Bridge and contains over 70 outdoor murals that decorate the pillars that support the bridge.
Chicano Park came into existence in April 1970 when neighborhood activists occupied the then vacant space under the bridge. The bridge was built around three years earlier, displacing thousands of residents in the process. Though the vacant space under the bridge was originally set to be the site of a highway patrol station, community activists instead demanded that the site be turned into a public park. After months of struggle, the city ceded to the community activists’ demands and designated the site a park. Soon thereafter local residents began calling the space Chicano Park. The name Chicano Park reflected not only how Barrio Logan was a predominantly Mexican and Mexican American neighborhood, but also how those involved with the takeover supported El Movimiento, the civil rights movement in the U.S. that focused on those of Mexican descent. Activists who participated in El Movimiento regularly identified themselves as Chicanas and Chicanos.
Since the 1970s artists like Victor Ochoa, Yolanda Lopez, and Salvador Torres have painted murals dedicated to Mexican and Mexican American culture and history on the bridge’s bare pillars. Popular murals painted in the 1970s include Historical Mural, Quetzalcóatl, and Birth of La Raza. Much like the name of the park, artists found inspiration in El Movimiento’s goals of eradicating ethnoracial discrimination and used the bridge’s pillars to present positive renderings of those of Mexican descent. Also starting in the 1970s, a festival, or Chicano Park Day, is held each April commemorating the day community residents occupied the land under the bridge, reinforcing the park’s continued importance to the local community.
After around a half hour of walking toward the park, colorful pillars broke into view. I entered the park and saw people walking among the pillars taking photos of the murals and reading the walls. People sat on steps of the green, red, and white painted kiosko situated near the center of the park. As I walked around taking my own photos a man in his mid-20s approached me and we began to talk. Learning that I was not a local, he began running through aspects of the park’s history. While I would later tell him that I was writing about Chicano Park in my dissertation, I initially kept this information to myself. I was more interested in hearing about how he spoke of the park. As he talked he braided the park’s history and importance to the community with the park’s significance in his own life. We stayed in the park and talked for hours while he guided me from pillar to pillar discussing the murals.
My “Humanities Moment” is therefore the confluence of walking to the park, seeing the pillars for the first time, and listening to a man – now a friend – talk about the importance of Chicano Park in his life and to the community. Chicano Park is representative of Mexican and Mexican American activism, culture, and history in the U.S. and reveals the power of community to determine the shape of its immediate surroundings. As my friend also demonstrated, Chicano Park is deeply personal and holds layers of meaning for community residents and those who visit the park.
My visit to Chicano Park in San Diego, California
2017
Sean Ettinger, 28, PhD Candidate in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
chicano-park
Visiting the Anne Frank House
At the age of 16, I had the opportunity to travel to Amsterdam with my family. Even at an early age, I had a genuine interest in history and different cultures of the world, and I had never traveled outside of the country, so I was very excited about this trip.
In our travels through the city, I had many wonderful experiences. I visited several nice restaurants, had seen interesting live performances, and soaked up the culture everywhere I went. I went to the Van Gogh museum and beautiful Catholic churches hidden throughout seemingly regular neighborhoods. The most memorable venture for me, however, was when I went to the Anne Frank house.
I don't think anything can necessarily prepare a person for an experience like that. Sure, one can read about the atrocities of the mid-twentieth century that took place all over Europe - worldwide, really - and one can view photographs online of the reprehensible things that were done to people over the course of that time, but it's difficult to fully comprehend what people were subjected to until you are actually standing in the same space where it all occurred.
Behind a normal-looking, innocuous bookshelf on the top floor in what used to be Anne Frank's father's business, opened up a single space that was approximately 450 square feet in size. For two years, eight people hid in this tiny space from an invader who was determined to find and exterminate people like them. Upon entering that room, I was floored. I couldn't believe that they were forced to live like that - in hiding from murderous tyrants.
I think that's when I realized the power of the human spirit and its will to survive. What lengths could a person be willing to go to simply stay alive and protect the ones he or she loves? I posit that that limit doesn't exist; people will likely do anything necessary to survive.
2001
Jared Willis, 34, Student
visiting-the-anne-frank-house
Who is the Hero of <em>Animal Farm?</em>
When I was in middle school I came to love history, especially Russian history and Hitler's Germany. This time period intrigued me, plus I learned if I read about communists and Nazis, teachers would leave me alone, and allow me to read. My father recommended George Orwell's <em>Animal Farm</em> while I was in 8th grade. I read the book, and enjoyed it, then moved on. <br /><br />In ninth grade social studies, I had to read a satire and present it to the class. I asked to read <em>Animal Farm</em>, and gave the worst presentation. But my teacher stopped me and began to ask me questions, especially about links between current events and the book. I was able to make connections. <br /><br />In eleventh grade, my social studies teacher, Mr. Eldeman, had my class read and discuss <em>Animal Farm</em>. He asked us questions about the book, and one question has stuck with me. Who is the hero of the book? As a class we would present a character, and he would show us why the character was not the hero. We never answered the question. 5 years after I graduated, I ran into Mr. Eldeman, and asked him who was the hero, his response was who do you think? To this day I still do not know the answer.
<em>Animal Farm</em> by George Orwell
Middle School and High school
Mary Catherine Keating, 52, Teacher
who-is-hero-animal-farm
Scottish Highlands
I've always loved to travel, and one of my favorite parts is getting to have a connection to the place that in our classrooms we refer to in the abstract. It makes the history more tangible, real, and often provides perspective that we don't get from secondary sources. While travelling in Scotland last summer, I did one of those seemingly cheesy bus tours that carts you around to different scenic and historic locations.
The legacy of English rule and colonization is still very present and visceral to the Scottish people. Hearing the stories being told about the breaking of the clans, the violence towards rebels, and seeing some of those monuments lent a viewpoint that I hadn't really been privy to. This was a topic that I had learned mostly from an English perspective, minus a movie or TV show here and there. Watching "Braveheart" is one thing, but hearing a descendant of a Scottish rebel speak of the events as though he were there is another. Standing in Glencoe valley and hearing of the skirmishes that occurred adds another layer of understanding. To this day, the experience makes me reconsider the phrase "History is written by the victor." What other perspectives are we missing by staying in one place?
A summer trip to Edinburgh, Scotland
July, 2018
Sarah Murphy, Teacher in Virginia
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The Day I Decided to Major in History
Graduate student Justina Licata explains how a junior high school teacher's passion and influence led her to embrace the study of history as a lifelong vocation.
A teacher's lesson
When I was 12 or 13 in the eighth grade.
Justina Licata, 32 years old, Ph.D. Candidate
day-I-decided-to-major-in-history
"The Town that Freedom Built": Preserving Zora Neale Hurston's Eatonville
This plaque, and several others, are sprinkled throughout Eatonville, Florida to guide a walking tour of America's first legally established self-governing all-African American municipality. Eatonville was established in 1887. The town gained popularity from its depiction in Zora Neale Hurston's novel, <em>Their Eyes Were Watching God</em> (1937), and her autobiography, <em>Dust Tracks on a Road</em> (1942). <br /><br />Sadly, 100 acres of Historic Eatonville has been lost due to expansion of the Greater Orlando area and Interstate 4. However, The Historic District of Eatonville was added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 3, 1998. The Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community has been working to make Eatonville an internationally recognized tourism destination, to enhance the resources of the town, and to educate the public of its cultural significance and the community's heritage. <br /><br />I came to Eatonville because of my research and love for Zora Neale Hurston. Inspired by scholars such as Alice Walker, who worked to find and mark Hurston's final resting place, I too am aspired to keep Hurston's legacy from disappearing. The dilapidated plaques that are supposed to guide and educate the public about the importance of Eatonville are impossible to read. <br /><br />The sight of these plaques awakened a call-to-action inside of me. Since this moment, I have been working to digitally preserve Zora Neale Huston's Eatonville through geospatial technology and augmented and virtual reality technology. This technology has the capability to tell these stories in ways that are immersive and accessible. By digitally preserving these stories, future curious minds will be able to explore and share the experience.
Eatonville Walking Tour Plaques
February 2014
Valerie Rose Kelco, UNC-Greensboro, Literature
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Reclaiming Richmond
Historian Ed Ayers discusses how Richmond, Virginia’s 2015 sesquicentennial celebration drew upon the past to re-imagine the future. He emphasizes the ways in which the event’s planners sought to honor the diversity of perspectives and lived experiences in the former capital of the Confederacy.
The 2015 sesquicentennial in Richmond, Virginia
April 2015
Dr. Ed Ayers, former President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond, former President of the Organization of American Historians, and noted public historian
ed-ayers-reclaiming-richmond
A Lifelong Love of Biographies
<p>Author, educational advocate, and entrepreneur David Bruce Smith recounts how his passion for reading biographies as a child instilled in him an enduring love of history and allowed him to overcome scholastic pressures he faced to deviate from his intellectual path. This exercise also connected him more strongly to a shared literary tradition within his family and granted him a level of insight and wisdom he has carried throughout his life.</p>
<p><em>Curator's note</em>: The Grateful American™ Foundation is dedicated to restoring enthusiasm in American history for kids and adults. Smith holds a bachelor’s degree in American Literature from George Washington University, and a master’s in Journalism from New York University. During the past 20 years he has been a real estate executive and the editor-in-chief/publisher of <i>Crystal City Magazine</i>. He is the author of 11 books, including his most recent title, <i>American Hero: John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States</i>. The Grateful American Book Series for <i>children</i>, featuring historic couples that were partnerships, debuts in the fall with <i>Abigail and John</i>—a joint biography of the Adams's.</p>
David Bruce Smith, Founding Father of the Grateful American™ Foundation
david-bruce-smith-biographies
Understanding History as Gossip
<p>Author, educational advocate, and entrepreneur David Bruce Smith discusses a transformational moment in his education, during which a high school teacher showed him the revelatory truth that history, at its core, is a collection of stories and gossip. Smith believes strongly that by presenting history to students as a series of exciting and illuminating stories, we can cultivate a more widespread appreciation for—and understanding of—history’s importance in the next generation of learners.</p>
<p><em>Curator's note</em>: The Grateful American™ Foundation is dedicated to restoring enthusiasm in American history for kids and adults. Smith holds a bachelor’s degree in American Literature from George Washington University, and a master’s in Journalism from New York University. During the past 20 years he has been a real estate executive and the editor-in-chief/publisher of <i>Crystal City Magazine</i>. He is the author of 11 books, including his most recent title, <i>American Hero: John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States</i>. The Grateful American Book Series for <i>children</i>, featuring historic couples that were partnerships, debuts in the fall with <i>Abigail and John</i>—a joint biography of the Adams's.</p>
David Bruce Smith, Founding Father of the Grateful American™ Foundation
david-bruce-smith-history
The long arc of history
My humanities moment is about a brilliant encyclopedia which covered the vastness of world history from the prehistoric times to the present day in a concise and engrossing manner. I remember seeing the encyclopedia as a 5th grader in my neighbourhood bookstore. I was entranced by the picture on the book jacket. I think it was a medieval Norman-English stained glass painting. The book was imported into India and was very expensive, so my parents did not agree to get it immediately. I remember stopping by the bookstore many times on my way back from school and checking if the book was still on sale. I finally persuaded my parents to buy it for me.
One of the more interesting parts was that for every historical era there were timelines which showed significant events in every continent of the world. It made me appreciate how different civilizations and cultures went through ups and downs through the centuries, and how some went extinct while others adapted to changing circumstances and persisted through the tough times. It also makes you understand that the present world order is just a slice in the long arc of history and is not permanent.
The book really created in me a lifelong curiosity for history. I think learning about history also enlightens you about what makes communities and cultures strong and successful. Things like a healthy scepticism against dogma, a robust justice system and a conducive climate for innovation are all things which enable great societies. And I think we should all be cognizant of it so that we can improve our communities.
Kingfisher World History Encyclopedia
1999
Milind Kulkarni, 30, Engineer
milind-kulkarni-long-arc-history
How Theology Helped Me Succeed in International Business
In any successful international business venture, you need to understand another culture. That’s the advice that James Hackett gives to his students. In this video, he reflects on how theology school—especially the study of the Bible—prompted him to investigate the intricate connections between religion, history, and culture.
The Bible
James Hackett, CEO, Alta Mesa Resources
james-hackett-theology-culture
An epiphany over a statue of Gandhi
In front of the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta you’ll find this statue of Mohandas Gandhi. For years I have used a photograph of this statue to introduce our Indian Independence unit to my 7th graders with the prompt “Why is this statue of Gandhi in front of the King Center?” My students are already familiar with the American civil rights movement, and this inquiry was always a great hook to learn about Gandhi’s system of nonviolent civil disobedience, which Dr. King utilized so effectively.
Recently a substitute teacher asked a question that made me re-evaluate this prompt and the lesson I’d been teaching. During a casual conversation at lunch she asked me, “Why is Gandhi’s statue in front of the King Center?” I started to talk about satyagraha and how King found inspiration from Gandhi’s methods of protesting injustice, when she stopped me. “No, why is a statue of a racist in front of Dr. King’s museum?”
I was taken aback. It’s true, Gandhi’s racism toward people of African descent is well documented. He wrote about the black people of South Africa using derogatory terms like “Kaffir” and lamented the indignity of being imprisoned with native Africans. He spoke out against forcing Indians to share the same communities with Africans and condemned the denigration of Indian genes through marriage with black people.
Without realizing it, I had been teaching a sanitized version of Gandhi’s legacy. This moment opened a whole box of questions. For example:
- Surely, Dr. King knew about Gandhi’s views. Yet, he chose to ignore these for the sake of what he could accomplish by using Gandhi as a role model. What does that say about Dr. King? Was he selectively ignoring the racism or was his character so strong that he could look past this?
- Who “owns” history? Historians who seek to paint the clearest, most accurate record of the past? Or people who use those lessons for their own purposes?
- Was my pride in engaging students with history in a way that was easy for them to digest misplaced? Have I been doing them a disservice all these years?
So, I’m embracing a new approach. History is messy and needs to be taught that way. Exposing students to all sides of a story gives them a better chance to explore the nuances and form their own opinions. It can also give them a deeper appreciation for figures like Dr. King.
Statue of Mohandas Gandhi
September 2018
Rick Parker, Middle School Social Studies Teacher
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Overlooked Histories
The image of this colorful sign is obviously meant to be “fun” and perhaps even funny. When I took this picture while traveling with fellow teachers and educators in Barbados, it honestly was because I thought the sign was kind of cute. But later on that day, when I thought about the sign and about looking East across the Atlantic Ocean, I had mixed emotions. The image seemed cheerful, but thinking about the sign marking the distance to Africa’s west coast made me feel anything but. All I could think about was that a few hundred years ago, African slaves on that coast were forced onto ships in chains. Those people endured a horrific journey of thousands of miles that lasted for several months, during which they endured most gruesome, horrific, inhumane treatment imaginable. Men, women, and children were separated from their loved ones, herded onto ships like animals, and packed into tight spaces to maximize cargo and profit for their captors. Many died of disease, suffocation, or drowning by throwing themselves overboard because they would rather die on their own terms than face whatever horrors awaited them at the end of their journey. Those that survived were whipped, beaten, starved, and then sold on the island of Barbados to grow sugar cane and face some of the shortest lifespans for slaves anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. These thoughts make me really upset. It’s a mixture of sadness, anger, shame and guilt that I used to push out of my mind when talking about or teaching about slavery or other less-than-cheerful topics in history in order to seem more objective or “removed”, but now I embrace those feelings. I use them to check my privilege, and to fuel the fire in me as a teacher and lifelong learner to learn as much as I can about the events and people in history who are so often underserved or overlooked because they aren’t “pleasant” or nostalgic enough to be “fun” to teach or learn about.
My trip to Barbados was an eye-opening one in many ways (some unexpected). I discovered that some of my own ancestors are buried on that island, and I learned that they were sugar planters and slave owners. This discovery further affirmed my belief that everyone is connected. Those connections might be rooted in the past, but they shape our present in ways that we don’t always fully, consciously acknowledge or understand. I wasn’t surprised by this information, and I also make no effort whatsoever to hide it. I don’t want to hide it. I don’t want to feel neutral or indifferent about it. I don’t want to ignore it or bury it or pretend that it doesn’t matter. It does matter. It matters because my privilege as a white person living in the United States is built on the forced movement and enslavement of African people. My ancestors came to the Americas of their own free will, and profited from slave labor in Barbados before they moved further north to Virginia. Those are the facts. The life that I now live and the comforts that I enjoy are byproducts of slavery, and to deny that fact would be unconscionable.
As a teacher, it is my responsibility to convey to my students that the impact of slavery cannot be underestimated. It is my job as an educator to not only be an objective purveyor of knowledge and information, but to help students contextualize why historical truth matters and how white privilege allows people to feel neutral and indifferent about slavery. Removed or neutral feelings about slavery are artifacts of white supremacy. Slavery isn’t something that should be taught only as a part of a unit on European Exploration and Colonization of the Americas. The Atlantic Slave Trade defines the American experience for all of us. The modern history of this entire hemisphere and of the entire world is defined by it. In my 10th and 11th grade classes, students do have questions about slavery and the slave trade. Unfortunately, they often sound a bit like this: “It happened, it was bad, but should we really worry that much about it? Do we really know what slavery was like? Do we really need to talk about it that much? Does it really affect people living in the 21st century?” This trip to Barbados, and the humanities moment that I had there only reaffirmed my belief that the answer to all of those questions is: YES.
A sign that I photographed while on the Atlantic coast of the island.
Kristen Wilson 30 years old, history teacher in Albemarle County, Virginia
overlooked-histories
Statues and the Shapeshifting of History
As a young girl visiting Vicksburg, Mississippi, Julia Nguyen encountered a Civil War statue. It altered not only the way she understands history, but the way she thinks about that very concept.
Civil War statue in Vicksburg, Mississippi
Julia Nguyen, historian and grant-maker
statues-shapeshifting-history
Discovering Contested Territory Through Vietnamese Folk Poetry
Until this summer institute, I had never heard of the Vietnamese folk poetry known as ca dao. To be honest, I had never even thought of Vietnamese people having a poetic tradition at all. I, like so many other Americans, had relegated Vietnam to an inert location on a map or a tidy historical category. I could barely conceive of a Vietnam beyond the context of American military intervention. Even as we learned about the legacies of European colonialism in the initial seminars, I still saw Vietnam as an almost passive landscape trodden over by successive waves of foreign invaders. In effect, I had made Vietnam a victim in its own story. That changed for me when I heard professor and poet John Balaban talk about his experience collecting and publishing for the first time the oral poetry of Vietnamese farmers. Balaban spoke of an ancient people, full of history, full of passion, and full of pride, inundated by the monsoons that swept away the architectural vestiges of power that we in the “West” have come to rely on so heavily for our historical identity. What was left was a long, beautiful tradition of oral history preserved in the daily life of simple farmers. As Balaban eloquently writes in <em>Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry</em>, poetry flourished “in villages where the lone singer can hear his or her voice against the drone of crickets, the slap of water, or the rustling of banana leaves in the wind (p. 2). This line jolted me out of my facile characterization of Vietnam and its people. Long before the French cast their colonizing net over the people of Vietnam, long before the Americans stumbled into their disastrous war, long before there even was a place called Vietnam, a lone singer could hear her voice “against the drone of crickets, the slap of water, or the rustling of banana leaves in the wind.” The theme of our institute was “Contested Territory: America’s Role in Southeast Asia.” At first glance, I assumed that we would be discussing America’s involvement in the so-called Vietnam War of the twentieth century; after two weeks of intense study, I have realized that I fundamentally misread the title of this institute. To study contested territory is not to examine how America and the Viet Cong fought bitterly over this hill or that, but rather to place America in the context of an ancient regional story that is crowded with diversity and life. “America’s Role in Southeast Asia” says nothing of dominance or destiny – it was my enculturation as an American that read into it such a teleological narrative. Contested territory, like so much else, starts, and perhaps ends, in the mind.
<em>Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry</em> by John Balaban
Wednesday, July 18th, 2018
Kevin Shuford
discovering-contested-territory-through-vietnamese-folk-poetry
Contested Perspective
Human connection is the most important part of life to me. I really value great relationships and look forward to connecting with new people every chance I get. Obviously, I am not going to have the same views on every single topic as anyone else. I think we make the biggest growth as human beings when we connect with people who have very different perspectives than our own, and we are willing to see things through their eyes. It does not mean that will always lead us to the same conclusion or change our own perspective in any way.
I use the phrase, “life is all about perspective” all the time, but how much the concept of contested territory is related to perspective did not really hit me until Morgan Pitelka was presenting his seminar, “Memory and Commemoration.” He discussed the Yūshūkan War/ Military Museum in Tokyo, Japan and explained that the Japanese people say the museum is a place of memorial for the lost soldiers, while others see it as a place to glorify Japan’s violent military past. There were other strong examples of contested perspectives throughout my time here in North Carolina, but that moment brought it all together for me.
July 26th, 2018
Breann Johnston, Middle School Teacher
contested-perspective
Embracing the Complexity and Chaos of the Humanities Through a Photo
On May 8th, 1957, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was greeted by President Dwight Eisenhower (along with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles) at Washington National Airport at the beginning of an official state visit for President Diem. This seemingly ordinary photo is noteworthy because it captures the complexity of the Cold War and the contested territory of Southeast Asia, and embracing that chaotic feeling is a main reason why I love the humanities.
There is much to teach about in this photo. Why would Eisenhower personally greet Diem at the airport, something he only did on one other occasion (and is almost never done by sitting U.S. presidents for heads of state)? Why is the year 1957 important? What does the United States think of Vietnam at this time? How is this photo potentially problematic? There are contrasts on many levels when dissecting this photo, and it can launch exploration in so many directions.
The photo encapsulates a conversation that I had with Vietnam historian Pierre Asselin after a talk he presented to our NEH summer seminar at the National Humanities Center. While we were discussing the challenges of teaching the Cold War to students, Professor Asselin noted, “if you study the Cold War correctly, you should be more confused as you go along, and that’s a great feeling!” This last line resonated with me, and reiterated my belief that it is important for students to understand different perspectives, sometimes without finding an answer to the question that was posed, but understanding the complexity and nuance of that question. This process is where real learning takes place, and it is important to teach students to embrace this chaos (and even to seek it out) in their own learning. Challenging our initial impressions of a source and digging deeper speaks to the lifelong value of the humanities.
July 24, 2018
Bryan Boucher, 39, Teacher
embracing-the-complexity-and-chaos-of-the-humanities-through-a-photo