Category: Humanities MomentsPage 6 of 8
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…
From reading Crime and Punishment as a high school senior and the Depression-era masterpieces Absalom, Absolom! and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in college, Gil Greggs describes…
Fresh out of graduate school, Jon Parrish Peede embraced the chance to travel, arriving in Eastern Europe during the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. A last-minute decision to see the…
Some would say music is the most powerful of the arts. The album To Pimp A Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar is just that, powerful. The overall theme of…
This past year my aunt, my mother’s sister, passed away very young at age 45. Her passing devastated me and my family. The thought that kept entering my…
Today I went to Smoothie King after I left the gym, like I always do. As I neared the drive thru window, a little voice inside my head…
Sitting in a large field in Leakey, Texas at night, I looked up and there were millions and millions of stars around me. I was awe struck about…
As a society we are so often encouraged to go about our days in such a way that builds our own futures. This is great and all, but…
Averill Corkin describes the moment she decided to major in the humanities after seeing a video performance of the song “Du måste finnas” (“You Have to Be There”),…
I recall flipping through Ebony magazine as a child in the 80s and often seeing pictures of Fashion Fair models. It didn’t dawn on me then how the…
Ina Dixon explains how a letter from her grandfather to her grandmother, written just before the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, reconnects her to her grandfather and…
In my late 20s, I knew that I wanted to make a vocational shift, but I struggled to find the courage to do so. One day, I came…
I was in my English class and we were talking about humanities moments for extra credit. We talked about a woman who disagreed with the “mimetic” effect and…
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,…
I was a newspaper reporter covering the War in Iraq in the late 2000s. My assignment was exciting, but often lonely. I bounced from town to town, usually…
When I was 8 years old, I found hidden in a drawer a little, brown book. It was a well-worn copy of, “How to Get U.S. Citizenship,” which…
In this excerpt from a podcast with National Humanities Center Robert D. Newman, U. S. Representative David Price reflects on the transformative experience of reading the work of…
Esther Mackintosh explains how a single letter from her father offered solace during an especially trying period of her life. As a graduate student facing an uncertain future,…
On Tuesday February 6th of 2018, I watched SpaceX launch Falcon Heavy and successfully land two of its boosters. This launch was inspiring to many people because it…
In this podcast excerpt with National Humanities Center Director Robert D. Newman, award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem discusses how he came to understand of the power of fiction in…