Griswold recalls how a childhood encounter with a sentimental, “middlebrow” poem about a dog and a veteran (which makes her cry to this day) tapped into wells of…
As a college freshman, Thérèse Cory encountered Plato’s Socratic dialogue Euthyphro for the first time. Reading Socrates’ exhortations for Euthyphro—a man bringing charges of murder against his father—to…
While acting as a teaching assistant for a large art appreciation course, Caroline Jones witnessed a student’s curiosity about a painting of the Madonna. Such symbols, so pervasive…
For Peter Galison, an influential moment was seeing a film made in 1961 by an anthropologist and a sociologist, featuring a series of estival interviews with people on…
In this account, William E. Leuchtenburg shares the story of a seemingly routine exchange with literary scholars in the late 1970s which spurred him to new insights about…
Throughout their son’s childhood, Stephen Hall’s parents, both children of sharecroppers, crafted a “deeply humanistic perch” from which he could “view the world.” Though possessing none of the…
In 1979, at age 16, Hollis Robbins found herself enrolled at John Hopkins University. Though she was there as part of a program for girls who excelled in…
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…
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…
Bernier shares how her lifelong interest in the history of slavery was sparked by curiosity about the stories that seemed to be missing in the account of the…
At the end of my sophomore year in high school, during the awards ceremony in June, I received my varsity letter for playing football. And then my history…
According to the ancient Greeks, harmony is discord rendered concordant, a concept that applied not just to music but everything from the order of the cosmos to human…
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…
As a 21-year-old senior in college, Nancy Hirschmann encountered—and was forever changed by—German philosopher Hegel’s notoriously difficult passages in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Suddenly, she “broke through the…