Humanities, November/December 2015

HUMANITIES N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 015

T H E M A G A Z I N E O F T H E N AT I O N A L E N D O W M E N T F O R T H E H U M A N I T I E S

HUMANITIES

EDITOR’S NOTE

N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 015

T H E M A G A Z I N E O F T H E N AT I O N A L E N D O W M E N T F O R T H E H U M A N I T I E S

On anniversaries, we look to the past and recommit ourselves to the future.

In this issue of HUMANITIES, published as NEH celebrates its fifty-year anniversary, Duke University president Richard H. Brodhead asks how it is that the idea of an independent federal agency devoted to humanistic scholarship and programming came about. What had to happen before a

—Sterling Hundley

commission of scholarly organizations and then the president of the United

See page 20 for Craig Lambert’s article on Ric Burns’s new documentary The Pilgrims.

States determined that there should be an independent federal agency devoted not to questions of material progress but to matters of the mind and spirit?

A big modern government and a nation so prosperous that its leaders worried about the problem of too much leisure was definitely not what the Pilgrims foresaw as they crossed the Atlantic and fought to survive their first winter. Ric Burns’s new documentary about the English Puritans who

HUMANITIES

celebrated the first Thanksgiving casts these religious separatists in a new

A bimonthly review published by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

light. Writer Craig Lambert explores the scholarly background of this

Chairman: William D. Adams Editor: David Skinner Managing Editor: Anna Maria Gillis Assistant Editor: Amy Lifson Senior Writer: Meredith Hindley Associate Editor: Steve Moyer Editorial Board: Jane Aikin, Brett Bobley, Nadina Gardner, Scott Krawczyk, Karen S. Mittelman, William Craig Rice, Katja Zelljadt Director of Communications: Theola DeBose Art Director: Maria Biernik Graphic Designer: Andrea Heiss The opinions expressed in HUMANITIES are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect Endowment policy. Material appearing in this publication, except for that already copyrighted, may be reproduced. Please notify the editor in advance so that appropriate credit can be given. HUMANITIES (ISSN 00187526) is pub­lished bimonthly by the National Endowment for the Humanities, 400 7th Street, S.W., Washington, D.C. 20506. Telephone: 202/606-8435; fax: 202/208-0774; e-mail: publications@neh.gov­; url: www.neh.gov Periodicals postage (USPS #531-230) paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to United States Government Printing Office, Super­intendent of Documents, Washington, D.C. 20402. New subscriptions and renewals: U.S. Government Printing Office, P.O. Box 979050, St. Louis, MO 63197-9000. Annual subscrip­tion rate: $24.00 domestic, $33.60 foreign. Two years: $48.00, $67.20. For new orders, 202/512-1800; for current subscriber questions, 202/512-1806.

www.neh.gov 2 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

excellent film, which was made with a major production grant from NEH. In this issue, HUMANITIES magazine inaugurates a series of articles devoted to the future. Michael Dirda, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and longtime Washington Post writer, starts us off with an essay on the future of reading. The essay itself is a short read, but it leaves you with a hunger to spend the whole night curled up with an old novel.

The future was also a dire concern for Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World. As Danny Heitman informs us, this visionary author and distinguished prose writer was a strange and exotic bird. A bohemian in his home life, Huxley belonged to a family of distinguished scientists and was one of those people blessed with endless curiosity about the world.

If you are curious about the future of old-time rag music, you’ll be pleased that the dance-friendly jazz music that evolved into swing is alive and well in America today. Jazz writer Peter Gerler takes a look at the ongoing revival of swing music and swing dancing, wondering what exactly is the itch that this music is scratching. And why is it that swinging together makes us feel so much a part of something and yet free of everything at the same time?

In this issue, we also cover the 2014 National Humanities Medalists. On September 10, ten distinguished humanists—an eclectic mix of scholars, writers, one landscape architect, one chef, and one national education program—were honored at the White House. They represent some of the best work going on in the humanities. And it is also true to say that they represent our past, our present, and our future.

—David Skinner

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10 The Future of the Humanities: Reading As technology advances, doomsayers stay constant. By Michael Dirda

12 NEH at Fifty On the fate and fortunes of public goods.

Page 12

By Richard H. Brodhead

16 Mr. Huxley’s Many Talents A man of numerous stories, he is remembered for but one. By Danny Heitman

20 Pilgrims’ Progress A new film revisits the Puritan Separatists who arrived aboard the Mayflower. By Craig Lambert

28 Swinging Together What it means that we are Lindy Hopping again.

By Peter Gerler

34 Ten of Our Finest Meet the newest class of National Humanities Medalists.

Page 20

4 Curio

45 Noteworthy

6 Statements

46 Around the Nation

Illinois celebrates the centennial of Spoon River Anthology, and veterans’ stories are heard in a new documentary in Florida.

26 Calendar

51 In Focus

Page 28

Rocker Patti Smith discusses her memoir in Tennessee, and still lifes by Georgia O’Keeffe are on view in Texas. Compiled by Laura Wolff Scanlan

54 Impertinent Questions with Michael D. Gordin on the evolution of a common language for science. Edited by Anna Maria Gillis 55 Deadlines

Oregon’s Adam Davis plants seeds for discussion, not consensus.

By Brett Campbell

HUMANITIES 3

—Photo © Gary Shrimpling

Curio

ETERNAL CITY’S BUILDING FRENZY

—Pizzaemandolino / Wikimedia Commons

ARCHITECTURAL MODIFICATIONS TO PIAZZA COLONNA SINCE THE MID SEVENTEENTH CENTURY HAVE BEEN RELATIVELY SLIGHT. THE COLUMN DATES FROM 180 BCE, WHEN IT WAS ERECTED AND DEDICATED TO MARCUS AURELIUS. IN 1589 POPE SEXTUS V HAD THE STATUE OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR ATOP THE COLUMN REPLACED WITH ONE OF SAINT PAUL. THE BUILDING AT RIGHT—PALAZZO CHIGI— WAS PALAZZO ALDOBRANDINI TILL 1659, WHEN IT WAS SOLD TO THE CHIGI FAMILY. TODAY THE STRUCTURE SERVES AS THE OFFICE AND OFFICIAL RESIDENCE OF ITALY’S HEAD OF GOVERNMENT.

As University of Tennessee professor Dorothy Metzger Habel examined architectural archives for seventeenth-century Rome, she started hearing voices. The many participants in the Eternal City’s building boom at that point—when 30 percent of the work force was engaged in the construction industry—came to life in her mind as she studied plans, laws, and other documents. They offered insight, she writes in the introduction to the NEH-funded When All of Rome Was Under Construction: The Building Process in Baroque Rome (Pennsylvannia State University Press, 2013), into “fundamental questions, ranging from how to finance building and how to speed the work of building to how to account for costs and how to accommodate displaced constituents.”

A financing plan Habel found tucked away in one archive seemed particularly notable. It aimed to redevelop and open up the Piazza Colonna, making it into a majestic public space surrounded by private and commercial buildings of note, and to do this “without expense and without aggravating anyone.” The usual method had been to raise money through the sale of bonds and to levy taxes to pay the interest. But an innovative scheme took hold in the 1650s that would add shares to existing financial instruments.

The whole operation was to be guided by a set of clearly stated best practices.

Private, papal, and commercial interests would all work in common, and one project could piggyback on another.

The plan was at first given a nod of approval by Pope Innocent X, known, in fact, for his “acumen in economics and law,” but then later rejected by him.

The many competing interests around the piazza at the time explain why.

A strong Spanish diplomatic presence in the city required fine residences for official duties and entertaining. The Spanish, in fact, were the first to recognize the Papal See. Additionally, several influential Spaniards held high office in the Vatican. The Piazza Colonna was an attractive address. It offered proximity to several churches of prominence and was commodious enough to provide prospective renters plenty of room for the foot traffic and carriages arriving at the residences.

Rivalries among Spanish factions in Rome at the time, however, led to street skirmishes near the piazza and proved alarming for Innocent X. Rather than put a stamp of approval on a scheme that seemed to encourage disruptive groups with diplomatic immunity to lodge securely at a key spot along the city’s main artery, Via del Corso, Innocent pulled the plug on the project. Another reason may have been a whiff of fraud traceable to the plan’s principal proponent, Marco Giovanni Stefano, secretary of a prominent financial institution.

Still another reason was the fact that the piazza’s principal structure—Palazzo Aldobrandini—was owned by rich widow Olimpia Aldobrandini, who fell in love with Camillo Pamphili, the papal nephew. Camillo resigned his position the next year as the cardinal nepote, and he and Olimpia wed the next month. However, “tongues wagged in Rome at news of the marriage,” writes Habel, “and the newlyweds were banished from the city for a period of nearly four years” (the Roman populace and the Vatican were both somewhat taken aback by Camillo’s swift transition away from his ecclesiastical calling and duties).

A few years later, Piazza Colonna was transformed into a public space, thanks to the “builder pope,” Alexander VII. The financing, however, was not the creative scheme suggested by Stefano.

Habel follows similar stories in other architectural work in Rome. As Stephanie C. Leone notes in a review for the College Art Association, each case—but especially in the opening of Piazza Colonna—points to a broader question: “Did the public have a voice in the development of a

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theocratic city?” Yes, in fact, they did, demonstrating that principal stakeholders helped put controls into place “to ensure that the space [did not] become identified with a single individual.”

The main title of Ethan Matt Kavaler’s sumptuous tome on architecture— Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470–1540 (Yale University Press, 2012)—is, he admits in his introduction, “an ironic term, a joining of words that signal two radically opposed historical traditions.”

The “Gothic” in the title signifies a new Gothic for a new age. Kavaler’s NEH-funded work aims to define the nature of Late Gothic ornament, which he views principally as tracery.

In his chapter “Ornament and Aesthetics,” Kavaler deftly makes this point by noting that “the church of Notre-Dame at Louviers in Normandy presents itself on its market side through a remarkable filigree screen that seems to dissolve its massive buttresses under the myriad diminutive tabernacles that sheath their surface, fragmenting light and dispelling any sense of stable monumental form. This porch, this attachment to the building proper, comes to characterize the entire edifice. It can stand as a metaphor for celestial architecture, unfettered by the requirements of mundane engineering. . . . In the southern and eastern German lands, church vaults are cloaked by complex geometric nets of straight and looping ribs that catch the wandering eye. The ribs meander beneath the webbing, at times hanging in free air. In both cases the elaborate vaults displace the fabric of the chamber in the mind of the beholder.”

An appreciation of these embellishments—requiring the highly nuanced and individualized perception developed in the Renaissance—resides, indeed, primarily in “the mind of the beholder.”

—Book jacket courtesy Yale University Press

SHEATHING SURFACES, FRAGMENTING LIGHT

BOOK JACKET ILLUSTRATION IS OF THE CLOISTER VAULT IN BASEL MINSTER IN BASEL, SWITZERLAND, AND IS ATTRIBUTED TO JOHANN DOTZINGER.

ATLANTA’S CONSTITUTION

Seventy-two teachers participated this summer in one-week workshops on the history of the color line. Educators studied the city’s Jim Crow past by visiting relevant Atlanta landmarks, scaling the steps to the old colored entrance to Fox Theatre, trekking by bus to view an obelisk in memory of Confederate dead resting in the cemetery there, and visiting Piedmont Park, site of Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” address. The experience gleaned from the NEH-funded Landmarks of American History and Culture workshops was immersive and hands-on, and, in the case of the 95 steps black moviegoers needed to climb until 1962 to enter the extravagantly designed Fox, “excruciating.” One teacher from Nashville remarked, “Just think about the mental impact of what they went through.

All I can think of is how strong they were to survive that.”

That Nashville teacher was Sean Bethune, quoted by at-large writer Bill Torpy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who reported on the NEH institute in his column, after he accompanied teachers from the classroom to the landmarks to observe their reactions. David Strausbaugh, a high school history teacher from Ohio, who also teaches contemporary issues, told Torpy, “When we talk about racial issues [in class] I get push-back. Some kids ask, ‘Why do we have to talk about this?’”

While standing before the monument to 6,900 Confederate soldiers, the teachers pondered the site’s impact both as “the point of memorialization” and as a testament to the narrative of the Lost Cause. At Piedmont Park, site of the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, they listened to Eric Fields, a black teacher of American government from Jacksonville, as he read aloud a section from the speech Booker T. Washington gave, in which he called for a greater piece of the economic pie for black Americans while remaining socially and politically separate.

“More than a century later, social separation is still largely there,” Torpy concedes in conclusion, “but there is always hope for mutual progress.”

—Steve Moyer HUMANITIES 5

statements

—Kharbine-Tapabor / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

Poetic Justice

ARTHUR RACKHAM’S ILLUSTRATION GHOSTS IN A CEMETERY.

ILLINOIS WHEN SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY WAS published in 1915, Edgar Lee Masters shattered the myth of small-town America as the bastion of American virtue.

In his thinly veiled fictional town of Spoon River, situated in central Illinois near Lewistown, where Masters grew up, the honest, hardworking, chaste, and churchgoing live amidst corrupt bankers, abusive husbands, unfulfilled wives, sexual deviants, and failed dreamers.

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“Although such experiences and views were part of American culture, poets had not written about them before,” says John E. Hallwas, author of Spoon River Anthology: An Annotated Edition.

In the groundbreaking work, Masters, a onetime law partner of Clarence Darrow, gives voice to more than two hundred deceased citizens of Spoon River who are laid to rest in Oak Hill Cemetery, known to the locals as The Hill. Freed by the shackles of life, the un-living who “sleep beneath these weeds” confess their deepest secrets, disappointments, frustrations, joys, and warnings to the living in the form of brutally honest free verse poems. “No volume of poetry since Whitman’s Leaves of Grass had attempted so much or had been so original,” says Hallwas.

Each postmortem poem in the collection is titled with the name of the citizen who reveals some truth about their daily existence in Spoon River. Masters gleaned tidbits of stories and gossip he heard during the time he spent in Lewistown and nearby Petersburg, where his grandparents lived. In some cases, Masters barely changed their names.

Henry Phipps was really banker Henry Phelps. Harry Wilmans was Henry Wilmans. In a few instances, he used real names, such as William H. Herndon, the law partner of Abraham Lincoln, and Anne Rutledge, considered Lincoln’s first love.

Meant to be read as a novel, the reader is required to piece together narratives from single lines and fragments contained in individual poems. Minerva Jones tells us she was raped by Butch Weldy and died during an abortion.

Doctor Meyers, the abortionist, blames Minerva for his own death in jail saying, “I tried to help her out.” Mrs. Meyers, the doctor’s wife, believes her husband deserved the town’s scorn for breaking “the law human and divine.”

Butch Weldy, on the other hand, never mentions the rape but tells us he “got religion and steadied down.”

The book was a literary sensation and huge commercial success. Carl Sandburg wrote in the Little Review, “The people whose faces look out from the pages of the book are the people of life itself, each trait of them as plain or as mysterious as in the old home valley where the writer came from. Such a writer and book are realized here.” Ezra Pound rejoiced in the London Egoist: “At last the American West has produced a poet . . . capable of dealing with life directly, without circumlocution, without resonant meaningless phrases. Ready to say what he has to say, and shut up when he [has] said it.” It was an international best-seller, reported to have sold 80,000 copies in four years. Masters himself boasted that it “broke the record in America for the sale of a book of verse.”

Back in Lewistown, however, the villagers were not so enthusiastic. On the contrary, they were furious with “that scoundrel Masters.” “After all,” says Hallwas, “he often exposed the troubled lives of people.” Even though most names were fictitious, everyone in town knew exactly who he was talking about. Because of this, the book was

immediately banned from schools and libraries in the area, including the Lewistown library, where Masters’s mother worked as a librarian. Although the book was not available in the area, some found a way to obtain a secret copy, which they talked about only in whispers.

Masters was interested in writing from a very young age, but was encouraged to follow in his father’s footsteps as a lawyer. He was admitted to the bar in 1891 and left Lewistown to build a law practice in Chicago. In his off time, he wrote poetry and plays with little success. Masters became acquainted with writers who would become known as the Chicago Renaissance, including Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser, who Masters honors with a poem titled “Theodore the Poet” in the Anthology.

After reading Epigrams from Greek Anthology, Masters experimented with the epigram form and submitted some poems he wrote to Reedy’s Mirror, a literary magazine in St. Louis. The poems were serialized in 1914 under the pseudonym Webster Ford for fear of damaging Masters’s law practice. His real identity was revealed later that year by Mirror editor William Reedy, who asserted Masters’s work was “a great work of literary art.”

With the success of Spoon River Anthology, Masters left his law practice to write full time and moved to New York in 1920. Although he would write more than 50 books, including novels, plays, poetry, and biographies of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Abraham Lincoln, he never equaled the success he had with Spoon River Anthology.

The wounds have healed in Lewistown as successive generations joined their family and friends on The Hill.

The book’s banning was lifted in 1974. Masters and Spoon River Anthology are now celebrated throughout the year in Lewistown. To commemorate its 100-year anniversary, Lewistown is hosting several events, including Oak Hill Cemetery tours, exhibitions, theatrical performances, and walking tours. As part of the Illinois Humanities Speakers Bureau, Paddy Lynn, Jon Lynn, and Patti Ecker perform dramatic readings throughout the state, and Hallwas gives his talk, “Poets of Community and Human Struggle: Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg.”

Masters died in 1950 and is buried at Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg. In 1970, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in his honor.

The work continues to stay relevant for its treatment of the human condition says Hallwas. It has never been out of print, has been adapted for stage and screen, taught in acting classes, translated into numerous languages, and phrases from “Alexander Throckmorton” were quoted by Pope Francis during his recent visit to America.

—LAURA WOLFF SCANLAN

Laura Wolff Scanlan is a writer in Wheaton, Illinois.

HUMANITIES 7

FLORIDA SEVEN PERFORMERS BOWED AS THE APPLAUSE and the cheers continued, but instead of exiting the stage, they turned to each other to hug and shake hands. They had done it. After three months of work, the group had shared the stories they set out to tell: their own.

Veterans Terri Davis, Michael Dunlap, Jessica McVay, Ryan Simonson, Taylor Urruela, Scott Owens, and his wife, Shannon, took to the stage in Telling: Tampa Bay, supported by the Florida Humanities Council.

It is part of The Telling Project, a national program that helps veterans and their families break through feelings of isolation to share their experiences in nontraditional theater performances. Each line of the script comes from interviews conducted with the veterans and family members at the beginning of the process. Each performer memorizes and performs their own words, scripted together into a cohesive, one-hour production.

Also supported by the Florida Humanities Council is a behind-the-scenes documentary about the program and its process, Veterans—The Telling Project, which will air on Florida public television November 5. A second Florida Telling Project is under way in Pensacola with performances scheduled this November. The Tampa Bay cast is considering a reunion performance in the spring.

“If someone could see this and say, ‘Well, we have a bunch of veterans,’ and invite everyone to come out and share some of their stories and share that burden, that would be amazing,” said Simonson, a West Point graduate who served in the Army for 13 years, including tours in Iraq. He retired after returning home from a mission to discover his children couldn’t remember him.

The stories on stage reflect the range of veterans’ experiences as well as the similarities. Davis served as a Navy cryptologist during the Cold War and was stationed at the Pentagon in Virginia, and in Iceland. There, two marines had to accompany her outdoors whenever there was a strong wind—at 85 pounds, she would have literally blown away without them holding onto her.

Army infantryman Urruela lost his leg below the knee after more than 30 operations trying to correct the damage inflicted by a roadside bomb in Iraq, two days before he was scheduled to come home. His femoral artery blew during a 14-hour surgery and his heart stopped twice on the operating table.

Dunlap joined the Marine Corps before graduating high school and served from 1976 to 1982. Upon leaving the Marines, he was unable to settle into civilian life and drifted across the country for nearly two decades, spending long periods of time unemployed or homeless.

“These aren’t actors. These are people telling their stories,” said director Lisa Powers. “No one added anything or told them not to say something. It was done their way and it was really, really powerful because of that.”

It was also very, very difficult. Some of the participants had told their stories to doctors, therapists, or family members hundreds of times. But performing is different, and they had to learn to reconnect emotionally with what they

were saying and communicate those feelings with the audience. Others shared their stories infrequently and had to summon tremendous courage just to talk.

“There are some days that I don’t want to think about it and I don’t want to talk about it. And then there are other days that, yes, I do want to talk about it, and today? Today is one of those days,” said Jessica McVay, who was raped twice during the five years she served in the Marine Corps. One rape resulted in an entopic pregnancy and the

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removal of one of her fallopian tubes. The other resulted in her medical retirement from the Marines.

Scott Owens struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and a misdiagnosed traumatic brain injury when he left the army after nine years of service. Despite sending out hundreds of job applications, he was unable to find employment. Feeling like a drain on his family, he contemplated suicide.

“He looked up from his video-game remote and I realized that he had his gun right there, and said, ‘you know, you guys would be better off without me. The insurance policy will pay for me whether I do it or someone else does it,’” Shannon Owens said.

She called the police for help. One of the officers was a veteran himself and understood Scott’s plight and got him assistance. That same officer attended a performance of The Telling Project four years later. Shannon recognized him in the audience and called out to thank him during the talkback session at the end of the show.

“It was a crazy, amazing moment,” said Powers. “You can’t plan that.”

After the performances, veterans in the audience stood and shared their own stories. One Vietnam War veteran and recovered alcoholic compared the experience to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: hearing other people’s stories, sharing your own, and knowing that you are not alone in your struggles. Powers recalled a 25-year-old veteran who approached her after a performance to tell her how helpful it was to hear other people talking, in public, about the problems he experienced in private but couldn’t articulate.

“He felt that he had been seen, even though it wasn’t him up there,” Powers said.

“This has helped some of us come out of the shell we’ve been in so long and cope better with the fact we’re not alone,” said Shannon Owens. “You know there’s someone out there going through the same stuff.”

—TORY COONEY

Tory Cooney is a freelance writer in Minneapolis.

CAST OF TELLING: TAMPA BAY, CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT: RYAN SIMONSON AND TAYLOR URRUELA, SIMONSON, JESSICA McVAY, TERRI DAVIS, THE ENTIRE CAST ON STAGE, AND URRUELA.

—Photos by Danny Bruno, WEDU PBS

Veterans TELL

THEIR Stories

HUMANITIES 9

of reading

THE FUTURE OF THE HUMANITIES

READING ALWAYS SEEMS TO BE IN CRISIS. Two and half millennia ago, Socrates inveighed against the written word because it undermined memory and confused data with wisdom. When the codex—the bound book—appeared, some conservative Romans almost certainly went around complaining, ‘What was wrong with scrolls? They were good enough for Horace and Cicero.’ Gutenberg’s press gradually undercut the market for illuminated manuscripts. Aldus Manutius, inventor of the pocket-sized book, rendered huge folios a specialty item.

To skip ahead a few centuries, the Fourdrinier papermaking machine and other industrial-age innovations helped democratize books and periodicals by making their production faster and cheaper. Three-volume Victorian novels flourished as a staple of the rental library—until railroads came along and passengers sought shorter, more portable light fiction for their now daily commutes. For half the twentieth century, the Book of the Month Club transformed reading into a mail-order business: No longer did you need to visit a store to acquire the latest best-seller. Since the 1930s, mass-market paperbacks have extended the life of popular hardcovers and resurrected older masterpieces: What Baby Boomer doesn’t remember the clean, elegant feel of Signet Books, the distinctive design of Penguin Classics?

After each of these technological advances, most of them initially regarded with distaste by the sophisticated, the market for books expanded and the number of readers increased. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when public education made basic literacy available to everyone, the western world couldn’t get enough printed matter. Andrew Carnegie financed the construction of hundreds of city libraries. Newsstands resembled caves of wonder, overflowing with magazines and serial fiction for every taste. This was the heyday of Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, and the Scarlet Pimpernel, of The Secret Garden and The Thirty-Nine Steps, of The War of the Worlds and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Escapist reading had never been better.

Of course, scolds regularly complained—then as now— that people were just drugging themselves with trash, that bad books were driving out good, that young people were being corrupted by pulp fiction when they should be devoting their days and nights to Plato and Shakespeare. Civilization was obviously being dumbed down, if not entirely destroyed. Consequently, educators and fast-talking salesmen were soon promulgating the virtues of spending 15 minutes a day with the Harvard Classics or, a little later, of investing large sums in the Great Books of the Western World.

Today, many people similarly bluster that digital books and our increasingly screen-based culture herald the end of 10 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

serious reading. This is nonsense. There are consequences, and sometimes drawbacks, to all new technologies, but human beings can’t live without stories and poems. Young lovers will always read Sappho, Donne, and Keats. Madame Bovary and The Great Gatsby will remain irreplaceable commentaries on our proclivity for romantic illusion. Older folk, hoping to make some small sense of life before its end, will continue to study history and philosophy. Whether people turn pages or look at pixels on a screen is secondary.

But consider this: Through social media, the young woman of today who discovers Sylvia Plath can quickly share her excitement with friends around the world. She might leave a comment about Ariel or The Bell Jar on Goodreads, or join an online discussion group, or post links to sites devoted to the poet’s work and memory. Her enthusiasm might lead a dozen or a thousand more people to Plath.

That’s just one advantage of our screen-based culture.

Older and half-forgotten titles are now readily available through Project Gutenberg and its ilk. Entire libraries can be carried in your pocket. Digitized texts can be easily and quickly searched, or their font size enlarged for aging eyes.

Nonetheless, countering these real benefits are various pitfalls. Computers encourage skimming instead of focused attention and solitary engagement with a book’s words and ideas. The buzzing Internet hive fosters meaningless chatter as well as meaningful dialog. Screens themselves impose a factitious homogeneity: James Bond looks like Jane Austen and a smartphone blurs the difference in size between the Giant Bible of Mainz and a tiny miniature book.

Above all, no digital facsimile can ever replicate the mana, the glamour of a physical artifact. An online image of Van Gogh’s Starry Night hardly conveys the impact, the glory of the actual painting.

In like fashion, first editions aren’t just a collector’s fetish: The dust jacket, the binding, the advertisements and blurbs, and even the misprints convey useful information. Printed books do more than furnish a room; they assume a real, vital presence in our lives. We can casually pluck a volume from a bookcase, reread a poem or a few pages of a novel, find ourselves comforted, refreshed.

I once looked up a famous quotation from Walden online and found four different versions of the same sentence, only one of which matched my Princeton edition of Thoreau’s book.

by Michael Dirda

—© David Pearson / Alamy Stock Photo

ends and could be far easier when dealing with evanescent pixels instead of cold, hard type. This anxiety may seem slightly paranoid, and yet the Internet is already rife with misinformation. I once looked up a famous quotation from Walden online and found four different versions of the same sentence, only one of which matched my Princeton edition of Thoreau’s book.

This leads to my third major concern: The excessive privileging of the present. So powerful are the online forces of conformity and political correctness that it sometimes seems that knowledge of the past is being judged as irrelevant and every former age dismissed as unA MODERN-DAY “CAVE OF WONDER.” enlightened. For centuries, antiquity might have been over-reverenced; now earlier eras are condescendingly patronized, smugly disdained as racist, imperialist, By contrast, our increasing reliance on digitized texts classist, sexist, and generally reprehensible. Such presentism carries some odd, but credible dangers. First, our mental universe may, paradoxically, grow constricted, since so much is intellectually impoverishing, as well as generally bad for one’s character, and should be resisted. The timeworn adage of a dedicated reader’s life depends on browsing. At a used remains at least partly true: We are but pygmies standing on bookshop, you might pick up an old paperback from a bin the shoulders of giants. because of the sexy brunette on its cover or pull The Rose of In my own case, I am grateful to have passed my life in Tibet, The Last Good Kiss, or The White Goddess from a shelf just what now looks to be print’s golden twilight. To me, books because of those evocative titles. You might spend a minute enjoying a paragraph or two, then add the book to the others have long been things of beauty in themselves, as well as you absolutely must take home. The experience of browsing containers of knowledge and purveyors of adventure and romance. In those pre-Internet days you had to go out and is hard to replicate online. Human beings are tactile creaactually find physical copies of a favorite writer’s works, tures, and we find ourselves drawn to things we can touch and handle. What’s more, in this instance, screens are slower. whether in libraries or bookstores, in thrift shops or at yard sales. The hunt, sometimes extending over years, was part of Your eyes can dart down a row of books faster than your smartphone can display titles. If brick-and-mortar bookshops the excitement. Even now, after a half a century, I continue to feel about books as I did when I was a 12-year-old boy riding utterly disappear, we run the risk of losing familiarity with a bicycle around Lorain, Ohio, stopping at Clarice’s Values, huge swathes of older fiction and nonfiction. the Salvation Army store, and the St. Vincent de Paul charity A second worry is somewhat Orwellian. Physical books shop, looking eagerly for something good to read. are—more or less—textually stable. We own them, we don’t simply borrow them for a while from an online vendor or download them from some nebulous cloud. But how much integrity can you attribute to pixels? Who’s to say that some evil jokester, religious zealot, or government agency might not quietly start altering texts, adjusting them to conform with current beliefs and ideologies? Controversial books might Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book columnist for be softened—no more N-words in Adventures of Huckleberry The Washington Post and the author, most recently, of Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books.

Finn—or even suppressed. Once begun, censorship never HUMANITIES 11

NEH AT FIFTY:

On the Fate and Fortunes of Public Goods

By Richard H. Brodhead

LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON PHOTOGRAPHED IN NOVEMBER 1965, SHORTLY AFTER THE FOUNDING OF NEH.

I

wish a happy fiftieth birthday to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For fifty years, NEH has helped scholars open the human record to new understanding, made our shared past accessible to a broad democratic public, and, in partnership with state councils, kept the humanities alive at the local level in all fifty states, reminding us that history has happened everywhere and bears the imprint of us all.

Fifty years back, this familiar agency was a profoundly new thing, and the meaning of that novelty is my subject today. Let’s remember how it came to be. The agency was officially authorized when President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation creating national endowments for the humanities and the arts in a Rose Garden ceremony on September 29, 1965. This legislation implemented recommendations from a National Commission on the Humanities that had been set in motion in 1963 by three scholarly organizations: the American Council of Learned Societies, the Council of Graduate Schools in America, and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. The commission’s report, published in 1964, speaks to a nation in confident possession of superpower status, a status that brings new risks and new choices.

12 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

Global dominance can take two forms, the report explains. One is a dominance of economic might, military power, and technological superiority. Alternatively, together with economic and military supremacy, a nation could exert a different order of power—in the ideals and image of civilization it projects—in which case, other nations would eagerly follow its high lead. Get enough economic and military superiority, and you are at best a muscled-up hegemon; add the humanities, and you could become an aspirational civilization. That’s the opportunity before the United States, and seizing it is not guaranteed.

How to assure this better outcome? What’s needed is help advancing “things of the spirit”—help on the artistic and humanistic side.

As the cochair of a recent humanities commission, I marvel that when a comparable group sat down in 1963– 64, they arrived at a single recommendation: the creation of a federal agency to support humanistic activity, federally funded but with independent decision-making power.

President Johnson embraced this proposal in a speech at Brown University in September 1964.

Within a year, came from without underthe legislation standing how the sphere of had passed federal authority expanded with bipartisan in the first half of the support, the bill twentieth century. was signed, and NEH was born.

So the question I ask myself is, How did it happen that a proposal in this exact form was so persuasive to both academic and political leaders in the 1964–65 season? There is a relatively easy answer. The 1964 report is jealously mindful of the creation of the National Science Foundation in the early years of the Cold War, and science envy is the proximate cause for wanting a foundation of our own. But the idea draws on forces and developments reaching well beyond NSF, and I’d like to share the story of how I came to understand them.

Please be patient as I take you on a humanist’s excursion. Last summer—this is how I spent my summer vacation!—I read Sven Beckert’s book Empire of Cotton.

Beckert traces the long history of the industrialization of cotton around the globe across five centuries, underlining the dependence of free markets on coerced labor. Once the labor of slaves on plantations in the American South supplied the cotton to English, then also New England, mills. Three or four decades after the Civil War, cotton manufacture moved to the Southern states that had once been sites of cotton growing, with women and children cast in laboring roles.

—© Bettmann/CORBIS

WE CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHERE THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES

History, the recovery and reinterpretation of the past, is one primary humanistic form. The study of visual culture is another, and images brought me the next stage of my journey. When I got to this point in Beckert’s book, it put me in mind of Lewis Hine’s classic photographs documenting child labor in the North Carolina cotton mills in the early twentieth century. These images bring history vividly to life, such that we can see the faces of individual children, see the relation of small bodies and large machines that Beckert had evoked.

These photographs brought something else to mind, this time retrieved from the world of law. Law is nothing if not the humanities applied: an affair of texts and interpretation and arguments over meaning, an attempt to align values and precedents with contemporary situations. Four or five years back, David Levi, the dean of the Duke Law School and a former federal judge, and Jed Purdy, a Duke law professor and political philosopher, asked me to join them in teaching a course. The course was a consideration of how the law had negotiated key moments of national crisis in American history. This was great fun, since it gave me a chance to be back in the classroom, my primary passion, but it was also a lot of work, since I had to master tons of material from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now, one of the cases we worked through was called back to mind by the idea of cotton mills in North Carolina. The case was Hammer v. Dagenhart, decided in 1918.

In 1916, Congress had passed a law prohibiting interstate commerce in goods that had been produced with child labor. (The age in question was 14.) A father of two minor sons employed in a mill at Charlotte was upset that his family should lose the children’s earnings, so he sued, arguing that the law exceeded federal authority. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

In judging between a federal law and the father of child mill workers, perhaps playmates of the ones imaged by Hine, the Court reasoned as follows. It recognized that by 1918 public opinion had undergone a powerful shift toward viewing child labor as dehumanizing and unethical.

It acknowledged that many states had passed laws limiting the practice—North Carolina itself forbade child labor under the age of 12. But the judges could not be persuaded that child labor was a proper subject for federal regulation.

Here’s why. By the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution reserved for the states all powers not delegated to the federal government. Regulation of interstate commerce was one of those delegated powers. But by the analysis of the Court, “the making of goods . . . [is] not commerce, nor does the fact that these things are to be afterwards shipped or used in interstate commerce make their production a part thereof.” This conclusion arises from a segmenting cast of mind that sees parts as more real than the wholes they form: In this case, it sees the differences of phases of production as far more significant than their continuities. Manufacture is over and done with before cloth leaves the mill to enter trade. Ergo, manufac-

HUMANITIES 13

ture is not commerce. Ergo, its practices are not subject to federal legislation. (In his tart dissent in Dagenhart, Oliver Wendell Holmes rolled his eyes at a nation that could figure out how to federally prohibit the sale of alcohol but not the exploitation of children in factories.)

These habits of mind derived from an older world where local things were not experienced as part of larger integrations, and where the federal government’s sphere was correspondingly small. (Remember that only in 1913 was Congress’s right to impose a federal income tax established.) These were once common, mainstream understandings, and they continued their mental hold as the world around them changed. During the Great Depression, the scale and duration of national economic dysfunction made it desperately obvious that local remedies were of no avail. With the ascendancy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, problem after problem was visualized as having a federal solution and so received federal regulation of its own. Hence the birth of federal agencies: the Farm Security Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Federal Housing Administration, and many more.

But through Roosevelt’s first presidential term, the Supreme Court continued to balk at these innovations, for reasons wholly familiar to a student of Dagenhart. In the case that ruled the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional, Chief Justice Hughes retraces the familiar logic.

The kosher slaughter of chickens at the Schechter plant in Brooklyn was a localized, self-contained activity. Even if they came from elsewhere, when the chickens reached the slaughterhouse, “the interstate transactions in relation to that poultry then ended.” Since the work involved was not in interstate commerce, it was not subject to federal regulation. Don’t you get it?, Chief Justice Hughes all but says to New Deal adherents. I know you are dealing with a damnably difficult problem, but our national system does not permit your solution. “Extraordinary conditions may call for extraordinary remedies. . . . [But] extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power.”

The 1935–36 court decisions mark one of the great impasses that have defined the history of this country—a moment when a set of rules and understandings perfectly well-established in one cultural world are unable to cope with powerful new facts. An earlier impasse—over the federal government and slavery—was not resolved short of civil war. This one was resolved by a change of understanding that took place between 1936 and 1937.

FDR won an electoral landslide in November 1936 on a scale the country had never seen. The next spring, probably not in response to Roosevelt’s court-packing proposal, the Supreme Court began finding by 5-4 margins that the truth had changed sides. In a March 1937 decision in a minimum-wage case involving chambermaids in Washington State, the Court found that the federal government had a far larger power of regulation, with the same Chief Justice Hughes commenting that, although the Depression emergency had not created new constitutional powers, “recent economic experience” has brought heretofore overlooked chains of cause and consequence “into a strong light,” justifying a federal role where none had seemed warranted before. Within a year, the bare majority thinking became a new consensus. (The Dagenhart decision was unanimously 14 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

overturned in 1941.) From that point on, the United States had entered a new normal world where virtually no challenge was outside the federal government’s sphere.

I may seem to have made a long detour, but, to my mind, we cannot understand where the National Endowment for the Humanities came from without understanding how the sphere of federal authority expanded in the first half of the twentieth century. There was no federal role in support of the humanities before this transformation. Without the conceptual transformation forged in the crucible of the Great Depression, it is inconceivable that a national commission could have envisioned a federal solution to the challenge of the humanities in 1964.

When the NEH legislation was adopted, of course, this was not an act by itself. It formed an integral part of the Great Society program, Lyndon Johnson’s revival and extension of the New Deal amidst 1960s American preeminence and prosperity. NEH proposed to do for the nation’s humanistic yearnings what the Economic Opportunity Act

MATERIALISM, TRIVIAL AMUSEMENTS, AND GADGETRY define this report’s nightmare of a deficient civilization.

(signed in August 1964) did for employment, what the Voting Rights Act (March 1965) did for participation in the political process, what Medicare and Medicaid (July 1965) did for the health needs of the elderly and seriously disabled.

The public roared approval. Johnson was reelected in November 1964 by a popular vote margin that exceeded Roosevelt’s largest percentage. Nor did this support go away when the optimism began to dim. Just as both the Republican and Democratic parties contained progressive wings in the early twentieth century, both parties shared a big-government vision in mid century. Johnson launched NEH with a $2.5 million appropriation. It was under Richard Nixon, then Gerald Ford, then Jimmy Carter, that NEH received major new increments of funding, just as it was under Nixon and his successors that federal environmental programs—another new aspect of the general welfare now enforced through a federal role—saw their greatest growth.

There is no understanding where NEH came from without understanding how the American dream of government got big.

That change having been accomplished, the world, of course, did not stand still. Coming forward from the NEH launch to the world of today, three changes are especially salient.

First, that day’s confidence in America’s mission to lead the world has certainly not vanished, but it has grown more complex. I find it striking that the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing military action in Vietnam passed Congress in August 1964, right before Johnson’s embrace of the national endowment idea in September. I entered college at that exact time, and I can testify that few saw the toll the war would take on belief in the government’s

— Library of Congress

GIRL WORKING IN A MILL IN CHERRYVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA, IN A PHOTO BY LEWIS W. HINE.

integrity and in America’s benevolence abroad. Even after many reversals, American civilization is still unparalleled in its global attractiveness, but this has not functioned as the report envisioned.

A fascinating section of the report spies a new danger Americans are facing in the 1960s, a novel access to superabundant leisure. If the humanities do not fill this leisure with rich materials for “man’s questioning and his need for self-expression,” the 1964 report sternly cautions, “men and women [will] find nothing within themselves but emptiness” and “turn to trivial and narcotic amusements.”

Materialism, trivial amusements, and gadgetry define this report’s nightmare of a deficient civilization. But as our culture has continued to hold sway over the global imagination, this has worked through, not in spite of, consumerism, personal technology, and popular entertainment: Think of the stream of popular music, film, video, and iconic brands that have held the world enthralled via iPhones and other American-born devices.

As this suggests, a second great change between NEH’s debut moment and today involves the public standing of the humanities idea. The 1964 report is confident that there is a body of knowledge that connects individuals to a rich heritage and rich domains of existential meaning. This body of knowledge is spread through a model of education with roots in classical antiquity that aims to develop the whole person, what we call the liberal arts. As you know, this confident, unitary vision of the humanities has suffered

self-questioning and fragmentation among its adherents in intervening decades, and no longer commands wide public persuasion. When the Commission on the Humanities spoke, Johnson answered in the idiom of humanistic highmindedness. When claims for humanities and the liberal arts are made today, they’re often met with skepticism, if not scorn.

The core conviction of NEH’s launch was that the federal government was the right player to advance the humanities. In a third change, this tenet too has grown uncertain.

In New Deal and Great Society historiography, the age of big government is here at last, so happy days are here again. But there was always an alternative that, if eclipsed, never lost its power. In the election of November 1964, the scale of Barry Goldwater’s defeat seemed to confirm that his version of conservatism was a freak development that would never be seen again. Of course, this conservatism had older roots than many at the time cared to note. In the late 1950s and 1960s, Henry David Thoreau, a writer for the first time enjoying vast popularity, gave validation to the civil rights movement through his essay “Civil Disobedience.” But, as is often forgotten, the same works

by Thoreau set forth an antistatist gospel. In the first line of “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau repeats the adage “that government is best which governs least” and then offers this improvement: “that government is best which governs not at all.”

—Continued on page 52 HUMANITIES 15

Mr. Huxley’s

Many Talents

A man of numerous stories, he is remembered for but

one.

By Danny Heitman

16 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

AT

SIX

FEET

FOUR AND A HALF INCHES,

Aldous Huxley was perhaps the tallest figure in English letters, his height so striking that contemporaries sometimes viewed him as a freak of nature. British novelist Christopher Isherwood found Huxley “too tall. I felt an enormous zoological separation from him.” Virginia Woolf described him as “infinitely long” and referred to him as “that gigantic grasshopper.”

Everything about Huxley seemed large. “During his first years his head was proportionately enormous, so that he

could not walk until he was two because he was apt to topple over,” writes biographer Sybille Bedford. Shortly before his death, Huxley confided to a friend that his childhood nickname had been “Ogie,” a substitute for “Ogre.”

But this seems like the kind of exaggeration children so often use to rib each other. In pictures, Huxley looks imposing, but far from ugly. Anita Loos, the American screenwriter, playwright, and author, was impressed by Huxley’s “physical beauty . . . the head of an angel drawn by William Blake.”

His voice, preserved in recordings easily sampled online, was also part of his charm. Huxley spoke like Laurence Olivier—with exacting British diction and an unerring verbal accuracy that few people, then or now, possess in casual conversation. He talked in silver sentences, treating conversation as a form of theater, or even literature.

The largeness of the man and the precision of his language continue to live more than a half a century after his death. Every year, another generation of young students gets that sense of him from Brave New World, the 1932 novel that’s become assigned reading for millions of middle schoolers.

Taking its title from an ironic line from The Tempest by Shakespeare, Brave New World envisions a fictional society in which infants are grown in laboratories, and people become so conditioned to consumer comforts that they no longer question their leaders. Amid this malaise lingers a dissident regarded as a savage because he still embraces Shakespeare, his passion for poetry suggesting an indulgence of feeling that, in this brave new world of tomorrow, seems dangerously taboo. Readers still argue about the degree to which Huxley’s grimly conceived future has become the human present, and the emergence of test-tube babies, television, and online culture invite obvious parallels to Brave New World.

HUXLEY IN 1934.

—© Pictoral Press Ltd. / Alamy Stock Photo

Huxley transcribes the emotionally arid landscape of Brave New World into visual terms, translating the dormancy of the human soul into a city devoid of bright colors. In his description of a laboratory where new citizens are conceived, he writes: The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north . . . for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. . . . The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-colored rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost.

Huxley also wrote poetry, plays, travelogs, essays, philosophy, short stories, and many novels. Sadly, the overshadowing fame of Brave New World has tended to obscure the range of his talent.

Huxley came from one of England’s great intellectual families: He was born in Surrey, England, the son of Leonard Huxley, editor of the influential Cornhill magazine, and Julia Arnold, niece of the legendary poet and essayist Matthew Arnold. Huxley was the grandson of T. H. Huxley, a scientist and friend of Charles Darwin. Huxley’s brother Julian was a noted biologist and writer, and his half-brother Andrew was a Nobel laureate in physiology.

Huxley appeared destined to work in science, too, initially planning to become a physician. But, in 1911, when he was 16, he suffered an eye infection that left him nearly blind for almost two years. His sight was so compromised that he learned to read in Braille. He eventually recovered some vision, initially using strong eyeglasses to cope. With his sight damaged, a career in medicine or science seemed impractical, so Huxley turned to writing.

“He rose above the disability but he never minimized the importance of the experience in his life,” notes biographer Nicholas Murray. Huxley was fascinated by how adjustments in the senses greatly altered how we perceive reality, a theme that would deeply inform some of his later books.

His struggle with vision was the subject of a 1943 book, The Art of Seeing, in which Huxley championed the controversial theories of Dr. W. H. Bates, who asserted that eyes could be improved with training exercises instead of prescription lenses. Huxley claimed that the Bates Method worked for him, though it still remains far outside the medical mainstream.

Just how much Huxley was able to see is uncertain, although his eyes were obviously compromised, forcing him to compensate in creative ways. Julian Huxley thought that his brother developed a Herculean memory so he could better retain what he labored so hard to read. “With his one good eye, he managed to skim through learned journals, popular articles and books of every kind,” Julian recalled.

“He was apparently able to take them in at a glance, and what is more, to remember their essential content. His intellectual memory was phenomenal, doubtless trained by a HUMANITIES 17

tenacious will to surmount the original horror of threatened blindness.”

Early in his writing career, Huxley worked as a journalist and teacher, including a stint at Eton instructing a young Eric Blair, who would eventually become known to the world as George Orwell.

Published in 1949, nearly two decades after Huxley’s masterpiece, Orwell’s 1984 depicted a world in which the state imposes its will by force. Huxley wrote a fan letter to Orwell after 1984 appeared, complimenting him on “how fine and how profoundly important the book is.” But —Aldous Huxley Huxley offered a polite dissent from Orwell’s premise: “I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.” Huxley thought it more likely that in the long run, despots would find it efficient to coddle rather than coerce humans into conformity.

When Huxley published his first novel, Crome Yellow, in 1921, he gained attention not as a sober prophet of human oppression, but a light satirist of the English gentry. “What makes Crome Yellow . . . so appealing is its restfulness,” literary essayist Michael Dirda has observed.

“There is no plot to speak of. Nothing dramatic happens.

Instead, the book sustains interest almost solely through its style, a low-keyed ironic wit, and the evocation of a leisurely summer of cultivated country-house pleasures. Young people make love and their elders discourse about life; afternoons are spent in walking or painting, evenings taken up with reading aloud and conversation.”

The fictional house of the novel’s title appears to be based on Garsington, the estate where Lady Ottoline Morrell hosted Bloomsbury-era artists and writers, including Huxley. At Garsington, Huxley met the beautiful Maria Nys, a Belgian refugee displaced by World War I. They wed in 1919, and their marriage, perhaps reflecting its origins in Bloomsbury avant-garde society, was unconventional. Maria was bisexual, and the Huxleys at one point entered into a romantic triangle with a mutual friend, Mary Hutchinson.

Unusual though such an arrangement might have been, the Huxleys appeared devoted to each other until Maria’s death in 1955. Their household grew to include one son, Matthew, born in April 1920.

“She devoted herself wholly to him,” Murray writes of Maria’s relationship with Aldous. “Because of his poor eyesight, she read to him, endlessly, even if the material bored her beyond belief. She drove him thousands of miles around Europe and the United States—putting her profession as ‘chauffeur’ in hotel registers. She typed his books and was his secretary and housekeeper.”

The life the Huxleys created seemed a mostly happy one.

Although the future Huxley popularized in Brave New World

“I wallow in my mental vice.”

18 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

was bleak, the author himself didn’t lack cheer or humor, as anyone who reads his essays quickly discovers. “Aldous Huxley is an essayist whom I would be ready to rank with Hazlitt,” Somerset Maugham declared. “The essayist needs character to begin with, then he needs an encyclopedic knowledge, he needs humor, ease of manner so that the ordinary person can read him without labor, and he must know how to combine entertainment with instruction. These qualifications are not easy to find. Aldous Huxley has them.”

“Meditation on the Moon,” a 1931 essay, exemplifies Huxley’s sometimes dreamily poetic style. He argues that skygazers don’t have to think of the moon as either a rock or a romantic icon; it can be both. It’s an essay about the claims and limits of technical knowledge, in which Huxley, whose family tree included poets and scientists, attempts to reconcile their intellectual traditions. He wrote: The moon is a stone; but it is a highly numinous stone. Or, to be more precise, it is a stone about which and because of which men and women have numinous feelings. Thus, there is a soft moonlight that can give us the peace that passes understanding. There is a moonlight that inspires a kind of awe. There is a cold and austere moonlight that tells the soul of its loneliness and desperate isolation, its insignificance or its uncleanness. There is an amorous moonlight prompting to love—to love not only for an individual but sometimes even for the whole universe.

The passage points to Huxley’s deftness as a scene-setter, a skill that made him a great travel writer, too. Along the Road, Huxley’s 1921 collection of travel essays, is perhaps one of the best modern travel books—and inexplicably, one of the most overlooked. It chronicles his jaunts around Europe, often with self-deprecating charm. In a funny musing called “Books for the Journey,” Huxley considers the bibliophile’s tendency to overpack. “All tourists cherish an illusion, of which no amount of experience can ever cure them; they imagine that they will find time, in the course of their travels, to do a lot of reading,” Huxley writes. “They see themselves, at the end of a day’s sightseeing or motoring, or while they are sitting in the train, studiously turning over the pages of all the vast and serious works which, at ordinary seasons, they never have time to read.”

Huxley suggests, as an alternative to all those heavy books, just toting a random volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica along for the ride. “I never pass a day away from home without taking a volume with me,” he confides.

“Turning over its pages, rummaging among the stores of fantastically varied facts which the hazards of alphabetical arrangement bring together, I wallow in my mental vice.”

Huxley was really serious about carrying around the Britannica. “Bertrand Russell joked that one could predict Huxley’s subjects of conversation provided one knew which alphabetical section of the Encyclopedia he happened to be reading at the time,” Murray notes. “Huxley even constructed a special carrying-case for it on his journeys.”

This was so like Huxley, his mind sparked by any fact, however arbitrary. The poet Elizabeth Bishop, who was

living in Brazil when Huxley arrived for a visit, described what it was like to see him explore a new place:

Huxley’s travels paralleled an intellectual and spiritual odyssey that increasingly shaped his work. His early fiction, which extended the wry tone of Crome Yellow, evolved into more somber, psychologically complex novels like Eyeless in Gaza, his 1936 story about a cynical Englishman who comes of age during World War I and eventually turns to Eastern philosophy and meditation to address his disillusionment.

Many readers see Eyeless as a deeply autobiographical work reflecting Huxley’s own turn away from ironical detachment to life as, in Dirda’s words, “a gentle mystic.”

Huxley’s globe-trotting took him to the United States in 1937, where he made his home, primarily in Los Angeles, for the rest of his life. Lucrative Hollywood screenwriting jobs proved hard to resist. He wrote film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, as well as a Disney version of Alice in Wonderland that was never made. In 1956, a year after Maria’s death, Huxley married Laura Archera, an Italian violinist and psychotherapist who had been a family friend, and who proved an equally devoted wife. California’s climate of cultural experiment seemed suited to Huxley, whose willingness to explore new things in the pursuit of enlightenment led him to the strangest writing project of his life.

In the spring of 1953, Huxley took a precisely measured dose of mescalin, the hallucinogenic drug derived from the peyote cactus of the American Southwest, then recorded his experience in a small book, The Doors of Perception, its title inspired by a quote from the visionary poet William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Huxley found that the drug greatly enhanced his sense of color. “Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood,” he wrote. But Huxley also noted that under the influence of mescalin, “the will suffers a profound change for the worse. The mescalin taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular.”

The book doesn’t argue for unrestricted drug use, and in other writings, Huxley pointed out the dangers of abuse and dependency. “In their ceaseless search for selftranscendence, millions of would-be mystics become addicts, commit scores of thousands of crimes and are involved in hundreds of thousands of avoidable accidents,” he cautioned in his essay, “Drugs That Shape Men’s Minds.” Even so, The Doors of Perception achieved considerable cachet in the drug culture of the 1960s. The rock group the Doors took its name from Huxley’s book, and in a sad irony, its lead singer, Jim Morrison, would struggle with drug addiction until his death in 1971.

—© Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

There is a slight cast to his bad eye, and this characteristic, which I always find oddly attractive, in Huxley’s case adds even more to his veiled and other-worldly gaze. When examining something close . . . a photograph or a painting, he sometimes takes out a small horn-rimmed magnifying glass, or, for distant objects, a miniature telescope, and he often sits resting his good eye by cupping his hand over it.

ROCKERS (FROM LEFT) JOHN DENSMORE, ROBBY KRIEGER, RAY MANZAREK, AND JIM MORRISON TOOK THE DOORS AS THEIR NAME, INSPIRED BY ALDOUS HUXLEY’S THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION.

Huxley’s own death after a lengthy struggle with cancer contained an irony of its own. He died on November 22, 1963, just hours after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and on the same day that fellow writer C. S. Lewis passed away. Kennedy’s death overshadowed the passing of Huxley and Lewis. But just as events in Dallas cracked open the chaos of the 1960s, so Huxley’s life and work, with its questioning of conformity and the power of the state, seemed to anticipate the countercultural revolution that would soon sweep his adopted country.

In a 1958 nonfiction work, Brave New World Revisited, Huxley concluded that new developments had made it even more possible for the ominous social order of his most famous novel to be realized. But in Island, a utopian novel completed shortly before his death, Huxley depicted a benevolent mirror image of Brave New World, in which ingenuity is harnessed for good rather than evil. It was Huxley’s way of saying that human destiny is still a matter of moral choice—a choice that must be informed by constant inquiry.

“Fearless curiosity was one of Aldous’s noblest characteristics, a function of his greatness as a human being,” Isherwood recalled of his friend. “Little people are so afraid of what the neighbors will say if they ask Life unconventional questions. Aldous questioned unceasingly, and it never occurred to him to bother about the neighbors.”

Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Louisiana, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.

NEH has supported several projects over the years related to Aldous Huxley. Most recently, the Vedanta Society of Southern California received a $6,000 grant that will aid in preserving the society’s archive, which includes some of Huxley’s correspondence. Brave New World is one of the texts assigned to students in an NEH Enduring Questions course on “What is Happiness?” at New Mexico State University.

Scholar Jerome Meckier, who has written extensively about Huxley, received a $10,000 NEH fellowship in 1974.

HUMANITIES 19

n 1620, the Mayflower plowed across the Atlantic through headwinds and ocean currents at an incredibly slow two miles per hour.

The overcrowded vessel’s crossing took more than two harrowing months. On the way, its 102 passengers witnessed an astonishing scene. During a fierce storm, an indentured servant named John Howland had come topside for fresh air when the ship rolled violently, casting him into the raging sea. He sank well beneath the waves. Such a fate almost certainly meant death by drowning. Yet, somehow, Howland had managed to grab a halyard on his way overboard, and desperately clung to it long enough for the crew to haul him back to safety.

Howland not only made it to America and worked off his indenture, but married a pretty young woman in the new colony named Elizabeth Tilley. They produced ten children, who begat 88 grandchildren, from whom an estimated two million Americans descended over the next four centuries. These included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Smith, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Humphrey Bogart, Chevy Chase, and both Presidents Bush.

Howland’s story suggests the seminal power of the handful of Pilgrims who landed in Plymouth, near Cape Cod, in the late fall of 1620. Every culture invents creation myths to answer the questions, Where did we come from, What got us here?

Such myths mingle tall tales with, at times, a seasoning of fact.

For American culture, the story of the Pilgrims, including their “first Thanksgiving” feast with the local Native Americans, has become the ruling creation narra-

tive, celebrated each November along with turkey, pumpkin pie, and football games. The Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock have eclipsed the earlier 1607 English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, as the place where America was born.

A new documentary, The Pilgrims,

BY CRAIG LAMBERT written and directed by Ric Burns and made with the help of a production grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, airs on PBS’s American Experience this November 24 and again on Thanksgiving night. Its retelling of the Pilgrims’ adventure and ordeal sheds new light on why their story became the creation myth that we, as a people, adopted. It draws on the unique, nearly lost history, Of Plymouth Plantation, written by William Bradford, the new colony’s governor for more than 30 years, whom the late actor Roger Rees portrays from a script derived from Bradford’s book.

Filmmaker Burns interviews several scholars, who show how the reality of the Pilgrim experience diverged in several ways from images embedded in the public imagination. For example, “the story of the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving has Native Americans welcoming them with open arms,” says Kathleen Donegan, a Berkeley English professor interviewed in The Pilgrims whose book Seasons of Misery: CatasOPPOSITE, THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS IN 1620, A TAPESTRY BY MABELLE LINNEA HOLMES.

20 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

—Jamestown-Yorktown Educational Trust, Virginia / Bridgeman Images

A new film revisits the Puritan Separatists who arrived aboard the Mayflower.

HUMANITIES 21

partment llections De s Special Co assachusett —Th

ary of M e State Libr

—Courtesy of Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Massachusetts

22 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

trophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America was a source for the film. “It has been translated into this multicultural festival. But just as the Pilgrims don’t represent all English colonists, the Wampanoags, who feasted with them, don’t represent all Native Americans. The Pilgrims’ relations with the Narragansetts, or the Pequots, were completely different.”

Clearly, the story of a “multicultural festival” happening in newborn America resonates with the national ideology of inclusiveness. The Pilgrims did embody elements that took root in American culture, and this helps explain why, in retrospect, we call them our founders. The forces that shaped their lives also remain in place today. In that sense they are almost modern characters: Replace their wide-brimmed hats, doublets, and petticoats with baseball caps, T-shirts, and jeans, and they might easily blend into a homeschooling support group or a Tea Party rally.

The image of intergroup harmony and tolerance is naturally appealing to an immigrant country like America. Many imagine that the Pilgrims left the Old World behind to worship as they pleased and start a new country imbued with religious freedom, an ideal later codified in the First Amendment. Nothing could be further from the truth.

“A big misconception is that they were for religious freedom and liberty,” says Donegan. “Actually, the Pilgrims saw the world as a wilderness, in which the one right way of practice toward God might cultivate a garden—and you needed a

—The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY

hedge around that garden to protect it from the wilderness.

They were terrified of contamination. The Pilgrims were not for freedom of religion. Quite the opposite: They had very specific ideas about how to worship God, and were intolerant of deviations.” Historian Pauline Croft of the Royal Holloway University of London declares in the film, “One might say, if you wanted to be critical, they’re religious nutters who won’t settle for anything except the most literal reading of the Bible. They want to transform a nation-state into something that resembles what they take to be a Godly kingdom.”

Purists, by definition, are extremists, and it’s no accident that many in England dubbed those who wanted to reform the Church of England “Puritans,” which “was always a derisive term,” Donegan explains. “The Mayflower pilgrims were the most extreme kind of reformers. They called themselves Saints, but were also known as Separatists, for their desire to separate themselves completely from the established church. They were extremely hot Puritans who saw the Church of England as hopelessly corrupt and felt they had to leave it to get back to a pure and honest church.” Separatists viewed the church’s hierarchy—and its holidays, rituals, vestments, and prayers—as obstacles interposed between people and God. In truth, “they were on a journey towards purity,” historian Susan Hardman Moore of the University of Edinburgh says in the film. “That’s what they sought; that’s what took them out of England.”

The Separatists’ devotion to Scripture as the untrammelled source of faith resembles that of today’s religious fundamentalists, who venerate the literal word of God as found in the Bible.

Ironically, the most popular translation of that Bible, the King James version, came to be under a monarch who, in a sense, drove the Pilgrims from England. It was one thing to disagree with the church hierarchy, but the political problem was that the head of the Church of England was also the reigning king. And James I, who came to power in England in 1603, was a strong believer in unity when it came to his church; he had no patience with religious rebels or heterodox churches. “Anyone who separates from the church is not just separating from the church, but they’re separating from royal authority,” explains Michael Braddick, a historian at the University of Sheffield, in the film.

“And that’s potentially very dangerous.”

You could be fined 20 pounds—equivalent to $9,000 today—for not attending services at the official church. Those who persisted faced imprisonment. After the Act Against the Puritans of 1593, Queen Elizabeth added banishment.

“I think, with James, the next step could have been death for these people,” historical novelist Sue Allan asserts in the film. “He was newly to the throne—not popular. He wasn’t going to have any dissenters. So I really think that these folk were risking everything.”

With the handwriting on the wall, in 1608, the future Pilgrims exiled themselves to Amsterdam, where the Dutch had greater tolerance for radical Protestants. Soon they decamped southward for Leiden, a textile center where they formed a little English-speaking immigrant community and

THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS BY HOWARD PYLE. UPPER LEFT: ORIGINAL LIST OF THE MAYFLOWER’S PASSENGERS FROM BRADFORD’S HANDWRITTEN MANUSCRIPT. LOWER LEFT: THE MAYFLOWER ON HER ARRIVAL IN PLYMOUTH HARBOR BY WILLIAM FORMBY HALSALL, 1882.

worshiped God as they pleased, unmolested. But adults and children alike, who’d been farmers in England, now toiled from dawn to dusk, six or seven days a week, weaving cloth in the textile factories. Even with such hardships, the Pilgrims later regarded their Leiden years as a type of “glory days,” whose difficulties were nothing compared with the ordeals they faced in America.

By 1617, the Separatists were getting anxious to move again. “Their biggest concern after a decade in this foreign land was that their children were becoming Dutch,” Nathaniel Philbrick, the author of Mayflower, another source for The Pilgrims, explains in the film.

“A big misconception “They were still very is that they were for proud of their English heritage. They were religious freedom and also fearful that the liberty,” says Donegan.

Spanish were about to attack again.” Indeed, a conflict was building between Spain’s Catholic king and European Protestant powers, which would soon embroil the continent in the Thirty Years’ War. Radical Protestants viewed this as a battle between the forces of good (Protestantism) and evil (Roman Catholicism), little short of Armageddon. “Everything seemed to be on the edge of complete meltdown,” Philbrick says. “And so they decided it’s time to pull the ripcord once again. Even if it meant leaving everything they had known all their lives.”

Many in the Leiden group made the wrenching decision to leave all behind—even children, in some cases—and try for a new start across the ocean. They determined to settle near the mouth of the Hudson River, not far from presentday New York City. A London broker, Thomas Weston, approached them in early 1620 and said he’d arrange financing for a passage to the New World. His investors hoped the voyagers would harvest profitable resources like HUMANITIES 23

—Plimoth Plantation/Kristen Oney

—Granger, NYC; all rights reserved

three of them pregnant. They did not sail from Plymouth harbor until the disastrously late date of September 6, assuring that they would arrive in America after the growing season and at the onset of winter. Two had died by the time the crew sighted Cape Cod—two hundered miles off course, with no reliable charts—on November 9.

Predictably, there had been friction between the saints and strangers. Nonetheless, before disembarking A NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOOD ENGRAVING DEPICTS THE PILGRIMS SIGNING A TREATY WITH THE WAMPANOAG IN WILLIAM on November 11, 41 of BRADFORD’S HOUSE, 1621. the adult men signed a simple agreement, hardly more than a sentence long, to band together into a beaver pelts from the The first winter, people “civil body politic” with the power to enact laws. This docuvirgin territory. The died from dysentery, ment, known as the Mayflower Compact, became a touchcommercial motives stone, years later, for the Plymouth Colony’s Book of Laws, behind the Mayflower pneumonia, tubercuwhich affirmed that, in a time of crisis, a monarch’s authorivoyage receive fairly losis, scurvy, and ty could be set aside, but the consent of the governed could short shrift in most exposure, at rates as never be. A seminal document, indeed. textbooks, but they Right from the start, the death rate was awful. Mortalmay well be another high as two or three aspect of the Pilgrims’ ity had been enormous at the Jamestown colony, where per day. by 1620 nearly 8,000 people had arrived, although the enterprise that dovesettlement was struggling to keep its population above a tails with American thousand. Bradford’s history recalled the Pilgrims’ anticisociety, given that pation of “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild the United States has become the most successful capitalist economy on earth.

The right time to sail would have been early spring, giving the voyagers time to sow crops and build shelters during warm weather. But, by June, Weston had not raised the money and announced that his backers were getting cold feet: They were insisting that dozens of non-Separatist outsiders go with them. This was, of course, appalling to the cultic Separatists, who divided their own from these others by the categories saints and strangers. Yet they had no resources, and no choice.

The Mayflower’s manifest made an unlikely expeditionary force. Fewer than fifty were adult men, many of mature years, while at least thirty were children and nearly twenty women, 24 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

—Plimoth Plantation/Kristen Oney

beasts and wild men.” Ferrying in supplies from the ship meant wading through ice-cold water, at one point with sleet glazing their bodies with ice. The first winter, people died from dysentery, pneumonia, tuberculosis, scurvy, and exposure, at rates as high as two or three per day. “It pleased God to visit us then with death daily,” Bradford wrote.

The living were hardly able to bury the dead, let alone care for the sick. By spring, half of them had perished, and “by all rights, they all should have died, given how ill prepared they were,” says Philbrick. Yet A lone Indian warrior they survived, named Samoset and the Pilgrims’ appeared and story is as much one of survival as of origreeted the settlers, gins. They were also improbably, inventive enough, in English. as Donegan notes, to prop up sick men against trees outside the settlement, with muskets beside them, as decoys to look like sentinels to the Indians.

Early on, the settlers repelled an attack by Native American warriors—muskets against arrows, in a skirmish that presaged the continent’s future. Yet, in March, a lone Indian warrior named Samoset appeared and greeted the settlers, improbably, in English. Soon, the Pilgrims formed an alliance with the Wampanoags and their chief, Massasoit. Only a few years before, the tribe had lost 50 to 90 percent of its population to an epidemic borne by European coastal fisherman. Devastated by death, both groups were vulnerable to attack or domination by Indian tribes. They needed each other.

With spring, under the careful guidance of a Wampanoag friend, Tisquantum, the settlers planted corn, squash, and beans, with herring for fertilizer. They began building more houses, fishing for cod and bass, and trading with the Native Americans. By October they had erected seven crude houses and four common buildings. And, as autumn came, the Pilgrims gathered to in a “special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors,” wrote one of their number, Edward Winslow. Bradford made no mention of it.

That was the first Thanksgiving. There is no record of an invitation to the Wampanoags, but Massasoit appeared at the feast with ninety men. They stayed for three days, and went out and bagged five deer to add venison to the menu. They played games together. This was the humble affair that, centuries later, President Abraham Lincoln made an official American holiday, perhaps the most beloved one of all.

“We love the story of Thanksgiving because it’s about alliance and abundance,” Donegan says in the film. “But

PLIMOTH PLANTATION HISTORICAL INTERPRETER PORTRAYS PILGRIM PRISCILLA ALDEN. LOWER LEFT: THE BEDROOM OF WHAT WILLIAM BREWSTER’S HOUSE MIGHT HAVE LOOKED LIKE IN 1624 PLYMOUTH.

part of the reason that they were grateful was that they had been in such misery; that they had lost so many people— on both sides. So, in some way, that day of thanksgiving is also coming out of mourning; it’s also coming out of grief. And this abundance that is a relief from that loss. But we don’t think about the loss—we think about the abundance.”

“It’s a very humble story of people who don’t have much, who suffer, and who have a communitarian ideal,” she adds. “It’s a very interesting narrative for a superpower nation. There is something sacred about humble beginnings. A country that has grown so rapidly, so violently, so prodigiously, needs a story of small, humble beginnings.”

Craig Lambert is the author of Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day. The Pilgrims was supported by a $704,000 production grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is airing on November 24 at 8 p.m. EST, and again on Thanksgiving night at 9:30 p.m.

HUMANITIES 25

Calendar

Endowment-Supported Events

A writer from Mughul India, a painter in the Persian court, and a patron of the arts from the Ottoman Empire helped shaped the culture of Muslim societies through imagination and collaboration. “Pearls on a String: Artists, Patrons, and Poets at the Great Islamic Courts,” featuring more than a hundred works of calligraphy, textiles, ceramics, and jewelry from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, opens November 8 at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

—Young woman in a Georgian costume, probably Isfahan, late 17th century, oil on canvas, 151.1 × 82 cm, anonymous lender / courtesy Walters Art Museum

—Photo: Hazel Larsen Archer, Elizabeth Schmitt Jennerjahn and Robert Rauschenberg, ca. 1952, gelatin silver print, 6 ¼ x 9 ¼ inches / estate of Hazel Larsen Archer and Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center

Danish immigrant Jacob Riis used rudimentary flash photography to capture nighttime images of slum conditions in the overcrowded Lower East Side. Riis’s illustrated article in Scribner’s Magazine led to the book How the Other Half Lives, which helped raise awareness of the plight of the poor in Manhattan in the early twentieth century. “Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half ”continues at the Museum of the City of New York through March 20, 2016.

—Sleeping homeless children, Lower East Side, ca. 1890s / photo by Jacob Riis / Museum of the City of New York

26 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, presents “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957,” through January 24, 2016. The exhibition features works by more than 90 artists who studied or taught in the utopian setting in the Appalachians. Figures such as Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, and Elaine and Willem de Kooning spent some time at the experimental campus that formed the template for American art schools.

November/December

by steve moyer

The Lobster, 1908. Arthur Garfield Dove, American, 1880–1946. Oil on canvas, 25 5/8 x 32 inches / framed: 35 × 40 × 4 inches / Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, acquisition in memory of Anne Burnett Tandy, Trustee, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 1968–1980.

—Courtesy Virginia Foundation for the Humanities

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of D. W. Griffith’s controversial and monumental work, The Birth of a Nation, an example of how film’s treatment of history can affect understanding of the past. The National Museum of American History and the History Film Forum, in a Smithsonian–NEH collaboration, will examine the film and what it means a century later in a November 22 live event that will be hosted by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities-funded radio program Backstory with the History Guys. Tickets and information are available through the website historyfilmforum@si.edu.

From the days of the early American republic—when John James Audubon combined artistic and scientific ambition in works for his Birds of America—through the ’60s—when Pop Art icons such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein dazzled the art scene with images of mass-produced commercial goods and slick surfaces with eye-popping acrylics—the history of the still life’s development has been “motivated as much by wider cultural dynamics as by artistic taste.” “Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life,” with nearly a hundred artists represented, is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through January 10, 2016.

HUMANITIES 27

28 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

s

we Lin ’re ho dy ag pp ai ing n

s

r’ e - g g e y n n i i w nd p g Li opaiinn h gw a

toget h

er

What it means that we’re Lindy Hopping again

by peter gerler

—Marie Beschen

ONE SUMMER NIGHT IN 1914, A BAND OF NEW ORLEANS MUSICIANS on cornet, trombone, clarinet, violin, guitar, and stand-up bass showed up, far from home, at Doyle’s boxing ring in Los Angeles for a well-attended lightweight fight. Woodrow Wilson was president, Henry Ford had recently unveiled the first mass-production assembly line, and two weeks earlier World War I had broken out in Europe.

Between bouts at Doyle’s, the cornetist got up on a bench and started blowing.

Immediately, “the crowd stood up as one man and shouted for us to get in the ring, and screamed and screamed,” recalled George Baquet, their clarinet man.

Baquet was a formally trained musician, who nearly a decade earlier on New Orleans’s South Rampart Street had had a “conversion experience” when he heard the legendary First Man of Jazz, Buddy Bolden, play the clarinet. “After that, I didn’t play legitimate so much,” Baquet recalled.

He and his buddies, billing themselves as the Creole Orchestra from New Orleans, had wandered slowly into L.A. and pulled what gigs they could. A Los Angeles Record reporter described one of their shows: “In a corner of the café a strange orchestra was producing . . . a rhythm so enticing that the temptation to dance was almost overwhelming.”

A talent booker heard the rhythm at Doyle’s and asked the guys to form an act, “he did not care what, so long as he had that music.” Soon they were blowing the “uncanny sounds” of inchoate New Orleans jazz on vaudeville stages around the country.

DANCERS COMPLETE THE SCENE AS TUBA SKINNY PLAYS A SET.

HUMANITIES 29

Not long after, Einstein published his field equations, linking planetary pull with space-time. The coming of swing rhythm around this time seems more than coincidental. Now music was released from gravity.

A CENTURY LATER, THE NEW ORLEANS PARADE BEAT has, like grass, broken through sidewalks of cities across the globe. In the streets, dance halls, and late-night venues of New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Austin, Sacramento, Denver, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Vancouver, London, Paris, Edinburgh, Stockholm, and Tokyo, the music has reincarnated in the young bodies and souls of today’s millennial generation—musicians and hoofers alike.

Notices from the last two years show that this trend, first observed more than a decade ago, has swollen to massive proportions. The Guardian reported that with “the recent resurgence of swing music . . . dance floors all over the country seem to be filling with new Lindy Hoppers.” In Vanity Fair, the New York jazz journalist Will Friedwald wrote, “I find that I can go hear a twenties-style band, almost inevitably made up of musicians born well after 1980, playing somewhere in the city virtually every night of the week.” Offbeat has observed that in New Orleans, “more traditional bands may play regularly today than at any previous time in jazz history,” and audiences “have swelled into crowds of enthusiastic young people who turn out in droves from all over the world.”

What’s going on? Why are twenty- and thirty-somethings suddenly playing and dancing to music older than their grandparents?

On a Friday night at Boston Swing Central, hiding among industrial back streets, I watched two hundred Lindy Hoppers rock-stepping and swinging-out, smiles plastered on their faces, the Crescent City polyphony of the Baby Soda jazz band driving them on. A young dancer told me, “It’s a religious experience, I am so in the moment.”

Baby Soda coleader Peter Ford summed it up: “You’ve got these 25-year-olds throwing each other around the room with reckless abandon and swing.”

Baby Soda’s website describes the band as “on the forefront of a new movement loosely known as street jazz.”

But the “movement” never went away—just into slumber.

A century ago, “ragged” music played out on New Orleans streets amid marching brass bands, dance hall turkey-trots, street-corner honkers, and horse-pulled band wagons. For African Americans, it was about confidence and kinship— standing as humans under the sun.

Now on the hundred-year marker, I find myself thinking that the mill ennials who are playing and dancing to swing rhythm are experiencing those same, oddly joined feelings of freedom and connectedness. Talk to them and you hear one word coming up again and again: community.

APRIL 2014, FRENCH QUARTER FESTIVAL IN NEW ORLEANS. The band was Tuba Skinny, eight ragtag kids in their late

30 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

twenties and early thirties playing jazz and jug-band music tight as a clock and fueling a floor full of Lindy Hoppers into a jumping groove. A dancer named Les said, “When people are dancing, everyone smiles. You can see the joy in their faces.” Listeners thronged by the hundreds.

The band has roots going back to New York in 2006, just after Hurricane Katrina, when a 28-year-old University of Michigan music-school grad named Ben Polcer met a braying clarinetist named Michael Magro. He played “the same kind of music I heard growing up,” noted Polcer in Jim Flynn’s book Sidewalk Saints. “But it was grittier, and at the same time it also had this kind of sanctified feel, like church music. I was like, ‘damn, I wanna do that.’”

Billing themselves as the Loose Marbles, Polcer and Magro moved to New Orleans and began playing around the French Quarter. “There’s something about New Orleans where I just get so caught up in the moment,” Polcer remarked in Saints. This computes: Jazz players always look for that moment, the “pocket,” the groove.

Polcer once told a New Yorker writer, “I like rock ‘n’ roll.

We all like rock ‘n’ roll. But jazz is special. To play it well, you really have to listen to each other.” Contrast that with, say, the Rolling Stones, who have said that onstage they can’t hear one another.

Swing rhythm—the jazz heartbeat—comes from the early black Sanctified and Baptist churches. In the fabled plantation “ring shouts,” in their brush arbors, black folk could forgo the white man’s litany and find community, sharing the loneliness, howling in freedom to the heavens.

One old slave preacher recalled a Georgia camp meeting: “There is a joy on the inside and it wells up so strong that we can’t keep still. It is fire in the bones. Any time that fire touches a man, he will jump.”

The rhythm likely goes back to African work song, an example of coordinated group action. Folklorist Roger D. Abrahams wrote that plantation corn-shucking songs expressed “intense feelings as they were experienced by the whole group moving together in common purpose.”

In New Orleans, that sense of common purpose shows up in the “second line” brass band funeral parades, where whole neighborhoods side-step and gyrate alongside the “first line” of marching musicians. Writing in JazzTimes, Geraldine Wyckoff remarked, “When a brass band really starts kicking in and the club members and second liners get down with the groove, dancing for all they’re worth . . . , one can become lost in time and space, swept up in the rhythms and joyfulness.”

Polcer and Magro began pulling in all manner of musicians, some with training, some with just passion. One of them was 32-year-old Shaye Cohn, granddaughter of the renowned tenor saxophonist Al Cohn and current leader of Tuba Skinny. Growing up in Brookline, Massachusetts, Cohn practiced classical piano for 12 years, winning SHAYE COHN OF TUBA SKINNY WITH TUPELO THE DOG AT THE ROSENDALE CAFE IN NEW YORK

HUMANITIES 31

— James Riley Photography

TUBA SKINNY PLAYING AT THE SPOTTED CAT ON FRENCHMEN STREET IN NEW ORLEANS

awards. She studied music at New York University. But tiring of that “lonely, stressful lifestyle,” she walked aw ay.

“I didn’t think I’d be playing any other instruments ever again,” she told me.

She drifted down to New Orleans, where she connected with a fiddler who “played klezmer and old-time, Appalachian, and gypsy music from Romania.” It was a reawakening, “a new world of music for me,” she said.

She explained: “One thing really important to the Loose Marbles was ensemble playing. When I first started with them, I was playing second trumpet. So I had to work to find a voice where I could fit in. It taught me to play very simply, and to listen.”

Early jazz revolves around the ensemble—the whole band sound. (Modern jazz centers on the solo.) It has been called the sound of democracy, an example of e pluribus unum or “out of many” voices “one” song, a music that depends on musicians listening to each other, and working toward, again, a common purpose.

Eight years after arriving in the Big Easy, Cohn leads one of the most synchronous yet rootsy bands in the traditional jazz idiom. On tour last summer, Tuba Skinny played 24 different venues in California, Maine, and New York.

ON THE LINDY HOP’S LATE 1920S EMERGENCE, Canadian music professor Howard Spring has written, “The most direct factor was the dynamic relationship between musicians and dancers.” And, he added, “the dance set off changes in the music.”

The Lindy Hop is swing music made visible. As with the cornet-clarinet-trombone polyphony, the dance-player connection brings the ecstasy. If everyone pushes the beat just right, the moment swings.

They knew it back in the day. Albert Nicholas, a Crescent 32 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

— James Riley Photography

—Denis Martin

City clarinetist who played with Joe “King” Oliver, said, “The band played full but no blasting. Joe wanted to hear those feet on the floor; the feet of the dancers. He’d say, ‘When you don’t hear those feet, you’re not playing music; you’re making noise.’”

And they know it today.

In Why New Orleans Matters, Tom Piazza has written, “Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it’s as if the audience—dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing—is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing.”

So—the beat goes into the feet and connects everyone who is present to each other, even as it induces a temporary state of splendid freedom. Think of a child on a swing set.

At the top of the arc, there’s a moment between going up and coming down. The child floats, buoyant. He’s found release from gravity—and from all that word implies. And gravity, as Einstein showed a century ago, is a warp in space-time.

Beyond the century-old scientific and musical parallels, there are socioeconomic ones. In his landmark study Bowling Alone, the sociologist Robert Putnam has seen a decline in our social capital, that is, in our connections with others.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, massive industrialization and immigration split up families and neighborhoods. Today, Putnam writes, we have again been “overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities.”

By contrast, Bruce Boyd Raeburn, of Tulane University’s Hogan Jazz Archive, described the early years of jazz this way: “New Orleans players held a virtual monopoly on the syntax of collective improvisation, a musical give-and-take which resembled a street-corner conversation with everyone trying to get a word in edgewise.”

In a time of political polarization, it makes sense that music and dancing that connects people should seem especially exciting, an answer to some of the estrangement and alienation we feel off the dance floor.

The 32-year-old trumpeter/vocalist Bria Skonberg, a bright light in the jazz resurgence, has played major NYC jazz venues and toured ceaselessly around North America.

“Coming out of the ‘next great depression,’’’ she told me, “the music might be a way to bring people together. The energy is that much more important in dark times.”

It is the human quest, from the dark into the light. Writing of Emancipation and the spiritual “Go Down Moses,” the great New Orleans reed man Sidney Bechet recalled:

So—the beat goes into the feet and connects everyone who is present to each other, even as it induces a temporary state of

splendid freedom.

It was years they’d been singing that. And suddenly there was a different way of singing it. You could feel a new way of happiness in the lines. All that waiting, all that time when that song was far-off music, waiting music, suffering music; and all at once it was there, it had arrived. It was joy music now.

So now, ten years post-Katrina, what’s with the swing jazz resurgence? Tom Piazza may have hit it: “Most funeral traditions in our society are there to remind us that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. In New Orleans the funerals remind us that Life is bigger than any individual life, and it will roll on, and for the short time that your individual life joins the big stream of Life, cut some decent steps, for God’s sake.”

Peter Gerler writes about early jazz and is working on a book about the New Orleans trumpet legend Joseph “King” Oliver.

NEH has funded several projects on the evolution of jazz in New Orleans.

In the early seventies, a research grant was given to the renowned jazz collector and archivist Bill Russell for, according to HUMANITIES magazine, the purpose of “editing tapes and assembling narratives and illustrations for three books: one on Jelly Roll Morton, one on ‘Fess Manetta, and one on New Orleans style.” Other grants since then have related to New Orleans funeral music and postwar jazz history. NEH also made emergency grants to Louisiana State University and Louisiana Museum Foundation after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. WETA received an $800,000 production grant to support Ken Burns’s eight-part documentary Jazz, which first aired in 2001.

Sources: Pioneers of Jazz by Lawrence Gushee, Sidewalk Saints by Jim Flynn, Black Culture and Black Consciousness by Lawrence W. Levine, “Swing and the Lindy Hop: Dance, Venue, Media, and Tradition” by Howard Spring in American Music (Summer 1997), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam, Oh Mister Jelly by Bill Russell, Why New Orleans Matters by Tom Piazza, Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History edited by Robert Walser, The Oxford Companion to Jazz.

HUMANITIES 33

10 f o OUR

finest

34 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

ON SEPTEMBER 10, PRESIDENT OBAMA BESTOWED the National Humanities Medal on a diverse set of humanists and one institution, representing a vast range of intellectual and creative achievement.

Among the winners were a course in the humanities for low-income adults; a nature writer and memoirist who writes poetry and novels; a landscape architect who champions historic preservation of African-American landmarks; a philosopher who writes novels; a historian and editor whose work reflects her own AfricanAmerican family’s long and distinguished history; a short-story writer and novelist who writes of the cultural in-between and is now writing in Italian; a specialist in Arabic literature who has become a noted commentator on American law and culture; a western writer and screenwriter who is also a well-known book seller; a historian who has pioneered the history of Latinas in the United States; and a chef who has become a spokesperson and activist for organic foods and healthier eating.

the Bard Clemente Course for the Humanities and professor of French and comparative literature at Bard College. More than ten thousand adult students have attended Clemente Courses, which take place over an academic year, usually four hours a week from September to May. This fall, students will begin thirty Clemente Courses nationwide.

Those who enroll pay no tuition and receive the assigned books for free. They also receive transportation vouchers for themselves and their children and free child care during class, removing crucial barriers to attendance. Although the work is challenging, more than half of enrollees complete the Clemente Course, for which they can receive college credits.

“A large number of people have continued and have gone on to college,” van Zuylen says, but “I never think of ‘Clemente success’ as going on to college.” Instead, she says, it means a student who “is now solidly ready to participate” in democracy and the community and engaging with the world in a new way. “Doing something for yourself, not anyone else, reflecting on something, learning—that opens up a space inside of you.”

In one survey, Clemente graduates reported that improvements in communication skills and confidence make it easier to communicate with those in authority: teachers, counselors, principals, bosses, supervisors, college professors, and law enforcement. Another study of Clemente graduates from Massachusetts found a wealth of other positive effects, including more confidence speaking in groups and more encouragement of children and other family members to pursue education. Of the Massachusetts Clemente graduates, seven out of ten went on to different kinds of coursework, including college.

Van Zuylen also teaches literature in a Clemente Course, where she finds that fictional characters are often a way to mediate difficult issues. “When we talked about Antigone, daughter of incest, suddenly this theme of abuse came up in the class,” she recalls. “Although everyone had the respect to keep talking about it through the text.”

Clemente Courses include a Spanish-language course and courses focused on the languages and cultures of Native American people. There are also Clemente Courses outside the United States. In 2017, the Clemente Course will pilot a new initiative aimed at struggling veterans, including a partnership with Antioch University in Seattle and a partnership with Veterans First in Phoenix.

The most telling accounts of the Clemente Course are in the voices of graduates. One Clemente graduate wrote in the Massachusetts survey: “Everything that I’m doing right now and everything that I will be doing in the future has to do with the Clemente program. Clemente was the starter. It was kind of like [turning] on the engine.” Wrote another, in describing the course’s impact: “Poetry awakens something in my mind. It’s my medication: healthy for your mind and healthy for your soul.”

—Esther Ferington

CLEMENTE COURSE IN THE HUMANITIES In a culture where vocational training can seem like the one and only answer to poverty and unemployment, the Clemente Course in the Humanities marches to the beat of a different drummer. Its founder, the late Earl Shorris, argued that low-income adults could benefit just as much as Ivy League freshmen from learning about the humanities— and that they should have the same access to them. The humanities “give people a sense of self, to see the world and themselves differently,” he said. “People who know the humanities become good citizens, become active, not acted upon.”

Shorris, who was a writer, invented the Clemente Course twenty years ago as he interviewed prison inmates and others mired in deep economic distress for his book New American Blues: A Journey Through Poverty to Democracy. In 1995, he organized the first course at lower Manhattan’s Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center, for which the Clemente Course is named. Students had to be at least 18, have an income of less than 150 percent of the federal poverty line, and be able to read a tabloid newspaper—much the same requirements as today, except that at the beginning there was a maximum age as well. Highly qualified faculty members taught the five classes that still make up the Clemente Course: philosophy, literature, art history, American history, and critical thinking and writing.

The experience was so powerful that the 1995–96 course soon inspired many more. Shorris helped develop independently run Clemente Courses around the United States and in other countries, and received a National Humanities Medal for his efforts. Since 1996, New York’s Bard College has administered the Clemente Course, granting academic credit to successful students and providing critical support through professional development, outreach, academic oversight, and fundraising.

Although Shorris died of cancer in 2012, the courses—a number of which are sponsored by state humanities councils—continue to expand and thrive. “It’s grown immensely,” says Marina van Zuylen, academic director of

—Richard Getler

Esther Ferington is a freelance editor, writer, and content developer based in Northern Virginia.

HUMANITIES 35

—Phyllis Rose

I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest.

I’d half-awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.

ANNIE DILLARD The award of a National Humanities Medal to Annie Dillard will bring more attention to a writer who does her best to stay out of the spotlight. “I lay low,” Dillard tells visitors to her official website, which she rarely updates.

“I’ve never promoted myself or my books.”

A sense of solitude informs most of Dillard’s writing, including Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which she describes as “a sustained nonfiction narrative about the fields, creeks, woods, and mountains near Roanoke, Virginia.”

The book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1975. Eudora Welty, reviewing Pilgrim in the New York Times, noted its deeply private tone. “Annie Dillard is the only person in her book, substantially the only one in her world,” she observed. “I recall no outside human speech coming to break the long soliloquy of the author.”

Other voices do enter Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as when Dillard stops during an interstate drive and chats with a gas station attendant. Such moments remind the reader that Dillard isn’t a mystic cloistered among the trees, but a modern woman balancing the concerns of work, family, and finding her place in the world. Nature dwells as part of—not apart from—the domestic in Dillard’s work.

“In Virginia, late one January afternoon while I had a leg of lamb in the oven, I took a short walk,” she begins an essay in her 1982 prose collection, Teaching a Stone to Talk.

That’s vintage Dillard—the leg of lamb paired with the first leg of an exploration, a personal odyssey beginning, as so many odysseys do, from a family hearth.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek appeared at a time of emerging environmental awareness, and its chronicle of a natural world near cities and suburbs affirmed a connection the country was just starting to sense in a new way. Dillard also gained attention because she was writing about nature in a genre long dominated by men. Her arrival on the literary scene coincided with the burgeoning women’s movement, giving another dimension to the book’s success.

Dillard doesn’t treat nature as a place of pastoral pieties or easy simplicities, but a crucible where complicated truths come into play. The opening passage of Pilgrim exemplifies her vision:

36 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

This is Dillard’s world—and, as she quietly reminds us, ours, too: a universe touched by motherhood and death, the beautiful and the profane, roses and blood. It’s also a landscape in which the landscape itself—a field or creek, stone, or tree—offers a connection to the cosmic.

She evokes transcendentalist themes, as Edward Abbey recognized when he compared her to Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau “and Emerson were big influences, as were the other Americans: Willa Cather, Faulkner, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Wallace Stevens, Zora Neale Hurston,” Dillard noted in a recent e-mail. The writer she admires most, though, is the late Italian author Primo Levi.

“He’s a writer of integrity: no sentimentalism, no cheap shots, no grandstanding, no quarter asked,” says Dillard, “and tireless in his lifelong pursuit of the truth, however displeasing.”

Dillard is married to Thoreau biographer Robert D. Richardson, with whom she connected after writing him a fan letter about his Thoreau book. They spend most of their time in Massachusetts, Florida, and Virginia. She has taught in Washington state and Connecticut, but grew up in Pittsburgh, a period recounted in her winning 1987 memoir, An American Childhood. Dillard has also written poetry and fiction, but she is best known for her nature writing. A new collection of her prose, The Abundance, comes out next year. Her readers have come to know what Noel Perrin wrote of her in 1987: “She is one of those people who seem to be more fully alive than most of us, more nearly wide-awake than human beings generally get to be.”

—Danny Heitman

Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Louisiana, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.

—Rosalinda Fly

EVERETT FLY At his first meeting as a board member for what was then called the Texas Council for the Humanities, Everett Fly was asked, “Why is there an architect on the humanities council board?”

The newcomer had an answer. “For me, landscape architecture’s connection to the humanities is the culture of the people represented or expressed in what we design,” he said.

Fly’s ideas have influenced not only the humanities council (he served for eleven years) but also his profession. For nearly four decades, he has been using architecture to find and preserve crucial places and stories of American culture.

His fascination with history took shape when he was growing up in San Antonio, Texas, where he still lives with his wife, Rosalinda. The city is, of course, home of the Alamo, the Majestic Theatre, Spanish missions, and much more. It boasts “a tremendous mix of cultures here,” he explains, “people from Spain, Mexico, Native Americans, German immigrants, Czech, black, you name it.”

After studying architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, Fly became the first African-American graduate of the master’s program in landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. When he noticed that his classes rarely mentioned the buildings and places significant to African-American culture and heritage, he commenced a research project he calls “Black Settlements in America,” a career-long study of the origin and evolution of historic black settlements.

“When I started working with the history of these black settlements and towns, it was really a quest to answer questions for myself,” Fly says. Or, as he told Humanities Texas in 2013: “I was always interested in how people related to buildings, not just physical styles of buildings or building materials, not just the abstract aspects of architecture and landscape architecture. I wanted to know how people related to them. Why did people settle in a place, or why did they build a building a certain way?”

Ever since then, Fly has been saving and unearthing historically significant but forgotten or unrecognized Nativeand African-American settlements, which he numbers at over 1,200: Hobson City, Alabama; Idlewild, Michigan; Nicodemus, Kansas, and many more. Fly has been summoned to towns across the land. Using old maps and records from archives as well as his experienced eye for discerning artifacts like fence lines, he reveals history that has gone undocumented.

Fly’s work might help properties get listed as historically significant, or result in them becoming tourist destinations and educational opportunities. For example, his work protected Eatonville, Florida (the oldest incorporated African-American municipality in America, whose history stretches back to the late nineteenth century, and childhood home of writer Zora Neale Hurston), from a road-widening project.

“It’s hard to travel in any state and not find some significant place or building site where there’s not been some contributions of African Americans,” Fly says. “Black craftspeople over the centuries have worked on everything from the White House to naval shipyards to the state capitol in Austin,” he says. Fly recently salvaged hand-forged nails from a decades-old building crafted by African Americans, which “represented the hand trades and crafts of the black folk that built it,” he says.

To Fly, preservation is about more than the past. “When different groups of people understand how their ancestors contributed and worked together in the built environment, they realize that no one person can do everything—make the bricks, the glass, the nails,” he says. “It takes a whole team of folks to put it together.”

Just as Fly has helped change the humanities’ view of architecture, humanities-infused work has been part of a broader transformation in his profession. Today architects increasingly go beyond aesthetic considerations to ask how buildings and places affect the people who use them.

“I was trained studying the great masters of architecture and I refer to some of those masters every day,” Fly acknowledges. “But as societies and culture evolve, the perspectives change, the values change, the mix of the folks involved changes. Architecture is one of the professions that need to adjust along with those, as we need to address everything from environmental issues to social issues.”

Fly’s seemingly obscure historical work is especially relevant in this year of deadly cultural conflict in places like Ferguson and Charleston. “If we want our American cities to be healthy and sustain them in the future,” he says, “we have to find ways to value not just new office buildings and developers that have the most money and political clout.

You find collective history in places where everyday people worked and made contributions that are just as valuable as a big businessperson or landowner. If you can find those connections to their history, people can have a closer relationship to their community.”

—Brett Campbell

Brett Campbell writes about the arts for the Wall Street Journal, Oregon ArtsWatch, and other publications. His biography of American composer Lou Harrison, coauthored with Bill Alves, will be published by Indiana University Press next year.

HUMANITIES 37

—Brad DeCecco

REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN The writing of fiction might seem far removed from the rigorous dissections of philosophy, but Rebecca Newberger Goldstein has spent decades blending art and argument with great success. An analytic philosopher and the author of six novels and many short stories, Goldstein has also written biographical studies of philosopher Baruch Spinoza and mathematician Kurt Gödel. Like all her novels, her most recent, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, was animated by philosophical issues, in this case contemporary debates on atheism and religious conviction.

And, in 2014, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away made an inventive case for philosophy’s relevance, in which the ancient immortal converses with modern characters, such as a Google software engineer. (They debate whether ethics can be crowdsourced.)

Goldstein’s novels are often set in academia, and many grapple with the complexities of genius. “I’m fascinated with genius of all sorts,” says Goldstein, who herself received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1996. The Orthodox Jewish culture she grew up in revered genius, putting Talmudic genius near the pinnacle of human life—but such a status was closed to women. “I wondered,” she says, “What happens to a woman of genius?”

Early on, Goldstein “wanted to write a philosophically motivated novel,” and did so in The Mind-Body Problem (1983). (It begins, “I’m often asked what it’s like to be married to a genius.”) She has continued to produce philosophical literature—and imaginatively inspired philosophy—ever since. “I’m obsessed by what I call ‘mattering theory,’” she explains. “What is it in life that matters?”

For her, what matters is this world, not the next: Like her husband, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, Goldstein is 38 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

a prominent atheist and humanist. In 2011, the American Humanist Association designated her its Humanist of the Year. As a child, she absorbed Judaism’s focus on doing good works on earth, rather than aspiring to posthumous salvation. “Judaism is very this-world-oriented,” she explains. “That’s an aspect that I deeply related to.”

The Newberger family lived in straitened circumstances, though surrounded by prosperity in the suburban Westchester County town of White Plains, New York.

Goldstein’s father was a cantor in an Orthodox synagogue.

“Yet we never felt deprived,” she recalls. “The standards my family used in evaluating a good life were non-materialistic.”

“As a kid, I was going to be a mathematician,” she recalls.

A precocious girl fascinated by science, she married physicist Sheldon Goldstein at 19. (“I try to keep up with science,” she says. “One way of doing this is to marry various scientists!”)

In 1972, Goldstein graduated from Barnard College in philosophy with highest honors, then went on to earn a PhD in philosophy at Princeton. In 1976, she returned to Barnard to teach subjects like philosophy of science and mathematical logic for ten years. Since 2011 she has been a visiting professor of philosophy at the New College of the Humanities in London.

A critical juncture in both life and career set the stage for her first novel. “I had just come through an emotional time,” she explains on her website, “having not only become a mother but having also lost my father, whom I adored. . . . I found that the formal, precise questions I had been trained to analyze weren’t gripping me the way they once had. Suddenly, I was asking the most ‘unprofessional’ sorts of questions (I would have snickered at them as a graduate student), such as how does all this philosophy I’ve studied help me to deal with the brute contingencies of life?”

She turned to literature and wrote The Mind-Body Problem, whose title the New York Times reviewer glossed as “sex versus cerebration,” later referencing the “cerebral foreplay” of the book, whose heroine, Renee, explores Plato, Descartes, and Spinoza while discovering the pleasures of the body. It’s a funny coming-of-age novel that was well received, but “writing novels set back my career as a philosophy professor,” says Goldstein. “I’d published this sexy novel, and my academic colleagues were horrified. It was bad enough that I was a woman; writing fiction wasn’t kosher, it was frivolous.”

But fiction was essential to Goldstein’s intellectual and spiritual quest. Religious affiliations, for example— unlike religious beliefs of the sort she abandoned in college—entail complexities that “aren’t always based on fallacious reasoning,” she says. “When questions get more complicated—maybe as emotional and relational issues factor in—they can become a novel, as only a novel can do justice to the human complexity. I’ll start to think, ‘Someone should write a novel about this,’ and that becomes a call to my unconscious, which starts throwing out characters that start to grow on me. To me, there’s a continuity between what I think about as a philosopher and a novelist.”

—Craig Lambert ­ raig Lambert is the author of Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen C Jobs That Fill Your Day (Counterpoint, 2015).

—Harvard University

EVELYN BROOKS HIGGINBOTHAM Some of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s earliest memories are of the 1538 Ninth Street, NW, Washington, D.C., home of Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History). Inside the three-story Victorian row house, she would sit and watch Woodson and secretary-treasurer, Albert N. D. Brooks, her father, conduct business and chart the organization’s future.

Many of the founding figures of the African-American history profession—Rayford Logan, Charles Wesley, Benjamin Quarles—became familiar faces. “I believe that my experience is unique,” Higginbotham says, “in that I knew from childhood that I wanted to teach, research, and write about the history of African Americans.”

For Higginbotham, widow of the late federal jurist A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., the study and institutionalization of African-American history have always been deeply personal. “My father introduced me to history in my formative years through the stories he told me about his siblings, parents, and grandparents,” she reflects. Her great-grandfather Albert Royal Brooks, born a slave in Chesterfield County, Virginia, in 1817, would in freedom serve on the jury to try former Confederate president Jefferson Davis. His wife, Lucy Goode Brooks, established one of the first post–Civil War orphanages for black children. Higginbotham’s grandfather Walter Henderson Brooks served as pastor of Nineteenth St. Baptist Church, the oldest black Baptist congregation in Washington, D.C., from 1882 to 1945. And her aunt, Julia Evangeline Brooks, stood among the incorporators of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first African-American sorority.

“In many ways,” Higginbotham says, “the family stories inspired me to pursue the discipline of history and gave me an appreciation of the importance of individual lives, broadly speaking, as a lens or mirror to much larger social and political contexts.” She received her BA in history in 1969 from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, her master’s from Howard University in 1974, and doctorate from the University of Rochester in 1984.

Employed in the early 1970s in the Manuscript Division of Howard’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Higginbotham came to see the fullness and complexity of black life, gaining what she describes as a “different perspective on history” and appreciation for women’s contributions, like that of the pioneering religious leader, educator, social reformer, and black feminist Nannie Helen Burroughs.

Higginbotham’s discovery of Burroughs set her on “a lifelong intellectual journey” to tell the stories of “individuals, groups, and institutions left out of the traditional American narrative.” Her focus on women’s history served as an opportunity to learn more about her own history as well. Her grandfather’s church had been the site of the founding of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896.

Immersion into Burroughs’s social, political and religious world led to Higginbotham’s groundbreaking 1993 book Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880–1920, a work of meticulous research and theoretical innovation. Higginbotham both named and explained the “politics of respectability,” a strategy for racial uplift and political advancement that remains a topic of debate. Righteous Discontent and her many other writings reflect a commitment to the intellectual history of black women, work that entails biographical excavation but also engagement with ideas, so that, as Higginbotham asserts, “the mind and thought of black women” are respected.

Higginbotham is herself a part of this intellectual history.

She has held faculty positions at Dartmouth College (her father’s alma mater), University of Maryland, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University, where she is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African American Studies. Higginbotham served as editor in chief of The Harvard Guide to African-American History and coeditor, with Henry Louis Gates Jr., of the 12-volume African American National Biography.

Higginbotham’s most meaningful work, however, was coauthoring with John Hope Franklin the ninth edition of his landmark book From Slavery to Freedom. “Franklin, more than any other historian, brought black history into the mainstream of American history,” she says fondly of the scholar, mentor, and friend she had known since five years of age. Before his passing, Franklin told her that she had “given the book new life.”

This year, Higginbotham is running for president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The curious child who once played amongst the stacks of papers in Carter G. Woodson’s household office now hopes to lead the organization that Woodson founded 100 years ago and that her father shepherded after Woodson’s death. In thinking about the next century of AfricanAmerican history, in thinking about the pioneers who came before her, in thinking about her father, Higginbotham sees the work ahead as “a duty, not just a privilege.”

—Chad Williams Chad Williams is associate professor of African and AfroAmerican Studies at Brandeis University.

HUMANITIES 39

—Marco Delogu

JHUMPA LAHIRI Jhumpa Lahiri was shy as a child. At a young age, she began reading and writing, and a new connection to the world opened up through the words she found and placed on the page. But it wasn’t always so easy, or straightforward. As she got older, she no longer wrote. Out of fear, or out of insecurity. When describing herself as a young adult, she says, “I felt so lost. I was just searching for that thing, that place, that kept me sane and kept me whole.”

How did she start writing again?

“I just had no choice. I was so afraid to open up that box again, and go inside there, and yet I knew that it was the one place where I had to be in order to survive, to live this life. We are animals, and we’re built to survive. And I knew that my survival as a person, as a human being, depended on writing.”

She attended Boston University for her MFA, and then received a seven-month fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown. Through “wonderful teachers” and the encouragement of peers, her confidence grew again.

She has published two novels and two collections of short stories in English, and her fifth and most recent book is a collection of essays she wrote in Italian while living in Rome, titled In Altre Parole (In Other Words). She received the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award for her first book, Interpreter of Maladies, at the age of 32.

She has been a finalist for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award. President Obama appointed her as a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in 2010. Literary critics have characterized her as one of the foremost contemporary writers on the immigrant experience in America. This fall, she will join 40 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

Princeton’s creative writing faculty. It is no stretch to say she is one of the most influential writers at work today.

Lahiri was born in London to Indian parents from West Bengal. When her father was studying at the London School of Economics, MIT offered him a job as a university librarian. Her parents came to the Unites States. “not from necessity, but from choice, from curiosity.” Lahiri was two years old. They planned to stay for a few years. They’ve lived in Rhode Island for over forty years now.

Bengali was “the first language of [her] life,” the language she spoke at home with her parents. But English was what she spoke outside of home, in school, with friends, and the language in which she read and wrote. But she says that though she has a “technical full mastery of English, I never felt it was fully mine. It was the language in which I built a life away and apart from my mother and father, which was always emphasizing the distance between us.”

Her family traveled back to Calcutta often to visit relatives. Seeing her parents so emotionally connected to their point of origin raised many questions in her own mind. She wondered what her emotional point of origin was; she didn’t feel the same connection to India as her parents did, nor did she feel genuinely linked to America.

“At many times in my life, I wished I could be like any other American . . . feel really a part of it, really woven into it. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it. And all of my writing has come out of that.”

However, Lahiri has recently found a place where she’s “never felt as at home.” She has been living for the past three years with her husband and two children in Rome.

For years, she studied Italian. The impetus to do so came from instinct: Over twenty years ago, she traveled to Italy for a weeklong trip, and within a day or two of arriving, she had “a very intense reaction to the language,” which made her feel the need to begin learning Italian.

She’s now fluent. For several years, she has read only in Italian. And a week after moving to Rome, she began writing solely in Italian. In Altre Parole is a reflection on the experience of turning her life toward another language.

Through discovering a third language, it seems she has found herself. She has built her life and career by following instincts. When describing what she continually strives for in her work, she says what interests her is “moving forward, and moving on to unexplored territory.”

—Elizabeth Word Gutting Elizabeth Word Gutting is a writer in Washington, D.C., and the program director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

—Indiana University

FEDWA MALTI-DOUGLAS As a child, she listened to her aunt tell stories like those from Thousand and One Nights and learned the traditions of her foremothers. Her father, a physician in the family’s hometown of Deir el-Qamar, would take her with him to his clinic in Beirut, where she got to know his patients. In general, she took in the world around her: the domestic ritual of soap-making, the slaughter of chickens for a meal, and the hills from which her village, once the summer retreat of emirs, had sprouted half a millennium earlier. “I could see the palace from my house,” she says.

In their broad contours, Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s early years presaged much of the diverse scholarly career that followed. Her sense of history was born in Lebanon, as was her concern with the human body and its ailments, and, above all, her commitment to language and the lives of women. Even in a field as multidisciplinary and politically active as gender studies, Malti-Douglas stands out, a nimble intellect known for the perspicacity with which she has engaged some of the most timely—and often most controversial—intersections of the last four decades: feminism and Islam, politics and sex, medicine and the soul, to name a few.

The Martha C. Kraft Professor of Humanities emeritus at Indiana University, Malti-Douglas began her formal education at French Catholic boarding schools in Lebanon before emigrating at the age of 12 to the United States. The transition—particularly from her native Lebanese Arabic to English—was not easy. “What saved me in high school,” she says, “was my French. I joined the French club, if you can believe it. And I read a lot; I would go to the library and pick up one after another of Dickens’s works.”

Her English improved throughout high school, but at the same time, she found, her Arabic faded. It wasn’t until her undergraduate years at Cornell University that she decided to reconnect with that lost part of her childhood by studying Semitic languages. The decision led her to specialize in Arabic in graduate school—which she did primarily at the University of California, Los Angeles,

and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris—and, later, to tackle subjects ranging from the bukhala (misers) of medieval Arab literature to the comic strips, political and otherwise, of the Middle East and North Africa today (which she researched with her husband, Allen Douglas).

Some of her most important scholarship, however, came with Men, Women, and God(s), an extended study of the Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi’s oeuvre.

Although a popular and prolific writer, Saadawi had been ignored, when not outright attacked, by academics in the West and the Middle East, who tended to regard her critiques of patriarchy in the Muslim world— including such practices as female excision and honor killing—as more polemical than artistic. By theorizing Saadawi’s iconoclastic position in Arab culture and then meticulously unraveling the poetic complexities of her novels, Malti-Douglas pushed Saadawi’s work and agenda decisively into the sphere of serious academic debate.

For all the thousands of pages that she has devoted to interpreting and expanding her motherland’s heritage, Malti-Douglas is also, as she once put it, “an unashamed lover of America.” She has written about and taught on the Americans with Disabilities Act (Malti-Douglas was herself diagnosed with a hereditary form of muscular dystrophy in graduate school) and, toward the end of the Clinton era, she wrote a book called The Starr Report Disrobed. The latter took an unexpectedly literary approach to Ken Starr’s legal account of the Lewinsky affair, teasing out of its details lively readings of sexuality and gender in the United States. “I just thought that it was such a fascinating text that it needed to be written about as a text,” she says.

Recognized for her scholarly endeavors by the American Philosophical Society and the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences, among other organizations, Malti-Douglas has also published two novels, written op-eds for the popular media, and appeared as an expert commentator on such television news programs as Greta Van Susteren’s On the Record and Lester Holt’s America at War. Intellectually restless even in retirement, Malti-Douglas has focused increasingly on her creative writing, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree from Bennington College (where she worked with poetic luminaries Amy Gerstler and Major Jackson) and studying at the Writers Studio in New York. Her post-academe output so far includes a chapbook of visual poetry, the beginnings of a third novel, and a nearly complete draft of her memoirs. Asked about the remarkable variety of her career, Malti-Douglas says simply that she doesn’t want to write the same book over and over again. “For me, that would be death,” she says. “I need to keep exploring.”

—James Williford James Williford is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.

HUMANITIES 41

—Courtesy Diana Ossana

LARRY MCMURTRY “I don’t remember either of my parents ever reading me a story—perhaps that’s why I’ve made up so many,” wrote Larry McMurtry in his first memoir, Books. By his own count, he is author of fifty works, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove and many other novels, but also an Oscar-winning screenplay, three memoirs, a short biography of Crazy Horse, and a collection of essays.

In a telephone interview, he avoided making any pronouncements about the state of the humanities, maintaining, “I don’t myself theorize,” adding, however, that he’s “saddened by what’s being lost,” as people read more devices and fewer books.

Larry McMurtry was born in 1936 on a ranch outside of Archer City, Texas. His first library was a set of 19 books given to him by a cousin setting off for war in 1942.

McMurtry read and reread the adventure novels. The gift, he once wrote, “changed my life.”

Among other books McMurtry remembers reading as a child was an abbreviated version of Don Quixote. Looking back, he recalls pondering “the grave differences (comically set) between Sancho and the Don. Between the two is where fiction, as I have mostly read and written it, lives.”

Entering Rice Institute (later Rice University) in Houston in 1954, McMurtry’s reading life took off as he “strolled in wonder through the stacks of the Fondren Library, which then held about 600,000 books.” He left Rice and graduated from North Texas State Teachers College, but then returned to Rice for a master’s. He also spent a year at Stanford University as a Stegner Fellow, where he studied with Irish short-story writer Frank O’Connor. By the late fifties, McMurtry had manuscripts for two novels under his arm.

The one, Horseman, Pass By, would become in 1961 his first published novel, later made into the movie Hud. The other, Leaving Cheyenne, would be McMurtry’s second novel, and about which Marshall Sprague wrote in the New York Times that “if Chaucer were a Texan writing today, and only 27 42 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

years old, this is how he would have written and this is how he would have felt.”

“The best part of a writer’s life is actually doing it,” McMurtry wrote in his second memoir, Literary Life. “The thrill lies in the rush of sentences, the gradual arrival of characters who at once seem to have their own life.”

Two of those characters are Emma Horton in the Terms of Endearment novels and Duane Moore in the five Last Picture Show books. When Emma died, he writes, “I felt the loss most keenly.” And about Duane Moore, he admitted in Literary Life, “It would be strange if I didn’t miss him. He was not my alter ego in the first books, but he was certainly my alter ego in the last books.”

Lonesome Dove, McMurtry’s 1985 novel about a pair of irascible Texas Rangers, attempted to demythologize the cowboy. He told one New York Times reviewer, “I’m a critic of the myth of the cowboy. I don’t feel that it’s a myth that pertains, and since it’s a part of my heritage I feel it’s a legitimate task to criticize it.” Two other novels followed that were also critical of the cowboy myth, and were, as was Lonesome Dove to a large extent, misread as supportive of those legends. He contends there’s a danger of oversimplification, once telling the Times, that “the myth of the clean-living cowboy devoted to agrarian pursuits and the rural way of life is extremely limiting.”

McMurtry lives for part of the year in Tucson, Arizona, with wife Norma Faye Kesey (novelist Ken Kesey’s widow), sharing the house of his writing partner, Diana Ossana, and the three—all residents of Texas—spend the rest of the year in Archer City. McMurtry and Ossana have collaborated on several works, including the screenplay of Brokeback Mountain, based on the short story by E. Annie Proulx.

With the revenue earned from movie rights and writing screenplays, McMurtry has garnered a reputation as one of America’s leading bookmen, having had antiquarian and secondhand bookstores for many years. While living and teaching near Washington, D.C., McMurtry founded Booked Up in Georgetown. As famous bookstores closed their doors in Washington and elsewhere in the seventies, he and his partner, Marcia Carter, bought up the stocks and filled their own store. They also bought from their wealthy and well-read neighbors in Georgetown and Dupont Circle.

Much of the library of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, for example, came their way one cold February day.

At 79, McMurtry is still the kind of cowboy he’s been most of his life, herding words into paragraphs that become books, and herding books from all over the country into the inventory of Booked Up in Archer City, Texas.

—Steve Moyer Steve Moyer is associate editor of HUMANITIES.

— Courtesy L. Ruiz

VICKI L. RUIZ As a transfer student at Florida State University in the mid 1970s, Vicki Ruiz did not think she’d be on the vanguard of creating the field of Chicana/Chicano studies in the United States. She just wanted to be a schoolteacher, a career her mother always encouraged her to pursue. So when Jean Gould Bryant, then an assistant professor in history, asked Ruiz if she’d ever considered graduate school, Ruiz demurred.

“I said, ‘Hmm, graduate school. That’s for rich people.

That’s for smart people. I’m neither,’” Ruiz says. But Bryant convinced her that she was smart enough and could get a fellowship. Intrigued, Ruiz followed Bryant’s advice about how to prepare. By the fall of 1977, she was enrolled in the graduate history program at Stanford University.

Despite having read only a few books about it, Ruiz knew she wanted to focus on Chicana/Chicano history in graduate school. At the time, the field was small and focused mostly on men. Ruiz wanted to focus on women, which was virtually unheard of. “Mexican-American women’s history did not exist in what today we would deem an intellectually credible sense,” Ruiz recalls. In the early 1980s, there were only two monographs on the subject, and when Ruiz graduated from Stanford, she became the fourth MexicanAmerican woman to ever receive a PhD in history in the United States.

Undeterred, Ruiz set out with other intellectuals such as Louise Año Nuevo Kerr, the late Shirlene Soto, Antonia Castañeda, and others to create a field and bring attention to the history of Mexican-American women in the United States. “One challenge has been showing that Latinos and Mexicans did not arrive the day before yesterday, contrary to many media stereotypes,” Ruiz says. “There are people who have been in this country for many generations.”

Ruiz’s work has also focused on dismantling the idea that Latinas are docile women whose domain is in the home.

Based on her dissertation, her book Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950, which is now in its eighth printing, tells the story of the Mexican women and Jewish women who helped form the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) labor union, which, among other things, ensured female workers would earn the same as their male counterparts.

Her three-volume Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, which Ruiz coedited with Virginia Sánchez Korrol, was the first encyclopedia about the contributions of Latinas in the United States and includes close to six hundred entries. “I think it represents a coming-of-age for the field,” Ruiz says. The book covers a grand sweep of history starting with the first European settlement in the United States, St. Augustine, established in 1565 by Spanish speakers. It moves on to cover Latinas fighting for civil rights in the 1940s, and even has entries about current stars like Gloria Estefan. The book was named a 2007 Best in Reference book by the New York Public Library and an Outstanding Title by the American Association of University Presses.

Over her 35-year academic career, Ruiz has written, edited, or coedited more than a dozen books, been appointed to the National Council on the Humanities, was a 2015 National Women’s History Month honoree, and was named a Latina magazine “Woman of the Year in Education” in 2000.

Ruiz is the first in her family to get an advanced degree.

Ruiz’s mother dropped out of school when she was 13 to be a donut girl and help her widowed mother and two siblings, but she pushed her own daughters to finish school and go to college. Ruiz’s family also instilled in her an appreciation for storytelling. Ruiz grew up listening to her mother and grandmother talk about being Mexican in America. And when she was in graduate school, she heard another story, that of the late Luisa Moreno, a former union organizer and civil rights activist in the United States.

Ruiz interviewed Moreno as part of a project of one of her graduate-school mentors. Moreno was generous with her time, taking Ruiz to dinner and around Guadalajara, where she then lived. At the end of her stay, Ruiz told Moreno that she was going to write her dissertation about her, but Moreno told Ruiz to write her dissertation about the cannery women and union organizers of Southern California.

Ruiz followed her advice, though she’s now working on a biography of Moreno, and telling one more story that many in the United States have never heard.

In one of her books, Ruiz quotes Chicana artist Irma Barbosa, who said, “Stories are the spirit threads passed on from generation to generation.” It applies to Ruiz’s career.

“That’s one of the things I’ve tried to do in collecting oral histories . . . to honor how the past becomes memory and how memory becomes history.”

—Rosalind Early Rosalind Early is the associate editor for Washington University in St. Louis’s alumni magazine.

HUMANITIES 43

—Amanda Marsalis

ALICE WATERS When Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971, she wasn’t hoping for anything more than a community restaurant, a place for her friends to gather and eat.

“It was as naïve as that!” says Waters, then a Montessori schoolteacher in her mid twenties. “I was looking for taste, the taste of food I’d eaten in France. I was looking for a certain way of life. I was thinking about a philosophy of food that’s been around since the beginning of civilization: You buy what’s in the market, you eat what’s locally in season, you share it with family and friends, and you take care of the land. I’m grateful that I had a community of friends I could count on to take care of me if I wasn’t making money—because that’s certainly what happened in the beginning.”

Now midway through its fifth decade, Chez Panisse still occupies the same bungalow on Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue, but its influence extends far beyond its walls, beyond California, and across the United States. Waters’s search for good food within what was otherwise a “fast food culture” led her to develop a network of local, organic farmers to supply the restaurant, and to become one of the country’s most ardent advocates for organic food.

“Activism and the restaurant were all of a piece for me,” Waters says. “I’d been involved in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley as a student, and in the counterculture movement to stop the war in Vietnam. This was a different kind of activism: finding a humanistic way to run a restaurant. That’s been the work and the mission of Chez Panisse. We never compromise on the food, and 44 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

we’re willing to pay the farmers and ranchers to do their good work.”

For such efforts, Waters was named Best Chef in America by the James Beard Foundation in 1992—and was the first woman to win the honor. The acclaim of the restaurant only solidified Waters’s belief that eating is a political act, and that the table is a powerful means to social justice and positive change.

“When my daughter Fanny was born, I knew the restaurant couldn’t be an island unto itself. I had to think about her future. That’s when I started to think of public education, that place where we can reach every child, as a way to change the world.”

In 1996, to celebrate the restaurant’s twentyfifth anniversary, Waters founded the Chez Panisse Foundation, now called the Edible Schoolyard Project, to build and share an edible education curriculum for prekindergarten through high school. The project promotes a vision of gardens and kitchens as interactive classrooms for any and all academic subjects.

“I took Maria Montessori’s philosophies on experiential learning and applied them to teaching in a garden, teaching in a kitchen, as a way to open children’s senses,” Waters says. Today there are nearly 5,000 locations— school cafeterias, classrooms, support organizations, and businesses—in the Edible Schoolyard network.

And Alice Waters isn’t finished. She’d like to see the principles of the Edible Schoolyard inform a national initiative—“feeding all children, engaging them at the table, making school lunch an academic subject. You lift up the farmers, the teachers, and the students into a new kind of experience, one they will carry with them through their lives. We as a country just have to decide that we will do it. We have to make it part of the core curriculum.”

Waters is an outspoken advocate for school lunch reform on the national level, for ensuring every public school student has a nutritious daily lunch, free of charge. “We as a nation talk about poverty and inequality. Well, this is the place of social justice. It’s the most important thing to me.”

Waters is also the author of a dozen books, many of them cookbooks offering recipes for the kind of simple, delicious food that has made Chez Panisse a legend, inspiring everyday home cooks to eat locally, seasonally, and sustainably.

“We are part of nature, and we’re all longing to be connected to nature again,” Waters says. “I think that’s why we want to eat in restaurants where the food changes with the seasons, where we’re eating something that’s alive, where we’re connecting with other people. It’s something we still have in our genes.”

—Molly Wizenberg Molly Wizenberg is the author of Delancey: A Man, A Woman, A Restaurant, A Marriage and A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table.

NOTEWORTHY

dent’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in partnership with National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, and Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Started in 2010, Teen Reading Lounge is a program that combines scholar-led reading with creative projects for kids aged 12 to 18; it has already been held in 57 libraries across Pennsylvania. Projects have included filmmaking, cooking, archery, wilderness survival, and other topics the teens relate to the books they’re reading. More than 90 percent of participants report afterward that they would choose the library as a place to hang out, encourage others to visit, and help develop new programming.

CHEF AND NATIONAL HUMANITIES MEDALIST ALICE WATERS TWEETS IN HONOR OF NEH’S 50TH ANNIVERSARY.

The exhibition at the garden reimagined Kahlo’s home, Casa Azul in Mexico City, and displayed more than a dozen of her paintings in the garden’s conservatory. It offered a Frida Kahlo lookalike contest, poetry readings and lectures, and a Day of the Dead celebration. During the end of the run, the museum extended its hours to give Kahlo fans more ways to enjoy the show.

THE LIBRARY GENERATION

—Photo by Robert Benson

Between May 16 and November 1, 2015, the NEH-funded exhibition “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life” broke the standing attendance record for the New York Botanical Garden, bringing an estimated 500,000 visitors to the Bronx institution. The previous record was 373,000 people, who came to see “Monet’s Garden” there in 2012. “We thought Frida Kahlo would be a wonderful thing,” the garden’s president Gregory Long told the New York Times, “but we never thought that it would outdo Monet.”

Evidently, Kahlo has an even bigger following, at least in recent years. For decades, Kahlo was considered just the long-suffering “wife of ” Mexican muralist and larger-than-life personality Diego Rivera. Kahlo, who was also an artist, painted almost exclusively self-portraits, which couldn’t compete commercially with Rivera’s monumental works. Hayden Herrera’s 1983 biography of Kahlo helped bring her work out of obscurity and triggered a slew of Kahlo exhibitions, an almost cult fan base, and even a Hollywood film starring Salma Hayek.

—Chris Flynn

MORE THAN MONET

Teen Reading Lounge, a project of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, has been named one of 50 finalists for the 2015 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award, which honors outstanding after-school and out-of-school programs for young people.

The award is given each year by the Presi-

HAPPY 50TH, NEH!

On NEH’s 50th anniversary, September 29, more than 1,500 tweets came from around the country with good wishes and reasons to love the humanities. The Twitter thunderclap that ran between 1 and 2 p.m. reached more than 3.9 million Twitter accounts and garnered more than 10.6 million impressions.

Among NEH’s friends and followers were historian Ed Ayers, filmmaker Ken Burns, cellist Yo Yo Ma, the Coast Guard, 40 state humanities councils, dozens of academic institutions, several legislators, and chef Alice Waters, who wrote, “I love the humanities because they help us realize the full depth of our human potential.” Don’t worry if you missed it, you can see highlights at storify.com/NEHgov/nehturns50, and there will be more celebrating throughout the year.

Also on September 29, NEH launched a website (50.neh.gov) devoted to telling about its first 50 years through the projects it has funded. If you’re even more curious about NEH’s early grants, they are now all online thanks to a two-year effort to digitize the paper punch cards called McBee cards, which recorded and categorized NEH grants—the very first one in 1966 to the American Society of Papyrologists to conduct a summer institute at Yale University. That grant, and all the others ever awarded by NEH, can be searched through NEH’s Funded Projects Query Form available from www.neh.gov.

—AL AN INSTALLATION OF PAPER DRESSES BY HUMBERTO SPINDOLA IN “FRIDA KAHLO: ART, GARDEN, LIFE.”

HUMANITIES 45

Around Nation the

A Roundup of Activities Sponsored by the State Humanities Councils

—Jesse Dittmar

COMPILED BY LAURA WOLFF SCANLAN

ROCKER AND AUTHOR PATTI SMITH TALKS IN TENNESSEE.

ALASKA

The Alaska Humanities Forum in Anchorage displays the art of KN Goodrich in November and Atz Kilcher in December.

Ten Alaskan artists were chosen to create ornaments for this year’s U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree (selected from the Chugach National Forest). The designs were used to inspire four thousand additional ornaments made 46 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

by students and community members across Alaska that will decorate the national tree and trees in congressional offices in Washington, D.C. ARIZONA

Spoken word artist Truth B. Told discusses his new book, Words I Remember, in Phoenix on Dec. 1.

FLORIDA

Veterans—The Telling Project premieres

on Tampa Bay’s WEDU PBS TV on Nov. 5 and will be made available to PBS stations nationwide.

“Isaac Burns Murphy: The Prince of Jockeys” is on display at the Coulson House in Pensacola through Dec. 15.

The exhibition explores the life of Murphy, an African-American jockey who won three Kentucky Derbies in the nineteenth century.

Eliot Kleinberg gives the talk

More than twenty Speakers Bureau and Kentucky Chautauqua programs are scheduled throughout the commonwealth during November and December.

Libraries hosting Prime Time Family Reading Time programs in November and December include the Shawnee Branch and Okolona Branch of the Louisville Free Public Library, Gallatin County Free Public Library in Warsaw, and the Garrard County Public Library in Lancaster.

“Florida’s Amazing History and Why You Should Care” at the Fort Myers Library South Building on Nov. 2.

Cynthia Barnett discusses her book Rain: A Natural and Cultural History at the St. Petersburg History Museum on Dec. 3.

ILLINOIS

Jeff Williams moderates a panel discussion following a screening of the PBS documentary Latino Americans at the Carbondale Public Library on Nov. 10.

Panelists include René Francisco Poitevin, Bridget Phillips, and Juana Duran.

The ChiWriMo National Novel Writing Month kickoff will be held at the Chicago Cultural Center on Nov. 15.

As part of the Designing the Social Good program, “Beyond the Building” takes place at the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library in Chicago on Nov. 19, and “Value and Viability” will be at the Chicago Architecture Foundation on Dec. 10.

William Iseminger presents “Telling Time in Ancient North America” at the Canal Corridor Association in LaSalle on Dec. 3.

“Jewish History in the Quad Cities” is on display at the Rock Island Public Library through Dec. 31.

LOUISIANA

Professor Kathleen Schott Espinoza and students from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette will gather oral histories from local Hispanic immigrants at the Lafayette South Regional Library on Nov. 7.

MARYLAND

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown, this year’s One Maryland One Book selection, will be discussed at Montgomery County Public Libraries, including the Germantown Branch on Nov. 3, Aspen Hill Branch in Rockville on Nov. 17, Wheaton Branch on Nov. 17, and the Chevy Chase Branch on Dec. 9. On Nov. 6, the Wicomico Public LibraryDowntown Branch in Salisbury screens 42, the Jackie Robinson story, followed by a discussion of The Boys in the Boat.

In conjunction with the exhibition “Moving History/History Moving: Stepping Down the Path of Peabody Dance through 100 Years of Maryland History,”

INDIANA

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis hosts “Veterans Reclaim Armistice Day” on Nov. 7, a panel discussion and arts fair featuring NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep, author Capt. Luis Carlos Montalván, and the stories of veterans.

The All-In Block Party takes place at the Athenaeum in Indianapolis on Nov. 20 to raise awareness of how the building’s residents serve the community.

dancers from the Estelle Denis/Peabody Dance Boys Program perform at the Cecil County Public Library-Elkton Central Branch on Nov. 8. The exhibition then opens at the Wicomico County Public Library-Downtown Branch in Salisbury on Dec. 15.

MASSACHUSETTS

The Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston hosts the panel discussion “Citizenship, Justice, and Racial Conciliation” on Nov. 1 as a prelude to the 2015 Governor’s Awards in the Humanities dinner and awards ceremony.

“Family Adventures in Reading” programs take place in November at the Lenox Library Association on Nov. 7 and 14; Needham Free Public Library on Nov. 7, 14, and 28; Sutton Public Library on Nov. 7 and 14; Brockton Public Library on Nov. 7 and 14; and Erving Elementary School Library on Nov. 4 and 18.

Geologist and “dinosaur hunter” Paul Sereno gives a presentation for families at the Springfield Symphony Hall on Nov. 22 as part of the Springfield Public Forum program.

“Underground Railroad Exhibit: Confronting Our Legacy—Slavery and Anti-Slavery in the North” closes Dec. 31 at the Jackson Homestead and Museum in Newton.

“The Lure of the Spindle: The Portuguese in Early Twentieth-Century Lowell” remains on display at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum in Lowell through Dec. 1.

KANSAS

KENTUCKY

The 34th annual Kentucky Book Fair will be held at the Frankfort Convention Center on Nov. 13 and 14, featuring more than a hundred authors and illustrators.

—Photo by Stacey Evans

As part of “Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India” on display at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita through Dec. 13, Jodi Throckmorton, curator of contemporary art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, gives a talk on contemporary Indian arts on Nov. 17 and moderates a panel discussion titled “Voices of Partition” on Nov. 18.

VIRGINIA’S ARTS OF THE BOOK CONFERENCE FEATURES THIS HANDMADE MINI BOOK.

HUMANITIES 47 HUMANITIES 47

NEVADA’S DISTINGUISHED WRITER PROGRAM HONORS AUTHOR JESS WALTER.

—Courtesy Nevada Humanities

lips County Museum in Malta on Nov. 12; “The Dog Soldier Ledgerbook” by Richard Ellis at Ravalli County Museum in Hamilton on Nov. 12; “Chinese in Montana: Our Forgotten Partners,” with Ellen Baumler at Skyview High School in Billings on Nov. 17; “Sgt. John Ordway of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” with Arch Ellwein at Terry Schools on Nov. 17; “How We Miss Them: Ghostly Gatherings,” with Ellen Baumler at Skyview High School in Billings on Nov. 17; “Champion Buffalo Hunter Yellowstone Vic Smith” by Arch Ellwein at Skyview High School in Billings on Nov. 17; “Dueling Paintbrushes” by Kristi Hager at Western Heritage Center in Billings on Nov. 19; and “Butte: Cosmopolitan City of Montana,” with Tom Satterly at the University of Montana Western in Dillon on Dec. 18.

MICHIGAN

Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, this year’s Great Michigan Read title, talks about the book at the Otsego County Library in Gaylord on Nov. 2, North Central Michigan College in Petoskey and the Boyne District Library on Nov. 3, and the Darcy Library in Beulah and West Shore Community College in Scottville on Nov. 4.

To kick off the “Talking Service” program at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo on Nov. 11, Benjamin Busch speaks to veterans about his service and the experience of reentering civilian life.

MISSISSIPPI

“Telling: South Mississippi,” a performance/storytelling program for veterans and their families, takes place at the Hartwig Theatre in Hattiesburg on Nov. 11, 21, and 22; Brownstone Center in Poplarville on Nov. 12; and FEC Auditorium in Long Beach on Nov. 13 and 14.

MISSOURI

The Federation of State Humanities Councils convenes its annual conference in St. Louis, Nov. 5 through 8. Participants will explore the Missouri History Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum, architectural sites, Anheuser-Busch’s facilities, and can partake in trips to Hannibal and Ste. Genevieve.

MONTANA

Speakers Bureau programs include “The Metis in Montana History” by Nicholas Vrooman at the Judson H. Flower Jr. Library in Miles City on Nov. 5; “History of Social Dance in America,” with Mark Matthews at the University of Montana in Missoula on Nov. 7; “Profiles of African-American Montanans” by Ellen Baumler at the Mehmke Museum in Great Falls on Nov. 8; “Singing the Western Legacy,” with Neal Lewing at Phil 48 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

NEBRASKA

Prime Time Family Reading Time sessions continue through November and December in Norfolk, Omaha, Grand Island, and Lincoln, including bilingual programs and a bilingual Prime Time preschool program.

As part of the NEH “Latino Americans: 500 Years of History” project, Humanities Nebraska holds a screening and discussion about the PBS documentary Latino Americans at the Grand Theater in Grand Island on Nov. 12.

Nebraska Warrior Writers, a free writing workshop for veterans and activeduty military personnel, continues at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha through Nov. 7.

The Smithsonian traveling exhibition “The Way We Worked” remains on view at the Plainsman Museum in Aurora until Nov. 25, then opens at the Sarpy County Museum in Bellevue on Dec. 9.

NEVADA

The Robert Laxalt Distinguished Writer Program honors best-selling author Jess Walter on Nov. 17 in Reno.

Sundance Books and Music in Reno hosts “Nevada Humanities Salon: A

Conversation with Tom Burmester” on Nov. 20. Burmester, founder and current artistic director of the Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble, discusses his play The War Cycle: Nation of Two and his experience working with veterans.

The Nevada Humanities Program Gallery in Las Vegas hosts two exhibitions: “A Nevada Collection—Poetry and Art” through Nov. 25, and “Wanderlust: Journeys in Southern Nevada,” which opens on Dec. 3.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Humanities to Go Speakers Bureau programs taking place include “Poor Houses and Town Farms: The Hard Row for Paupers,” with Steve Taylor at the Wilton Public and Gregg Free Library on Nov. 3; “Mary Todd Lincoln: Wife and Widow,” with Sally Mummy at the Marion Gerrish Community Center in Derry on Nov. 4; “Our National Thanksgiving: With Thanks to President Lincoln and Mrs. Hale,” with Steve and Sharon Wood at the Claremont Opera House in Newport on Nov. 6; “Digging Into Native History in New Hampshire,” with Robert Goodby at the Olive G. Pettis Library in Goshen on Nov. 7; “Pleasures of the Parlor: Middleclass Domestic Music-Making in NineteenthCentury New England,” with Marya Danihel at the Elkins Public Library in Canterbury on Nov. 10; “(Not So) Elementary, My Dear Watson: The Popularity of Sherlock Holmes,” with Ann McClellan at Brookline Public Library on Nov. 12; “Discovering New England Stone Walls,” with Kevin Gardner at the Madbury Public Library on Nov. 18; and “Family Stories: How and Why to Remember and Tell Them” by Jo Radner at the Plaistow Public Library on Dec. 2.

NEW JERSEY

In connection with its Rising Tide Project discussion series, Montclair State University presents “The Netherlands, New Amsterdam, and the Origins of Modern America” on Nov. 2, “Remembering Holland: A Film Discussion” on Nov. 10, and “Predicting the Next Superstorm: The History of Man’s Quest to Understand the Power of the Sea” on Nov. 19.

The Camden County College Center for Civic Leadership and Responsibility continues its “Two Wars that Changed America: The Civil War and World War II” lecture series with “Double V for Victory: Black Americans, World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement” by Jill Titus on Nov. 4 and “From World War I

Public Library of Hasbrouck Heights on Nov. 7 and the Mirage Women’s Club in Barnegat on Nov. 9; “The Shannachie of Glendunbun Ballybeg: Traditional Celtic Tales” at the Evesham Branch of the Burlington County Library System on Nov. 8; “Theodore Roosevelt: American in the Arena” at the Westfield Senior Housing Corporation on Nov. 11; “Ichabod Crane, Washington Irving, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” at the Dorothy B. Kraft Center in Paramus Nov. 13; “Nineteenth-Century New Jersey Photographers” at the Strauss Mansion in Atlantic Highlands on Nov. 18; “Clara Barton: Angel of the Battlefield” at the Bordentown Branch of the Burlington County Library System on Nov. 19; and “Musical Life in Colonial Williamsburg” at the Midland Park Memorial Library on Dec. 14.

NEW MEXICO

The Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe sponsors “Acting Out,” a series of panel discussions and workshops on indigenous performance art on Dec. 3 and 4. “Performing for the Camera” panel discussion will take place at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe on Dec. 3, followed by a performance workshop. The New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe hosts a symposium, spoken-word performance, panel discussions, and a keynote address by Lucy Lippard on Dec. 4.

OKLAHOMA

The traveling exhibition “Water: Congressional Representation to Protect a Precious Resource” is on display at the McAlester Public Library during November, then moves to the Cherokee

DANIEL JAMES BROWN IS THE AUTHOR OF THE 2015 ONE MARYLAND ONE BOOK, THE BOYS IN THE BOAT.

—Robin V. Brown

to Iraq: War and America’s Rise (and Decline?) as a Global Super Power” by Michael Adas on Nov. 11.

The Monroe Township Public Library offers a series of discussions on war, including “Was the War in Afghanistan Worth Fighting?” on Nov. 4; “Point and Shoot: A Film Discussion” on Nov. 10; “Redeployment: A Book Discussion” on Nov. 13; “Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1: A Film Discussion” on Nov. 17; and “Was the War in Iraq Worth Fighting?” on Nov. 18.

The Maplewood Memorial Library continues its American Classics book discussion series with talks on Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston on Nov. 5, and Native Son by Richard Wright on Dec. 3.

“Everything That Rises,” featuring works by artist Casey Ruble, remains on display at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit during November and December. In conjunction, an oral history workshop takes place on Nov. 8 and a discussion of the film Revolution ’67 on Nov. 13.

On Nov. 14, a panel discussion, “Poetry and Music: Inspiration and Culmination,” is held at the Toms River Branch of the Ocean County Library.

Throughout December, the African American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey in Atlantic City hosts the traveling exhibit “Marching from Atlantic City to Washington and Beyond: Civil Rights Activism in New Jersey.”

Horizons Speakers Bureau programs include “The Role of New Jersey After the Civil War” at the Hackettstown American Legion on Nov. 3; “Lenape Culture: An Introduction to American Indian Life in New Jersey” at the Free

City County Library on Dec. 1.

“Cherokee Syllabary: From Talking Leaves to Pixels” opens at the Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill on Nov. 14, exploring the Cherokee written language.

The Jewish Muslim Film Institute screens Of Many at the Raindrop Turkish House in Oklahoma City on Nov. 15.

OREGON

As part of the “Talking about Dying” initiative, programs will take place at the Newport Public Library on Nov. 1; Illinois Valley Branch of Josephine Community Libraries in Cave Junction on Nov. 4; St. Helens Public Library on Nov. 5; Dallas Public Library on Nov. 6; Ashland Branch of the Jackson County Library on Nov. 8; Lebanon Public Library on Nov. 9; Jackson County Library in Medford on Nov. 15; Klamath County Library on Nov. 15; Tigard Public Library on Nov. 17; Lake County Library in Lakeview on Nov. 18; and Christmas Valley Community Hall on Nov. 19.

PENNSYLVANIA

Teen Reading Lounge book discussion groups for students ages 12 to 18 take place across the Commonwealth during November and December.

SOUTH CAROLINA

The fifteenth Annual Columbia Jewish Film Festival being held Nov. 1 through 17 at the Columbia JCC and Nickelodeon Theatre includes an opening ceremony, student film competition, screening of ten films, and an authorled discussion on Nov. 9.

Eric Goldman, scholar in residence, gives lectures on “What Film Can Teach Us About Our Religious Traditions” for the Interfaith Association of Spartanburg, Nov. 12 through 15, including “The American Jewish Story Through Cinema” at the University of South Carolina Upstate on Nov. 12; “A Lens on Israel: A Society Through Its Cinema” at Temple B’Nai Israel in Spartanburg on Nov. 13; “Reflecting and Affecting Memory: Cinema as a Medium for the Holocaust” at Nazareth Church in Moore on Nov. 14; “The Coming of Age of American Jewry: A Study of the 1940s and 1950s through the Lens of Films from the Period” at First Presbyterian Church in Spartanburg on Nov. 14; and “Hollywood Zion: How American Movie-Makers Presented Israel” at Central United Methodist Church in Spartanburg on Nov. 15.

The Greenville Jewish Federation HUMANITIES 49 HUMANITIES 49

—Courtesy of Christopher Owens

SPOKEN-WORD ARTIST TRUTH B. TOLD PERFORMS IN ARIZONA.

presents “Testimony to the Human Spirit: A Holocaust Survivor ’s Story,” featuring Robbie Waisman, who was liberated from Buchenwald in a group of 903 boys that included Elie Wiesel.

Events will take place at Converse College in Spartanburg on Nov. 8, Furman University in Greenville on Nov. 9, and St. Joseph’s High School in Greenville on Nov. 10.

TENNESSEE

Rocker Patti Smith talks about her memoir M Train at Oz Arts Nashville on Nov. 13 for the Salon@615 program.

The discussion program “Let’s Talk About War: When Johnny and Jane Come Home” takes place at the Delta Heritage Center in Brownsville on Nov. 21, featuring documentary filmmaker Henri Giles and a dramatization of veterans’ stories.

“Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll: The Musical Genius of Sam Phillips” remains on display during November and December at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.

TEXAS

The traveling exhibition “Voces Ameri 50 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

canas: Latino Literature in the United States” is on display at the Wichita Falls Public Library through Dec. 1.

“The Power of Children: Making a Difference” exhibits at Southwestern Adventist University in Keene from Nov. 16 to Jan. 3. The NEH “On the Road” exhibition explores the lives of Anne Frank, Ruby Bridges, and Ryan White.

The Texarkana Museums System offers a historian-developed scavenger hunt for children and their parents on the grounds of the Ace of Clubs Historic House in Texarkana on Nov. 7.

“Eloquent Objects: Georgia O’Keeffe and Still Life Art in New Mexico” is on view at the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi through Jan. 3, featuring forty-five paintings by O’Keeffe and other American modernists. On Dec. 4, Carolyn Kastner, curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, gives a public lecture.

The W. K. Gordon Center for Industrial History of Texas in Mingus hosts “Forgotten Gateway: Coming to America through Galveston Island” during December. The traveling exhibition explores the Port of Galveston’s role in immigration.

UTAH

Book discussions at Brigham City Library include The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of Thirteen American Women and the Dream of Space Flight by Martha Ackmann on Nov. 5 and Eye in the Sky: The Story of the Corona Spy Satellites by Dwayne A. Day on Dec. 3.

Pioneer Book in Provo hosts a poetry reading and anthology launch party on Nov. 10 to conclude its community poetry workshop program.

Mary Pinard and Stephen Graham Jones discuss fiction, poetry, and grief at the Art Barn/Finch Lane Gallery in Salt Lake City on Nov. 12.

Ten randomly selected individuals have five minutes to tell their story on the theme “Revelations” at the Urban Lounge in Salt Lake City on Dec. 10.

VERMONT

The “Why Do Stories Matter?” conference takes place at the University of Vermont’s Dudley H. Davis Center in Burlington on Nov. 13 and 14.

Keynote speakers include William Cronon, Wendy Doniger, and Maria Tatar.

First Wednesdays monthly lecture series continues Nov. 4 with “Climate

of Doubt” by John Hockenberry at Saint Michael’s College McCarthy Arts Center in Colchester; “Churchill and Roosevelt: The Personal Element in Their Partnership,” with Mark A. Stoler at the Rutland Free Library; and “Face to Face with the Emotional Brain,” with Paul Whalen at Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro. On Dec. 2, talks include “Don Quixote of La Mancha,” with Ilan Stavans at First Congregational Church in Manchester; “Reading Homer with Veterans: Narratives of Return and Rage,” with Roberta Stewart at Ilsley Public Library in Middlebury; and “The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789,” with Joseph Ellis at Norwich Congregational Church.

VIRGINIA

The “edUi Conference” for web professionals working with cultural organizations takes place at various venues in downtown Charlottesville from Nov. 9 to 11.

The Virginia Arts of the Book Center in Charlottesville hosts “Raucous Auction: The Bad Quarto” on Nov. 13, showcasing the work of printers and book artists, a handmade book of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and a silent auction.

WASHINGTON

Speakers Bureau programs include “Theodore Roosevelt: Wilderness Warrior in Washington State” by Scott Woodward at the Wenatchee Public Library on Nov. 4, “Seriously Funny: Humor, Film, and Philosophy” by Mike VanQuickenborne at the Pickford Film Center in Bellingham on Nov. 9, and “The Roots of Music—Exploring Earth’s Soundscapes” by George Halekas at the Leavenworth Public Library on Dec. 11.

The Think & Drink series presents “Seattle Skin: Being Black in a Liberal City,” featuring Eva Abram, Eric Davis, Megan Ming Francis, and Charles Mudede at Naked City Brewery and Taphouse in Seattle on Nov. 10.

WEST VIRGINIA

On Nov. 1, the West Virginia Humanities Council launches an initiative with the State Folklorist Project to document folk culture.

WISCONSIN

Ex Fabula presents a storytelling event at Turner Hall Ballroom in Milwaukee on Dec. 17. Between stories, community members can share their own stories and reactions.

In Focus

BY BRETT CAMPBELL

Adam Davis of Oregon Humanities

—Kim Nguyen

When Oregon Humanities commenced its Conversation Project titled “Why Aren’t There More Black People in Oregon?” last year, the facilitator began by examining troubling parts of the state’s past. Talking about a history of racism that stretched from the nineteenth-century influx of former Klansmen to twentiethcentury laws that restricted where black Oregonians could live to contemporary economic displacement made some participants from the overwhelmingly white state uncomfortable.

“It’s not easy to get people who love their state to look at shameful things in its past, from legislation to attitudes,” Adam Davis says. “Some asked, Why are you talking about race? and some said, We need to talk about these issues. At Oregon Humanities, we want to go toward the tension rather than shying away. I think there’s more diversity at the table if you model respectful disagreement and show that that’s a good thing rather than a bad thing. We’re not after consensus. We want exploration, not agreement.”

Davis, who has headed Oregon Humanities since 2013, has spent much of his career mixing the social and the intellectual.

He earned a PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and when he wasn’t studying, he did physically demanding work first with the Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest and then on a farm and a kibbutz. He has also taught in nontraditional venues, including summer and Saturday programs for Camp of Dreams, a nonprofit organization benefitting young Chicagoans that he cofounded with his brother.

“I knew while I was getting my degree that full-time academia was not what I wanted,” he recalls. “I loved the community aspect,” he says, adding, “I loved asking the questions,” not just assuming he had all the answers. In work with various projects, including directing the Illinois Humanities Council’s Justice Talking / The Meaning of Service, a reading and discussion group for AmeriCorps members and staff, Davis combined his teaching with community work by “getting young people thinking about why they were doing the work they do.” He often used poetry and other literature (from Plato’s Republic to poems by Naomi Shihab Nye to a short story by Charles W. Chesnutt) to provoke them to question their own motivations and goals. Some of those literary works appear in Taking Action: A Reader and The Civically Engaged Reader, which Davis developed while at the Center for Civic Reflection. Davis says that “having all these readings and questions they raised collected and available to pick up and think about seems to honor the complexity of the good, difficult work many people are trying to do in the world.”

Davis began working with the Center for Civic Reflection in 2005 and became its director in 2011. It was while he and his colleagues were doing workshops on their reflection-provoking work that he learned about the efforts of Oregon Humanities. “They were using the tools of the humanities to help people connect, to ask the hard questions,” he realized.

Davis’s ability to make the case for the value of the humanities has boosted OH’s support, both through grants and via partnerships with libraries, VISTA, Portland Children’s Museum, Portland Playhouse, Adelante Mujeres (an organization that works to empower low-income Latinas), and now even a private company, Cambia Health Solutions. In OH events such as its quarterly Think & Drink programs, in meetings with various partners and facilitators, and in the organization’s communications efforts such as its magazine and website, Davis emphasizes how the humanities bring people together to reflect upon urgent issues.

In its Conversation Projects, OH facilitates discussions hosted by a local nonprofit, community group, or business on a topic relevant to their community. Rather than swooping down from Portland with a prepackaged program, “we start with the community’s questions.” In conversations with board members, facilitators, and others around the state, the organization learns where tensions are emerging. Projects have addressed controversial matters like what people want from the wilderness, Oregon’s pioneering land-use policy (with its innovative urban growth boundary), and economic inequality.

Even in a state that, as the TV series Portlandia often portrays, prefers to avoid conflict or deal with it in passive-aggressive ways, those projects have drawn strong attendance, proving so popular that OH wound up working with other organizations in the state’s rural areas, forming work groups that continue the conversations. As Oregon rapidly grows more diverse, issues arise with increasing frequency, opening spaces for the kind of conversations Oregon Humanities sparks.

The next tough issue Davis is pursuing may be the ultimate hard question: death. In Oregon, which enacted the nation’s first death with dignity law in 1994, its place in public policy debate along with its extremely personal nature makes dying an ideal — if sometimes uncomfortable — subject for deep conversations. In this Conversation Project, poems by Adrienne Rich and Stanley Kunitz will augment discussions sometimes dominated by economics and policy, if not religion and philosophy. Almost certainly, there will be much to disagree about and much to think about.

HUMANITIES 51 HUMANITIES 51

—Continued from page 15

Such conservatism came roaring back with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, returning to power a philosophy of small government that produced the first large cut in NEH funding in constant dollar terms. (The second, fundamentally unreversed to this day, came with the Republican-led 104th Congress, elected in 1994.) In our time, big-government and small-government forces have reached a longrunning political deadlock, with one byproduct, sequestration, inhibiting virtually any increased investment in the discretionary portions of the federal budget, humanities and research funding prominently included.

Put together the waning power of the dream of the humanities and a waning belief in the positive role of government, and you arrive at the most salient novelty in the past fifty years: the decline in the belief in public goods. The Great Society’s heyday was charged with confidence that the quality of life for every American could be improved along every axis, civic, economic, medical, educational, aesthetic, and spiritual; that these improvements would be enacted through federal government activity; and that if there was a cost to the public in taxes, that was a small price to pay for the value derived. The idiom of that day was one of sacrifices for the larger good. “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

Fifty years down the road, that way of speaking sounds quite dated. Today’s public has a seriously thinned-down concept of what social goods are worth having beyond personal happiness, and an even weaker notion of why it should incur any sacrifice to fund such abstractions. The revealing figure here is not the decline of NEH funding but the decline of state funding for public higher education.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented that since the 2008 recession, adjusted for inflation, state funding per student for public university systems has been slashed, with 15 states reporting cuts of 25 percent or more and 16 additional states with cuts north of 20 percent.

Tuition costs to students and their families have risen to fill the gap. In the days when higher education was thought of as a public good worth investment from all taxpayers because an educated population increased the quality of life for all, students and their families paid around one quarter of public higher education expenditure. Today the personal share is near to 50 percent and shows no sign of falling.

So, how is a believer in the humanities to proceed at this time? This cause is more, not less, urgent because of the changes I have described. But there is no use ignoring the new facts we have to contend with. Our need is to find out how to advance this cause in the world that we actually inhabit.

Let me say what this means in tactical terms—and if I do not sugarcoat things, it is because, like Emerson, “I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter.” First, the federal government is not the prime target for this moment’s appeals. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences commission that I cochaired was authorized by two congressional leaders from each party, Lamar Alexander and Mark Warner in the Senate and David Price and Tom Petri in the House. They have been thoughtful advocates, and they spoke compellingly when our report was launched. It is 52 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

important to have such voices on our side, and to get as much support as we can possibly win for NEH. But major new federal initiatives are unlikely now, and though we might hope for restoration (for instance) of Title VI funds for foreign languages and cultures, the things that most need doing are not federal affairs.

In truth, the humanities are sustained by a continuum of institutions, very few of which are federally funded: elementary schools, high schools, colleges, universities, and community colleges; libraries, museums, performance halls, and other places of artistic presentation; local history centers and book clubs, and a thousand others. Since World War II, science has inevitably looked to Washington, because government alone can supply funding on the scale and with the long-term horizon that scientific research requires. But the humanities were never principally a federally supported activity, and their advocacy needs to be decentralized.

If there is one single thing humanities lovers need to press for at this time, it’s a stronger, more equitably distributed foundation of elemental literacy, the root of democracy and every humanistic power. President Johnson said in the Great Society speech: “Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination.” “We are still far from that goal,” he added—and we are equally far from that goal today. But funds to attract and retain great K–12 teachers are still overwhelmingly state and local appropriations. In North Carolina, 66 percent of the public instruction budget comes from the state, 26 percent from localities, and a mere 8 percent from federal sources. So advocates need to work nearer to home.

Further, if championing the humanities is a multifront battle now, we also need to think a great deal harder about how persuasion works. In our long time of troubles, too many humanists have been guilty of making our case the way some travelers repeat an English phrase louder and louder to an uncomprehending foreigner, as if with a little more volume, the imbecile is bound to understand. But as rhetoric (one of the oldest humanistic disciplines) might have taught us, persuasion does not involve restating what I already believe. It involves engaging with others, entering into their different frame of reference, then thinking how I could make my point in terms that make sense to another.

This challenge should not be beyond our collective wits.

From my experience, it helps to recognize that there are different bands of audiences, each of which might respond to a different approach. First, there are the believers: not just professional humanists, but lovers of art and visitors to art galleries, lovers of music and attendees of musical performance, lovers of reading, history buffs. This is not a small group. If every one of these people spoke up for their passion, we might gain massive public traction. If every museumgoer actively advocated for art exposure for children in public schools, if every book club member spoke to a school board member or state legislator about the human needs satisfied by this means, we would have a chorus for the humanities the United States has not heard in years.

In a second ring are what we might term lapsed believers. One of the most frustrating features of recent years has been the number of highly educated people, some paying small fortunes to send their children to liberal arts colleges,

who say that such things were great back in the day, but we can’t let people waste time with liberal learning now: The only education of value is the one that lands you a job.

I used to find this perverse, but I’ve come to understand that it’s just a repetition of sayings heard so many times in “serious” media outlets that they have entered many minds as received ideas. If I ask such a person, Did you find that the things you studied that were directly instrumental led to your later success?, the answer is invariably no. If I then ask, Can you name a single successful person who had just one job-related skill, and did not instead start

WHEN THE COMMISSION ON THE HUMANITIES SPOKE, JOHNSON ANSWERED IN the idiom of humanistic highmindedness. When claims for humanities and the liberal arts are made today, they’re often met with skepticism, if not scorn.

with a broad education that opened the mind in varied and unexpected ways?, the answer is usually no again.

(Even Steve Jobs, the poster child for dropouts, studied calligraphy in college with decisive effect on Apple design aesthetics.) A lot of people beyond active converts know the value of the humanities but have forgotten. We will do ourselves a favor if, with patience and good humor, we remind them of what they already know and love.

A third ring, those who don’t have a latent belief to be reactivated, need a different approach. One thing humanists should be eager to do nowadays is to connect with people working on other problems who can be made to feel what the humanities has to contribute. In a recent project on pandemics at Duke, it was not surprising that ethicists from philosophy departments were of crucial value, since a key question in pandemics is how to allocate scarce medical resources. Less predictable was the help a literature professor could supply by explicating the role of narrative in pandemics: the storylines that get established, then giddily revised, as the emergency takes shape. It is hard to see how we will make new friends and allies if we fail to reach out.

Another thing I have seen work with the unbaptized is what I have learned to call “third-party validators.” My humanities commission, like the one in 1964, contained people of visibility and accomplishment who were not in the academy or professional arts. Their voices carried special weight in the rollout because they were not known to be pre-sold. Jim McNerney, chairman and former CEO of Boeing, has said that while his company principally looks for engineers, no one will rise beyond a certain level if they don’t also have other skills: skills in communication and cross-cultural sensitivity, the products of humanistic training. Karl Eikenberry, military commander, then ambassador in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011, has said that military weapons will never be strong enough to solve

global conflicts. At least as critical to national security are the understanding of foreign histories, foreign languages, foreign religions, foreign cultures—humanities subjects par excellence. We need to keep recruiting friends like this.

Then let’s imagine a really hard challenge: people for whom terms like “the humanities” or “the liberal arts” carry not the slightest residual meaning, are intimidating, or off-putting, or even just a bore. What to do with the hard nuts to crack? I have two thoughts. First, the humanities can take highly evolved forms, but they are rooted in our most fundamental human powers and needs. When other lines of appeal aren’t available, we need to reconnect with the forms that are familiar to people and start from there. A Duke student I know taught debate last summer to ninth graders in the Mississippi Delta. When he asked why debate might matter, one student was quick with a reply: Debate was the key to the antislavery and civil rights struggles; plus if you can argue well, you can persuade your parents. That’s a great base to build on.

And if you couldn’t get even that much of a purchase?

As a last resort, we could just subject someone to the power of the experience. For instance, take them to the hip-hop musical Hamilton. The composer-performer Lin-Manuel Miranda read Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton on vacation and saw how he could translate Hamilton’s transcultural itinerary into a modern, transcultural music-and-dance idiom. Miranda has brought history to life and brought added richness to the performing arts by fusing them with the historical past.

But there’s no need to know or care about any of that in advance. Anyone who has heard “Hey, yo, I’m just like my country / I’m young, scrappy and hungry” will have lived the energy of the humanities. Later, there might be a chance to find that this creation has complex cultural sources that can be analyzed and might even deserve support. Start with that point and you’ll get nowhere. Start with the experience and you’ll have better luck.

The start of this discussion might have sounded like a familiar story of humanistic decline, but let me say bluntly: It is not helping us to cling to the myth of the lost cause. We live at a particular moment of social history. Other times may have been more auspicious; if so, lucky them. But there’s no point pining for what we do not have. The only thing that will move us forward is to understand where we are, to assess the challenges clearly, to spot opportunities with imagination, and to use all our intelligence, passion, and ingenuity to figure out how to restore the perception of a value that has grown dim, to our collective cost.

At the end of The Prelude, Wordsworth said to Coleridge: “What we have loved / Others will love, and we will teach them how.” We care about what we value because the ability to feel that value was nurtured in us by teachers of many sorts. Let’s have the confidence to teach the humanities in that sense. People crave it more than we imagine.

Richard H. Brodhead is president of Duke University. This essay was delivered as the keynote address at the Democracy and the Humanities Symposium, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the National Endowment for the Humanities, at Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 25, 2015.

HUMANITIES 53

­­­Questions Impertinent

WITH MICHAEL D. GORDIN

Edited by Anna Maria Gillis

—Etta Recke

There was a time when scientists had to be polyglots. Not anymore. Michael Gordin takes us on a walk through history to see the role languages, including made-up ones, play in research. He is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University and the author of Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which he wrote with an NEH fellowship.

When did Latin lose its sway?

Around 1610, Europe’s most famous scientist, Galileo Galilei, switched from Latin to Italian, and he began a trend that crept north. Isaac Newton published his Principia in 1687 in Latin, but his Opticks in 1704 in English. After 1830 or so, it is virtually impossible to find important scientific works produced in Latin.

What languages did a cosmopolitan scientist need to know?

Most scientists had active command of one of the three major languages of science (English, French, and German), and passive capabilities—they could read or understand the language when spoken, but not write or speak—in at least one other.

Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval abbess, appears in your book. Why? Because she developed what was arguably the first constructed language, which she supposedly used in prayer. She called it the lingua ignota. It is a harbinger of efforts to construct “philosophical languages,” which were intended to better match the shape of reality. For Hildegard, that reality was the nature of the divine.

Dmitri Mendeleev almost didn’t get credit for the periodic table of elements, one of science’s greatest icons. What went haywire?

Mendeleev developed his version of the periodic table in 1869 and then refined it over two years. There were others, but Mendeleev’s was the most sophisticated.

After he submitted an article about it to the Journal of the Russian Chemical Society, he wrote a one-page abstract and asked a colleague to translate it into German. The colleague farmed the job out to a graduate 54 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

student, who mistranslated the Russian word for “periodic” (periodicheskii) as “gradual” (stufenweise). When the German chemist Lothar Meyer read it, he thought, ‘Mendeleev is very close, but he doesn’t seem to understand that the system is periodic.’ He published his response, and Mendeleev was furious! But Meyer couldn’t read the Russian original.

Your favorite scientific language story?

In 1870, a marginal chemist named Liasovskii proposed that the Russian Chemical Society create a patriotically Slavic chemical nomenclature. He wanted to adapt the Russian tradition of patronymic names to chemical compounds.

Just like “Ivan Denisovich” means “Ivan, son of Denis,” he suggested that we could name molecules so they would end up like “Hydrogen Oxygenovich” for water: Water is the hydrogenous son of oxygen. This plan went absolutely nowhere.

What’s Volapük? It sounds like a cold, northern river.

Volapük is a constructed language published in 1880 by a German pastor named Johann Martin Schleyer, who, rather grandiosely, wanted it to become the planet’s sole language. It is a largely forgotten episode in history, but, if you wander the stacks of a university library that was around then, you’ll find a stack of Volapük grammars. It was so popular that librarians stocked up to prepare people for the language of the future.

What was Couturat’s delegation?

In 1907, a French philosopher named Louis Couturat assembled a delegation of the International Association of Academies to decide whether the association should endorse a single language for international scholarly communication. Couturat’s delegation investigated scores of proposed constructed languages. In October 1907, on the cusp of selecting Esperanto, Couturat steered the committee to endorse Ido, a modified form of Esperanto, which shattered the unified support for an international constructed language.

German was a major language of science before World War I. What happened?

After the Triple Alliance’s defeat, German and Austrian scholars were boycotted by the victorious nations. (Albert Einstein, a noted pacifist, was practically the only exception.) At the same time, groups such as the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry were being established with only English and French as official languages. This locked German out of many organs of international scientific governance.

The decline of German in the United States didn’t help. When the United States entered the war in 1917, roughly half the states criminalized the use and teaching of German. In 1924, the U.S. Supreme Court declared these laws unconstitutional in Meyer v. Nebraska, but the damage was done.

Adolf Hitler added the final blow by exiling or murdering German-Jewish scientists and cutting German universities off from international students.

Who was Léon Dostert?

Léon Dostert, who moved from France to the United States as a teenager to attend high school, was the unlikely prime mover in the development of Machine Translation (MT). He had served as Eisenhower’s translator during the war and had set up the system of simultaneous translation at the Nuremberg Trials and then adapted it for the fledgling United Nations before settling down as a professor of French at Georgetown.

In 1952, he attended a conference at MIT to discuss the feasibility of using computers to solve the problem of translating languages.

An enterprising character, he solicited IBM’s cooperation to develop the first demonstration of MT: the Georgetown– IBM experiment of January 1954, which succeeded in translating carefully selected sentences from Russian into English. This triggered a competing Soviet MT effort, which goaded the CIA into bankrolling Georgetown’s efforts.

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Directors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Humanities Initiatives at Historically Black, Hispanic-Serving, and Tribal Colleges and Universities . . . . . . .

Humanities Initiatives at Community Colleges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dialogues on the Experience of War: A Standing Together Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Application guidelines and forms are available online at www.neh.gov TDD: 866-372-2930

DEADLINE

PROJECTS BEGINNING

March 1, 2016 Summer 2016 February 25, 2016 Summer 2017 March 1, 2016 February 25, 2016 June 23, 2016 September 7, 2016 September 15, 2016

Summer 2016 Summer 2017 January 2017 September 2017 May 2017

Nadina Gardner, Director • 202-606-8570 • preservation@neh.gov Humanities Collections and Reference Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . July 19, 2016

Documenting Endangered Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . September 15, 2016 Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . December 1, 2015 National Digital Newspaper Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . January 14, 2016 Preservation Assistance Grants for Smaller Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . May 3, 2016 Preservation and Access Education and Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . May 3, 2016

Preservation and Access Research and Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . June 21, 2016 Common Heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . June 21, 2016

May 2017 May 2017 September 2016 September 2016 January 2017 January 2017 January 2017 January 2017

PRESERVATION AND ACCESS PROGRAMS

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Karen S. Mittelman, Director • 202-606-8269 • publicpgms@neh.gov Museums, Libraries, and Cultural Institutions Planning and Implementation Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . January 13, 2016 Media Projects Development and Production Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . January 13, 2016 Digital Projects for the Public . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . June 8, 2016

September 2016 September 2016 January 2017

RESEARCH PROGRAMS

Jane Aikin, Director • 202-606-8200 • research@neh.gov Fellowships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Summer Stipends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Collaborative Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Scholarly Editions and Translations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Awards for Faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Awards for Faculty at Hispanic-Serving Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Awards for Faculty at Tribal Colleges and Universities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Public Scholar Program. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

April 28, 2016 September 29, 2016 December 9, 2015 December 9, 2015 August 16, 2016 April 14, 2016 April 14, 2016 April 14, 2016 February 2, 2016

January 2017 May 2017 October 2016 October 2016 January 2018 January 2017 January 2017 January 2017 October 2016

CHALLENGE GRANTS

Katja Zelljadt, Director • 202-606-8309 • challenge@neh.gov Challenge Grants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early 2016 Next Generation Humanities PhD Planning Grants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . February 17, 2016 Next Generation Humanities PhD Implementation Grants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . February 17, 2016

NA August 2016 August 2016

OFFICE OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Brett Bobley, Director • odh@neh.gov Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Humanities Open Book Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Digital Humanities Implementation Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

March 15, 2016 September 2016 September 13, 2016 May 2017 September 21, 2016 May 2017 February 17, 2016 September 2016

FEDERAL STATE PARTNERSHIPS

Scott Krawczyk, Director • 202-606-8254 • fedstate@neh.gov Each state humanities council establishes its own grant guidelines and application deadlines.

THE COMMON GOOD/STANDING TOGETHER Eva Caldera, Office of the Chairman • www.neh.gov/commongood

HUMANITIES 55

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 400 7th Street SW Washington, D.C. 20506

PERIODICALS POSTAGE & FEES PAID NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES PUB. NO. 531-230

Official Business Penalty for Private Use, $300.00 ISSN 0018-7526

www.neh.gov