Humanities, Spring 2016

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HUMANITIES I ONNAAL L E ENNDDOOWWMME ENNTT F FOORR TTHHEE HHUUMMAANNI T I TI IEESS TT HH E EMMA A GG A AZ ZI NI NE EOOF FT THHE E NNAA T TI O

K E N B U R N S 2 016 J E F F E R S O N L E C T U R E R

—Tim Llewellyn

EDITOR’S NOTE

2016 Jefferson Lecturer Ken Burns. See page 8.

HUMANITIES

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

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 quarterly 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 Publishing Office, Superintendent of Documents, Washington, D.C. 20401. New subscriptions and renewals: U.S. Government Printing Office, P.O. Box 979050, St. Louis, MO 63197-9000. Annual subscription rate: $25.00 domestic, $35.00 foreign. Two years: $50.00, $70.00. For new orders, 202/512-1800; for current subscriber questions, 202/512-1806.

www.neh.gov 2 SPRING 2016

If I were to make a film about Ken Burns, no doubt the first shot would be of Walpole, the churchy postcard of a New England town in which he and his film company reside. Next, I’d want a close-up of the cup, inside a meeting room at Florentine Films, filled with perfectly sharpened No. 2 Ticonderoga pencils, which are Ken Burns’s favorite brand of pencils.

After that I might try a shot panning across the back of editor Paul Barnes working at a bank of monitors. To his right is a box of Kleenex for people, like me, who forgot to check their feelings at the door before watching clips of The Vietnam War, Burns’s next epic, which was supported by a production grant from NEH. I was accompanying NEH Chairman William D. Adams for his interview with Burns, included in this issue. And while the chairman asked the man himself about his life, career, and what gives his work its heroic sense of mission, I tried to learn what I could.

During a stop on my way north, Larry Hott, an old friend of Burns’s from their Hampshire College days, and a well-known director in his own right (Through Deaf Eyes, Rising Voices), recalled for me the time he worked on Burns’s senior thesis, Working in Rural New England, a 27-minute film made for Old Sturbridge Village in western Massachusetts.

A cinéma vérité portrait of farm life at the dawn of the industrial era, the film followed the village’s historic reenactors as they went about plowing, blacksmithing, weaving, and so on. Hott gushed over a scene around the 7-minute mark in which a farmhand gently takes hold of a sheep, its pink nostrils aquiver, and slowly cuts away its fluffy wool, using old-fashioned, hand-forged sheers. Hott compared it to Michelangelo’s Pietà, the famous sculpture of Christ’s body held in the lap of his mother, Mary—such was the intensity of the moment and the care that went into shooting the scene, in what was merely a student project. A select filmography in this issue suggests where such care led—to dozens of excellent films.

Also in this issue, we learn from contributor Danny Heitman about the life and work of poet Marianne Moore, who cleverly managed her own image as the spinster aunt of American literature.

The great Garrison Keillor is stepping down from A Prairie Home Companion, the live variety show and public radio mainstay that he created. Writer Peter Tonguette interviewed Keillor at length to learn what’s next for him.

Danielle Allen, author of Our Declaration, a striking book that arose from her experience teaching disadvantaged adults about the American founding, writes about the important connection between a humanities education and one’s readiness to participate in our civic culture.

And Emily St. John Mandel, whose novel Station Eleven was a finalist for the National Book Award, remembers her experience as the featured author in the Great Michigan Read, which is supported by the Michigan Humanities Council. It was a long year for her, a special year, too, but also a strange year.

Last, there are two pieces of magazine business to mention. One, HUMANITIES the print title is now a quarterly. For years our online audience has been growing steadily and outpacing our print readership. This shift from six print issues per year to four will enable us to redirect resources to expand our web content. Two, as we turn the ship in this digital direction, we are conducting a reader’s survey online at neh.gov/humanities/survey.

Please take a minute to visit our website and let us know what about this magazine strikes your fancy or not.

—David Skinner

THE MAGAZINE

Page 12

OF THE

N AT I O N A L E N D O W M E N T

FOR THE

HUMANITIES SPRING 2016 VOL. 37 NO. 2

6

The Future of the Humanities Teaching the art of democracy—how humanities education supports civic participation. By Danielle Allen

8

The Documentarian A conversation with Ken Burns, the 2016 Jefferson Lecturer.

12 Ken Burns and NEH A selected filmography. By David Skinner 16 Global Impact The Osher Map Library invites the whole world in.

By Edgar Allen Beem

20 Moore or Less Did the persona distract from the poetry? By Danny Heitman 24 The Year of Numbered Rooms The author of Station Eleven reflects on her seemingly endless book tour. By Emily St. John Mandel

28 The Next Stage of Garrison Keillor After 40 years on the radio, what to do next?

By Peter Tonguette

Page 16

4

Statements Iowa remembers its homegrown starlet Jean Seberg, and Maryland students record oral histories of Vietnam veterans.

15 Noteworthy

32 Calendar 34 Around the Nation The “Hip Historian” talks about Route 66 in Arizona, and New Jersey displays Islamic art. More from these and other states.

Compiled by Laura Wolff Scanlan

40 In Focus Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt looks to be a game changer in North Dakota.

By Marnie Lahtinen

47 Deadlines

Page 24

HUMANITIES 3

statements THE SECRET LIVES

IOWA IT WAS THE BIGGEST TALENT SEARCH FOR A Hollywood film in the 1950s. More than 18,000 unknown actresses from the United States and Europe auditioned, but a pretty seventeen-year-old girl from Marshalltown, Iowa, won the chance to play Joan of Arc in Otto Preminger’s 1957 film, Saint Joan.

It had the largest soundstage in Europe, 1,500 extras, and glittering premieres in France, England, and America, but critics panned the movie. The media treated Jean Seberg’s portrayal of the French martyr so viciously that many assumed she would return to her quiet life in Iowa as soon as possible.

But the actress persevered to become an important figure in the development of modern cinema and the face of Mod fashion.

Seberg starred in another Preminger film, Bonjour Tristesse, in 1958, which redeemed her reputation. She soon became the “it” girl for French New Wave film through Breathless, an experimental movie that rejected big budgets and formal techniques for something more raw. While too risqué for Marshalltown, the French adored it and clamored for more of Seberg.

Her celebrity grew as she made films in French and English, championed new directors, and appeared on magazine covers ranging from Life to Vogue. The Kennedys entertained Seberg and her second husband, the writer and diplomat Romain Gary, at the White House, and girls across France cropped their curls into her signature pixie cut, “à la Seberg.”

“It’s incredible that in the wake of all that, somehow we’ve forgotten who Jean Seberg was,” says Kelly Rundle, codirector of Movie Star: The Secret Lives of Jean Seberg, a documentary funded by Iowa Humanities that premiered in 2013 and is making the festival circuit.

Rundle and his wife, producer Tammy Rundle, joined forces with fellow Iowa native and project creator, Garry McGee, to bring Seberg back into America’s consciousness—detailing her complicated life and examining the forces behind her tragic death.

“This version of her story has not been told before. It’s a more personal look and an unabashedly Midwestern perspective of Jean’s life,” Rundle says. “We were trying to get at something a little deeper.”

Seberg was a passionate activist long before she became a star. She joined the NAACP in 1952, at the age of 14, and championed every cause she crossed paths with. As an adult, she donated generously to several organizations, including the Black Panthers, as did Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and other Hollywood celebrities.

“She had this need in her to make the world a better place,” says Seberg’s friend Rabbi Sol Serber. “All you had to say to her was ‘people are being hurt.’”

Seberg was drawn to the Black Panthers because of their free breakfast programs for children, but her involvement led to government surveillance, beginning in 1969. A casual phone call with Black Panther leader Elaine Brown brought her to the attention of the FBI. 4 SPRING 2016

—Regional Film/Universal Pictures

of Jean Seberg

SEBERG STARS IN THE 1968 BIRDS IN PERU, DIRECTED BY HER HUSBAND, ROMAIN GARY.

“They went after her because they found a moment, a weak spot,” Brown says in the film. “She wasn’t personally targeted, they were all targeted. . . . But she took the first and hardest hit.”

Seberg was pregnant with her second child by Gary when the FBI released a tip to the Los Angeles Times stating that the baby was actually fathered by a Black Panther. The false information ran as a thinly veiled “blind item” in May 1970, and was published again that August, with Seberg’s name, in Newsweek.

Seberg had a breakdown and delivered the baby prematurely. Her daughter, Nina Hart Gary, died two days later and was buried in Marshalltown after an open-casket funeral that clarified her parentage. Seberg and Gary sued Newsweek for libel and won, with $20,000 in damages, but the actress remained in constant fear.

“She came to visit us right after [the funeral],” says Seberg’s sister, Mary Ann Seberg. “She was completely distraught, withdrawn. I think she was in utter disbelief, too, that her life could be destroyed by something like this.”

Seberg continued acting over the next nine years, but never returned to Hollywood. Her interest turned to writing, and she directed a short film, but the downward spiral continued. She went missing in late August 1979. Nine days later, the police found her body, wrapped in a blanket in the backseat of her car, three blocks from her Paris apartment. The death was declared a suicide, but conflicting evidence raised the suspicions of family and friends.

Shortly after Seberg’s funeral, the FBI’s smear campaign against her came to light, as well as other intrusions Seberg had suspected. She had been followed and spied on, her phones tapped, her mail opened.

“There’s an odd sort of amnesia about Jean Seberg in the United States, which is so puzzling to me,” Rundle said. “At her peak, she was on the cover of every magazine . . . but what’s the most surprising is how successful the neutralization campaign was.”

—TORY COONEY Tory Cooney is a writer at the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

—Jennifer Davidson

MARYLAND “I NEVER KNEW HOW TO HANDLE VIETNAM,” says Jennifer Davidson, who teaches U.S. and world history at Southern High School in Harwood, Maryland. The daughter and granddaughter of men who served in the Vietnam era— her father in the Navy and her grandfather in the Army—was struck that she never heard veterans telling stories about the Vietnam War. “My grandfather was a veteran of Korea and Vietnam, and he didn’t talk about it,” Davidson says. When he died in 2015, she decided the stories of that era were not going to be lost.

Last fall and this spring, 105 of Davidson’s students interviewed 29 Vietnam vets as part of an oral history project supported by the Maryland Humanities Council (MHC). It is part of Standing Together, an NEH initiative to help Americans understand the experiences of American soldiers.

University of Maryland, Baltimore County, oral historian Barry A. Lanman taught the students how to interview, research, and document the veterans’ stories. Bruce Kissal, a professional videographer and a Southern High School parent, worked with the students, and Bill Buestring from Maryland Public Television talked to a class about editing.

VIETNAM

William Mayhew, who served in the 82nd Airborne Division, participated because “I was hoping the need to really learn history would click with them. History is not a boring subject.

It has relevance.”

Just agreeing to do the interview with the students, however, brought flashbacks that sent Mayhew back to counseling.

In the transcript of his interview, the students recorded that fighting the Viet Cong in the south was particularly scary. The North Vietnamese fought conventionally, and “if they overran your position, they would actually bury your dead,” Mayhew told them. But the Viet Cong in the south practiced guerrilla warfare, and they wouldn’t attack unless they had you “completely outnumbered.”

Other veterans remembered leeches, the oppressive heat and humidity, the monsoons, triple canopy jungles, being attacked in the dark, the sergeant who taught survival, Agent Orange exposure, the beauty of the landscape, the friends who didn’t make it home.

“We never spoke about the war,” says Gene Feher, a veteran who retired to Easton, Maryland. Having served “was a black mark.”

Feher had been drafted in 1968. When he left Oakland, California, for Vietnam, he recalled that it was 2 or 3 in the morning, and “suddenly the outside doors of this gym room opened and all of these fellow GIs came in, but you could tell they were wearing worn jungle fatigues . . . they walked by us, and it struck me as odd that, the 100 or 200 guys that walked by, not one of them looked up at us.” It wasn’t until he came home that Feher understood why. “You don’t want to look at somebody that might not ever come home.”

The students asked him, “Can you describe everything that you were feeling on your way home?” “Blind euphoria,” Feher replied. “I think the best thing was when we finally got on that airplane that everyone referred to as the ‘freedom bird.’

—Abigail Bolander

SPEAKING ABOUT ABOVE: FROM LEFT TO RIGHT ARE KYLIE WEIFFENBACH, GENE FEHER, ALYSSA TURLEY, AND JORDAN BELL. BELOW: GENE FEHER’S CAP.

The flight home to what we referred to as ‘the World.’”

Alyssa Turley, the interviewer in the three-member team that took Feher’s oral history, said that “the treatment of soldiers upon their return home was something that came as a shock to me.”

When he re-entered civilian life, Feher told the students he interviewed for jobs in New York City, and he’d get the inevitable question about the two-year gap in work experience. “I said, ‘I was in the military.’ ‘Where were you?’ ‘Vietnam.’ And pretty much the interview was over. They wouldn’t hire you.

They would not hire a Vietnam vet.”

Lanham says Davidson “did a great job teaching them about empathy—about listening, even if they don’t agree. The kids understood the topics could be intense.”

Was anything off limits? Turley says when Feher chose not to answer a question, she ”felt I had no right to push deep.” For his part, Feher felt “they didn’t need to hear certain things.”

Davidson says, “I think the veterans found it easier to talk to a generation not affected by the negativity around the Vietnam War.” —ANNA MARIA GILLIS Copies of the footage from the interviews conducted at Southern High School will be sent to the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis and to the Maryland Museum of Military History in Baltimore. For Armed Forces Day on May 21, the students will share their projects with veterans, parents, and the public at Southern High School, and a video by Maryland Public Television, featuring Southern High students, will be part of an education packet coming out this summer. Students from around the state, including Davidson’s, have been invited to show their work at LZ Maryland, MPT’s event to honor Vietnam vets at the state fairgrounds in Timonium this June.

HUMANITIES 5

of democracy

THE FUTURE OF THE HUMANITIES HOW HUMANITIES EDUCATION SUPPORTS CIVIC PARTICIPATION

6 SPRING 2016

patterns also show up in a study that controls for students’ preexisting levels of interest in politics by Duke University political scientist Sunshine Hillygus. In Hillygus’s study, “The Missing Link: Exploring the Relationship between Higher Education and Political Engagement,” participation in social-science college curricula is a strong predictor of later political participation.

The difference between these educational strands in higher education is mirrored in K–12 education as well, Hillygus finds.

Just as those who major in the humanities or take social-science courses in college are more likely to participate politically after graduation, so too those whose verbal skills are higher by the end of high school, as measured by SATs, are more likely to become active political participants than those with high math scores. Moreover, the SAT effect endures even when collegelevel curricular choices are controlled for.

65.0% SAT VERBAL

60.0%

SAT MATH

55.0% Predicted Probability of Participation

FOR THE LAST DECADE OR MORE, THE GOAL OF readying young people for college and career has dominated discussions of educational policy. In 2010 Congress called on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to study the question of the current state and future role in the country of the humanities and social sciences. The resultant commission produced the report “The Heart of the Matter” in 2013, and urged that alongside career readiness and other goals we should also foster “participatory readiness” in our young people. By this, the commission, on which I served, meant that our educational systems and supporting cultural organizations ought to prepare young people for civic participation in their communities and in the country’s political institutions. The insight of the “Heart of the Matter” report is that, of all the disciplines, the humanities and social sciences have a special contribution to make to civic education.

Over the last four years, I’ve worked with a team of researchers to study assessment in the humanities and liberal arts (HULA). As will surprise no one, when practitioners of the humanities—whether college instructors or public humanities program directors—describe their pursuits, they frequently mention cultivating civic orientations and capacities in their students.

As it happens, some small fragments of data back up the idea that humanities and social sciences education achieve relevant effects. Scholars have long known that attending college seems to encourage people to increase their engagement in the political process. Importantly, level of education is an even stronger predictor than income of whether one will vote on Election Day. This suggests that something is happening on college campuses, and not in the K–12 system, that goes beyond the provision of economic opportunity. But what?

Not all college experience is the same, of course, and this fact holds an important key. Students have varying experiences depending on, among other things, their choice of major. Interestingly, there is a statistically significant difference in the rates of political participation between those who have graduated with humanities majors and those who graduate with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) majors.

Data from the Department of Education shows that, for the class of 2008, while 92.8 percent of humanities majors had voted in an election within a year of graduation; the same was true of only 83.5 percent of STEM majors. A comparison of 1993 graduates showed that 44.1 percent of former humanities majors had written to a public official within ten years of graduating, while the percentage of STEM majors who had written to a public official was 30.1.

Of course, the self-selection of students into the humanities and STEM majors may mean that the difference reflected by these data points derives from underlying features of the students rather than from the teaching they received. Yet these

50.0% 45.0% 40.0%

41.1% 37.4%

35.0% 30.0%

34.4% 30.8%

25.0% 20th

30th

40th

50th

60th

70th

80th

SAT score percentiles

Lesson in civics: The higher one’s verbal score on the SAT, the more likely one is to participate politically.

Not so for math scores.

Correlation is not the same as causation, of course, but those with better verbal skills are clearly more ready to be civically and politically involved. Something outside the classroom may have motived them to become politically involved in the first place, and then, once engaged, these students sought the verbal skills to thrive in a public sphere. Or the verbal competence may have made it easier to engage. We don’t have a study that considers levels of engagement before and after significant increases in verbal competence. But we do have a tantalizing suggestion that

by Danielle Allen

the work of the humanities is intrinsically related to the development of “participatory readiness.”

That there is a connection between the humanities and liberal arts and civic education should not be surprising. It is, however, often overlooked, despite its great significance.

When we think about education policy, we often ask how a mass democracy such as ours can thrive in a competitive global economy. As we focus on that question, as the 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” and the 2007 report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” taught us to do, the STEM disciplines look like safe bets to secure a competitive economy and vocational success for our young people. But competitiveness alone is not enough to answer the question of how a mass democracy can thrive in the current world.

Because of science, technology, engineering, and both math and medicine, the world saw a rapid acceleration of population growth rates in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

World population grew from 1 to 7 billion in little more than 200 years. In short, the human world in the wake of the industrial, aeronautical, biomedical, and digital revolutions simply has a different scale than it did in earlier eras of human history, and the STEM fields get credit for unleashing the “mass” part of “mass democracy.” We surely need their help to navigate this new landscape.

But if the STEM fields gave us the “mass” part of “mass democracy,” the humanities and social sciences gave us the “democracy” part. The people in this country and in Europe who designed systems of representative democracy had been broadly and deeply educated in history, geography, philosophy, literature, and art. This makes obvious sense the moment one pauses to ask what is involved in educating someone to participate in political and civic activities.

The pithiest summary of the intellectual demands of democratic citizenship that I know of appears in the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence. To understand the force of its argument, it is necessary to quote that sentence in full, with special attention to the final clause: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed; that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

In the final clause of this long sentence, the Declaration sums up the central intellectual labor of the democratic citizen. Citizens must judge whether their governments are meeting or failing to meet their responsibility, spelled out earlier in the sentence, to secure rights. If a government is failing in its core purposes, its citizens have the job of figuring this out and of figuring out how to change direction. This requires making judgments about grounding principles for the political order and about possible alternative approaches to the formal institutional organization of state power. Properly conducted, the citizen’s intellectual labor should result in probabilistic judgments about a causal question: What combination of principle and organizational form is most likely to secure collective safety and happiness?

If this is the work of citizenship, what intellectual resources do we need to carry it out? To make judgments about the course of human events, and our government’s role in them, surely we need history, anthropology, cultural studies, economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, not to mention some of the tools of math (especially for the statistical reasoning necessary for probabilistic judgment) and science, because governmental policy does intersect with scientific questions. If we are to make judgments about the core principles or values that should orient our judgments about what will bring about our safety and happiness, surely we need philosophy, religion or the history of religion, and literature. Then, since the democratic citizen does not make his or her judgments alone, or proceed to execute them as a solitary Prince Valiant, we need the arts of conversation, eloquence, and prophetic speech. Preparing ourselves to exercise these arts surely takes us back again to literature, and also to the visual arts, art history, film, and even music. In other words, we need the liberal arts. They were called the free person’s arts for a reason.

To say that we need all these disciplines in order to cultivate “participatory readiness” in our young people is not to say that we need precisely those versions of the disciplines that existed in the late eighteenth century. To the contrary, it is our job, working as scholars and teachers now, to build the most powerful intellectual tools we can and to decide for ourselves, learning from our predecessor’s successes and errors, how to shape these tools.

If we care about shepherding a mass democracy through the complexities of our contemporary world, we cannot content ourselves with addressing only issues of economic security, public health, and transportation for populations scaled in the hundreds of millions. We must also tend to the “democracy” part of mass democracy. For this, we need the humanities and social sciences, not only in universities but also in our K–12 schools.

Professor of Government and Education at Harvard, Danielle Allen is also director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and Chair of the Mellon Foundation Board.

HUMANITIES 7

ON FEBRUARY 10, 2016, NEH CHAIRMAN WILLIAM D. ADAMS SAT DOWN IN WALPOLE, NEW HAMPSHIRE, WITH THIS YEAR’S JEFFERSON LECTURER, KEN BURNS, FOR A BROAD DISCUSSION OF FILMMAKING, RACE IN AMERICAN HISTORY, AND THE CURRENT MEDIA ENVIRONMENT.

THE DOCUMENTARIAN

A CONVERSATION WITH KEN BURNS, THE 2016 JEFFERSON LECTURER

invitation to be the Jefferson Lecturer. We’re really looking forward to it.

KEN BURNS: It’s a tremendous honor, and I will do everything I can to live up to your enormous trust in me.

ADAMS: I know you will. So, it’s our fiftieth anniversary,

and it’s now 37 years since our first grant to you for Brooklyn Bridge. How has the relationship evolved over time and how has the agency evolved?

BURNS: I came in when Joe Duffey ran NEH, and have been through Bill Bennett and Lynne Cheney and many others. The agency takes on, in some ways, superficially, the personality of its leader, of course. Yet there’s a fundamental sameness about it, too, this rigorously earned imprimatur that a successful application means. It meant the same thing back in 1979 as it did last year. We’re devoting the same blood, sweat, and tears to proving to our peers and an academic panel that our idea is worthy.

Our most important moment came perhaps when I wanted to make a film on Huey Long, and a professor at LSU interested me in the project. He’d been turned down

by NEH. And, after reading the proposal, I could see why.

But I was drawn to the subject and said, “Look, if you want to give it to me, I’ll do it. But I’ve got to do my own work.”

At that time, the Endowment was resistant to biography.

I think part of it was the very real anxieties about hagiography, that it wasn’t the business of the United States to exalt individual people.

ADAMS: Right.

8 SPRING 2016

BURNS: My argument was, is, that history, as Thomas Carlyle argued, is biography. That it is possible, without being seduced by the individual you’re covering, to understand the way in which that individual shaped the age but, more importantly, the way that person reflected the age.

Our Huey Long proposal to NEH had to be that much better because we were swimming upstream, and I was happy to hear 10 or 15 years later that some program officers were still sending out that proposal as a model. And, of course, that rule about biography has been relaxed.

ADAMS: Absolutely.

BURNS: It’s always been a part of your mission to insist on critical thinking, in regard to biography and everything else.

A lot of my colleagues complain and moan about the process.

ADAMS: They’re not alone.

BURNS: The second they’ve got a film project that doesn’t have anything to do with the humanities, there’s a “whew.”

But on those other projects we still arm ourselves with scholars and advisers. We submit ourselves to the same rigors you demand, and why wouldn’t we?

It makes the films better. The folks who go kicking and screaming into these rules and regulations forget that all of this helps to center your project. Nobody is trying to take away your artistic agency.

We’ve found also that film can contain a multiplicity of perspectives, whether in a film about the Civil War, or about jazz, or about Vietnam, without being boringly mediocre. At the same time, it can speak to all Americans, which ought to be part of our mission.

—Courtesy Florentine Films

WILLIAM D. ADAMS: Ken Burns! Thank you for accepting our

HUMANITIES 9

ADAMS: Another part of our mission at NEH is preservation.

Could you talk a little bit about your use of archives?

BURNS: I can’t imagine what I would do without them. I started filming archives right from the beginning, old photographs and paintings and drawings and lithographs. And the envelope with the address written in the cursive of the time, the stamp, the cancellation. All of those have a kind of graphic power and meaning.

It was my intention always to take an old photograph and treat it the way a feature filmmaker would a long shot—a master shot that contained within it a long, a medium, a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, a zoom-out—all in an attempt to try to will that old photograph to life.

We spend a good deal of time visiting hundreds of archives. And trying to bring back the best. It’s like having an apron, and you’ve just seen an orchard that is filled with magnificent fruit. But you can only take with you as much as your apron can hold. How do you choose?

It’s been my life’s work to try to wake these photographs up. We trust that they had a past and a future. If there’s a cart rolling in the scene, now with modern sound you can make that sound move from left to right. Or the same with cannonballs firing or ice cubes in a glass, clinking.

It is more than just a visual exploration. It’s also an oral thing aided by, we hope, cogent use of the English language, appreciating the power in the English language, not the uniform terseness that has gotten into a lot of film writing.

ADAMS: So it’s the sound archive as well as the visual archive?

BURNS: Very much so. And you supplement that, as I have,

not just with that third-person narrator, but with a chorus of voices reading first-person testimony, which gives you a sense of the style and articulation of that past moment. It’s a phenomenal tool, if done right.

ADAMS: I’m very worried that we’re losing a feel for and a

commitment to history and the teaching of history. Do you think that’s happening, and, if so, what are the consequences?

BURNS: I think that started when we changed from teaching

history to social studies. And we completely lost civics. It isn’t just that there are three branches of government and one hundred senators. Civics is the glue of how human beings get along.

If you combine that with two phenomena, you can see what’s happening. One is a consumer society, which is trying to convince you that if you just wear the right blue jeans or drive the right car or smell the right way or have this right body, everything will be all right.

But it will not be all right. The inevitable vicissitudes that visit everyone will visit them, and they’ll be completely unprepared.

The second thing is the Internet. One of the great promises of humankind is also something that has promoted a great atrophy of attention. It’s promoted incivility and doesn’t permit us to live anywhere but in a narcissistic present.

Right now, on the Internet, you can see these now famous on-the-street interviews with Texas Tech students who couldn’t tell you who won the Civil War, who couldn’t say when or from whom the United States declared its independence, who couldn’t name the vice president of the United States, but they knew every bold-faced name. I mean, we fought a revolution to take the bold off of typeface and make us all equal. But now we’ve resubmitted to a tyranny in

10 SPRING 2016

which I think history and the humanities are the only way out, at least a bulwark against the entropy this inattention and slavish devotion to celebrity promotes.

ADAMS: It leads me to ask about a passion of yours, and

that’s the topic of race. I wonder, How does history matter as we grapple with life since Ferguson?

BURNS: Let me just back up and say that I don’t go looking

for the question of race. It’s just there.

The first theme in American history is freedom, but you quickly find out that the guy who wrote the American creed, that “all men are created equal,” owned more than a hundred human beings and didn’t see the hypocrisy.

I get a great deal of mail. I would characterize some of it as hate mail from people who think that I “black up” American history. And I’m taken aback by that.

After the inauguration of Barack Obama, there was, “Now can we stop talking about it? We’re done with this.” I said, “No, no, wait and see. It will get worse.” And it has.

When we think about slavery, we just assume that Americans respond with charity and atonement, that we are like the slaver who gives it all up and writes Amazing Grace. But, in fact, a not insignificant portion of us react with anger and bitterness and violence to the guilts, the “old guilts,” as Robert Penn Warren called them.

I’ve just finished a film on Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson is addressing Ferguson. Jackie Robinson is addressing everything that’s been going on in our newspapers for the last few years.

Now, perhaps sadly, people aren’t saying to me, “Ken, it’s not about race anymore.” I’ve had people come and say, “You were right.”

When an African American is killed almost every day by a policeman in America, when you see the warehousing that goes on in our prisons, you see the kind of Internet trolling of the president that takes place for only one reason, the color of his skin. When you see the new subtle code words of the birthers or “I don’t know if he’s a Christian” or “He’s not one of us,” it’s just another way of saying the N-word.

History is a table around which we can still have a civil discourse. So that Jackie, like most films we’ve worked on, I think, has the possibility of being a kind of Trojan horse that gets a real conversation going where the heat of the present moment might prevent that.

You know, we just had an incident when a fight broke out over integrating a swimming pool in Texas. Well, Jackie had that. We talk about driving while black. Jackie had that.

We talk about the disproportionate arrests of young AfricanAmerican males. Jackie had that.

And it continues. In 1974, Hank Aaron was getting thousands of letters a day, much of it hate mail, as he was on the verge of breaking the cherished homerun record of Babe Ruth. And we don’t do a very good job of talking about it.

After the Charleston massacre, I was very upset. I was actually on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard with my family, and I just wept. My little girls were stunned. I called up Mayor Riley, and I said, you know, “What can we do?” He said, “Come.”

—Continued on page 44

WITH THE VIETNAM WAR, KEN BURNS’S NEXT NEH-SUPPORTED EPIC, THE FILMMAKER EXPLORES AN ESPECIALLY GRITTY HISTORY OF WAR AND POLITICS IN THE ERA OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL.

HUMANITIES 11

—© Bettmann/CORBIS

KeN

BuRnS &NeH

A SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY FoR 37 YeArS, ThE NaTiOnAl EnDoWmEnT FoR ThE HuMaNiTiEs HaS BeEn HeLpInG KeN BuRnS MaKe FiLmS. HeRe Is A LiSt Of DoCuMeNtArIeS He HaS DiReCtEd Or CoDiReCtEd ThAt WeRe FuNdEd By NeH.

BrOoKlYn BrIdGe (1982)

Ken Burns’s one-hour debut chronicled the bridge’s construction and discoursed elegantly on its cultural significance as an architectural sonnet to beauty, function, and daring.

With urban historian Lewis Mumford and playwright Arthur Miller, Brooklyn Bridge was directed and produced by Burns, who also shot this Oscar-nominated film. Already in place were third-person voiceover narration, the dramatic handling of old photos, first-person text voiced by professional actors, in short, the main elements of Ken Burns’s mature filmmaking. 58 minutes. (Also funded also by the New York Council for the Humanities.)

ThE ShAkErS (1985) (CoDiReCtEd By AmY StEcHlEr)

The Shakers begins with live film of a chair and a chest of drawers catching sunlight from a nearby window as we hear the words of Thomas Merton: “The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.” Less a full retelling of Shaker history than a passionate distillation, the documentary expressed many a sentiment about craftsmanship that might be applied to Ken Burns, who began collecting quilts after making this short feature. 57 minutes.

(Funded by the state humanities councils of Kentucky, New Hampshire, New York, and Massachusetts.)

HuEy LoNg (1986)

Ken Burns’s first biographical documentary was built on priceless footage of Huey Long at the podium and jawdropping interviews with admiring Cajuns, old hangers-on, and upper-crust Southerners who loathed the Kingfish, as he was known. This telling of the Louisiana politician’s stunning ascent and shocking assassination fills an essential gap in the American library of Machiavellian leadership, a nonfiction supplement to Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. 88 minutes.

ThOmAs HaRt BeNtOn (1988)

The opening title card reads, “Thomas Hart Benton painted America,” and so he did, in large pictures of gunslingers, showgirls, and farmhands depicted in a runny, rawboned style partly inspired by the motion picture industry. Benton had his heyday in the 1930s and was as famous for his putdowns as he was for his murals, and so might have appreciated this film’s plenitude of barbed commentary. Art critic Hilton Kramer played one of the spoilsports: “I don’t think popularity can be cited as a standard of achievement in art.”

85 minutes.

ThE CiViL WaR (1990)

Antebellum Ken Burns was an acclaimed auteur with a handful of documentaries to his credit. After The Civil War, he is called an American Homer and this his Iliad. Upwards of 40 million viewers saw its first broadcast. To celebrate NEH’s 25th anniversary, which occurred in the same month, NEH Chairman Lynne Cheney screened clips for a Washington audience of Cabinet secretaries, generals, and members of Congress.

Years later, Colin Powell wrote that he couldn’t get his copy of the film back after he lent it to President George H. W. Bush. 11.5 hours.

—Florentine Films

EmPiRe Of ThE AiR (1992)

12 SPRING 2016

This documentary tells the ornery origins story of radio and radio “broadcasting,” the latter term said in the film to be taken from the analogy of a farmer casting seeds in a wide arc to cover a large area.

The tale begins with Lee de Forest and Edwin Howard Armstrong, two stubborn inventors sparring

THE CIVIL WAR CAPTURES THE DESOLATE RUINS OF RICHMOND, VIRGINIA.

this comment, Burns told the sprawling history of America’s great indigenous musical genre, from the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century to the splintering scene of the 1960s, in a contrapuntal narrative highlighting the genius of Louis Armstrong amid wave upon wave of innovation. The lively commentator and expert witness Wynton Marsalis illustrates musical concepts, horn in hand. 19 hours.

ThE WaR (2007) (CoDiReCtEd

By LyNn NoViCk)

—Library of Congress

The film expresses Burns’s deep faith in the historical significance of major events as experienced by the ones who don’t make it into the textbooks, the foot soldiers and the people back home. Conceived as the story of four representative American towns and their draftees, The War made superlative use of surviving veterans and local angles. Though criticized for its exclusive focus on the American perspective on World War II, it remains a moving testimony to the ordeals of war and the courage of American soldiers. 15 hours.

BaSeBaLl (1994)

Divided into nine innings, the series begins with the sport’s misty nineteenth-century origins. Initially conceived as a tenhour production, it expanded to 18 hours plus after Burns discovered the riches of history at his disposal. A telling as jaunty as “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” the series featured many a sportswriter and a seemingly infinite trove of beautiful vintage photos, but found its minor key in the trials of Jackie Robinson. 18 hours.

FrAnK LlOyD WrIgHt (1998) (CoDiReCtEd By LyNn NoViCk)

Burns’s fascination with the American artist and the built environment combine in a two-hour biodoc about the great architect. The slow revelation of old photos and firstperson testimony in other Burns’s films find their parallel in images of a fireplace, a hallway, a dining room, and masterpieces such as the Guggenheim Museum and Fallingwater.

Costarring the engrossing life story of a deeply flawed man.

2.5 hours.

JaZz (2001)

Scholar Gerald Early said on camera, in Baseball, that in two thousand years American civilization would be remembered for the U.S. Constitution, baseball, and jazz. Inspired by

PrOhIbItIoN (2011) (CoDiReCtEd By LyNn NoViCk) Set in the heart of a period Burns and company have covered in several films, Prohibition achieves a richness of tone more commonly seen in the later films.

With the help of historians Michael Lerner and Catherine Gilbert Murdock, along with journalist Daniel Okrent, the film traces the dry movement from its FAR LEFT: KEN BURNS SHOOTS MURAL FOOTAGE FOR THOMAS HART BENTON WITH ART HISTORIAN HENRY ADAMS IN JEFFERSON CITY, MISSOURI. RIGHT: BENNY GOODMAN PERFORMS WITH HIS TRIO IN 1937 FOR BURNS’S JAZZ.

—Courtesy of the Frank Driggs Collection

over patents in court, while the prize for building the first radio network went to Darvid Sarnoff, a young executive at RCA. Memorable interviews with Red Barber and Garrison Keillor show Burns’s increasingly light touch with personal testimony. 100 minutes.

HUMANITIES 13

ThE NaTiOnAl EnDoWmEnT FoR ThE HuMaNiTiEs PrEsEnTs

ThE 2016 JeFfErSoN LeCtUrE In ThE HuMaNiTiEs

KeNbUrNs 7:30 P.M., MaY 9, 2016

—National Archives & Records Administration

NATIONAL ARCHIVES INFORM THE DUST BOWL—HERE A MAN ABANDONS HIS CAR DURING A DUST STORM IN NEW MEXICO.

roots in nineteenth-century temperance campaigns, across tangents to abolitionism and the fight for women’s suffrage, before reaching the notorious 21st Amendment: “Virtually every part of the Constitution is about expanding human freedom, except Prohibition,” says a gravelly voiced Pete Hamill. 5.5 hours.

ThE DuSt BoWl (2012)

—Tim Llewellyn

Ken Burns once wrote that he sought to “nourish the witness.”

The witnesses in The Dust Bowl were survivors of this Depression-era man-made calamity, old men and women who as children had known the “brown world” of wind-churned earth. They knew what it was like to lose their crops and find their farms beached in sand. On camera, Floyd Coen recalls suffering from “dust pneumonia,” and watching his little sister’s body carried out on a table leaf. 4 hours.

ThE JoHn F. KeNnEdY CeNtEr FoR ThE PeRfOrMiNg ArTs In WaShInGtOn, D.C. ThE LeCtUrE Is MaDe PoSsIbLe By GeNeRoUs SuPpOrT FrOm

CaRnEgIe CoRpOrAtIoN Of NeW YoRk, ThE ArThUr ViNiNg DaViS FoUnDaTiOnS, ThE JoHn D. AnD CaThErInE T. MaCaRtHuR FoUnDaTiOn

VICKI AND ROGER SANT 14 SPRING 2016

NATIONAL TRUST FOR THE HUMANITIES

ThE RoOsEvElTs: An InTiMaTe HiStOrY (2014)

One of the few Burns films to carry a subtitle, The Roosevelts is the first and only family biography in the Burns oeuvre.

Triangulating among Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin, this touching tryptic emphasizes the inner lives of its subjects amidst the triumphs and travails of the extended clan, as close to a royal family as American history has known. Considered one of the best of Burns’s films, it makes particular use of longtime collaborator Geoffrey Ward, who wrote the script and is the author of two books on FDR. 14 hours.

ThE ViEtNaM WaR (2017) (CoDiReCtEd By LyNn NoViCk)

Ken Burns and crew traveled a great many air-miles to tell both sides of the story, the American and the Vietnamese, and Burns believes he has the goods to upset a lot of conventional wisdom on this polarizing piece of history. A short clip of the film’s opening suggests a major departure from his earlier work. The rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack, modern photojournalism, and a catchy opening sequence show us the master of nonfiction historical documentaries working a terrain more commonly associated with Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone. Approximately 18 hours.

—David Skinner

NOTEWORTHY FRESH FACES

NEH welcomed three newcomers in March to the National Council on the Humanities, the twenty-six member group that advises the NEH chairman on the awarding of grants.

Francine Berman is Hamilton Distinguished Professor in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. Berman has been influential in the design and development of cyberinfrastructure on a national level, and is recognized as a Digital Preservation Pioneer by the Library of Congress.

Patricia Limerick is chair of the board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she also teaches environmental history. Limerick has served as president of the Organization of the American Historians and as the state historian of Colorado. She was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995.

Shelly Lowe is the executive director of the Harvard University Native American Program and a member of the Navajo Nation. Before going to Harvard, she was at Yale as the director of the Native American Cultural Center.

She also directed graduate education for American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona. Lowe has served on the board of the National Indian Education Association and as a trustee for the National Museum of the American Indian.

ENDANGERED ARTIFACTS

NEW GRANT PROGRAMS FOR THE COMMON GOOD

NEH is partnering with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support born-digital scholarship. The NEH-Mellon Fellowships for Digital Publication will foster research that needs digital presentation to demonstrate its findings. The first application deadline for this program is April 28.

Individual grantees will receive $4,200 per month for a six- to twelve-month period.

Another new grant offers matching funds for programming at institutions that serve young audiences, communities of color, or economically disadvantaged populations. Instead of the usual $3 to $1 match needed for most NEH Challenge Grants, Humanities Access Grants require only a $1 match in private funds for every $1 in NEH support, in awards of either $50,000 or $100,000.

During a five-year grant period, the first two years will be used for fundraising, and the last three for implementing

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—Wikimedia Commons

From an NEH-supported two-day conference last December, in which 19 international groups discussed how to save cultural artifacts in Syria and

other war zones, NEH has announced Protecting Our Cultural Heritage initiative. The initiative invites applications for projects that will produce virtual and 3-D reconstructions of important landscapes or monuments, training for assessment and preservation, or datasharing about cultural sites at risk.

“The recent targeted destruction of so many cultural sites in the Middle East and Africa underscores the urgency of protecting the global cultural heritage to which we all belong,” says NEH Chairman William D. Adams. “NEH is encouraging efforts that will stem the loss of millennia of human history and knowledge.” More information about the initiative can be found at neh.gov.

ANCIENT ROMAN RUINS IN PALMYRA, SYRIA, 2010, BEFORE THEY WERE DESTROYED BY ISIS.

HUMANITIES 15

16 SPRING 2016

BY EDGAR ALLEN BEEM —ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE OSHER MAP LIBRARY AND SMITH CENTER FOR CARTOGRAPHIC EDUCATION

—K-un-yu ch uan - tu, 1860

DR. HAROLD OSHER, THE RETIRED CHIEF of cardiology at Maine Medical Center, and his wife, Peggy, began collecting old maps in 1975 when, on a trip to London, they visited an exhibition at the British Museum related to the colonization of North America.

Dr. Osher was so taken by the historic maps that he and his wife went directly to the Weinreb & Douwma map shop on Great Russell Street and asked to see any antique maps they had of Maine. The shop had several for sale.

“If you like them so much, why don’t you buy them?” Peggy Osher advised her husband, adding, “If you don’t, I will.”

The Oshers purchased two maps on the spot and returned the next day to buy three more.

The very first map they bought was J. H. Colton’s 1855 map of Maine.

Forty years later, Dr. Osher calls that day in 1975 his “awakening.” The appeal old maps hold for him is almost physical. “I am very visually oriented,” he explains, “in my medical practice, in my reading, and in my interest in history. Maps let me see history.”

In 1989, the Oshers made local history by donating their extensive map collection to the University of Southern Maine to create what has become the Osher Map Library and Smith Center CARTOGRAPHER FERDINAND VERBIEST WAS AMONG THE JESUITS WHO INTRODUCED WESTERN SCIENCE TO CHINA. HIS ORIGINAL MAP, PUBLISHED IN 1674 IN PEKING, SHOWED TWO HEMISPHERES AND INCLUDED INFORMATION ABOUT NATURAL PHENOMENA. THIS DETAIL IS FROM AN 1860 COPY PUBLISHED IN KOREA.

for Cartographic Education. This sweeping collection occupies parts of three floors of the Glickman Family Library, a landmark building, on the Portland campus, that was once a plumbing supply warehouse and, before that, an industrial bakery.

The collection now runs to some 450,000 maps, spanning five centuries, and 272 globes, the second largest collection of globes in a U.S. public institution after the Library of Congress. The library fills 19,000 square feet of space with a reading room, a gallery, offices, a digital lab, and a classroom on the ground floor, and storage on the second and third, including a vault with nonaqueous fire suppression for the most rare and valuable maps and globes.

But the Osher Map Library, which opened in the fall of 1994, is actually the result of the collecting passions and generosity of two couples.

In 1986, Eleanor Houston Smith (1910–1987) had donated the Smith Collection of 458 sheet maps, 685 atlases, and 62 globes to USM to honor her late husband, Lawrence M. C. Smith (1902–1975). The Smiths, a Philadelphia couple, were ardent environmentalists, who purchased a saltwater farm in Freeport, Maine, in 1946, the same year they began a collection of antique and contemporary maps and atlases of all kinds that focused on the northeast corner of the United States. The Smiths’ Wolfe’s Neck Farm is now a nonprofit devoted to sustainable agriculture.

Matthew Edney, the library’s faculty scholar, was hired in 1995 after the Oshers gave their collection to the university. He says the Osher became something quite different from older, better-known map libraries such as the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University or the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, which were run for many decades by scholar-librarians.

“All these libraries were created before 1930, housed in beautiful neoclassical buildings, and were kind of like giant gentlemen’s clubs with books,” says Edney. “Harold Osher’s advisers told him that model was dead, so what Harold did instead was hire a faculty scholar to teach with the collection, to help with its development, but not to run the place.”

Edney earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin and was mentored by David Woodward, who headed the massive NEH-funded History of Cartography project there. When Woodward died in 2004, Edney took over the project, which he still directs in addition to working at the Osher.

It was Edney who started the library’s website in 1996, an online presence that now brings the Osher’s holdings to collectors, students, scholars, and researchers worldwide.

“We are not only putting images online, but good information about those images,” says Edney.

“Early map collections are generally not much utilized,” he says. “With Internet use that’s less of a concern, but we pride ourselves on providing not HUMANITIES 17

ALTHOUGH THIS MAP OF JERUSALEM MAY SEEM WHIMSICAL, SCHOLARS CONSIDER IT THE FIRST MODERN PRINTED MAP BECAUSE IT WASN’T CREATED FROM A CLASSICAL SOURCE. LUCAS BRANDIS DID FOLLOW TRADITION BY PUTTING EAST AT THE TOP.

—Palestine, 1475

Close to 90 percent of the library’s 7,000 sheet maps have been scanned and are available online, but the vast majority are in bound atlases, only 10 percent of which have been digitized to date.

To create these high-quality images, two digital-imaging technicians are kept busy turning ancient maps, atlases, and globes into digital documents that will be accessible online.

David Neikirk and Adinah Barnett work painstakingly in a darkroom equipped with multiple editing computers, lights, hoods, backdrops, diffusers, and an Ortery 3-D camera system.

An example of their work is the digital likeness of a 1606 celestial globe by Willem Blaeu, a pupil of astronomer Tycho Brahe, for which they took 219 separate images. The globe was photographed on its stand (known as its “furniture”) and without its furniture; then the furniture itself was photographed. All these images became a kind of virtual flip book before editing turned them into a seamless digital image. The finished product is a 3-D image accessible online, but the library does not use the digital files to construct reproductions of their globes.

“We are the first institution in the world to create a fully rotatable, 360-degree, fully zoomable scan of a globe,” says Ian Fowler, director of the Osher Map Library, as he conducts a tour of the library.

Digitizing the collection is a way of making the maps available to a much larger audience than the few scholars who find their way to the Osher. In reality and virtual reality, however, the map library remains something of an undiscovered gem on the commuter campus of a state university.

In 2015, for example, only 908 people visited the featured exhibition gallery, and fewer than 400 used the library reading room. All that may be changing under Fowler and a new USM president.

In the first quarter of 2016, 547 people had already visited the gallery and 349 had used the reading room as the library increased its weekly open hours —Die gantze Welt in ein Kleberblat, 1581

just maps and images but background information to integrate the materials—how the map was made, who made it, how it was used. We’re pretty much unique in that regard.”

Digitizing maps not only makes them more readily available to a wider audience, it can also reveal information not always available to the naked eye. The digitizing of the Revolutionary War-era Map of the Most Inhabited Part of New England, for example, allowed Edney to examine it and discover how British General Hugh Percy had pieced the map together from four sections and annotated it with strategic information, something he had not noticed in ten years of looking at it.

“High-quality digital imagery can thus extend as well as supplement our analyses (as when making faint or abraded features legible),” wrote Edney in a scholarly paper entitled “Hugh, Earl Percy Remakes his Map of New England.”

18 SPRING 2016

THIS WOODCUT MAP OF JERUSALEM APPEARED IN ITINERARIUM SACRAE SCRIPTURAE (TRAVEL BOOK THROUGH THE HOLY LAND)

BY PROTESTANT THEOLOGIAN HEINRICH BÜNTING. ALTHOUGH PUBLISHED IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, THE MAP ADHERES TO A MEDIEVAL PRACTICE OF PUTTING JERUSALEM AT THE WORLD’S CENTER. THE CLOVERLEAF MAY HAVE BEEN INSPIRED BY THE COAT OF ARMS OF HANNOVER, WHERE BÜNTING WAS BORN.

—Nova Typis Transacta Navigatio, Nova Orbis Indiae Occidentalis, 1621

THIS ILLUSTRATION, FROM A BOOK ABOUT THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA, DEPICTS THE TRAVELS OF ST. BRENDAN, THE IRISH MONK, WHO LEGEND SAYS SET OFF FOR THE GARDEN OF EDEN BY SEA IN THE FOURTH CENTURY CE.

from 12 to 32, and a popular “Women in Cartography” exhibition drew in visitors.

Fowler, formerly at the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, took over as director in September 2014.

His enthusiasm for the maps and globes in his care is infectious, and he has made it his mission to promote a greater appreciation for them among students, scholars, and the general public.

“The Smiths and Oshers are both incredible collectors,” says Fowler. “The versions of maps we have are the cleanest, most colorful, most beautiful, and earliest states.”

The Osher Map Library’s greatest hits were featured in “Masterpieces at USM: Celebrating Five Centuries of Rare Maps and Globes” (November 19, 2015, to March 12, 2016).

One of the stars of the show was a colorful world map published by Nicolas Visscher in Amsterdam in 1657.

Created for Dutch Bibles, the Visscher Orbis Terrarum features not only the continents and the heavens but also spandrels illustrated with allegorical figures representing the four continents—Europe with a bull, Asia on a camel, Africa riding an alligator, and America on an armadillo.

“This is not a way-finding map but a conceptual map,” explains Fowler, “an expression of the world in religious and cosmological terms.”

A more graphic example of a conceptual map is a 1581 world map by Heinrich Bünting that takes the shape of a three-leaf clover: Jerusalem sits where the leaflets representing Asia, Africa, and Europe meet. America makes a furtive appearance in the lower left corner.

Among the other masterpieces is the library’s oldest piece, Lucas Brandis’s 1475 Jerusalem-centric map of the Holy Land, considered to be the first modern printed map. There are also Dr. Osher’s favorites, a rare copy of a 1494 letter from Christopher Columbus detailing his discovery of the New World; the much sought-after 1513 Strassburg edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia in which the New World makes its first tentative appearance; and Abraham Ortelius’s 1575 Theatrum Orbis Terrarium, the first atlas.

The library has a substantial collection of maps from China, Japan, and Ottoman Turkey. The most noteworthy of the

non-Western maps is a nineteenth-century copy of Ferdinand Verbiest’s elegant, hand-colored woodblock world map first published at Peking in 1674. It also owns a full set of the fabulous 1662–1672 Atlas Maior by Willem and Joan Blaeu. The 11-volume Blaeu atlas was the largest and most expensive book published in the seventeenth century, containing 4,608 pages and 594 maps. The atlas was intended to be part of an even larger work, but the Blaeu workshop burned in 1672, and Joan Blaeu died the following year.

“It’s 1662, but it looks so perfect!” enthuses Fowler as he carefully opens a 354-year-old volume to a map with colors so crisp and bright it looks as though it might have been printed yesterday.

For the Osher Library, it is not enough to be a repository of maps as objects of beauty or curiosity. Preservation and conservation are critical to its mission of cartographic education.

In 2008 the library received a $466,009 preservation grant from NEH to purchase storage systems and construct map vaults.

In 2014 the library also received a $260,000 NEH grant to help with the ongoing conservation of its globe collection.

That 1606 Willem Blaeu globe, for example, was not just dusted off for its digital close-up. It first had to be prepared by conservators from Studio TKM, a Somerville, Massachusetts, firm commissioned to restore the library’s pre-1900 globes.

When Studio TKM got the Blaeu globe, the plaster over papier-mâché sphere was dented and spongy in places, and the 12 gores, arcs of paper that allow a two-dimensional map to be wrapped around a round object, were loose and cracked, according to a 2015 report by Studio TKM. The meridian ring was broken, and the globe stand was in rough shape as well.

The globe was removed, and the oak stand was sent to East Point Furniture Conservation for restoration.

Studio TKM conservators cleaned the surface of the globe with erasers and methylcellulose, steamed off loose gore sections, repaired the sphere with plaster, pasted the gore sections back on, filled lost paper with matching papers and then glazed the surface. The horizon ring paper was also steamed off and blotter washed, and the circumferential lines were digitally reproduced before the paper was pasted back on the —Continued on page 42

HUMANITIES 19

Did the persona distract from the poetry?

By Danny Heitman

20 SPRING 2016

—Maria Biernik

In the autumn of 1955, a Ford

Motor Company executive wrote to ask poet Marianne Moore to help him come up with a name for the company’s latest model—a request that prompted one of the oddest episodes in American literary history. Imagine Maytag recruiting Robert Frost to name a washer, or Frigidaire drafting Carl Sandburg to christen a freezer, and you’ll get some idea of how unconventional the letter from Ford might have seemed when it landed in Moore’s mailbox.

But Moore, who’d gained national celebrity as much for her personality as her poetry, was getting accustomed to strange mail. In 1951, the year she turned 64, Moore had won three top honors: the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Pulitzer. “This brought her a kind of celebrity that was a quantum leap greater than that which she had had before, and she became the media’s darling,” said Moore scholar Patricia Willis.

Moore’s peculiarly charming demeanor made her a popular sensation. A longtime resident of Brooklyn who had never married, she was a seminal enthusiast of retro fashion, favoring lace collars, mink stoles, and huge hats, including a tricorne that became her signature. Her fondness for the Brooklyn Dodgers and boxing matches endeared her to people who had assumed poets wouldn’t be interested in such populist pastimes.

Here’s how Elizabeth Bishop, a fellow poet and Moore protégé, described Moore’s ascendance in those postwar years: “She was now Marianne Moore, the beloved ‘character’ of Brooklyn and Manhattan; the baseball fan; the friend of many showier celebrities; the faithful admirer of Presidents Hoover and Eisenhower and Mayor Lindsay; the recipient of sixteen honorary degrees (she once modeled her favorite academic hoods for me); the reader of poetry all over the country.”

With fame, Moore’s mailbag mushroomed, as fans and favor-seekers sent her manuscripts, trinkets, and invitations to travel near and far. The letter from Ford, though, would become one of the most memorable in the poet’s career. It was written by Robert B. Young, a Ford marketing executive who explained that the company wanted a name for its new car line that would be as evocative as Thunderbird, a label that had done wonders. Ford’s in-house creative team was stumped, Young confessed, so he was hoping a poet could rescue him. Although Young encouraged Moore to give herself free rein in brainstorming a car name, “another ‘Thunderbird’ would be fine,” he wryly added.

“I am complimented to be recruited in this high matter,” Moore responded. “I have seen and admired ‘Thunderbird’ as a Ford designation. It would be hard to match.” She agreed to the assignment, but dodged Ford’s offer to pay her, insisting that she’d take money only if she could offer “specific assistance”—meaning, presumably, the coining of a car name the company decided to use. Moore first suggested the Ford Silver Sword, named after a plant which “I believe grows only in Tibet, and on the Hawaiian Island,

Maui on Mount Haleakala (House of the Sun).” Other Moore suggestions included the Resilient Bullet, bullet cloisonné, bullet lavolta, Intelligent Whale, Ford Fabergé and Mongoose Civique. Anticipator and Pastelogram made the list too, along with another Moore nomination that would become her most-quoted idea.

“May I submit UTOPIAN TURTLETOP?,” she asked Young. “Do not trouble to answer unless you like it.” Ford eventually opted for a name from its own ranks: the Edsel.

If anything, Moore’s genius for car-naming was ahead of its time. Many of the names on her list appeared to anticipate the ethereal car monikers we now take for granted, such as the Honda Civic, Mustang Bullitt, and Chevy Volt.

But Moore’s efforts on Ford’s behalf were not in vain.

The New Yorker eventually published her correspondence with Ford, much to the amusement of readers across the country. On one level, the letters seemed like a literary farce, the earnestly dotty ramblings of an old lady who wasn’t quite in on the joke. Not everyone has found the joke funny. Poetry critic Helen Vendler sees the letters as Moore’s sad lapse into self-caricature, a career turn that obscured her stature.

“These letters lodged themselves more firmly in the imagination of the general public than anything else Moore wrote,” notes biographer and NEH research fellow Linda Leavell. “Is the poet as hilariously remote from the modern world as the letters indicate?” Leavell thinks not. Moore allowed the letters to be printed in the New Yorker, after all, and she included them in A Marianne Moore Reader among her best work.

It’s quite possible, if not likely, that Moore knew exactly what she was doing in taking on the Ford assignment, seeing it as a chance to promote not only a car, but herself.

She was a master at cultivating her own profile, despite her public image as a sheltered maiden aunt. As Leavell notes, Moore “had long regarded her own poetry as a form of advertising,” including these lines in her poem, ‘The Arctic Ox (or Goat)’: ‘If you fear that you are / reading an advertisement, / you are.’”

And as Clive Driver, her literary executor, has pointed out, there was nothing accidental about Moore’s unconventional public character, which so many observers misread as the unstudied disposition of a naïve spinster. “Her interest in images extended to her own persona,” Driver said.

“From at least the time she was in college, she was intensely interested in devising the way she appeared. Sometimes, she would put together a whole outfit, and then she would go down into the subway in one of those little booths where you could take your own picture, to see whether or not the effect that she wanted to achieve by this outfit came across in photography.”

Along with her lifelong interest in advertising, Moore had another reason to help name a car. “Marianne was intensely interested in the techniques of things—how camellias are grown; how the quartz prisms work in crystal HUMANITIES 21

clocks; how the pangolin can close up his ear, nose and eye apertures . . . how to drive a car; how the best pitchers throw a baseball; how to make a figurehead for her nephew’s sailboat,” Bishop recalled. “The exact way in which anything was done, or made, or functioned, was poetry to her.”

Moore was an objectivist poet, which meant, among other things, that she believed writing about objects could be a good way to explore larger moral and emotional truths.

Among her friends was fellow objectivist William Carlos Williams, who famously penned a handful of lines about a red wheelbarrow to touch on such themes as nature, neglect, and the balance between beauty and function.

Moore tackles equally ambitious subjects in “Four Quartz Crystal Clocks,” a poem that allowed her to indulge two of her favorite fascinations, marketing and mechanical devices. The poem draws on a promotional pamphlet from the Bell Telephone Company. It opens like this: There are four vibrators, the world’s exactest clocks; and these quartz time-pieces that tell time intervals to other clocks, these worksless clocks work well . . .

Later in the poem, Moore draws a parallel between chronological accuracy and linguistic accuracy. She notes how quickly tiny alterations in language can throw a whole scheme of understanding wildly out of calibration. The bellboy who collects our luggage is entirely different from a bouy-ball that marks a part of a sea, although the words sound almost like twins. She mentions similar gulfs of meaning between “glass eyes” that taxidermists use and “eye-glasses” that we use to see.

Although Moore’s comparisons seem obvious at first, she invites us to realize just how bizarre our mother tongue is, the smallest adjustments in syllables pointing the listener in radically divergent directions. A poem about clocks evolves into a poem about words—a poem that’s ultimately about poetry itself.

It’s a quintessentially objectivist poem, one that illustrates the strengths of this particular school of literature as well as its complications. Moore’s poetry, so often grounded in clocks or church steeples, tiny animals, a paper nautilus, or a page from a magazine, can seem emotionally arid to the casual reader. If there’s no obvious contest of love or other emotional conflict at the heart of the narrative, then what’s really at stake, and why should we care?

But “Four Quartz Crystal Clocks” has a quiet passion at its core, contemplating as it does the narrator’s obsession with precision. The poem underscores Moore’s primary ambition—to see the world and render it with surgical accuracy on the page. She saw literary precision as not just cleverness, but a moral imperative. Moore implies in “Four Quartz Crystal Clocks” that without this kind of clarity, order quickly slides into chaos.

“To read a poem by Marianne Moore is to be aware of exactitude,” another Moore friend, poet Grace Schulman, writes. “It is to know that the writer has looked at a subject—a cliff, a sea animal, an ostrich—from all sides, and has examined the person looking at it as well.”

Moore knew that this kind of exactitude was an ideal easily corrupted by human fallibility. In an early poem, 22 SPRING 2016

“Leaves of a Magazine,” she describes how magazine pages reveal their treasures: They open of their own will to the place Where Captain Kidd stands with averted face And folded arms, as solid as an oak, His loosely knotted sash and scarlet cloak Encircling him, and flapping in the breeze.

But later in the poem, we see that the pages have grown imperfect from use: A block of shade, with blurs and puckers where Admiring hands have often brought to bear Their pressure on the picture and the rhyme Of buccaneering in the olden time.

In this way, or so Moore seems to say with her reference to the smudges and abuses of “admiring hands,” our attempt to see what’s real and true and beautiful becomes compromised by our familiarity with it. Poetry, she hints here, is one way to renew our sense of life’s strangeness.

And strangeness, in fact, is a hallmark of Moore’s sensibility. Her poems, though grounded in earthly concerns, can read like reports from an alien planet.

That’s especially true of “An Octopus,” Moore’s acclaimed poem inspired by Mount Rainier. The title refers to eight glaciers radiating from a mountain, although Moore doesn’t explicitly mention Rainier in the poem. This can seem like militant obscurity, and maybe it is. But in so obliquely referencing a national landmark, then describing it as a monster, Moore forces us to see a landscape as a life force, and not simply a tourist destination: Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus with its capacity for fact.

“Creeping slowly as with meditated stealth, its arms seeming to approach from all directions,” it receives one under winds that “tear the snow to bits and hurl it like a sandblast shearing off twigs and loose bark from the trees.”

At six pages, “An Octopus” is one of Moore’s longest poems, and its size chimes with its subject. The poem reads like a dense mountain of fact; it’s as if Moore is suggesting, perhaps ironically, that nature can be completely colonized by the human mind, if only we throw enough observation at it. The quotation in the poem, from an article in the Illustrated London News, is one of many in “An Octopus,” and it points to her penchant for filling her poetry with prose fragments from other commentators. There’s often so much quotation in a Moore poem, in fact, that the voice behind the verse can sound impersonal and aggregated, like an entry in an encyclopedia. She copiously documented these sources in notes that accompanied her poems, as if she were writing a term paper. But it’s in the selection and arrangement of this material that Moore expresses her vision. The odd juxtaposition of these excerpts—derived from sources as varied as classical quotation, commercial pamphlets, and tourist brochures—gives Moore’s poetry its dreamlike quality, much like the collages of her friend, the artist Joseph Cornell.

Moore wrote “An Octopus” after taking a trip to Rainier with her older brother, Warner, and her mother, Mary. It

was a happy occasion for a family that had known many challenges. Moore was born in 1887 in Kirkwood, Missouri. Her father suffered a nervous breakdown before her birth, and she never met him. The Moores moved in with her maternal grandfather, a minister whose death in 1894 prompted the family to move again, to Carlisle, Pennsyl“. . . her talk, like her vania. Moore entered Bryn Mawr College poetry, was quite in 1905, where her indifferent from anyone terest in writing grew.

After graduating in else’s in the world.”

1909, she worked as a —Elizabeth Bishop teacher, and by 1919, with Warner embarked on a career as a naval chaplain, Marianne and Mary had settled in New York. Marianne worked as a secretary, librarian, and tutor while pursuing her literary ambitions. Her poetry brought her to the attention of The Dial, an influential literary journal that hired Moore as its editor in 1925. She ran The Dial until its publisher’s declining health forced it to close in 1929. At a time when few women held positions of authority in American letters—or anywhere else in America, for that matter—Moore’s reviews helped advance a new era of literary modernism. Her circle included William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, who praised her as “one of those few who have done the language some service.”

But not everyone was a fan. Informed by her upbringing in a minister’s household, Moore had a strong—some would say confining—sense of propriety. As The Dial’s editor, she rejected excerpts from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as too crude, and she insisted on changes to Hart Crane’s poems, too. Referring to Moore’s tenure at The Dial and Harriet Monroe’s leadership of Poetry, Crane lamented that the nation’s two leading literary journals were edited by “hysterical virgins.”

Moore, Bishop recalled, had once reprimanded her for using the term “water closet” in a poem. But despite her nineteenth-century manners, Moore impressed Bishop chiefly as a daring innovator. As a college student, Bishop was eager to meet Moore after reading her poems. “I hadn’t known poetry could be like that,” Bishop wrote. They became close friends. “She must have been one of the world’s greatest talkers,” Bishop recalled. “Entertaining, enlightening, fascinating, and memorable; her talk, like her poetry, was quite different from anyone else’s in the world.”

Bishop’s homage to her mentor, a poem called “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,” casts Moore as a kind of metaphysical fairy buzzing over the Gotham skyline. But the image of Moore as an amusing sprite tends to downplay just how ambitious and shrewd she was. She’d made her way to the top of New York literary culture, becoming an influential editor and poet, all the while insisting on her own, idiosyncratic standards of art and life. “She was extraordinarily, I think we would say, gutsy,” poet Richard Howard once said.

George Plimpton told of arriving to escort Moore to a Dodgers game, then being given a postcard of a pangolin, a

kind of scaly anteater, as a gift. “It is hard to know what to say, presented with a postcard of an anteater,” he remarked about the experience. Moore was fascinated by animals and often wrote poems about them. Those poems “are really not about animals,” Howard said. “Her poems are about herself.”

That seems true enough in Moore’s “To a Snail,” in which she praises qualities in the creature that she tries to embrace as a writer: If “compression is the first grace of style,” you have it. Contractility is a virtue as modesty is a virtue.

The quotation in “To a Snail” comes from Demetrius (though Moore attributes the line, incorrectly, it seems, to Democritus). For Moore, the reason for so much quotation in her poems seemed self-evident. “When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better,” she explained, “why paraphrase it?”

Moore’s calm insistence on being herself was part of her public appeal. Her death in 1972 at age 84 brought the exit of one who was arguably the last celebrity poet of her generation. Robert Frost had died in 1963, Carl Sandburg in 1967. With Moore’s death, the nation lost one of the last poets that might actually have been recognized by passing strangers on the street. But it was a fame that, in Moore’s last years, appeared to operate apart from her work, not as an extension of it. She was widely known among many people who didn’t seem to know her poems.

They weren’t, after all, easy poems to get to know, and they still require readers to meet them at least halfway.

Moore helped usher in a new era of poetry that was generally more cryptic and less accessible—a genre that now tends to resonate among a niche readership rather than the broad general public. She seemed to recognize the complications she had helped create.

“I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle,” Moore famously wrote of poetry.

“Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it, after all, a place for the genuine.”

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 funding has supported numerous Marianne Moore projects over the years. One of the more recent efforts was a $144,801 grant to advance the digitization of several small literary magazines where the works of Moore, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and other important writers were published. Linda Leavell was the recipient of three separate research grants from 1989 to 2005 for projects relating to the works of Marianne Moore, including her award-winning 2014 biography Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore.

Sources: Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore by Linda Leavell. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, A Marianne Moore Reader, The Best of Plimpton by George Plimpton, Elizabeth Bishop: Prose, The Poems of Marianne Moore, The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, Voices and Visions, a 1980s public television series about American poets, and Great Women Writers, edited

by Frank Magill.

HUMANITIES 23

24 SPRING 2016

StAtIoN ElEvEn By EmIlY St. JoHn MaNdEl Is ThE WiNnEr Of ThE 2015 ArThUr C. ClArKe AwArD AnD WaS A FiNaLiSt FoR ThE 2014 NaTiOnAl BoOk AwArD. ThE BoOk WaS ChOsEn FoR ThE GrEaT MiChIgAn ReAd, A StAtEWiDe DiScUsSiOn PrOjEcT In 300 CoMmUnItIeS SpOnSoReD By ThE MiChIgAn HuMaNiTiEs CoUnCiL. As ThE NoVeL CaPtUrEs ThE JoUrNeY Of An ItInErAnT ShAkEsPeArEaN TrOuPe ThRoUgH ThE GrEaT LaKeS ReGiOn, So HeRe MaNdEl GiVeS A GlImPsE Of HeR OwN LiFe On ToUr. by

1.

By the time I arrived in Michigan this past fall,

I’d been on tour for so long that I had to take a picture of my hotel room door every time I checked into a new place, because otherwise I’d forget my room number. “We have a budget for five cities,” my American publicist had told me at the outset, before the book for which I was touring came out, but then five cities somehow became 17, then 30, and then the tour turned into a sort of self-perpetuating phenomenon that seemed somehow to replicate by itself.

The e-mail from the Michigan Humanities Council arrived in January 2015, somewhere around my fortieth book tour event: The book had been chosen as the 2015–2016 Great Michigan Read selection. It’s a biennial program, in which a series of regional committees pick a book that has some bearing on both Michigan and the humanities. I have no particular connection to the state of Michigan, but the book in question, Station Eleven, involves a traveling Shakespearean theater company in a postapocalyptic Michigan lakeshore region. If I agreed to participate, the Michigan Humanities Council would distribute several thousand copies to schools and libraries and then send me on a series of tours all over the state.

I was declining most event offers by that point, because it was clear by then that what had started as five cities in six or seven days was going to be something closer to 50 cities in 14 months. I am aware at all times of how lucky I was with Station Eleven, having published three previous novels that came and went without a trace, but it is possible to exist in a state of profound gratitude for extraordinary circumstances and simultaneously long to go home. I missed my husband. I was increasingly worn down by life in hotel rooms and airports, and worn down by other people; most of the people I’d met on tour had been wonderful, but a few too many seemed to expect serious responses to questions and statements like, “What’s with all the sentence fragments?” and “Don’t take this personal, but I found your characters a bit over-the-top, by which I mean they weren’t believable” and—my personal favorite— “Obviously, All The Light We Cannot See was better, but yours was good too.” In the brief intervals when I was home between tours, I’d come to dread the inevitable hour when I left for the airport.

Still, I never seriously considered declining the Michigan Humanities Council’s offer. The book sales were, of course, a factor, but the nature of the Great Michigan Read program itself was deeply appealing to me. The goal of the program is to encourage literacy and community, whereas the usual goal of a book tour is to encourage book sales.

Also, I’d written a book set partly in Michigan, and that book had changed my life. Perhaps, I thought, committing to four or five brief tours in Michigan was the least I could do.

2.

When the first of the Great Michigan Read tours

began, ten months later, I’d done 99 events in seven countries. That fall I sometimes felt as though it might be possible to somehow break through the tour, the way longdistance runners break through a wall of exhaustion to find something approaching transcendence on the other side.

My collection of hotel-room door photos had become an accidental travelog. Some were more memorable than others. Where were rooms 323, 810, and 122, for example?

I have no idea.

Room 948, on the other hand, was where I discovered I was pregnant. This was in Auckland, New Zealand. I told my husband via FaceTime—he was just sitting down to dinner in New York—and took a pink-and-gold pen from the room to perhaps give to the child later. “This pen’s from the room where I became aware of your existence,” I’ll tell her, unless she’s an unsentimental child who doesn’t appreciate mementos or quality pens, in which case I’ll keep the pen and will wonder if she was possibly switched at birth.

Travel was easier before Room 948 than after, although never as difficult as I feared it would be. The tour shifted from the Antipodes to the Midwest. Room 409 was the best room, in Iowa City. It had a kitchen, I could walk to the event venue, and the hotel was next to a grocery store.

Room 411 was the worst of all the rooms, in a Marriott.

Where? It doesn’t really matter, because all Marriotts are the same. “Have you stayed with us before?” the woman at the front desk asked, and I honestly wasn’t sure how to answer, because if you’ve stayed in one Marriott, haven’t you stayed in all of them? The room was very beige. The corridors were empty. It was a long dark Marriott of the soul, but what made it a bad room wasn’t that it was a MarHUMANITIES 25

—Vintage

Publishing

events in New York and New Jersey, and then on to Detroit for the first of the Great Michigan Read events.

That was my one hundredth event for Station Eleven, and the night was invigorating: In the town of Grand Haven I sat onstage in a state of awe and delight while the players of the Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company performed a medley of scenes from Lear, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet.

(The traveling company in Station Eleven performs all three plays, although I excised the latter two from the final draft for the sake of narrative velocity.) Pigeon Creek is Michigan’s only full-time touring Shakespeare company. They are dazzlingly good. Every so often, between scenes, I got up and read, and there was such joy in collaborating with other artists, after standing behind so many podiums alone.

The other events on that tour were fine, but not as good as the Grand Haven event, because the Grand Haven event had the Shakespearean troupe. If we lived in an alternate universe where authors could have tour riders, I decided on the flight out of Michigan, I would require Shakespearean actors at every stop.

I flew to Chicago, or more precisely to a hotel marooned in an ocean of parking lots on the outskirts of Chicagoland.

The lights of big-box stores shone in the distance. The hotel bar was full of independent booksellers. I stayed in Room 627 that night, memorable because it was the first room in some time with a window that opened. By then the pregnancy was extremely obvious. “Congratulations,” one of my favorite Penguin Random House sales reps said, in the hotel lobby. “I don’t know how you found the time.”

That day there were two school shootings, in different states. That night I lay awake in Room 627 while the baby fluttered and kicked. Please be okay, I thought. I know I can’t save you from every danger but just come to us safely, my beloved, my daughter, and we’ll try to protect you in this terrifying country.

—North Central Michigan College

3.

riott, it was that there was yet another gun massacre in a different state that day.

I was born in Canada, and lived there until I was 22. I’ve held dual citizenship from birth, because my father’s from California, and I love living in New York City, but the truth is that growing up in a country with strict gun-control legislation can lead to certain difficulties in adapting to life in the United States. I limped through that night’s lecture and then spent a long time alone in the room, thinking of the latest round of bereaved families and overcome by loneliness and wondering if I was making a fatal error in raising a child in this country. In the morning I traveled home for 26 SPRING 2016

From Chicago to Saint Paul, Hartford, Omaha,

Des Moines, Boston, Red Deer, Spokane. By Spokane, flight attendants were giving me that “please, for the love of god don’t go into labor in the air” look when I boarded airplanes. Home for a few days, then back to Michigan for the second Great Michigan Read tour. I flew into Pellston Airport, which is one of my favorite airports in the world, because it’s easily the strangest I’ve ever seen. There are taxidermied black bears and a cougar by baggage claim.

The stuffed elk are in the waiting area. Down to the beautiful lakeside town of Petoskey, where, for once, my usual request for an onstage interview in lieu of a lecture had been granted. My interviewer asked if there was anything in particular I’d like for him to cover.

“Surprise me,” I said. After over a hundred events for the same book, I longed by then to be surprised, which is why I’d taken to requesting the onstage-interview format.

Usually when I tell interviewers to surprise me, the surprise is that they’ve somehow managed to reproduce, nearly verbatim, the same ten questions that I’ve heard in the previous 40 cities. But that afternoon the questions were unusual and piercing, and weeks later, I found myself thinking of them at odd moments: In the first chapter, when the actor dies onstage, you compare the stage to a terminal. In what way is a stage like a terminal? And given the content of the scene and the double meaning of the word ‘terminal,’ in what way is a performance like a death?

4.

I deliver my lecture in Scottville that night,

and the last Great Michigan Read tour of 2015 is over. I’ll come back to Michigan a few times in the spring, but for now there’s just one more festival, this time in the south, and then finally, after 126 events for Station Eleven, I’ll go home. I’m having difficulty believing that this is actually true, because the thought of going home and staying there, going home without plans to return to the airport in 48 hours, is almost inconceivable at this point. I arrive at my hotel at 11 p.m. that night, and rise at four to fly to South Carolina.

More and more lately, and especially in the air, I’ve found myself silently narrating the tour to my daughter.

The year before you were born, my love, I traveled constantly. It was sometimes magnificent and sometimes

—Photo courtesy Brian Temple

In Benzonia a day later, I was eating lunch at a restaurant when a man came in with a handgun in his belt. I stopped breathing for just a second, but I’ve been in the United States for over a decade and immigration requires certain adjustments, so I spent the rest of the lunch watching him in my peripheral vision and trying to concentrate on what my lunch companions were saying. This state has open carry, I reminded myself. He’s not a criminal, he’s just not brave enough to face the world unarmed, and I should try to have some compassion for this. So long as no one startles him, we’ll all get out of here alive.

We survived lunch and carried on to the lovely old building that houses the Benzonia Public Library, where I sat in an armchair and delivered a lecture. Ninety people showed up for the event, which was startling in a community with a 2010 census population of 497. “Perhaps one more question,” I said finally, at the end of the audience Q&A. A woman at the back raised her hand to ask whether my book is modern or postmodern. I’d actually never thought about it. It occurred to me that if I were a little less tired, I’d be able to remember the technical definition of what constitutes a postmodern novel and could probably dance my way to an adequate response, but in that moment both the definition and the jargon eluded me. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Even though you don’t know much about literature and couldn’t say whether your book’s modern or postmodern, I think your book could still be taught in colleges,” she assured me later, in the signing line. Even though you don’t know much about literature. I refrained from throwing a book at her head and left as quickly as possible for Scottville.

The day was bright, until somewhere outside Elberta, a heavy fog descended over the road. Within the cloud, there was an apple orchard, gray and dripping, trees skeletal in the white, the orchard replaced by the ghostly silhouettes of marsh grass as the road passed near a lake. I was thinking of the beauty of this state, of the tremendous good fortune of getting to see so much of it on these tours. I was thinking of the man with the gun in the diner, realizing that I’d been witness to a performance: What he wanted, when he left the house that morning with a deadly weapon in his belt, was to play the part of an invincible man. (In what way is a performance like a death?) I was thinking of the way the tour had begun to mirror the book; we traveled endlessly, my fictional characters and I, afraid of violence and sustained by our art, exhausted and exhilarated in equal measure, and the costs were not insignificant but we’d chosen this life.

PELLSTON REGIONAL AIRPORT, MICHIGAN.

numbing. I knew the best places to eat in a dozen airports.

(The plane descends into the Carolinas, still green in November.) I was very tired, but there were moments of grace.

It was a year of loneliness and long flights and spectacular good fortune, a year of numbered rooms and standing behind podiums. “Culture,” I told the audience, “is an antidote to chaos,” although that year the chaos seemed exceptionally strong. It was a year of mass shootings, of blinking back tears in airport lounges beneath televisions tuned to CNN, of reading about new massacres in hotel rooms at night. The violence that year was stunning and constant and it was easy to conclude that it would never end.

But every day of the tour, in seven countries, I met people who cared about life, about civilization, about books, and by the end of the tour this seemed to me to be a reasonable antidote to despair. I thought very often about the world you’d be born into, about what it means to hold on to one’s humanity in the face of horror. In my life, the humanities have been the antidote to mere survival. In the book for which I traveled, the line Survival is insufficient is tattooed on someone’s skin.

Emily St. John Mandel is the author of four novels, most recently Station Eleven, which won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award and was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

The Michigan Humanities Council is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Great Michigan Read with Station Eleven continues through May 2016.

HUMANITIES 27

THe NExt STaGe of GArRiSon

KEiLlOr:

REtIrEmEnT

BY PETER TONGUETTE

28 SPRING 2016

—Sarah Lune, flickr

NO-NONSENSE MINNESOTAN THAT HE IS, Garrison Keillor warned us that he would one day depart A Prairie Home Companion.

Years before he formally announced that he would no longer write and perform in the St. Paul-based radio program—first transmitted on airwaves in 1974—Keillor forecast his decision on big screens around the country.

This was in the 2006 movie A Prairie Home Companion, starring Keillor, in which an ever-so-slightly fictionalized variant of the show was seen in the throes of its concluding broadcast. (The story was by Keillor and Ken LaZebnik.)

The on-screen setup was straightforward: An eager audience streams into the Fitzgerald Theater, the marquee of which is adorned with the likeness of its notable namesake, F. Scott. Inside, production assistants bustle like busy bees, while musical acts, including the Johnson Girls and cowboys Dusty and Lefty, ponder the past. The host, that would be Keillor, distracts himself from the sad significance of the evening by chitchatting continuously, even while he is putting on his pants. Meanwhile, smooth-as-silk detective Guy Noir keeps an eye on all, especially an ethereal blonde woman in a trench coat. Her presence may well be a bad omen, but, in truth, the program owes its demise to forces far more earthbound. A corporation headquartered in Texas bought what had been a family-run station, WLT, on which A Prairie Home Companion was broadcast. To paraphrase Emily in Our Town: Good-bye, Prairie Home Companion! Good-bye, Fitzgerald Theater, Johnson Girls, Dusty and Lefty . . .

In the movie, the show proceeds as planned, presenting a pleasing panoply of songs and laughs. Still donning napkins around his neck from being made up in the dressing room, Keillor launches into “Tishomingo Blues.” The Johnson Girls put all of their heart into “My Minnesota Home.”

Dusty and Lefty are given featured parts, too. Throughout, sound-effects artists ply their craft, and advertisements for Powdermilk Biscuits and Bebop-A-Reebop Frozen Rhubarb Pie are briskly recited. The entertainment is so rich that it is easy to forget that when the curtain comes down, it will never rise again. “Every show,” Keillor says philosophically, “is the last show.”

The content of the imaginary Prairie Home Companion closely tracked the real-life Prairie Home Companion. Yes, movie stars—Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, and Kevin Kline among them—appeared in the film, but so did actual veterans of the show: Keillor played himself, and Sue Scott and sound-effects impresario Tom Keith were also in the film.

Everything rang true, everything, that is, except the plot.

The actual Prairie Home Companion did not cease transmission a decade ago. And WLT was not sold—in fact, there was no WLT. Then and now, the program is broadcast by Minnesota Public Radio. Moreover, for its loyal listeners, to contemplate the demise of A Prairie Home Companion would be like contemplating the demolition of a landmark. A liner note accompanying a fortieth-anniversary CD collection of samplings from the show emphasizes its multigenerational continuity: “Children were begat who grew up forced to listen to it and resented that and now listen freely and force their children. This is how a show goes on for 40 years.”

And the show will continue to go on, but beginning in the fall, it will do so without its founding father. A Prairie Home Companion ending? Impossible. But A Prairie Home Companion moving on without Garrison Keillor? It is happening, and soon.

Keillor ’s final episode will air on July 2, the last show of the current 2015–16 season. Chris Thile, a mandolin player and periodic guest host, will take Keillor ’s place permanently. To be sure, a transfer of power is not the same as the end of an era, but still: What will Saturday nights be without the sound of Keillor singing “Tishomingo Blues”?

In a recent e-mail interview with HUMANITIES magazine, the 73-year-old explained, in detail, his decision to withdraw from A Prairie Home Companion.

“I want to live a new life as a writer, a smaller life, not so many deadlines, the life I imagined when I was young, in which you sit in a room and wrangle sentences and paragraphs, a cup of coffee at hand,” Keillor says. “I never was cut out for performance, never had the ambition, just sort of sidled into it. Now I’m going to sidle out of it.”

The native of Anoka, Minnesota, did not grow up wanting to step before a mic, but to put pen to paper. In his autobiographical introduction to The Keillor Reader—a delightful compendium of writings published in 2014—he traced his literary ambitions to the sixth grade, when he composed a report detailing a trip to faraway New York City. “There is nothing like good material,” he wrote in the introduction. “You only had to say New York and there was an awestruck silence.” Two grades later, he talked his way into a sports-reporting job at a weekly newspaper, the Anoka Herald. There, he stood in awe of a printing press that made his stories available to “dozens, if not hundreds, of subscribers, men and women in kitchens all over Anoka eager for my account of the game.” Here, as throughout his work, Keillor seems to be poking fun, but is in fact expressing an authentically felt sentiment. “A person never gets over this,” he wrote, with a note of wonderment, of his time on the Anoka Herald, “the pleasure of seeing his own words in print.”

In the same book, Keillor wrote of an epiphany he experienced while a student at the University of Minnesota (from which he graduated in 1966). He realized that he was “not screwed up enough” to join the ranks of the great men of letters: “So I accepted that I could not be a true artist and that my future lay in the field of amusement.” Already, he was a fan of a trio of writers who wrote amusingly—and well—for the New Yorker: A. J. Liebling, S. J. Perelman, and E. B. White. He retains his enthusiasm for each.

“White was an essayist who found a literate everyday American voice, very elegant and utilitarian,” Keillor explains. “Liebling was a newspaperman who wrote better than anyone else about gamblers, hustlers, boxers, soldiers, reporters, good eaters, and lowlife in general. Perelman was a humorist who ventured into surrealist fable with splashes of vaudeville, carny barker, and candy salesman.”

As fate would have it, it was the New Yorker, a publication with considerably more clout than the Anoka Herald, that turned Keillor from aspirant to professional. In 1965,

HUMANITIES 29

—Courtesy Prairie Home Companion

of characters I could talk about, the Krebsbachs and Bunsens and Tolleruds and Father Emil and Pastor Ingqvist and Darlene. A joke turned into a saga.”

And a sideline turned into the main tributary of Keillor’s career.

In 1971, Keillor’s morning-show stint came to an end, but in 1974, he reconsidered his leave-taking from radio when the New Yorker tasked him with writing about the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. “The people I met were so genuine, so grateful for the chance to play music—Dolly Parton and Marty Robbins, Porter Wagoner, Bill Monroe, Stringbean—and it was awesome watching them from the wings,” Keillor says. “And I went back to Minnesota, wrote the story, did a couple shows at the Walker Art Center, decided to do a few more, and it turned into four decades.”

A Prairie Home Companion (as the show had come to be called) was not, however, the Grand Ole Opry, and its chances for success must have seemed uncertain. The music, of course, could not be beat: The fortieth-anniversary CD preserves appearances by such titans as Chet Atkins and Emmylou Harris, but what to make of Lake Wobegon, with its descriptions of the characters and customs of the Midwest? And what about the relentlessly up-tempo commercials (“Heavens, they’re tasty!” Keillor says of Powdermilk Biscuits) or the sometimes eccentric skits? “Diet Squad,” broadcast in 1982, seems representative: Studs Terkel, hamming it up, was cast as a Joe Friday-like cop assigned to ferret out illicit unhealthy meals. “You know what a guy can get for one porterhouse on the street now?”

Terkel asks, tongue firmly in cheek.

The program proved widely appealing, which was, perhaps, a surprise to some, and it is now broadcast on 693 stations. Keillor says that the “liveness” of the show— “performers playing at the same time you hear them on your radio”—contributed to its success. “And it was a good time for the sort of acoustic music we offered. Emmylou Harris, Chet Atkins, Jethro Burns, John Prine, John Hartford, the Everlys—it was a rich broth,” he says. “And people enjoy being spoken to when there doesn’t seem to be a script—me talking to you, it is quite powerful on radio. So, the Lake Wobegon stories may have been a revelation to

GARRISON KEILLOR ONSTAGE DURING BROADCAST IN 2011 OF A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION, WHICH IS HEARD BY FOUR MILLION LISTENERS EACH WEEK.

30 SPRING 2016

KEVIN KLINE, GARRISON KEILLOR, LILY TOMLIN, AND MERYL STREEP FROM A SCENE IN THE 2006 FILM A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION.

—© AF archive / Alamy Stock photo

a journalism teacher named Bob Lindsay reckoned that Keillor’s talents and tastes made him a fit for the magazine, and he urged his pupil to give it the old college try. “He was brusque, not given to flattery,” Keillor wrote in the introduction to The Keillor Reader, “and when he said I should try to catch on at the New Yorker, I believed him.”

Submissions, and rejections, followed. Then, in 1969, a game changer came courtesy of the United States Postal Service. “I mailed my stories to 25 West 43rd Street in New York, as did thousands of English majors in the sixties, and a young woman assigned to comb through the slush pile found a story of mine and shot it upstairs to the big guys and they bought it,” Keillor says today. “Beautiful luck. I was living in St. Cloud and got the letter and was utterly stunned. It changed my life. How did it come about? I don’t want to know.” The story, “Local Family Keeps Son Happy,” was published in September 1970.

More beautiful luck: Also in 1969, Keillor accepted a position at Minnesota Public Radio, taking charge of a morning program. It was there that he first conjured the inhabitants of what would evolve into the fictitious town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, monologs about which would become the bread and butter, or meat and potatoes, if you prefer, of A Prairie Home Companion.

“In the early years of the morning show, I created sponsors—I’d grown up with commercial radio, after all—such as Jack’s Auto Repair, the Chatterbox Café, Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, and I needed a place to put them and that was Lake Wobegon,” Keillor says. “All those sponsors are long gone, and Lake Wobegon came to the fore as a home

—Courtesy Prairie Home Companion

SOUND EFFECTS MAN FRED NEWMAN, WITH VOICE ACTORS TIM RUSSELL, SUE SCOTT, AND KEILLOR ON AIR IN 2008 DURING A SKETCH FOR PHC, WHICH CELEBRATED ITS FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY TWO YEARS AGO. THE SHOW WAS FIRST BROADCAST ON JULY 6, 1974, AT THE JANET WALLACE AUDITORIUM AT MACALESTER COLLEGE IN ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA.

people who hadn’t grown up with that sort of thing. A great many listeners believed it was a real town, you know.”

Who could blame them? Keillor recites “The News from Lake Wobegon”—as that portion of the show has been styled since 1978—in a matter-of-fact, only moderately arch manner that convinces. On a recent episode, broadcast the week before Christmas, Keillor began with his signature introduction, which was immediately met by an appreciative burst of applause: “Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my home town, out there on the edge of the prairie.” The monolog that followed wandered hither and thither: Keillor began by admonishing Lake Wobegon denizens who took a tumble on icy sidewalks, following a cold snap (“They’re not wearing the right kind of shoes whatsoever”) before segueing into a pleasingly poetic account of a meteor shower (“‘falling stars’ we used to call them, until we knew better”).

Meanwhile, Pastor Liz—she of Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church—is said to have prompted parishioners to donate their spare coats and extra food to the needy, but Keillor mused that she would have been wiser to proffer a warning about the danger of walking on lakes that seem to be frozen solid but really aren’t (“She should have given a sermon about not walking out on ice until it really is all iced over”). In a seamless transition, Keillor shifted to the story of six men whose ice-fishing outing turned into an ordeal when they became stranded on a floe. Then, moving from anecdote to commentary, Keillor paused to reflect on what might happen when the hapless fellows tell their wives.

“When you’ve done something just monumentally stupid, how quiet she is,” he said, speaking generally now. “Asks if you would like some eggs and bacon, brings you the paper,

brings you your slippers, you look at her, is she smirking?

She seems to be smirking, a little bit, and you just wish she would just come out and say it, just say it, just say, ‘You are dumb enough to be twins.’”

Loosey-goosey transitions are common on A Prairie Home Companion. Later in the same monolog, after commenting on the prodigious eating and sleeping habits of college students on Christmas break, Keillor digressed again: “Corinne Tollerud once slept for 16 hours coming home from college.

They had to hold a mirror under her nostrils, pry open her eyelids and her eyes moved and so they let her sleep longer.” And then it was on to Corinne’s ex-boyfriend. After more than 13 minutes of the news Keillor said his goodbyes: “Merry Christmas to you all from the people of Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”

Simply put, “The News from Lake Wobegon” is told in a kind of homespun stream of consciousness—Ulysses as reimagined by Booth Tarkington—that is utterly unique.

In a 1982 article in the New York Times, writer Edward Fiske identified the segment as the show’s “centerpiece each week.” “His stories take off from events that everyone can recognize—the opening of duck hunting season, the death of a dog who liked to chase cars,” Fiske wrote, “and, as with them, his stories are for the most part autobiographical.”

Indeed, Keillor’s kith and kin can be found among Lake Wobegon’s populace, but in fictionalized form. “My Aunt Elsie and Uncle Don were quite pleased to recognize themselves in the characters Myrna and Earl, which pleased me,” Keillor remembers now. “I once told a terrific story about Myrna winning the state fair baking contest with —Continued on page 41

HUMANITIES 31

Calendar

Endowment-Supported Events

—Courtesy Detroit Institute of Arts

An exhibit by the New-York Historical Society highlights the diverse lives of Chinese Americans. Anna Lee Chin, for example, helped her fatherin-law translate World War II posters into Chinese. With the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, more than 1,000 Chinese men from New York’s Chinatown alone enlisted in the war. “Chinese American: Exclusion/ Inclusion” is on view through May 1 at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland.

Jitterbugs (II), William H. Johnson, ca. 1941, oil on paperboard.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of the Harmon Foundation / 1967.59.611.

“Dance: American Art, 1830–1960,” a multimedia exhibition continuing at the Detroit Institute of Arts through June 20, features works from such nineteenth-century painters as John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and Mary Cassatt, as well as works by Harlem Renaissance artists. Sacred dances, jigs, flamencos, quadrilles, and tarantellas all keep step with film and outdoor performances that demonstrate how central dance is to American culture.

—New-York Historical Society

Children attending “America to Zanzibar: Muslim Cultures Near and Far” will explore the variety in the architecture of world mosques, learn to say, “My name is . . .” in 15 languages, and barter and trade in an international souk.

Many other adventures in travel, performance, and fashion await at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan.

The pair of drums known as the tabla, sits on the floor and is played with the fingers and palms of both hands.

—Prince Baron Mei hua shin bao [Chinese American], February 3, 1883.

32 SPRING 2016

Spring 2016

BY STEVE MOYER

A young Polish officer who escaped Soviet imprisonment in September 1939, Jan Karski later witnessed Nazi atrocities in Warsaw’s Jewish Ghetto and at the Izbica transit camp. Having served as courier for the Polish underground, he was sent to both England and the United States to provide his eyewitness accounts to Anthony Eden and Franklin Roosevelt. His reports fell on deaf ears. “The World Knew: Jan Karski’s Mission for Humanity” travels to Manhattan College in New York, through May 23.

—Photo courtesy Wayne Hopkins

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Of the 233 existing copies of the first folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, the Folger Shakespeare Library holds 82 in its collection.

This year the Folger copies tour the country, making the scene in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. “First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare” travels to venues including the Durham Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, April 19 to May 1; the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, May 7 to May 30; and the Kansas City Public Library, June 6 to June 28.

HUMANITIES 33

Around Nation

AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION

the

COMPILED BY LAURA WOLFF SCANLAN

A Roundup of Activities Sponsored by the State Humanities Councils

ALASKA Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Clifford Levy, who oversees digital media platforms at the New York Times, gives the keynote address at the Alaska Press Club Conference in Anchorage in April.

—Courtesy Arizona Humanities

ALABAMA Educators from across the country will participate in an NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop focusing on Alabama’s role in the modern civil rights movement, beginning June 26.

“Family Matters: LGBTQ Youth Perspectives” remains on view at the University of South Alabama Museum of Archaeology in Mobile.

The Infanttree Project, a collection of works by Larry Thompson about the military, remains on display at Space One Eleven in Birmingham through April 29.

MARSHALL SHORE IS ARIZONA’S “HIP HISTORIAN.”

—Courtesy North Carolina Humanities Council

CALIFORNIA “On the Road with California Humanities: The Pulitzer Prizes Centennial Campfires Initiative” presents “Journalism and Democracy in California” on ARIZONA June 16 at the San Jose State University Two talks are scheduled at the Prescott Student Union with Pulitzer Prize Valley Public Library. Betsy Fahlman winners Héctor Tobar and Rob Kuznia, offers “Art of the Internment Camps: and “Food Futures at the Los Angeles Culture behind Barbed Wire” on April Times Festival of Books” with Pulitzer 23, and Laura Tohe, the Navajo Nation winner Jonathan Gold and chef Alice Poet Laureate, presents “Armed with Our Waters on April 10 at the University of Language, We Went to War: The Navajo Southern California in Los Angeles.

Code Talkers” on June 11.

The Tempe History Museum presents COLORADO an exhibit on Legend City, a local theme Colorado Book Awards finalists offer park that operated from 1963 to 1983. readings at the BookBar in Denver “Hip Historian” Marshall Shore preand various bookstores throughout sents “Arizona Kicks on Route 66” at the April.

Phippen Museum in Prescott on May 7.

Student winners from the “River of Words” poetry and art competition and “Letters About Literature” writing competition will be celebrated at the Student Literary Awards at the Denver Public Library on May 11.

As part of the Writers in the Schools Colorado program, student poets offer a reading at Scenic Elementary in Grand Junction on May 6, and Grand Junction High School highlights student writing and art with a public reception the week of May 9.

EDITORIAL CARTOONIST KEVIN SIERS IS PART OF NORTH CAROLINA’S PULITZER PROGRAMMING.

34 SPRING 2016

FLORIDA Starting June 12, Florida high school juniors and seniors will explore digital humanities research, web-based exhibits, and historical research for a week at the

University of Florida, Flagler College, and Eckerd College.

More than 300 K–12 teachers from around the state will attend Teaching Florida residential seminars in April and June in St. Augustine, St. Petersburg, Gainesville, Estero, Fernandina Beach, and Stuart. These workshops explore topics from Florida’s early peoples and colonial Spanish history to the state’s civil rights movement and water issues of the future.

“The Way We Worked” Museum on Main Street exhibit continues through April at the Molino Mid-County Historical Society Museum in northern Escambia County with presentations on local history topics on April 2, 14, 16, 23, and 28.

HAWAI‘I Students gather on April 16 at Windward Community College in Honolulu to compete in Hawai‘i History Day on this year’s theme, “Exploration, Encounter, Exchange in History.”

Stacy Hoshino leads a TALK program at Windward Community College – in Honolulu on April 3 focusing on E – Luku Wale E: Devastation Upon Devastation, a newly released photography book by Piliamo‘o, about the Hawai‘i Interstate H-3 project.

IDAHO The Smithsonian Institution Museum on Main Street traveling exhibit “Water/ Ways” opens at the Idaho Falls Public

—Pat Jarrett/Virginia Folklife Program

AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION

APPRENTICE WHITNEY NELSON PERFORMS AT THE VIRGINIA FOLKLIFE APPRENTICESHIP SHOWCASE.

Library on May 28. Activities including reading discussions, Speakers Bureau programs, and a local art exhibition will take place during May and June.

KANSAS On May 1, High Plains Public Radio in Garden City presents a readers book discussion on the three Spring Read novels: Plainsong by Kent Haruf, Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne, and A Strong West Wind by Gail Caldwell.

Events for the “Latino Americans: 500 Years of History” program include “La Colonia de Emporia: Stories of the Latino Community” on view at the Lyon County Historical Society in Emporia beginning May 14; film discussions of Prejudice and Pride (1965–1980) led by Leonard Ortiz at the Lyon County Historical Society on April 2, and led by Valerie Mendoza at Harvey

—Courtesy Hawai’i Humanities Council

ILLINOIS Two new initiatives start this spring.

Illinois Speaks, a grants program and small-group discussion series, has a goal of providing talks in every county in Illinois by 2018. Public Education, a collaboration with schools, parents, and local communities, debuts on April 27 with a talk by political philosopher Danielle Allen.

The Smithsonian traveling exhibition “Water/Ways” opens at the Franklin Creek Grist Mill on May 28.

Road Scholars events include “Ann Stokes: African-American Civil War Nurse,” with Marlene Rivero at the Orland Park Public Library on April 12; “He Gave the World the Steel Plow: The John Deere Story” by Richard Morthland at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Washington on April 25; and “Poets of Community and Human Struggle: Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg”

by John Hallwas at the Dairy Building in Bishop Hill on June 11.

INDIANA Participants of “Duck & Cover,” a historic bar crawl through Cold War Indianapolis, will learn about Indy’s Atomic Age on June 21 and 22.

As part of the “ALL-IN Block Parties” program, community members will participate in humanities-based activities at Allen County Public Library branches on April 1 through 3, and Gateway Park in Clarksville on April 9.

THE INTERSTATE H-3 PROJECT IS DISCUSSED IN HAWAI’I.

County Historical Museum in Newton on April 17; a talk on “The ‘Mexican Village’ in Dodge City: From the Eyes of Those Who Grew Up There,” with Louise Sanchez at the Dodge City Public Library on April 21; the debut of the Harvey County Historical Society and Archives online exhibition “A Presence in the Community: Newton High Azteca Club” on June 15; and a performance by the Azteca Dancers at the Harvey County Historical Society in Newton on June 19.

KENTUCKY The Kentucky Humanities Council will sponsor more than 50 Speakers Bureau and Kentucky Chautauqua programs this spring.

Four Kentucky libraries host Prime Time Family Reading Time: Nelson County Public Library; Letcher County Public Library; Rocky Adkins Public Library; and Jessamine County Public Library.

LOUISIANA On April 7, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities presents its 2016 Humanist of the Year award to singer, poet, and cultural activist Zachary Richard, who works to preserve the French language and Acadian culture in Louisiana.

The Alexandria Museum of Art opens two exhibitions on June 3: “Purchased Lives,” exploring the domestic slave trade, and “Changing Landscapes: Jan Beaboeuf along the Solomon Northup Trail.”

The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities commemorates “Hometown Teams” with a special edition of its quarterly magazine, Louisiana Cultural Vistas. The magazine will debut at the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame’s annual induction weekend, June 23 through 25, at the Northwest Louisiana History Museum in Natchitoches.

MARYLAND The Veterans’ Book Group series continues on April 1 at the St. Mary’s County Library in Lexington Park; April 20 at the Harford County Public Library in Bel Air; and April 5 and 27 at the Baltimore County Public Library in Towson.

HUMANITIES 35

THE EXHIBITION “WATER/WAYS” OPENS IN IDAHO.

Two panels on “Journalism and Its Power to Inform” take place at the Baltimore Sun: “Challenges Faced by Baltimore” on April 19 with Justin Fenton, Erica Green, and Pulitzer Prize winners E. R. Shipp and Diana Sugg, and “The Environment” on May 10 with McKay Jenkins and Pulitzer winners Will Englund, Elizabeth McGowan, and John McQuaid.

MASSACHUSETTS Family Adventures in Reading programs take place on Saturdays in April at Nevins Memorial Library in Methuen, Swampscott Public Library, Goodnow Library in Sudbury, and Eldredge Public Library in Chatham.

“Nuestras Abuelas de Holyoke: Empoderamiento y Legado—Our Grandmothers of Holyoke: Empowerment and Legacy” remains on display at Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke through April 24.

Essex Heritage hosts a discussion on “Invisible Injustice: Discovering and Disseminating the Story of Slavery in the North” on April 2 at Salem State University Veteran’s Hall.

MICHIGAN Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, this year’s Great Michigan Read selection, visits Swan Valley High School in Saginaw and Bayliss Public Library in Sault Ste. Marie on April 5; Troy Public Library on May 10; University of Michigan in Dearborn and Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor on May 11; and Plymouth District Library and Literary Detroit on May 18.

MINNESOTA “Sheeko Wadaag,” an event for families, educators, and community members to 36 SPRING 2016

celebrate the revival of the Somali Bilingual Storytelling Project, takes place at the Brian Coyle Community Center in Minneapolis on April 15.

The Minnesota Humanities Center in St. Paul hosts “Transforming Education through Absent Narratives,” a weeklong institute for K–12 educators from June 26 to July 1.

MISSISSIPPI In addition to touring five historic mansions, guests can learn about the lives of the Holly Springs’ slave population during the “Behind the Big House Tour” led by Joseph McGill of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The tour is part of this year’s Holly Springs Annual Pilgrimage, April 7 through 10.

“The Power of Children: Making a Difference,” highlighting the stories of Anne Frank, Ruby Bridges, and Ryan White, is on display at the Museum of the Mississippi Delta in Greenwood from April 6 to May 25.

The 2016 Petal Southern Miss Powwow will be held at Willie Hinton Park in Petal from April 14 to 17.

MONTANA Speakers Bureau programs taking place include “Women in Science,” with Mary Jane Bradbury at the North Lake County Public Library in Polson on April 14; “The Indian Education of Lewis and Clark,” with Hal Stearns at the Lewis and Clark Library in Helena on April 26; “A Jesuit Window on Life in Western Montana,” with Sally Thompson at the Great Falls Public Library on April 30; “A Visit with an 1879 American Fur Co. Trader,” with Greg Smith at Wise River School on June 21; and “The Dog Soldier Ledgerbook,” with Richard Ellis at the Lewis and Clark NHT Interpretive

Center in Great Falls on June 24.

As part of the Pulitzer 100 program, events taking place include a video interview and discussion with poet Maxine Kumin at the Billings Public Library on April 6; “Strong Is Your Hold: An Evening of the Poetry of Galway Kinnell” led by Dave Caserio in Billings on April 13; “Good Fences, Good Neighbors,” a discussion led by poet Lowell Jaeger at the Billings Public Library on April 20; a poetry workshop inspired by the work of Kay Ryan at the Western Heritage Center in Billings on April 23; and “Favorite Pulitzer Poems: Community Reading” with members of the Big Sky Writing Workshop at the Art House Cinema and Pub in Billings on May 2.

The Myrna Loy Center in Helena hosts a community conversation on April 14 about coming-of-age challenges to coincide with the staging of Spring Awakening from April 8–23.

“The Path Less Traveled: Montana Preservation Road Show 2016” takes place in Red Lodge from June 1 to 4.

NEBRASKA “Arte Plumaria/Feather Art” continues at El Museo Latino in Omaha through April 16.

“Go West! Art of the American Frontier from the Buffalo Bill Center of the West” remains on display at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha through April 17.

—Humanities Nebraska

—Courtesy Idaho Humanities Council

AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION

BILINGUAL FAMILIES ENJOY PRIME TIME FAMILY READING TIME IN NEBRASKA.

AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION

NEVADA United States Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Kay Ryan will be gracing two events at Sundance Books and Music in Reno: A conversation and book signing with Reno’s Poet Laureate Gailmarie Pahmeier on May 20, and as part of Downtown Reno Arts Corridor’s literary crawl on May 21.

NEW HAMPSHIRE Events taking place as part of the exhibit “The First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare,” on display at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, include the companion exhibit “Shakespeare’s Potions” through May 13; Shakespeare Family Day on April 9; a talk and museum tour led by Kevin Petersen and Susanne Paterson on April 10; First Folio Late Night, featuring music and theater performances on April 21; and a Shakespeare birthday celebration on April 23.

NEW JERSEY “Telling Untold Histories” for historians and historical institutions will be held at Rutgers University, Newark Campus, on May 13.

Eagle Theatre in Hammonton hosts “The Changing Phases of Hammonton Told through the Patterns of Immigration” from May 20 to June 25, featuring photos, videos, and interviews.

As part of the Community Conversation program, From the ‘Burg to the Barrio will be screened on April 30, followed by a panel discussion at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton.

A talk on “Queer Ecologies: The NonHuman League” takes place at Montclair State University on April 21.

“Wondrous Worlds: Art & Islam through Time & Place,” featuring more than 100 works of art, remains on display at the Newark Museum through May 15.

NEW MEXICO The University of New Mexico’s Institute for Medieval Studies in Albuquerque presents its annual lecture series, “Food and Festivity in the Middle Ages,” from April 18 to 21. Talks will explore topics such as the cultural implications of the spice trade; what medieval cookbooks reveal about medieval cuisine; the connections between food and the sense of identity; and the performance elements of medieval court banquets.

NORTH CAROLINA Programs taking place for “Pulitzer NC: The Power of Words,” part of the Pulitzer Prizes Centennial Campfires Initiative, include “A Study of Paul Green’s Pulitzer Prize in Drama: In Abraham’s Bosom,” a staged reading and panel discussion at UNC-Chapel Hill on April 4; a reading and discussion with poet Paul Muldoon at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory on April 14; “Bringing News to Light—Prize Winning Inves-

tigative Reporting,” a panel discussion with Mark Ethridge, Charles L. Overby, Karen Garloch, Maria Henson, and Walker Lundy at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte on April 19; “The Future of News,” a panel discussion with Tim Grieve, Rick Thames, Joe O’Connor, Julie Szulczewski, and Ed Williams at UNC at Charlotte on April 25; and “A Day with a Pulitzer Winner” for students at Parkway Playhouse in Burnsville on May 12.

Bookmarks Festival of Books and Authors’ summer reading program kicks off at the William G. White YMCA in Winston-Salem on May 12.

NORTH DAKOTA Annie Baker’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama The Flick will be staged at the Empire Arts Center in Grand Forks on April 1 and 2, followed by a panel discussion.

The University of North Dakota hosts its 47th Annual Writers Conference, April 6–8. This year’s theme is “The Art of Science.”

“We Don’t Talk Like That: Fargo and the Midwest Psyche” will take place at the Fargo Theatre on April 6.

Roland Geene commemorates the 400th anniversary of Don Quixote at the Fargo Public Library on April 23.

Pulitzer Prize winners will give presentations during the North Dakota Newspaper Convention at the Guardian Inn in Crosby from May 5 to 7.

The workshop “Picturing Writing: Fostering Literacy through Art” runs from June 13 to 17 at the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck.

“Native American Stories of Resilience,” a weekly Prairie Public Radio segment, will be aired April through June on Tuesdays.

—Courtesy of the Minnesota Humanities Center

“First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare” is on display at the Durham Museum in Omaha from April 9 through May 1.

Authors Amy Plettner and Katie F-S read their work on April 14 and lead a writing workshop on April 16 at KANEKO in Omaha for the “feedback” writing program.

State competitions for National History Day take place at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln on April 16.

The Nebraska Writing Project presents its annual “Poetry of Place” event at the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln on May 6, featuring student poets.

The Neihardt Spring Conference will be held at the John G. Neihardt State Historic Site in Bancroft on April 30.

Humanities Nebraska presents its new Chautauqua program “World War I: Legacies of a Forgotten War” in Hastings, June 1–5, and North Platte, June 8–12, featuring portrayals of Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, Jane Addams, W.E.B. DuBois, and Edith Wharton.

The Great American Comedy Festival will be hosted in Johnny Carson’s hometown of Norfolk, June 15–18.

The annual Homestead Days festival will be held in Beatrice from June 16 to 19.

MINNESOTA REVIVES ITS SOMALI BILINGUAL STORYTELLING PROJECT.

HUMANITIES 37

OKLAHOMA Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry in Locust Grove hosts its annual festival on April 9, on the topic of autograph book poetry, popular in the first half of the twentieth century.

Author of Four Perfect Pebbles, Marion Blumenthal Lazan, a World War II Jewish refugee and survivor of Bergen Belsen concentration camp, gives a talk at Northern Oklahoma College in Enid on April 11. Lazan also will speak with middle and high school students in Garfield County.

Six Tibetan scholars present “Wheel of Life,” featuring discussions, lectures, multiphonic chanting, and a sand mandala demonstration at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Norman from April 13 to 16.

“The Cold War: The Early Years,” is performed by Oklahoma Chautauqua at the Altus Public Library and Western Oklahoma State College from May 31 through June 4, and at the Tulsa Historical Museum from June 7 through 11. Historical portrayals include those of Winston Churchill, Nikita Khrushchev, Pete Seeger, Ralph J. Bunche, and Eslanda Robeson.

“Keep ’em Flying!” a World War II living-history event, will be held at Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center in Enid on June 4.

The Pawnee Bill Ranch presents “Pawnee Bill’s Original Wild West Show” on June 10 and 11, with a Wild West show reenactment along with Native-American storytelling and dancing.

—Wisconsin Humanities Council

AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION

SIGNS GO UP FOR A WALKING/LISTENING TOUR IN LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN.

Athens at the Museum of the Oregon Territory in Oregon City on May 18.

Fifteen students from Portland-area high schools will participate in WeLead training at the PLACE Center in North Portland on Tuesdays during April and May, culminating in a public event created by the students on June 1. WeLead is a collaboration between Oregon Humanities and Catlin Gabel’s PLACE program that trains high school students to lead community conversations about challenging issues.

PENNSYLVANIA Fifteen public libraries will launch Teen OREGON Reading Lounge programs this spring.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist HécThe Pennsylvania Humanities tor Tobar, author of Deep Down Dark: The Council has awarded civic engagement Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean grants to support humanities-focused Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free, approaches to community planning joins Adam Davis, executive director of and development in Carlisle, Meadville, Oregon Humanities, for a Think & Drink Williamsport, and the Germantown discussion at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland on April 19 and at Cozmic in neighborhood of Philadelphia.

Eugene on April 20.

SOUTH CAROLINA Conversation Projects taking place “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us across the state include “Northwest Shakespeare” is on display at the UniMixtape: Hip-Hop Culture and Influversity of South Carolina in Columbia ences” by Donnell Alexander at Portland from April 11 through May 1. Events State University School of Social Work on supporting the exhibition include a April 6, Hillsboro Public Library Shute grand opening, featuring Shakespeare Park Branch on May 25, and the Colum- scholar Stephen Orgel on April 14, a bia Center for the Arts in Hood River production of The Tempest, and a celon June 4; “Life after War: Photography ebration of Shakespeare’s birthday on and Oral Histories of Coming Home” by April 23.

James Lommasson at Rogue CommuSOUTH DAKOTA nity College in Grants Pass on April 14; and “Good Food, Bad Food: Agriculture, The Black Hills Film Festival takes place in Rapid City and Hill City from May 4 Ethics, and Personal Choice” by Kristy 38 SPRING 2016

to 7, with film screenings, presentations, discussions, and an exhibit about films made in South Dakota at the Journey Museum in Rapid City.

Speakers Bureau programs taking place around the state include “Patchwork of the Prairie” by Yvonne Hollenbeck at the Lake Norden Community Center on April 15; “Doc Sorbel– Webster’s Bandit Buster,” with Arley Fadness at the Civic Center Community Room in Burke on May 11; and “If You Have to Grow Up, It Might as Well Be in a Small Town” by Phyllis Schrag at the Days of ’76 Museum in Deadwood on May 12.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley’s book Some Luck will be discussed at the Sisseton Arts Council on April 5 and the Huron Public Library on May 20.

TENNESSEE Beverly Bond and Susan O’Donovan continue their project, “Memories of a Massacre: Memphis in 1866,” at sites in Memphis through May 21.

The exhibit “Slaves and Slaveholders of Wessyngton Plantation” is on view at the John Early Museum Magnet Middle School in Nashville through May 31.

Students compete in Tennessee History Day in Nashville at the War Memorial Auditorium, Tennessee Tower, Legislative Plaza, and Nashville Public Library on April 9.

For the final installment of the “Let’s Talk About War ” discussion series, Dorothy Granberry leads a tour of the

AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION

Civil War Contraband Camp in Corinth, Mississippi, on April 23.

Storyteller Kate DiCamillo gives a presentation for the Salon@615 Author Series at the Nashville Public Library on May 7.

James McBride, author of The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, this year’s selection for the Nashville Reads program, gives a talk at the Nashville Public Library on May 9.

The Children’s Festival of Reading takes place at the World’s Fair Park in Knoxville on May 21.

Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate hosts the Appalachian Young Writers’ Workshop June 19–25 for high school students.

TEXAS The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth presents a film screening of They Died with Their Boots On, followed by a discussion on April 10 in conjunction with its exhibition “American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood.”

The Tom Green County Library holds its annual “Read to Me!” march in San Angelo on April 15 and 16, with performances by John Erickson, author of the Hank the Cowdog series.

The Dallas Public Library sponsors the bilingual reading program “Day of the Book / Día del Libro” on April 30, featuring workshops, readings, and performances.

As part of a monthly discussion series at the Denton Public Library, AnaLouise Keating offers “Revisionist Mythmaking in U.S. Poetry” on April 13, Kathryn Jacobs presents “New Formalism and the American Poetic Tradition on May 11, and Gretchen Busl lectures on “When Prospero Becomes Prospera: Examining Gender Roles through Shakespeare’s The Tempest” on June 8.

For the Pulitzer Centennial Campfires Initiative, public lectures by Pulitzer Prize-winning historians include one on June 7 by Gordon S. Wood in Austin about changes in the American Republic from 1789 to the War of 1812.

UTAH Students in the Utah Humanities Venture Course graduate in April after completing two semesters of study in philosophy, art history, American history, literature, and writing: Cedar City students graduate April 19 and students from Ogden and Salt Lake City graduate April 21.

Paisley Rekdal leads a discussion

about In Cold Blood by Truman Capote for the Hivemind Book Club at Desert Edge Brewery at the Pub in Salt Lake City on April 7.

The Viridian Event Center in West Jordan hosts Story Crossroads on April 15 and 16, a gathering of multigenerational storytellers who merge song, dance, and visual arts with storytelling.

“Designing Our Stories: Museum Interpretation through Exhibits” workshops will take place at the Chase Home Museum of Folk Arts in Salt Lake City on April 18, May 16, and June 13.

VERMONT The First Wednesdays monthly lecture series continues April 6 with “An Evening with Poet Major Jackson” at Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro; “Who Stole the American Dream?” with Pulitzer-winning reporter Hedrick Smith at the Unitarian Church of Montpelier; and “‘You Are Not Special’ . . . and Other Encouragements,” with David McCullough Jr. at Norwich Congregational Church.

On May 4, talks include “Sentimental Journeys: Literature and Long Wars,” with Elizabeth Samet at First Congregational Church of Manchester; “Joseph Pulitzer and the American Republic,” with Heather Cox Richardson at Rutland Free Library; and “Robert Frost in the World,” with biographer Jay Parini at Ilsley Public Library in Middlebury.

Ideas on Tap conversations at ArtsRiot in Burlington include “That’s Art?” on April 6; “How Shakespeare’s Plays were Originally Staged” on April 26; and “Between the World and Me” on May 11.

VIRGINIA The Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Showcase takes place in Charlottesville at Ash Lawn-Highland, home of James Monroe, on May 15. The showcase recognizes the work of apprentices and their master artists.

Felts Park in Galax hosts HoustonFest, a bluegrass and old-time musical gathering, on June 10 and 11, featuring workshops, instrument makers, scholarship and grant awards, and musical performances.

WASHINGTON Think & Drink events will take place in Seattle and Spokane this spring, focusing on the intersection of climate change and the humanities.

Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer Prize-

winning journalist and Emmy awardwinning producer/correspondent, gives the inaugural talk for the Trudy Sundberg Lecture Series at South Whidbey High School in Langley on May 7.

Speakers Bureau events taking place include “Political Incivility and Polarization in America” at the North Spokane Library on April 7; “Superhero America: The Comic Book Character as Historic Lens” at the Kent Library on April 30; and “Islam 101: Perceptions, Misconceptions, and Context for the 21st Century” at the Port Angeles Main Library on May 16.

WEST VIRGINIA Frederick E. Hoxie lectures on his book, This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made at Marshall University in Huntington on April 7.

Violinist Luosha Fang and Maestro Grant Cooper lecture on the music of Sibelius for “Where Music Meets the Humanities,”a West Virginia Symphony Orchestra Lecture Series at the Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences in Charleston on April 8.

As part of the Little Lecture Series in Charleston, journalist Ken Ward Jr. talks about the landmark trial of coal executive Don Blankenship on April 10, and Jill Malusky shares the story of the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill on May 15.

The traveling exhibition “The Hatfields and McCoys: American Blood Feud” is on display at the Parkersburg & Wood County Public Library from April 11 through May 6, United Hospital Center in Bridgeport from May 13 through June 3, and the West Virginia Folklife Center at Fairmont State University from June 11 through July 4.

WISCONSIN During April and May, Hear, Here, an interactive documentary project about the Mississippi River city of La Crosse, offers phone numbers at spots around town where visitors can call and hear about the historical site and related stories. Participants are given the chance to leave one of their own stories for others to hear.

WYOMING Area residents can attend a Saturday U lecture and roundtable discussion in Rock Springs on April 23.

HUMANITIES 39

In Focus

BY MARNIE LAHTINEN

North Dakota’s Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt

AS ONE OF FIVE CHILDREN GROWING UP IN THE RURAL COMMUNITY

— Tom Gerhardt

of Center, North Dakota, Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt spent many hours at the town’s small library, discovering books. It was there, among those volumes, that she developed her devotion to lifelong learning. She has spent the years since honing that interest, both for her own pleasure and for the benefit of all the North Dakotans she can reach.

After graduating magna cum laude from Minnesota’s Concordia College with a major in religion and minors in classical studies and psychology, Gerhardt turned her sights toward Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received her master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard’s Divinity School in 2005 and headed home to the heartland, where she was hired as the program and resource coordinator for the North Dakota Humanities Council.

“They took a chance on me,” she reflects, with a smile. “I was super young, but super passionate.” Since July 2008, Gerhardt has been executive director of the council, where she focuses on encouraging thoughtful debate in the state’s communities. It’s a responsibility—and a challenge— that she relishes.

North Dakota’s council supports an array of institutions and individuals, focusing particularly on galvanizing creative collaborations between public and private partnerships. In a state whose university system includes 11 campuses, an agriculturally focused economy in the east, and an energy-based economy in the west, the task can be daunting.

“We’ve stopped teaching [humanities] in our schools. It’s the study of being human and everything that humans have struggled for, achieved, endured throughout time and place. It’s our human story and one we need to teach our kids and adults,” says Gerhardt.

“Too often, we’re too siloed, and the job of the council is to ask people, How do you live an amazing life in which you never stop learning, growing, and engaging with your community?”

The North Dakota Humanities Council saw a need to create dialog and to get people actively thinking in these terms. It created GameChanger, an annual ideas festival that Gerhardt affectionately calls their “passion project.” Each year, the council identifies an idea, event, or issue that’s changing the face of the world. It invites individuals close to the action to come for a one-day event in September to share their ideas on how to manage these challenges. Leading up to the event, the council proposes and suggests relevant authors, books, and plays for participants to explore prior to convening. Teachers, students, community boards, politicians, and business leaders are just some of the attendees: All are welcome.

In its inaugural year, 2014, GameChanger focused on the Middle East. Last year, the theme was technology, and in 2016 it is the 100-year anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize. At the event, local journalists will interview Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and historians about their work to facilitate discussion with the audience about the role of a free press and historically significant events.

“We want to celebrate journalists and historians and the importance of high-caliber journalism and history and the American public’s access to that,” explains Gerhardt. “The goal is that everyone who comes will have their thinking challenged . . . we’re not saying we have the answers; we are just starting the conversation.”

Events like GameChanger underscore the power and possibility of community members, according to Gerhardt. They also highlight the importance of bringing smaller, more isolated communities into the fold. The state’s recent oil boom brought an influx of new residents with it. For a state that is unaccustomed to population growth, the changing demographics have many North Dakotans considering how to welcome and accommodate newcomers.

“With all of the rapid change in western North Dakota, there’s been a lot of attention on infrastructure challenges but not a lot on core questions, like What does community look like?” says Gerhardt. “We need to be asking about the value of human connection, and what happens if it breaks down . . . because if you don’t have community, that’s not a positive thing.”

Gerhardt acknowledges that these are fast-paced and noisy times and not the best circumstances for deep, life-changing reflection.

Yet she is emphatically hopeful. “We need to ask ourselves, What kind of life do I want to live?” Gerhardt says. “If we can do that, the work will come.”

Marnie Lahtinen is a writer based in Mandan, North Dakota.

40 SPRING 2016

—Courtesy Prairie Home Companion

still possible at that point, but around 4 or 4:30 the show is what it is and you make the best of it.”

Keillor is not set to leave radio entirely. He has become an admirable advocate on behalf of poetry. His interest and enthusiasm in the form are obvious in such energetically assembled collections as Good Poems and Good Poems for Hard Times, as well as on the radio program, the daily Writer’s Almanac.

The program uses its modest five-minute length to gently guide the listener through the literary canon. Writers’ birthdays often provide springboards for tiny biographical portraits (“It’s the birthday of the journalist A. J. Liebling, born Abbott Joseph Liebling in New York City, 1904,” Keillor said on an episode broadcast on Oct. 18, 2014). And, most important, each show is capped off with a poem, with writers ranging from Robert Frost to Philip Larkin.

If A Prairie Home Companion is a big church picnic, the Writer’s Almanac is a dainty box of pastries—no less lovely for being small and delectable. Keillor wants to keep the program going, he says, “if public radio stations don’t mind fitting a five-minute show into their schedules. Five minutes is all I need—it’s a little gem of a poem surrounded by three minutes of historical batting.”

Yet it is likely that listeners who continue to seek out Keillor on the Writer’s Almanac will be more aware than most of what has been lost in his exit from A Prairie Home Companion. To listen to Keillor reciting John Updike’s Dog’s Death is to know the power of radio: His strong, orotund voice, benevolent in tone and Midwestern in accent, is more distinctive than any image. To think that we will never again hear that voice impart items about Lake Wobegon, or enunciate the pleasures of Powdermilk Biscuits, is almost too much to bear.

But Keillor remains unassuming as he gets ready to “sidle” away. Before he goes, he remembers Sept. 29, 1999, when he was among eight artists and scholars selected to receive the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Deserving or not,” he says, “there I was, and I went to dinner at the White House and sat, tongue-tied, at a table with Steven Spielberg, Jim Lehrer, and the first lady, Hillary Clinton.”

He adds: “I ate everything on my plate and was a very good listener.”

LIVE BROADCSAST OF PHC IN COLORADO

—Continued from page 31

a lemon meringue pie on a broadcast from the state fair grandstand with 8,000 people present, including Elsie and Don. I’d say that was a high point of my career. I made two beloved relatives feel important yet be anonymous.”

It is tempting to connect this gentlemanly impulse— crafting a story inspired by dear relatives as a way of honoring them—with Keillor’s political outlook, which is detailed in his book Homegrown Democrat. “I am a liberal and liberalism is the politics of kindness,” he wrote, and throughout he emphasizes the wellspring of values that led to his support of the Democratic party. He prizes “collective expression,” embodied in such things as “the old Lutheran table grace” and children’s rhymes; this finds expression in “The News from Lake Wobegon,” too, which is so specific yet enjoyed by listeners of all backgrounds.

“Prizes for brilliance are a dime a dozen,” he wrote in Homegrown Democrat. “What’s really special is to write something that speaks for others.” And how’s this for a political platform? “Let not the sun set upon your wrath,” he wrote, referring to the current of “courtesy and kindness” that he believes informs most Democrats. “Be grateful for your gifts. Say good morning. Let the customer have his say. Let aggravation pass without response.”

A look at Keillor’s schedule sheds light on why he has an itch to retire. After devoting Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday to other writing projects (he has authored both novels and short story collections), by mid-afternoon Wednesday he develops sufficient “panic” to begin writing that week’s show. “I intend to start in the morning,” he recounts, “but I procrastinate.” By noon Friday, a “scriptage” has been e-mailed, and an actors’ read-through follows later that day. “They are terrific collaborators,” he says. “I don’t offer much direction, they are excellent cold readers, and from listening to them read, I get a much clearer idea of what needs to change, and I head home and revise until I can’t work any longer.” Keillor’s own Lake Wobegon monolog does not take shape until late Friday or Saturday—the day of the show. “And then go to the theater for a sound check around 1 p.m. for a 5 o’clock show,” he says. “Revision is

Peter Tonguette has written about the arts for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Columbus Dispatch, and other publications.

In 1999 Garrison Keillor was recipient of a National Humanities Medal, an honor recognizing him as the creator, writer, and host of Minnesota Public Radio’s weekly variety program, A Prairie Home Companion, and as the host of the Writer’s Almanac, a fiveminute radio program about literature, broadcast daily on stations throughout the nation.

HUMANITIES 41

—Edo Meisho Ikken Sugoroku, c. 1858

—Continued from page 19

—Creatio Universi, 1720

THIS DETAIL FROM A MAP OF EDO (MODERN TOKYO) SHOWS THE CITY NEAR THE END OF THE TOKUGAWA SHOGUNATE WHEN JAPAN MOVED AWAY FROM ISOLATIONIST FOREIGN POLICIES. THE BIRD’S-EYE PERSPECTIVE WAS POPULAR IN THE LATE EDO PERIOD.

ring. The broken brass meridian ring was cleaned, repaired, and recoated before the globe was placed back in its restored furniture.

Preserving and publishing the maps online not only makes them more accessible, it also prepares the map library to assume a more prominent educational role at USM. Glenn Cummings, former speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, became USM’s president in July 2015. One of the first things he did was reach out to Dr. Osher to discuss the place of the map library in the university and in the community.

“Being a metropolitan university is not just about how USM benefits from our engagement in the community,” says Cummings, “but also how the community benefits from the resources USM offers. The Osher Map Library is a great example of this. The incredible collection is both a tremendous resource for USM and our students, and it is also a tremendous resource to the community.”

Just what the library’s role will be in the life of USM remains to be seen, but Edney says, “We are trying to position ourselves within the university in terms of hands-on research with primary resources.”

The Osher website features a selection of commentaries and exhibitions prepared by Edney’s cartography students. Among the projects are fascinating exhibitions on “Maps of Route 66: How Road Maps Built an American Legend” and “Getting there was Half the Fun: Traveling aboard a Transatlantic Ocean Liner in the 1960s.”

ENGRAVER TIGUR MELCHIOR FUESSLINUS USED RELIGIOUS AND SCIENTIFIC SYMBOLS IN THIS CELESTIAL MAP DEPICTING THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE. THE TETRAGRAMMATON, THE OLD TESTAMENT HEBREW NAME OF GOD, APPEARS AT THE TOP. HOWEVER, IN KEEPING WITH SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT, THE CENTRAL IMAGE SHOWS A SUN-CENTERED UNIVERSE, RATHER THAN AN EARTH-CENTRIC ONE.

42 SPRING 2016

—Tabula Anemographica Seu Pixis Nautica Ventorum, 1680

THE GREAT DUTCH CARTOGRAPHER JAN JANSSON PRODUCED THIS ANEMOGRAPHIC CHART, OR WIND ROSE, SHOWING THE MANY DIRECTIONAL NAMES OF THE WINDS, ALONG WITH PERSONIFICATIONS. TODAY’S DIRECTIONAL SYSTEM USES NORTH, EAST, SOUTH, AND WEST.

Edney’s own experience is that maps are extremely crossdisciplinary.

“One of the things I like about my job is that over the course of a year it involves looking at books in every letter of the Library of Congress classification from A to Z,” says Edney.

“What mapping history is doing is looking at how people look at the world, how people function in the world. The study of early mapping engages the arts through the humanities to the social sciences.”

But the resources aren’t just for the university’s students and scholars: The Osher uses its maps to engage schoolchildren, too. “It’s through the Smith Center for Cartographic Education that we can reach so many students throughout Maine,” says Fowler.

Renee Keul works with close to 3,000 students a year as the library’s K–12 education outreach coordinator. On this particular day, she has her hands full with 85 third graders from a Portland elementary school. The kids pore over real and facsimile maps for a unit on local history.

Of all the information contained in the old maps, the thing that excites the kids the most is finding that there was once a pickle factory in Portland’s Bayside neighborhood. The pickle factory is just a tiny, yellow rectangle in the 1914 Richards Atlas of the City of Portland, in which wooden buildings are yellow, brick buildings pink, and stone structures brown, but the kids find this feature of the incredibly detailed map amusing. (Ironically, four years after the atlas was published, the E. E. Clifford & Company pickle factory burned down. The cause of the fire was listed as “children.”)

“Maps give students a pretty good visual connection to the way a community used to be set up, and they can make connections to areas and buildings today,” says Keul of the allure maps hold for children. “They get really excited about change and things they can recognize.”

Maps are diagrammatic representations of the known world, as it was, as it is, and as we imagine it to be. Dr. Osher, who has given his maps, his money, his time, and his name to the library, believes the appeal of maps to people of all ages is pretty easy to understand.

“It’s an example of a common aphorism—a picture is worth a thousand words,” he says. “If that’s so, then a map is worth 100,000 words. Maps speak to all aspects of human thought and activity.”

Edgar Allen Beem is a freelance writer in Brunswick, Maine. He has been writing about the cultural life of Maine since 1978.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has been awarding grants for map projects since 1970. The University of Southern Maine has received two NEH preservation grants, totaling $726,000, to rehouse and to conserve and digitize materials in the Osher Map Library. Among the many other grantees are the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which has received $5.2 million in support to create the multivolume History of Cartography series; the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum in Chicago, the recipient of $109,164 in NEH funding to digitize the museum’s celestial maps and star charts, some of which date back to the fifteenth century; and the University of Virginia, which was awarded $297,115 to improve MapScholar, an interactive visualization tool that allows scholars to combine digitized maps from different collections.

HUMANITIES 43

—Continued from page 10

I thought it would be presumptuous of me to come and lecture about race, so I took my friend Skip Gates. We are both finishing films, our Jackie Robinson film, his is on Martin Luther King. People came and filled a 1,800-seat auditorium, and we said, “Look, it’s not enough to remove the Confederate flag.”

Symbols are important, and that’s a hugely important symbol. But we’ve got to continue to have a conversation, and I don’t know how. People even mock the notion of conversations today. But we wanted to talk deeply about what race meant in Charleston.

Nobody is trying to take anybody’s history away. That Confederate flag was a symbol not of the Civil War era, but of resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. So that’s a no-brainer. We’re just taking away the symbol of your resistance to what the American creed is, that all men are created equal.

But we’re not trying to take away legitimate history. We just want to expand it. You know, when Carter Woodson created Black History Month, he thought it would be a temporary thing. Well, we’re still insisting on segregating African-American history into our coldest and shortest month, as if it’s some politically correct addenda to our national narrative and not, as it appears, the burning heart of it.

ADAMS: Ferguson made me aware in a new way of the

importance of revisiting history in light of contemporary events. That the contemporary pushes us back and deepens our connection with the past.

BURNS: With every film I’ve made, one of the things that

leaves you gobsmacked in the editing room is just how contemporary it all is.

In that is a kind of optimism, too. Friends would say to me when the economy melted down in ‘08 or early ‘09, “This is a depression.” I said, “No, it’s not. In the Depression, in some American cities, the animals in the zoo were shot, and the meat distributed to the poor. When that happens, I’ll agree we’re in a depression.” There you go, history provided a bit of perspective . . . and reassurance.

I had the burden and honor to give a commencement address at Washington University in St. Louis in the spring of 2015 after Ferguson, and I needed Huck and Jim to help me through that. I couldn’t do it without Abraham Lincoln and his “better angels of our nature.” I couldn’t do it without that kind of historical triangulation, knowing that, as the crow flies, Ferguson was but five miles from where I stood.

History provided me with the wherewithal to make some sense of what had taken place, of a senseless act.

ADAMS: So, you’re just finishing up this massive film on

the Vietnam War. And NEH has been a part of the project.

I’m wondering how your understanding, of what happened there and what it meant, changed.

BURNS: Almost everyone’s baseline opinion about Vietnam has been shaped by their political disposition. But most of what we know about Vietnam is untrue, and most of what is knowable was unknown at the time. So our responsibilities as filmmakers are huge.

And let me just say this “our” is not some pretentious royal “we.” The film is codirected by Lynn Novick. It’s 44 SPRING 2016

written by Geoffrey Ward. The lead producer is Sarah Botstein. And we are assisted by an inner cadre of a dozen, dozen and a half people, and then hundreds of others.

Film, as I said before, makes it possible to represent a variety of viewpoints. There’s a wonderful moment when a Viet Cong soldier is peering through the bushes, and he says, 45 years later, “I saw the Americans crying over their dead. And it made me think that Americans loved each other the way we Vietnamese loved our own people, that they were as human as we were, and I hadn’t really thought of that.” That makes you stop and reconsider the “other.”

There are times when Richard Nixon is brilliant. And there are times when his venality is evident. I don’t have to say it. It’s so clear. And that’s what reminds us of the complexity of the past.

Let us also remember that all history, particularly biography, is failure. The person closest to you remains inscrutable in some way to the end. So how could we have the temerity, the presumption, to go into the past and resurrect an Abraham Lincoln or a Jackie Robinson or the brave people who fight our wars?

We’re obligated to try, of course, to create, to write books, to write symphonies, to make films, to raise families, to tend gardens. This is the human responsibility.

ADAMS: I was thinking that in 1965 there was a confidence

that government could do great things. It seems to me that one of the casualties of the war was that confidence.

BURNS: Our government misled us, from Harry Truman and

Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Americans accumulated 30 years of deceit. It made them hugely suspicious of government.

Think about the marginal tax rate. One of Dwight Eisenhower’s great achievements was to lower the marginal tax rate from 92 percent to 91 percent. But, in that 91 percent, you could build an interstate highway system. You could put a man on the moon.

Now we’re at 39.6, and people say, No new taxes. But if you added 5 or 10 percent, you’d have no deficit. You’d be paying down the debt. You could repair the infrastructure.

But it’s out of the equation, and a lot of that was born at Vietnam.

There’s a beautiful photograph of LBJ in our Vietnam film looking up at a painting of his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And you realize he wants to do all the things that Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, to create his own New Deal, the Great Society. But for the rest of our film those efforts are always compromised by his prosecution of the war.

Right now, our edifices, our confident edifices of opinion about Vietnam are informed by air, by presupposition, bias, and conspiracies that never happened.

We thought we were fighting Ho Chi Minh as the leader of our enemy. He had been marginalized by the late 1950s.

He was still a beloved figure and a symbol, but there was another guy running things. Doesn’t that color your basic notion of Vietnam? Of course, it does.

I think if we can build up layers and layers of trust, there will be a moment when, no matter what you believe in— left, right, or center—you’ll be really unhappy. But then the next moment, you’ll go, Well, good, they’re also showing that side of things.

ADAMS: Sounds like catharsis.

BURNS: I think that with an authentic expression of

memory catharsis is the desired result. You want to be able to relax your grip on that gun. Soldier, the battle is over. The firing has stopped. Thank you.

But, somehow, we Americans continue to grip the gun of partisanship and incivility long after the Civil War, long after World War II, long after Vietnam is over.

There’s a woman in the film who was a protestor against the war. Very near to the end of the film, she breaks down and cries. She says, “I just want to say I’m sorry. We were young, too.” And then, all of a sudden, you think, Of course, you know, who is fighting these wars? Eighteen-, 19-, 20-year-olds.

ADAMS: Right. Then and now.

BURNS: Are the protestors infallible? No, they are not. Are any of us infallible? No, we are not.

We can give Richard Nixon his due as a master politician. But we can also understand the political paranoia that destroyed him. We can understand where pragmatic foreign policy descended into cynicism. We can understand how deception on the part of Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson undermined their own military objectives and that those military objectives were always colored first by domestic political considerations.

But if everybody is doing it, then what can we learn? Not that all Republicans are bad or that all Democrats are bad, but that mistakes were made. Do you hear the echoes of Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria in this? You bet you do.

ADAMS: Last year, Congress commemorated the beginning

of the Vietnam War. This big, splashy event in Emancipation Hall in the Visitor Center at the Capitol, and I was invited.

You know what was amazing? Right below the surface of all this politesse and these benign statements, We’re not going to get political here. We’re going to just be nice and be civil, you could feel just below the surface . . .

BURNS: All the conflict.

ADAMS: . . . and people were trying not to go there, but you

could feel them going there. And the most dramatic moment came, and the only really authentic moment, I would say, in the whole thing came when Chuck Hagel got up to the lectern.

About 10 people spoke. He was last, and he said the most crushing and memorable thing. He said, “There is no glory in war, only suffering.” And the place was just shut down. I mean, it was amazing.

BURNS: This is what we do. The barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia encrust, particularly with war and the past in general, so that the Second World War, which killed more human beings than any other war, is looked upon as “the good war.”

Now, I know why it’s called that, but honestly there’s no such thing as a good war. What happens is our default position, as in any discussion of race, is to just adopt something that’s so sanitized that you don’t get any further than the politesse, as you say.

And what you need is somebody to burp and interrupt the ceremonies, the rituals of obfuscation, and all the things we do to make our past pretty so we don’t have to suffer for what actually took place. But a little bit of the real stuff actually brings us closer together, if you’re willing to understand it.

ADAMS: But then in the lead-up to, say, the second Iraq War,

all that seemed to disappear. The memory of that seemed to disappear, and there was nothing but a kind of . . .

BURNS: I call it an enthusiasm and kind of appetite for war.

You know, in August of 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. And Americans got very excited.

ADAMS: Right.

BURNS: A month and a half later, The Civil War was broad-

cast. Approval for going to war was at a fever pitch—something like 80 percent of Americans wanted to go to war. But after the series on the Civil War aired, which showed old daguerreotypes of Americans killing other Americans, that enthusiasm shrunk by a quarter, some commentators said.

I consider that our best review. The further we get from battle, the more we get distracted from war’s realities. We get distracted by celebrity politicians and generals who don’t do the fighting and the dying. We get distracted by strategy and tactics, which abstract the real cost of war.

We get distracted by armaments and guns, and that obviously keeps you from understanding what those arms do to human flesh. And we get distracted by the evil of our enemy.

And, so, all of this has the effect of turning war into the most simplistic sort of cartoon or metaphor, rather than understanding fundamental truths such as generals make plans, plans go wrong, and soldiers die.

ADAMS: The other thing that strikes me as unique about

your film is that it’s the first I know of that made a serious attempt to see the war from the Vietnamese point of view.

BURNS: We were so lucky. One of the men most responsible for persuading Senators John Kerry and John McCain and Bob Kerrey into supporting normalization was an ex-Marine named Tommy Vallely. And he’ll give all the credit, quite rightly, to McCain and Kerrey and Kerry. But he was behind the scenes, and he was a persistent, guiding force.

He’s been a senior adviser to our film, and we also interviewed him. He introduced us to Vietnam. We’ve got a couple of North Vietnamese that look like they came straight out of central casting, talking about “the glorious struggle” and “the imperialist puppets.” But most of them sound exactly like our GIs and our Marines.

But they also don’t sound alike, just as our Marines don’t.

And you learn things. For instance, they had problems with their draft. The sons of the wealthy got exemptions. They went to Moscow and Beijing to escape the war. It was the poor who were sent to the meat grinder of war.

We have North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong soldiers admitting to participating in atrocities that their government still denies ever took place, particularly in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive at Hue, where we believe some 3,000 civilians, most of them allied with the Saigon government, were brutally assassinated as the VC and the North Vietnamese were finally permitted to retreat after more than three weeks of fighting.

With the South Vietnamese too, we assume a kind of uniformity of opinion. Instead, you find a deep complexity and diversity of thought. People protesting the Diem regime and getting beaten up and thrown in prison. They are Catholics. They are Buddhists. They are young, old, soldiers, diplomats.

ADAMS: How and when did you decide to become a film-

maker?

BURNS: My mother died when I was 11. She had been sick HUMANITIES 45

with cancer for almost a decade. My father was a cultural anthropologist and also an amateur photographer. My first memory is of him building a darkroom in our basement in a tract house in Newark, Delaware.

In 1963 we moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Mom died in 1965. And I remember shortly after my twelfth birthday, just a few months after my mother died, my father, who set a very strict curfew, would allow me to stay up and watch movies with him. And I watched my dad cry for the first time.

He hadn’t cried at my mother’s funeral. None of us had.

We were all sort of shell-shocked. But here was this thing, this movie that had given my dad an emotional safe harbor.

And I remember saying right then, I want to be a filmmaker.

ideas. Happiness with a capital “H” was the humanities. It didn’t ignore religion. It embraced it. It understood religion was a part.

So, in the last years of college, I had a calling but hadn’t refined it. And, then, all of a sudden, the last film I worked on at Hampshire was my senior thesis on Old Sturbridge Village, and one of the last shots of that film, which is all cinéma vérité, with reenactors out at these very authentic early nineteenth-century buildings and farms, was a pan across a painting of a farm over to a factory.

Little did I know that I had just walked into my future, that it was going to be trying to take old photographs, putting them on the wall, and trying to make them come alive.

So, at 22, I knew that I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker in American history. I’m 62 now. That’s 40 years . . .

ADAMS: So that’s very early.

ADAMS: Forty good years.

BURNS: Very early. At that point, being a filmmaker meant

BURNS: I just feel like I have the best job in the country. It educates all of my parts. I work with extraordinarily talented people.

The approach of Monday is not to be feared. Friday is not a liberating moment. You know, Emerson said in his essay “On Self-Reliance” to do only what “inly rejoices,” i-n-l-y.

I think that’s the greatest thing I’d ever heard. I think he made the word up, “inly.”

being Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford or Howard Hawks, who were the great Hollywood directors of the 1960s.

ADAMS: Pretty good models.

BURNS: John Ford said, when faced with the fact or the legend, print the legend. And there was something about that that didn’t sit well with me.

In Ann Arbor, there was a 40,000-person university that I could go to for free, but I decided to move east to Hampshire, a tiny little college that had started the year before and was adding a few hundred people to the couple hundred already there.

All of its film teachers were social documentary still photographers and filmmakers who correctly reminded me that there is as much drama in what is and what was as anything the human imagination makes up. So I had my molecules rearranged.

I came out of Hampshire still unaware that my métier was history. I knew I was going to be a documentary filmmaker, but if you had told me then that, 41 years later, I would still be making historical documentary films, I’d say you were crazy.

If you think about what I do for a living, I wake the dead. I make photographs come alive. And I think my watching the slow decay of my mom, she was incredibly heroic, is part of that.

I was lucky at 12 to see that film was a way to express higher emotions. Not sentimentality and nostalgia. But the higher emotions our Founders wrote about and spoke about, emotions they thought would be liberated in people who were free and who could govern themselves. Adams said, “I must study politics and war . . .”

ADAMS: So that my children . . .

BURNS: So my children can study commerce and industry so that my grandchildren can study art and music. A paraphrase, but that’s it.

We always focus on the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson. I know I do. Beginning with his statement, “All men are created equal.” But at the end of it, he could have said, “Life, liberty, and property.” And that would have changed us immeasurably, but he wrote that inscrutable phrase, “pursuit of happiness.”

Happiness was not the acquisition of objects in a marketplace of things, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of

46 SPRING 2016

ADAMS: A shorter version of inwardly.

BURNS: Because of the vicissitudes of life, we do settle;

some of us just have jobs. And yet in us is that impulse towards the divine, towards the thing that is bigger than ourselves.

When we made the film on the national parks, someone said that Denali, I think it was, made you feel your “atomic insignificance.” And I love that. It is the great paradox of life and of the humanities. Feeling that insignificance, you are, paradoxically, inspirited and made larger, just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self-regard.

ADAMS: Now, the environment in which film is seen and

watched is changing rapidly. Yet your work seems to stick, irrespective of these massive changes around all of us.

Why is that?

BURNS: In this tsunami of information, we’re starved for

curation.

I’m going to sit here and watch this thing and have it unfold, and that’s really great. It reminds us that all real meaning accrues in duration. That’s what I’m interested in, real meaning.

ADAMS: Ken, thanks so much for spending time with me

this afternoon. And I just want to say on behalf of all your admirers at NEH, we’re enormously proud of your body of work and so pleased to have been involved over these 37 years.

BURNS: You know, I have to tell you that earning your grants, which are not easily obtained, have been some of the most satisfying experiences of my professional life because they don’t come with just a check. They come with an expectation of excellence.

And I think we’ve become better filmmakers because we’ve not only submitted to your process, but have been willing to subscribe to your ideals.

Deadlines

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

EDUCATION PROGRAMS

William Craig Rice, Director • 202-606-8500 • education@neh.gov Seminars and Institutes Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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

Landmarks Workshops for School Teachers Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

DEADLINE

PROJECTS BEGINNING

March 1, 2017 March 1, 2017

Summer 2017 Summer 2018

March 1, 2017 March 1, 2017 June 23, 2016 September 7, 2016 November 2, 2016

Summer 2017 Summer 2018 January 2017 May 2017 May 2017

PRESERVATION AND ACCESS PROGRAMS

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, 2016 National Digital Newspaper Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . January 12, 2017 Preservation Assistance Grants for Smaller Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . May 3, 2016 Preservation and Access Education and Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . May 3, 2016 Research and Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . June 21, 2016 Common Heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . May 12, 2016

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

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Karen S. Mittelman, Director • 202-606-8269 • publicpgms@neh.gov Museums, Libraries, and Cultural Organizations Planning and Implementation Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 10, 2016 Media Projects Development and Production Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 10, 2016 Digital Projects for the Public . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . June 8, 2016

May 2017 May 2017 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, 2016 December 9, 2016 August 16, 2016 April 14, 2016 April 14, 2016 April 14, 2016 February 1, 2017

January 2017 May 2017 October 2017 October 2017 January 2018 January 2017 January 2017 January 2017 September 2017

CHALLENGE GRANTS

Katja Zelljadt, Director • 202-606-8309 • challenge@neh.gov Humanities Access Grants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . May 4, 2016 Creating Humanities Communities Grants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . October 13, 2016

N/A N/A

OFFICE OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Brett Bobley, Director • odh@neh.gov Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . March 14, 2017 Humanities Open Book Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . September 13, 2016 Digital Humanities Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . January 11, 2017

September 2017 May 2017 September 2017

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 47

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

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