Humanities, Summer 2016

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

J ASNUUMAMREYR/ F2E016 B R U A R Y 2 012

HUMANITIES

EDITOR’S NOTE

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

As magnolia trees lazily blossom here in Washington, and all across America unsmiling teenagers in sunglasses climb atop lifeguard chairs at local swimming pools, HUMANITIES magazine sits back to savor a variety of stories and essays.

—© 2016 Manny Crisostomo

The Pulitzer Prize turns 100 this year and many state humanities councils

This photo by Pulitzer Prize winner Manny Crisostomo will be shown in a retrospective exhibition of his work opening in Guam this September to mark 100 years of the Pulitzer Prize. See page 4.

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 Interns: Erica Machulak and Alexander Stern 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 Publishing 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 SUMMER 2016

have responded to the call to celebrate their homegrown prizewinning reporters, writers, composers, and so on. Guam, a small island that sits about 6,000 miles west of Los Angeles, has produced one Pulitzer winner, the photographer Manny Crisostomo, whose career is now the subject of a major exhibition supported by the Guam Humanities Council. His magical photo of children swimming under an adult’s watchful eye adorns the cover.

For this issue, I visited New York City to spend a day with Judith Dupré, the first NEH Public Scholar to release a book, One World Trade Center.

Dupré showed me around the new skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, from the heights of the Observation Deck at One World Trade Center to the emotional depths of the 9/11 Museum. It was an extraordinary day, only some of which I was able to capture.

Summer is a great time for tackling literary classics. Danny Heitman revisits Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, itself a revisiting of the author’s aristocratic youth in the world about to be torn asunder by the Russian Revolution. Light fiction might seem best for the beach, but there is something about a summer afternoon, so long, so well-lit, that is especially welcoming to the intensely perceptive observations of great writing.

Reading liberates the mind from its present place and time, a familiar observation that has inspired such life-changing programs as the celebrated and NEH-supported Clemente Course in the Humanities for impoverished adults. Nancy Shepherdson reports on another humanities educational program, this one for prisoners of a maximum-security facility in Illinois.

Memory is not entirely reliable, as Nabokov knew and psychology points out. Steven Lubet and Rachel Maines examine an object with a great story to tell, though its actual significance is hard to disentangle from the memories surrounding it. The object is a shawl that the poet Langston Hughes donated to the Ohio Historical Society. It draws our attention to the events at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, but it also teaches some unexpected lessons.

Enjoy.

—David Skinner

The Magazine

of the

N at i o n a l E n d o w m e n t

for the

H u m a n i t i e s S u mm e r 2 0 1 6 V o l . 3 7 N o . 3

8 The Power of One A day with Judith Dupré, official biographer of One World Trade Center. By David Skinner

16 Speak, Nabokov Fifty years after its arrival, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited continues to draw readers. By Danny Heitman

Page 8

24 Gettysburg in the Round A famous battle, a once famous painting. By Eric Felten 28 Freedom of Mind Chicago program brings college-level humanities to maximum security. By Nancy Shepherdson

34 Langston Hughes’s Shawl Our objects tell amazing stories, not all of them accurate.

By Steven Lubet and Rachel Maines

4 Statements Page 16

State humanities councils celebrate a century of Pulitzers, and the fallout of the Boston Massacre comes to life in Massachusetts.

22 2016 Jefferson Lecture 32 Calendar

38 Around the Nation

A vocalist behind Patti LaBelle and the Rolling Stones traces the history of American music in New Jersey, and Nebraska advances children’s writing.

More from these and other states. Compiled

by Laura Wolff Scanlan

43 In Focus

Alabama’s Armand DeKeyser makes the humanities accessible.

By Laura Axelrod

46 Noteworthy 47 Deadlines

Page 24

HUMANITIES 3

statements

—Figures of Speech Theatre

The Many Faces of the Pulitzer Prize

THE NAME PULITZER SERVES AS AN IMPRIMATUR FOR the highest excellence in journalism today, but Joseph Pulitzer, who founded and endowed the prize, was, during his lifetime, more often associated with the grittiest, most selfserving, and sensationalist methods used to sell newspapers.

Pulitzer came from humble beginnings and was only 17 when he made his way from Hungary to the United States as a contracted substitute for a Civil War draftee. After the war, he traveled to Missouri, working his way up at the Germanlanguage Westliche Post and eventually becoming owner of the St. Louis Post Dispatch in 1878. He also owned the New York World, a competitive, combative paper known for its investigation of corruption at all levels and for its “yellow journalism”: outrageous, eye-catching headlines, exaggeration, and pervasive scandal-mongering. Yet Pulitzer harbored grand ambitions for journalism itself. “I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people,” he wrote.

Pulitzer retreated to Maine during the sunset of his career.

In 1902, at his summer estate, Chatwold, in Bar Harbor, he dictated his plan to establish a journalism school and annual prize. His vision was made a reality by his last will and testament. The Columbia School of Journalism opened shortly after his death in 1912, and the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917. Fittingly, the Maine Humanities Council is celebrating the prize’s centennial throughout the state this 4 SUMMER 2016

ON THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL’S FACE IN THIS PUPPET STAGING OF DAVID LANG’S PRIZEWINNING CHORAL PIECE IS WRITTEN THE ENTIRE HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN TALE.

year, including public programs about Pulitzer at Bar Harbor’s Jesup Library, education programs in connection with Ernest Hemingway’s restored blue marlin at the L. C. Bates Museum, forums with photographer Larry Price, and a talk by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich for the Association of Maine Archives and Museums.

Maine is just one of 46 state humanities councils taking part in the Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires Initiative, a partnership between the Pulitzer Prize Board and the Federation of State Humanities Councils. For example, Humanities South Carolina created three 30-minute programs to air on public television, featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning columnists, commentators, journalists, and authors. Cal Humanities is holding numerous traveling “On the Road” discussions with writers such as journalist Bettina Boxall and historian Miriam Pawel.

Indiana Humanities is sponsoring scholar-led hiking and camping trips that examine the state’s environmental authors and literary heritage. And on it goes across the country and territories.

Although the Pulitzer Prize is most often affiliated with American journalism and other literary endeavors, Pulitzer allowed for an advisory board to alter the prizes as they saw fit and, in 1943, they added the category of music to the prize roster. But it would have been hard for Joseph Pulitzer to imagine the haunting, almost sacred tribute that occurred earlier this year at Bates College’s Schaeffer Theatre in Lewiston, Maine, as David Lang’s Pulitzer-winning The Little Match Girl Passion was visually reimagined with puppets for the centennial celebration.

This 35-minute-long choral piece won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2008 as a new work that combined text from the tragic short story by Hans Christian Andersen and the libretto of Bach’s 1727 St. Matthew Passion. The result is a piece of

The little match girl is a life-sized puppet on whose face is written the Andersen story, mimicking the Bunraku tradition of adhering scraps of old scripts to carved puppet heads to protect them. But Farrell didn’t think that was quite right for the little match girl. “I wondered what it would look like if I took this white face and handwrote the entire story onto it.

Which, for me, felt like a way of turning her life into metaphor—her being is marked by the story itself.” Farrell admits, “I knew it wasn’t going to be seen by the audience, so why bother? I don’t know. There is something magical about her carrying that with her.”

In fact, a magical sense comes from the whole performance, which uses light and shadow to show memories, visions, and hauntings that are only in the girl’s mind. The puppet’s movements and static face seem tragically real at times. The grandmother hovers over the girl, watching and waiting. In the end she places the girl’s soul, a second puppet, in a boat to an unknown destination. “It took the story away from the realm of death,” says Farrell. The grandmother, and the audience, sense that the girl’s journey is not over.

Another artist, a Pulitzer-winning photojournalist named Manny Crisostomo, has also taken his audiences on journeys: through a year in an inner-city Detroit high school, through life as a Hmong refugee in California, through the struggles of children fighting obesity, and on a journey to see Guam through his native lens. The Guam Humanities Council is celebrating the island’s sole Pulitzer winner in September with a traveling retrospective exhibition of his work, a two-week

—Hmong ancestral spirit ceremony from “The Leftover People,” © 2016 Manny Crisostomo

music for four voices that elevates Andersen’s sad tale of an impoverished girl who sells matches on the city streets and freezes to death on New Year’s Eve to a tragedy of mythical proportions, showing the common strains between her death and the passion of Christ.

“What Lang did was combine two very different realms and ideas and gave them a third life,” says John Farrell, artistic director of Figures of Speech Theatre, the Maine-based troupe that staged the puppet performance. “It was Lang’s inspiration to combine these two different forms that leaped me into a different way of looking at the Little Match Girl story itself.”

“Come. Come. Come. Daughter, Daughter, Daughter,” begins Lang’s work, invoking Bach’s initial plea to the daughters of Zion to witness Christ’s passion. But here the words draw the audience directly into the relationship between the girl and her dead grandmother, the only figures on stage.

The grandmother is played by a human, all in white, with an ethereal Noh mask, inspired by Farrell’s work in Japanese theater (he had a fellowship in Japan in 1999). “In Noh, often one of the main characters will be the ghost,” explains Farrell, who sculpts the masks and puppets himself. “I began to think about the grandmother as not just the representation of Christ, who shows up at the last minute and carries the girl to heaven, but as a spiritual entity, who functions on the one hand as a cosmic mother figure, and on the other hand as the embodiment of a human mother figure who has to watch her granddaughter suffer and die.” Making the grandmother part human and part sculpture on stage stresses this duality.

MANNY CRISOSTOMO SPENT FIVE MONTHS DOCUMENTING THE JOURNEY OF HMONG REFUGEES FROM THAILAND TO THE UNITED STATES.

HUMANITIES 5

was, according to Crisostomo, evenly divided among white, Hispanic, and African-American students. Crisostomo spent three days a week at the school for a whole year, attending prom, sports events, and two funerals of students who had committed suicide. “I wanted access,” he explains. “I didn’t want to parachute in, take a bunch of pictures, and then hike my way out.”

The result was a special 12-page Sunday section published by the Detroit Free Press called “A Class Act: The Life and Times of Southwestern High School,” featuring more than 60 photographs taken over the school year. It won Crisostomo the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, and he donated the cash winnings toward a scholarship for the school.

Now a photographer at the Sacramento Bee, Crisostomo continues his photojournalism with an emphasis on access to sometimes overlooked communities—whether capturing intimate moments with Hmong refugees in his 2005 project “The Leftover People,” or sharing the beauty of his native culture in his 1992 book Legacy of Guam: I Kustumbren Chamoru. As a photographer, he hopes to be a fly on the wall. “I wish I was Harry Potter and had that invisibility cloak,” he says. “That would be a great accessory for photographers to have in their bag.”

—Amy Lifson Amy Lifson is assistant editor at HUMANITIES magazine.

—From “A Class Act,” © 2016 Manny Crisostomo

residency with the photographer, and lectures and workshops for students and the public on the art of photojournalism.

Born in 1958 in Guam, the Pacific island of around 172,000 people that became a U.S. territory shortly after World War II, Crisostomo started his journalism career just after high school as an intern at the Pacific Daily News, rewriting press releases and writing articles. He continued as a reporter at the University of Guam’s student paper and for the News on weekends and during summers. After he submitted his work for a fulltime position, the paper’s new executive editor said frankly to him, “Well, I don’t think you are any good at this.” Crisostomo laughs, “If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be in photography.”

Crisostomo took the only job open to him at the paper, as a photography lab technician—learning the trade in the darkroom, from photography magazines, and taking pictures of what he calls “mutant vegetables.”

“People would come in with their Siamese pumpkins, and their contorted gourds, and their super big tomatoes, and all the photographers were out doing real assignments, so I said, ‘Sure I’ll take a picture of it,’” recalls Crisostomo. So a lot of his first pictures “were of a guy in front of triplet gourds or something like that.”

But what Crisostomo has become renowned for are his photographs of people in their everyday lives. In 1988, while working for the Detroit Free Press, he spent a year documenting the world of an inner-city school with a student body that

CRISOSTOMO WON A PULITZER IN 1989 FOR “A CLASS ACT: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SOUTHWESTERN HIGH SCHOOL,” A YEARLONG PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDY THAT WAS PUBLISHED IN THE DETROIT FREE PRESS.

6 SUMMER 2016

MASSACHUSETTS ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 6, 1770, Boston was in crisis. The night before, British soldiers had fired their guns into a violent crowd, leaving four dead and seven wounded. This event was soon labeled the Boston Massacre, a milestone on the path to the American Revolution.

Bostonians demanded that acting royal governor Thomas Hutchinson remove all soldiers from town. Would that action keep the peace or reward mob violence? Did Hutchinson even have the authority to alter orders from London? Any choice would be fraught with consequences. This spring, modern crowds in Boston watched the discussion unfold again in a new play supported by Mass Humanities called Blood on the Snow, staged inside the same walls where the governor and his advisers debated those questions in 1770.

Blood on the Snow is an experiment in combining public history and theater. It is produced by the Bostonian Society, the nonprofit organization that maintains the Old State House, the brick building erected near the center of Boston in 1713 to house the town and provincial governments. The building is a major stop on the city’s Freedom Trail but, like all history museums, seeks new ways to engage visitors.

One of the Old State House’s main rooms was designed for the governor to meet with his council, the gentlemen selected to advise the royal appointee but often at odds with him. In recent years, the museum refurnished the Council Chamber using inventories from the mid 1700s. Visitors can sit in the governor’s upholstered chair at the long wooden table and examine reproductions of official documents. Nat Sheidley, the society’s historian, came to view the space as “a set that wanted to be peopled.”

But how? The Old State House already uses other methods of bringing history to life: a program of costumed interpreters called “Revolutionary Characters” and an annual outdoor reenactment of the massacre by dedicated volunteers. As he considered possibilities, Sheidley was struck by Boston’s response to the marathon bombing of 2013. Exploring how the community reacted to an earlier calamity could move the Council Chamber beyond politics to show “human beings living through the trauma.”

To dramatize that moment, Sheidley had to find the right playwright. Patrick Gabridge brought experience in writing dramas about historical events and for specific sites. Just as important, he came with a background in producing plays and had many contacts in Boston theater. He could assess the

—Nile Hawyer

DRAMA IN THE STATE HOUSE

MASSACHUSETTS GOVERNOR THOMAS HUTCHINSON ARGUES WITH HIS COUNCIL IN BLOOD ON THE SNOW.

dramatic potential of the Council Chamber and recruit director Courtney O’Connor and a cast of ten.

Gabridge’s commission called for a one-hour play that rendered the council’s March 6 debate gripping for modern audiences. The historical record offered some leeway, as accounts of that meeting are incomplete and conflicting (pre-Revolutionary Bostonians argued about everything). Gabridge limited the cast, dropping some historical figures to ensure the audience could get to know all those who remained.

Blood on the Snow centers on acting governor Hutchinson, who begins the play by asking, “Who will wash away all that blood?” Other characters include brand names Samuel Adams and John Hancock and such lesser-known politicians as Samuel Dexter, along with the council’s doorkeeper, maintaining order in his own way. Gabridge brought into the room Andrew, an enslaved man, to provide an eyewitness account of the shooting and to remind viewers of the limits on Massachusetts liberty.

(The cast remains all male.) At the end of the hour, the governor chooses to ask the local army commander to move the troops away. “Peace for now,” he says. Of course, audiences know that war broke out in the province five years later.

The Council Chamber itself was a major force in the production. Those 1713 walls provided an extra measure of authenticity during both rehearsals and performances. Audience members spoke of the experience as being like “time traveling.”

Nearly every show was sold out, including matinees for high school classes arranged with the National Parks of Boston.

Sheidley and Gabridge hope the Bostonian Society will find the funding to revive Blood on the Snow in 2017. They talk about the potential for similar dramas at other sites along the Freedom Trail or elsewhere. Not every historic site has a space like the Old State House’s Council Chamber: large enough to seat a sizable audience, furnished with modern recreations instead of irreplaceable artifacts. But the most important lesson in creating any such drama, Gabridge says, is “you don’t fight the room.” Each project like this is best designed around its particular site and everything that space brings, including its historical resonances.

—J. L. Bell

J. L. Bell, proprietor of the Boston1775.net website, is the author of The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War, published in May 2016.

HUMANITIES 7

One ‘ A day with Judith Dupre, official biographer of One World Trade Center

THE

POWER OF

By David Skinner

AIR, AIR, EVERYWHERE: THE NEW ONE WORLD TRADE CENTER IS THE TALLEST BUILDING IN NORTH AMERICA. ALL IMAGES IN THIS ARTICLE CAN BE FOUND IN ONE WORLD TRADE CENTER BY JUDITH DUPRÉ.

8 SUMMER 2016

HUMANITIES 9 —© Nicola Lyn Evans / WSP l Parsons Brinckerhoff

producer, cameraman, and Phil the sound guy, who is Judith Dupré via cell phone as I wait for her at the corner of quickly running a mic through the belt holes of my pants Greenwich and Liberty in Lower Manhattan. Now I see her and up my shirt.

On September 11, 2001, terrorist-hijacked commercial aircoming, smile first, a large shopping bag on her arm, wellplanes crashed into and destroyed the famous Twin Towers dressed but casual. Her mouth opens and I hear New York, at 1 and 2 World Trade Center. They also destroyed 7 World not so much in the accent as in the directness that, as a kid Trade Center and fatally damaged four other buildings from Queens, I find comfortingly familiar.

“I am a scholar but I have the common touch,” she says not within the complex, leading to their eventual demolition.

Almost immediately after the attacks, Mayor Rudy Giuliani long into our first conversation. I have to wonder whether declared, “We are going to rebuild,” but it was not at all anyone with the common touch even uses that phrase anyclear who “we” was. Every square inch of land at Ground more, but in Dupré’s case it’s more or less true.

Zero was subject to multiple claims of ownership, jurisdicShe holds a master’s of divinity from Yale and has complettion, and oversight. ed a string of research projects, aided by grants and fellowTwo months earlier, the Port Authority of New York & ships. She is also the author of picture books, well-researched, New Jersey had leased the properties to real estate developfact-filled, photographically rich, “illustrated histories,” she er Larry Silverstein. Fires amid the rubble of the old World calls them at one point, for the tourist and connoisseur alike.

Trade Center continued to burn throughout the fall of 2001, One of these, Churches, was a New York Times bestseller. Another, Skyscrapers, thin and tall like its subjects, is very popular and while the site of the attack, essentially a hole in the ground surrounded by metal fencing, drew hordes of interested has been updated and reprinted several times.

Throughout her work, text and image share equal billing, visitors. Meanwhile, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was founded, and New York State Governor as they should when you are writing about the built enviGeorge Pataki decided the Port Authority would be in ronment in the age of color printing. Her books are a more charge of rebuilding. Come January 2002, Mayor Giuliani sophisticated relative of the large-format nonfiction titles was leaving office, and plans for different aspects of the that are marketed to children or designed for coffee-table rebuilding effort came to the fore amidst a maelstrom of display. hot public concern. All too quickly for some people, SilverIn the language of NEH grantmaking, Dupré is a “public scholar,” which is also the name of a new program of research stein announced his intentions to rebuild, while drafts and concepts for master plans and memorials were published in grants aimed at academics who write for the public and professional writers who favor scholarly methods of research. newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet. And that was just the beginning.

Dupré might be considered either.

The intensity of feeling surrounding the project was but She is also a hands-on promoter. After inviting me for a Cook’s tour of the new One World Trade Center, the subject one of many challenges. The Hudson River flows only a of her NEH-supported book of the same name, she lets me few blocks west of what eventually became the construction know one day prior that a television documentary crew will site. The Number 1 subway line and four PATH trains from be following us. And there they are, a few paces behind, New Jersey run underground. And, of course, post–9/11 security concerns raised the bar significantly on how landmark skyscrapers, especially ones that symbolize the soaring American spirit, are to be built and kept safe.

Hard to build, hard to describe, but finally a sight to behold, the new World Trade Center consists, so far, of three completed buildings, a memorial, a museum, and a transportation hub, with at least a couple more skyscrapers to come. Although built on a more human scale and according to a gentler, more pedestrianfriendly aesthetic, the complex doesn’t lend itself easily to character-driven storytelling. The cast is too large (26,000 people have worked on these buildings), and the action is, by literary standards, slow, diffuse, and, 15 years later, still SKIDMORE, OWINGS & MERRILL CONSIDERED DOZENS OF MODELS FOR THE NEW incomplete, as work on building 3 continues SKYSCRAPER AT ONE WORLD TRADE CENTER, WHOSE FINAL SHAPE AND COLOR CAN and the design of 2 is not yet settled. But this APPEAR TO VARY GREATLY ACCORDING TO ONE’S PERSPECTIVE AND CHANGING WEATHER saga of glass, steel, and concrete does offer a CONDITIONS. —© Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

“TURN AROUND. I HAVE YOU IN MY CROSSHAIRS,” SAYS

10 SUMMER 2016

—© The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey/Photo: Michael Mahesh

THE 9/11 MEMORIAL POOLS AND THE 9/11 MUSEUM SIT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NEW WORLD TRADE CENTER. FROM LEFT: ONE WORLD TRADE CENTER, 7 WORLD TRADE CENTER (PARTLY OBSCURED BY ONE), THE NOT-YET-FINISHED 2 WORLD TRADE CENTER, OCULUS, 3 WORLD TRADE CENTER, AND 4 WORLD TRADE CENTER.

unity of place, to use the Aristotelian term, and Dupré and I are smack in the middle of it.

Our first stop is the lobby of 4 World Trade Center, where the TV producer just negotiated permission for his camera and sound to enter. Within seconds they are evicted. “No cameras,” says a large man with rueful conviction. Apparently, he’s the one who had given them permission not two minutes ago. I too begin to leave when Dupré points out that she and I are free to stay and continues with her tutorial.

The building belongs to Silverstein, who is an important landlord in the story of the World Trade Center and, not

incidentally, a lover of contemporary art. Delicate, precise music by Philip Glass plays in the lobby as Dupré directs my eyes from the fine-grained black marble of the lobby proper to the warm egg-yolk-colored wood of the three elevator banks, which terminate in video installations of, respectively, a path in the woods, a waterfall, and a blue sky.

Running my eyes over the space, I notice how the heavy sheen of man-made elegance encloses, then gives way to, the pastoral elements.

All day long I see things like this, human contrivance presenting, with a magician’s wave of the hand, images HUMANITIES 11

Dupré the docent lets no detail escape our notice, yet Dupré the author bears a strong preference for the quintessential and the iconic, as indicated by the definitionproposing titles of her books: Churches, Bridges, Skyscrapers, Monuments, those last two providing most of the credentials she needed to become, as she puts it, “the official biographer of One World Trade Center.”

Cameras rolling, our next stop is Oculus, which at street level is a lapel-grabbing sculpture by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, whose provocative design is based on a winged dove but tempts its critics with mental flashes of dinosaur skeletons and Pokémon figures. From inside the train station, and on the floor of the main hall 160 feet below, the rib-like struts and buttresses articulate a beautiful spacefantasy cathedral, dedicated perhaps to the god of sunlight.

Oculus is a public building. Instead of Phillip Glass, you hear the sound of commerce as construction workers build out spaces for Banana Republic and a new Apple store.

While critics bark about the project’s enormous cost overruns, delighted tourists lie on the white marble floor taking pictures. Ever sensitive to sightlines, Dupré has me stand in the center of the hall and look upward to spy the looming tower of One World Trade Center framed through the retracting window running down the middle of the roof.

ONE WORLD TRADE CENTER, Dupré’s book, is structured

—© The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey

like a magazine feature. Chapters alternate with stand-alone passages, sidebars, timelines, infographics; photography tells a very large part of the story while pull quotes and captions add emphasis and digress on fascinating details. Some of the book’s best writing is found outside the main text.

“There are piles of strange loveliness,” Dupré writes in the margin of the building chapter, “slabs of sheetrock, wooden spools of red and blue wire, plastic buckets, cinder blocks. Some pieces are spray-painted ‘Save.’ Dense hieroglyphics—the signatures, thoughts, and drawings of those lucky enough to be inside with a few minutes and a Sharpie—cover the walls. One reads, ‘Te Amo Tres Metros Sobre el Cielo,’ meaning, ‘I love you three meters above heaven.’”

A reader can easily miss how much research is on the page. The source index lists 70 interviews (excerpts soon to be posted on Dupré’s website) and ten pages of endnotes documenting how integral such material was to the writing. One can imagine different books written about the same events, but it would be hard to envision another book taking more seriously the construction of One World Trade Center as the consummation of so many trades, so many technical innovations, and A MODEL OF SANTIAGO CALATRAVA’S OCULUS, WHICH HAS DAZZLED MANY AN EYE AND so much politics all at the same time.

INDUCED MANY A GROAN OVER ITS PRICE TAG. 12 SUMMER 2016

—© The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey

of unspoiled nature. I see it next on 7 World Trade Center and One World Trade Center, as the sky, an infinity of blue dabbed with toothpaste smudges of white cloud, floats silently across their glass surfaces.

Leaving 4 World Trade Center, I follow my subject out the revolving doors, this historic moment captured by our waiting camera crew. Dupré tells me about the entrance to 7 World Trade Center, another gorgeous proscenium of tiled glass, this one supported from within by a crisscross of steel cables that would enable the grid to absorb the shock of an explosion and, like the strings of a racket meeting a tennis ball, send it back the way it came. This building also belongs to Silverstein, about whom many doubts were expressed in the press but who has emerged as an important catalyst of the new downtown.

Seven, the first of the trade center buildings to be rebuilt and a prototype for One World Trade Center, is celebrated for its thoughtful design and management.

Slim, rectangular, and 52 floors high, its modest size allowed Greenwich Street, which had vanished to make way for the Twin Towers, to be restored. Tenants are billed separately for energy use, encouraging economy.

The roof collects rainwater. The security incorporates art and not as an add-on: The beautiful wall of glass behind the front desk serves as a reading pane for a projected loop of quotations about New York City, installed by the artist Jenny Holzer; in the case of an attack, the wall would protect the base of the building’s elevator system.

Dupré tells me all this and more, adding, “Don’t worry, it’s all in the book.”

—© The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey

WORKING MORE THAN 1,000 FEET ABOVE STREET LEVEL POSES EXTRAORDINARY LOGISTICAL CHALLENGES. DUPRÉ WRITES THAT SHIPPING CONTAINERS WERE HAULED UP TO THE HIGHEST REACHES TO SUPPORT CONSTRUCTION WORKERS. INSIDE ONE CONTAINER WAS A MINIATURE SUBWAY SANDWICH SHOP, SAVING WORKERS THE TIME AND TROUBLE OF TRAVELING DOWN TO STREET LEVEL FOR LUNCH.

Over sandwiches at the esplanade, Dupré tells me how she became the “official biographer.” The obstacles to writing about the World Trade Center from the point of view of its owners, designers, and builders were formidable. The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey not only controlled the land but also the information. And surrounding its bureaucratic fortress was a defensive line of nondisclosure agreements signed by the project’s many contractors.

Dupré began by approaching contacts at the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which had designed 7 and would design One World Trade Center. This was during the short-lived governorship of Eliot Spitzer, and the response she received was discouraging. The Port Authority, Dupré learned, was extremely wary of any proposals that might smack of profiteering. But Dupré did not let go of the idea.

She had lived in Lower Manhattan for some two decades, from the 1970s to the 1990s, and was, like a lot of New Yorkers and Americans in general, forever changed by the two planes that flew into the World Trade Center. She remembers hearing the news on the radio, taking her sons out of school, and later that day walking down to the shore in Mamaroneck, New York, to try to see the Manhattan skyline and confirm with her own eyes that the Twin Towers, impossible as it seemed, were gone.

In 2010, Andrew Cuomo was elected governor of New York and, in 2011, he appointed Patrick J. Foye as the new executive director of the Port Authority. Dupré was paying attention. She knew Foye from his days as a lead attorney for mergers and acquisitions at Skadden, Arps. It seemed even more obvious than before that the Port Authority needed someone to tell the story from September 12 to the HUMANITIES 13

CITIZENSHIP Question: What do the TECHNOLOGY humanities have to say

WAR/RACE THE ENVIRONMENT about the biggest questions facing our world today?

CITIZENSHIP TECHNOLOGY FIND OUT AT THE HUMAN/TIES CONFERENCE

September 14–17 in Charlottesville, Virginia

Join David Simon, Alice Waters, and Salman Rushdie as they celebrate the humanities and the first 50 years of the National Endowment for the Humanities in a conference at the University of Virginia. This 4-day meeting of the minds includes individual lectures, discussions, film screenings, and more.

Also participating: historian Ed Ayers, White House adviser Melody Barnes, Slate political correspondent Jamelle Bouie, filmmaker Sarah Colt, literary editor John Freeman, author Suketu Mehta, and filmmaker Stanley Nelson.

humanties2016.com 14 SUMMER 2016

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present day. Dupré saw Foye at a social gathering, mentioned the idea, and followed up with a formal proposal.

Yes, came the answer, but it wasn’t easy. A lengthy contract resulted, granting Dupré access to Port Authority vendors and facilitating her access to records but granting the Port Authority a window onto her research. In practice, Dupré says, the Port Authority had no way of knowing what materials she’d finally use. The Port Authority also previewed the manuscript for security concerns but had no editorial say. And, during the research for the book, Dupré was assigned a “minder,” as she puts it, from Port Authority’s media relations staff. The minder, whose name is Rudy King, accompanied her on work sites and to all her interviews.

“Rudy’s job was to scowl,” says Dupré. Eventually, however, they became friends.

King, it turned out, was more than a little interested in Dupré’s project. On the morning of September 11, 2001, he was in Sky Lobby of Tower 1 when the first plane hit.

For years he was haunted by flashbacks and panic attacks.

After Dupré’s book came out, he wrote about what it was like to work on this project about rebuilding after 9/11. In a touching essay for the Port Authority’s blog, he described the experience as ultimately liberating, helping to release him from pain that had been following him these last 15 years.

“No one,” says Dupré, “is prouder than Rudy of this book.”

ACROPHOBIA IS A FEAR OF HEIGHTS. I suffer from a mild case of it. A physician’s assistant had prescribed for me some antianxiety medication, which I decided not to take lest it interfere with my ability to ask questions and record information for this article.

After taking our leave of the television crew and the Port Authority representatives who kindly showed us around the Oculus, Judith and I make our way over to One, which opened in late 2014. I am sorry to give up my mic. It and the cameras were a helpful distraction.

The elevator ride to the observation deck, 1,300 feet above street level, takes only 47 seconds. While the car is cruising upward, the walls of the elevator function as video screens and place you inside a time-shifting diorama of natural history in Manhattan. The only part I don’t like is when the video catches up to recent history and shows the building you are in but under construction: rebar, I-beams, a work site.

Before I can begin hyperventilating, the car stops and the doors open onto a part of the building that looks very much finished. Floor carpeted, walls painted, ceiling intact.

And none of my fellow tourists are freaking out.

If that lady over there can do this, I tell myself, so can I. If that kid can do this, so can I. If that old guy over there can do this, so can I. Thus do I ease my way onto the observation deck trying to follow Judith Dupré as she walks

—© The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey

WAR/RACE THE ENVIRONMENT

—© The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey

THE SLURRY WALLS, DESIGNED TO RESIST THE PRESSURE OF THE NEARBY HUDSON RIVER SO THE ORIGINAL TWIN TOWERS COULD BE BUILT, SURVIVED THE ATTACKS OF 9/11 AND PRESERVED THE LAND FROM A TOTAL FLOOD.

around to ask the young woman managing the gift shop how her book is selling this week.

To look out on the island of Manhattan from this height, to see Queens across the water, and next to it Brooklyn, and across the water, New Jersey, is, it turns out, exhilarating. The weather is wonderfully clear, and as Judith helps me identify landmarks, I am nervous but amazed.

What happened on 9/11 is officially verboten on the observation deck, which is managed, as a concession, by a sports-entertainment company. An ongoing presentation for tourists, listing numerous factoids about New York City, delivered by an “ambassador ” with the aid of a large ring of video screens, does not include an account of the hijacked planes and the buildings that came down, those defeated giants whose footprints you can see below in the 9/11 memorial pools designed by Michael Arad. But airplanes and terrorists are never far from my mind while standing on the observation deck. They actually help direct my thoughts.

One World Trade Center, 1,776 feet tall, is a defiant restatement of American ambition. It is bold and glamorous and beautiful. The battlefield of 9/11, in the air above Lower Manhattan, has been reclaimed. No Icarus-type regrets. No apologies for hubris. The nation of the Wright Brothers has taken back the sky.

Judith, increasingly aware of my dilemma, motions for us to leave and we head to the elevators, but I am not quite ready. Though my knees are trembling ever so slightly, I need to stay a little longer. Of course, says my guide. So we walk back to the observation deck and take another couple of laps around the city.

David Skinner is editor of HUMANITIES magazine.

Judith Dupré received a $37,800 Public Scholar grant to finish work on her book about One World Trade Center. The Public Scholar program supports well-researched books in the humanities intended to reach a broad audience.

HUMANITIES 15

16 SUMMER 2016

EARLIER THIS YEAR, WHEN the New York Times asked

novelist and essayist Roger Rosenblatt to name the best memoir he’d read recently, he was unequivocal in his reply.

“Speak, Memory, recently or ever,” Rosenblatt told the Times.

He was referring to the classic account by Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) of his idyllic Russian childhood in a family of colorful aristocrats, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that banished him to exile, and the path that would eventually lead him to live in the United States.

Rosenblatt is far from alone in hailing Speak, Memory as a gem. “To write superior autobiography one requires not only literary gifts, which are obtainable with effort, but an intrinsically interesting life, which is less frequently available,” literary critic Joseph Epstein once observed. “Those who possess the one are frequently devoid of the other, and vice versa. Only a fortunate few are able to reimagine their lives, to find themes and patterns that explain a life, in the way successful autobiography requires. Vladimir Nabokov

The sly illusion in Nabokov’s memoir resides in the very title, Speak, Memory, which evokes the idea of an earnest scribe waiting for the mythical Greek goddess Mnemosyne to talk so that he can scrupulously transcribe the past. But Speak, Memory, we learn in Nabokov’s foreword, wasn’t the book’s first name. His memoir was initially published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence, though that choice proved problematic. “Unfortunately, the phrase suggested a mystery story,” Nabokov explained, “and I planned to entitle the British edition Speak, Mnemosyne but was told that ‘little old ladies would not want to ask for a book whose name they could not pronounce’ . . . so finally we settled for Speak, Memory.”

Yet the declarative certainty within the premise— Mnemosyne as an infallible arbiter of one’s personal history—is quickly betrayed by the interior logic of the narrative. Nabokov’s 1966 version of the book, we learn, was intended as a corrective to the earlier work, a revision

Fifty years after its arrival, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited continues to draw readers.

By Danny Heitman was among them.” After closing the pages of Speak, Memory, John Updike, no slouch himself as a prose stylist, was carried away. “Nabokov has never written English better than in these reminiscences; never has he written so sweetly,” he declared. “With tender precision and copious wit . . . inspired by an atheist’s faith in the magic of simile and the sacredness of lost time, Nabokov makes of his past a brilliant icon—bejewelled, perspectiveless, untouchable.”

Updike was writing in 1966, the year that the definitive version of Speak, Memory, subtitled An Autobiography Revisited, was published. That edition is 50 years old this year, still in print after half a century, and still attracting new readers. Perhaps no one would be more surprised at the book’s longevity than Nabokov himself. He pronounced the memoir “a dismal flop” after its release, lamenting that it brought him “fame but little money.”

The work that had made Nabokov a lucrative author and ensured his financial security was—you guessed it—his controversial novel Lolita, which became an international sensation in 1955 with its tale of a shrewd pedophile’s relationship with his 12-year-old stepdaughter.

Lolita looms so largely over Nabokov’s literary legacy that the more quietly observed Speak, Memory is destined to lie in its shadow. But if Nabokov had never written Lolita —indeed, if he had never written the novels Mary, or Pnin, or The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or Pale Fire, or any of the poems or works of criticism that won him an international audience—then he would still deserve to be remembered for Speak, Memory, his exquisite paean to memory itself.

meant to clean up flawed recollections in the first edition.

“I revised many passages and tried to do something about the amnesic defects of the original—blank spots, blurry areas, domains of dimness,” he reports. “I discovered that sometimes, by means of intense concentration, the neutral smudge might be forced to come into beautiful focus so that the sudden view could be identified, and the anonymous servant named.”

Some of Nabokov’s revisions occurred after he returned to Europe following a 20-year absence, connecting with relatives who helped him realize that “I had erred, or had not examined deeply enough an obscure but fathomable recollection.”

Therein lies the central tension of Speak, Memory. Its prose is meticulous, suggesting memory as an exercise in exacting dictation from an omniscient oracle, yet its message points to memory as mutable, prone to the passage of time and the vagaries of imagination. “Fairly early in the book Nabokov spends pages and pages creating an exquisite picture of the vast figure of Mademoiselle, his childhood nanny, everything detailed, from her voice to her chins,” Rosenblatt notes. “Then he reverses course and says: Did I get her all wrong? Is she a fiction? Who but Nabokov could get away with a stunt like that—to make us believe all he has written about the woman, and doubt every word, and not care.”

This delicious ambiguity starts right away, in Nabokov’s reference to his birth, which was April 10, 1899, according to the Old Style calendar, largely derived from the Julian

LEPIDOPTERIST, MEMOIRIST VLADIMIR NABOKOV SCRUTINIZES THE LIVING TISSUE OF HIS OWN PERSONAL HISTORY IN SPEAK, MEMORY. —© Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos

HUMANITIES 17

calendar, used in Russia at the time. It was generally 12 days behind the Gregorian calendar in widespread use outside Russia, which would make Nabokov’s birthday April 22 once he left his homeland. But “with diminishing pomp, in the twentieth century, everybody, including myself, upon being shifted by revolution and expatriation from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian, used to add thirteen, instead of twelve days to the tenth of April,” he confesses.

It’s a seemingly small point, yet a profound one. Without self-pity or bitterness, Nabokov reveals how exile can disrupt the underlying realities of personal identity—even something as basic as one’s birthday.

The theme of dislocation subtly informs the rest of Speak, Memory. In a particularly lovely passage, Nabokov fondly recalls his mother’s return from hunting mushrooms, when she would lay out her trophies on a garden table to sort them:

As often happened at the end of a rainy day, the sun might cast a lurid gleam just before setting, and there, on the damp round table, her mushrooms would lie, very colorful, some bearing traces of extraneous vegetation—a grass blade sticking to a viscid fawn cap, or moss still clothing the bulbous base of a dark-stippled stem. And a tiny looper caterpillar would be there, too, measuring, like a child’s finger and thumb, the rim of the table, and every now and then stretching upward to grope, in vain, for the shrub from which it had been dislodged.

This is vintage Nabokov: everything bright and beautiful, then the sudden lurch of disruption—in this instance, as an innocent creature struggles valiantly to reclaim the familiar home from which it’s been so casually uprooted, inviting an obvious comparison to Nabokov’s own exile.

Born at the dawn of the twentieth century, Nabokov encountered a life that seemed destined to register, as vividly as a seismograph, the titanic political and social upheavals of his age.

After Vladimir Lenin came to power in Russia, Nabokov’s family escaped to Europe in 1919. In subsequent years, Nabokov would study at Cambridge and live in Berlin and Paris. He met his wife, Vera, a fellow Russian émigré, during his Berlin period, and a shared love of literature grounded their relationship. Their son, Dmitri, was born in 1934. Nabokov struggled to support himself as a writer, and his life became more complicated when the family’s presence in France coincided with the Nazi advance. They fled to America in 1940, just in time to escape danger.

“The Nabokovs had been through the historical wringer,” biographer Robert Roper noted in his recent book, Nabokov in America: They were Zelig-like figures of twentieth-century catastrophe, dispossessed of their native Russia by the Bolsheviks, hair’s-breadth escapees of the Nazis in Berlin and Paris, ”little” people with a monstrous evil breathing down their necks. Had they been in Russia that summer of ’43, they might have been among the thousands starving to death during the Siege of Leningrad, the most murderous blockade in world history; had they been in France, which they’d 18 SUMMER 2016

escaped at the last moment, on the last French ship for New York, Vera, who was Jewish, and their young son would likely have been destined for Drancy, the French internment camp that fed Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In America, Nabokov briefly taught literature at Wellesley, then secured a more permanent post at Cornell. He seemed to love his newfound country. “His embrace of it,” writes Roper, “and his comfort with the changes it forced on him had something to do . . . with being able to raise a healthy, promising child in America at midcentury.”

Even so, Nabokov avoided putting down roots outside his homeland. “Nabokov was never at home, literally or figuratively, after his departure from Russia in 1919,” writes critic Peter Quennel. “Never again would he own a residence. With Beckett he was our laureate of the lonely room, the saddest of digs.”

Maybe so, but there’s joy and humor and expectancy in Nabokov, too, as fabled New Yorker editor Harold Ross surely recognized when he published the vignettes that would become the basis for much of Speak, Memory.

The book’s origin within periodical journalism accounts for its episodic quality, a convenient analog for the fragmentary way in which memory actually works. Instead of following a strictly chronological line, the memoir unfolds like the images of a lantern slide, with poetical portraits of Nabokov’s mother, father, uncle, teachers, and other figures from his childhood.

It’s a deeply visual work, so much so that Updike found the use of family photographs to illustrate Speak, Memory a little beside the point. The photos, he groused, “make the book more of a family album and slightly less of a miracle of impressionistic recall.”

Chapter Six opens with a typically evocative word picture: On a summer morning, in the legendary Russia of my boyhood, my first glance upon wakening was for the chink between the white inner shutters. If it disclosed a watery pallor, one had better not open them at all, and so be spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for its picture in a puddle. How resentfully one would deduce, from a line of dull light, the leaden sky, the sodden sand, the gruel-like mess of broken brown blossoms under the lilacs—and that flat, fallow leaf (the first casualty of the season) pasted upon a wet garden bench!

But if the chink was a long glint of dewy brilliancy, then I made haste to have the window yield its treasure. With one blow, the room would be cleft into light and shade.

Clearly, Nabokov wrote for the eye, which isn’t surprising for a man who claimed to hear language as a form of color. The long a of English “has for me the tint of weathered wood,” he mentioned by way of example. “I see q as browner than k,” he added, “while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl.”

Nabokov’s pairing of sound and color, a mixing of the senses known as synesthesia, recalls Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in which the taste of a madeleine cookie prompts an involuntary flood of childhood memories.

Like Proust, Nabokov sometimes celebrates memory as a spiritual epiphany, the past prompting personal revelation

A LANDSCAPE BY ALEXANDER GOLOVIN, THE RUSSIAN ARTIST AND STAGE DESIGNER. —HIP / Art Resource, NY

“Nabokov was never at home, literally or figuratively, after his departure from Russia in 1919,” writes critic Peter Quennel. “Never again would he own a residence.”

HUMANITIES 19

—HIP / Art Resource, NY

STANISLAV ZHUKOVSKY’S OIL PAINTING OF A SITTING ROOM IN THE MANOR HOUSE ROZHDESTVENO, WHERE NABOKOV VISITED HIS UNCLE.

through the magical alchemy that renders experience into literature.

“Nabokov once said that he was ‘born a painter,’” scholars Stephen H. Blackwell and Kurt Johnson point out, also noting that as a boy Nabokov took drawing lessons from the celebrated artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky.

The late Alfred Appel Jr., a prominent Nabokov expert and his former student, recalled that Nabokov would sometimes teach in pictures at Cornell. One sleepy May afternoon during a class in European literature, Nabokov thought he heard a cicada, then proceeded to diagram the insect on the chalkboard, detailing how it created its wondrous sound.

“As a writer, I am half-painter, half-naturalist,” Nabokov told Appel in 1966. Nabokov’s naturalist streak expressed itself primarily in his passion for butterflies. They appealed to his keen grasp of visual beauty, and their fragile existence affirmed his sense of life as deeply transitory. He explains his avocation in Speak, Memory:

I have hunted butterflies in various climes and disguises: as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in flannel bags and beret, as a fat hatless old man in shorts . . . Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration.

After moving to America in the 1940s, Nabokov delighted in new opportunities to catch butterflies. “In his 20 SUMMER 2016

forties Nabokov was still stubbornly youthful,” writes Roper. “Despite the dentures and the tubercular look, he was physically vigorous, youthful also in the sense of being deeply enamored of himself. . . . During his twenty years in America, he traveled upward of 200,000 miles by car, much of it in the high-mountain West, on vacations organized around insect collecting.”

In a new book, Fine Lines, Blackwell and Johnson argue that Nabokov was more than a mere amateur lepidopterist, his drawings and insights making a real contribution to understanding evolutionary biology. “I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is,” Nabokov said.

On his road trips through America, Nabokov gained a familiarity with the landscape that would inform Lolita, his signature novel. Decades after its publication, Lolita’s subject matter continues to shock, and its most disturbing aspect lies in its basic contradiction: How could something so beautifully written advance a story of such utter debasement? Here again, Nabokov’s enduring fascination with memory figures into his art. The novel’s central character, Humbert Humbert, tells the story in retrospect, giving a morally bankrupt relationship the grandness of myth. Lolita is about many things, but one of its themes is the plasticity of the perceived past—how it can be bent through the biases of recollection to serve our personal conceits. In a kind of counterpoint to Speak, Memory’s treatment of the past as pure transcendence when transmuted into narrative, Lolita hints at literary recollection as a corrupting influence as dark as Humbert’s carnal appetites. That Humbert is a supremely sophisticated aesthete suggests the book as

—Photo © DILTZ / Bridgeman Images

JAMES MASON AND SUE LYON IN THE WELL-REGARDED 1962 FILM ADAPTATION OF LOLITA DIRECTED BY STANLEY KUBRICK.

a cautionary tale about the black magic of art, its power to not only define reality but distort it.

But in Speak, Memory, Nabokov implies that memory, flawed though it may be, is the closest thing we have to a fixed star in a rootless world. He speculates that, when it came to remembering things, “Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them by giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known.”

Nabokov colonized the English language so deftly in his prose that it’s easy to forget his Russian origins. His family, ardent Anglophiles, immersed him in English at an early age. In fact, his father was dismayed to learn that the young Nabokov could read and write English but not Russian, sending for the village schoolmaster to address the imbalance.

He seemed a citizen of the world, spending his final years in Switzerland before passing away at age 78 in 1977.

Five decades after its arrival, Speak, Memory still reminds readers that we’re really all wanderers, here for just a short while. “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of

light between two eternities of darkness,” Nabokov wrote.

“That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is something I share with the most gaudily painted savage.”

Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Louisiana, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House. His HUMANITIES essay on H. L. Mencken was listed as a Notable Essay of the Year in Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Essays 2015.

NEH has funded numerous projects related to Vladimir Nabokov over the years, including an Enduring Questions course on conceptions of time in physics, philosophy, fiction, and film, and another Enduring Questions course on the nature of memory. In 1998, NEH awarded a fellowship to Stacy Schiff for research leading to Vera, Schiff ’s Pulitzer-winning biography of Nabokov’s wife, to whom he dedicated so many books.

Sources: Speak, Memory; Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute, edited by Peter Quennell; Lolita, Pnin, Nabokov in America by Robert Roper; Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike.

HUMANITIES 21

2016 Jefferson Lecture IN THE HUMANITIES

THE CONCERT HALL AT THE JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS. OPPOSITE CENTER: KEN BURNS CHATS WITH FANS AT THE POST-LECTURE RECEPTION; BURNS POSES WITH SMITHSONIAN CONSERVATOR HELLEN INGALLS, CARNEGIE CORPORATION SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT ZOE INGALLS, NEH CHAIRMAN WILLIAM D. ADAMS, CARNEGIE CORPORATION PRESIDENT VARTAN GREGORIAN, AND ARTHUR VINING DAVIS FOUNDATIONS PRESIDENT NANCY CABLE. ALL IMAGES © 2016 PHOTO BY CHERISS MAY

22 SUMMER 2016

FILMMAKER KEN BURNS DELIVERED THE 45TH Jefferson Lecture to a packed house at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on May 9, 2016. Burns has made 15 documentaries with NEH support, beginning with Brooklyn Bridge, his first feature film, continuing through The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, The Roosevelts, and up to The Vietnam War, which is scheduled to air in 2017.

Among its many themes, the lecture documented a personal journey for Burns. He recalled the day his family was moving out of Newark, Delaware, so his father could take a job at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where it was hoped that Ken’s mother might receive treatment that would slow the cancer that was taking her life.

On their way out of town, the Burns family, riding in a rented station wagon, stopped at the home of Mrs. Jennings, an African-American woman who was their cleaning lady but also much more than that. Mrs. Jennings was, Ken Burns said, “a substitute mother.” She had dried Ken’s tears when his cat died, and in other ways offered the emotional support the 9-year-old needed while his mother ’s health deteriorated.

As the Burnses said their good-byes to Mrs. Jennings, she reached out to hug young Ken Burns, but he recoiled, refusing to be touched by this gentle black woman who had done so much for him and his family.

“Young man,” his father said shortly afterwards, “I am so disappointed in you.” The son came to see his error and to this day carries the “the guilt of that inexcusable snub.”

RIGHT, FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: PAULA KERGER, PBS’S PRESIDENT AND CEO; IVORY TOLDSON AND TAMMI FERGUSSON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND PROGRAM ANALYST (RESPECTIVELY) FOR THE WHITE HOUSE INITIATIVE ON HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES; BURNS GREETS SHARON PERCY ROCKEFELLER, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF WETA; AND PATRICIA DE STACY HARRISON, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING, WITH JEFF BIEBER, VICE PRESIDENT AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER FOR NATIONAL PROGRAMS BROADCAST ON PBS, AND A GUEST OF HARRISON.

In his lecture, Burns traced America’s conflicted racial present to the immoral compromises over race and slavery in America’s founding, expressed as national conflict in the Civil War, and re-expressed in the civil rights movement and present-day controversies involving race.

In studying our own history, said Burns, we can at least gain some perspective on these divisions that continue to fissure America. A more perfect union, he insisted, needs to be more than a phrase we recall from the U.S. Constitution. It needs to be a mission of the humanities.

HUMANITIES 23

A FA M O U S B AT T L E, A O N C E

A STITCHED VIEW OF THE 377-FOOT-WIDE GETTYSBURG CYCLORAMA.

GETTYSBURG IN THE ROUND ONE OF THE MOST CELEBRATED AND WIDELY VIEWED

paintings of the nineteenth century almost didn’t survive into the twentieth. The Battle of Gettysburg, a vast canvas with a vast audience—hundreds of thousands had once flocked to see it—was found by a Boston Globe reporter in 1904, moldering in a lean-to shed at the back of a vacant lot. It had been rolled up, bagged in oilcloth, and stuffed in rough wooden crates.

“The long box has been on fire two or three times in the years it has lain in the lot,” the Globe reported, with the flames doused not only by water, but by mysterious retardants from the fire department’s “chemical engine.”

“All this,” the reporter deadpanned, “probably has not helped to preserve the big painting in good condition.”

How big a painting? Forty-two feet from top to bottom, the canvas is 377 feet around. The Battle of Gettysburg was one of the great 360-degree paintings popular in the nineteenth century known as “panoramas” in Europe and “cycloramas” in the United States. Placing the viewer near the center of the action, the Gettysburg Cyclorama captures the moment, on July 3, 1863, when Confederate General George Pickett’s men charged into the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge.

The Battle of Gettysburg was painted in 1882–83 by a team of artists led by French painter Paul Philippoteaux. He had 24 SUMMER 2016

learned the craft from his father, Félix-Emmanuel-Henri Philippoteaux, one of the most prominent panorama painters of the mid nineteenth century. When it first went on display in Chicago in October of 1883, The Battle of Gettysburg proved so popular that Philippoteaux and his team were hired to produce three copies. There was so much demand for the painting that counterfeiters knocked off a dozen or more phonies, some slapdash, some (those produced by former assistants to the original artist) of high quality.

The copy of the painting made by Philippoteaux for display in Boston was eventually rescued from the vacant lot where it had been left to rot. The canvas was brought to Gettysburg in 1913 to be displayed as a tourist attraction; there it suffered further decay and repairs of clumsy expedience. Acquired by the National Park Service in the 1940s, The Battle of Gettysburg was finally given a thoughtful and deft restoration and went back on display in a new building in 2008.

The first panoramas were devised by English portraitpainter Robert Barker, who in 1787 took out a patent on the idea of a painting-in-the-round. He specified in the patent details of presentation—in particular the raised, central viewing platform—that would be used for most panoramas

F A M O U S P A I N T I N G . B Y E R I C F E LT E N

—Maria Biernik

to come. The word “panorama” was coined to advertise the landscapes-in-the-round Barker put on display in Leicester Square, London. By the early 1800s panoramas could be seen across Europe, with canvases representing not only landscapes, but historic moments—great battles, in particular.

Were panoramas art or entertainment? Both. The giant paintings, exhibited in large, custom-built rotundas, required the investment of rich speculators, especially those with a knack for promotion. (In the 1870s P. T. Barnum was among those trying their hands at the cyclorama game.)

But, from the beginning, Barker was at pains to argue that his innovation should “not be understood as an Exhibition merely for emolument,” but was “intended chiefly for the criticism of artists, and admirers of painting in general.”

When not driven by shameless commerce, propaganda purposes have often come into play: Napoleon wanted panoramas of all his great battles painted and displayed in Paris. In the 1980s the Egyptian army commissioned a panorama of the Arab-Israeli War. Yet for all the commercial and political imperatives, the best panoramas are remarkable works of art—astonishing and affecting, complicated and compelling images liberated from the constraint of frames. The Battle of Gettysburg features as much pathos as ballyhoo. In one direction there

are Union batteries largely obscured in smoke; opposite are caissons careening toward the front lines. Viewers are drawn to the first waves of Pickett’s charge met in melee at the stone wall; when one turns and faces the Round Tops, an improvised barnyard hospital comes into sight, the surgeons at work with their bone saws. The painting presents a romantic vision of heroism under fire, but it doesn’t lie about the carnage. Though not as gruesome as it could have been—say, if the painters had rendered the crimson mist when men were vaporized by canister shot—the dead and dying are everywhere, each rendered with heartbreaking individuality.

Panoramas demanded innovative technique. Among the challenges of painting in the round was mastering the peculiarities of cylindrical perspective—or as art historian Scott Wilcox has put it, “the difficulties of presenting straight lines on a curved canvas.”

There were other practical challenges. The great canvases were far too large to be completed (at least in a timely fashion) by any one painter: Panoramas were, of necessity, collaborative efforts executed by teams of artists. That teamwork required specialization, says Sue Boardman, who has coauthored histories of the Gettysburg cyclorama, and worked on the painting’s restoration. If different artists HUMANITIES 25

A KEY TO THE GETTYSBURG CYCLORAMA FROM A SOUVENIR PROGRAM. —Sue Boardman Collection

—Maria Biernik

THE DETAILS AND EXPANSE OF A CYCLORAMA ENCOURAGE THE VIEWER TO EXAMINE THE ART AT A LEISURELY PACE.

painted separate sections, she says, the whole would never hold together. Instead, each artist worked at his specialty.

Take, for example, any one of the horseback figures in The Battle of Gettysburg: It’s likely that one artist painted the ground under the horse’s hooves, another the sky above; another painted the horse, another the body of the rider, and yet another painted the rider’s face.

From the beginning, a high value was placed on verisimilitude in panoramas, a you-are-there immediacy. That meant not only representational realism, but accuracy in the details of time, place, and events—even clothing. “As truthfulness of costume is one of the great necessities,” Philippoteaux told the New York Times early in his work on the painting, “I hope to get everything relating to the dress of the soldiery, with the traits of the brave combatants on both sides.”

Just as sticklers today scour period films for historical bloopers, so too the Cyclorama-goers of the nineteenth century found details to complain about.

Philippoteaux painted Confederate General Lewis Armistead being shot from his horse; Armistead, critics quickly pointed out, was shot while leading his brigade on foot. And for all the artists’ efforts to achieve “truthfulness of costume,” the uniforms in the first version of the painting struck many viewers as “too French.”

The hyperrealism of panoramic painting enjoyed its 1880s heyday just as other artists were pushing the bound-

26 SUMMER 2016

A BACKSTAGE VIEW FROM ABOVE THE GETTYSBURG CYCLORAMA, SHOWING THE EQUIPMENT THAT CREATES THE MODERN SOUND AND LIGHT PRESENTATION. —© Bill Dowling (Image taken from The Gettysburg Cyclorama: The Turning Point of the Civil War on Canvas by Chris Brenneman, Sue Boardman, and Bill Dowling.)

aries of abstraction. Monet’s Impression, Sunrise was among the proto-Impressionist paintings exhibited in Paris in 1874; Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold—The Falling Rocket was displayed (and provoked no little fuss) in 1877.

Dutch artist Hendrik Willem Mesdag painted a panoramic land- and seascape of the beach at Scheveningen (a painting still on display in the Hague). After seeing it in the summer of 1881, Vincent van Gogh repeated a jibe once made of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson—that the “picture’s only fault is that it has no fault.” (This, even though Mesdag, of all the panorama painters of the time, may have been the least tethered to realism.)

And yet, to achieve realism Philippoteaux used some of the same techniques that were crucial to Impressionism.

Bodies in the Gettysburg cyclorama that look quite detailed and specific at a distance are, up close, created with ambiguous brush strokes, and small streaks and blocks of contrasting colors. But unlike regular canvases, which can be approached—and are often viewed from altogether too close—the rotundas custom-built for panoramas purposely keep the audience at a specific distance, allowing the artists to paint with the exact level of imprecision calculated to look lifelike from the central viewing platform.

The realist imperative can veer into kitsch, though, with the faux terrain, an early French addition to panoramic presentation, which fills the space between platform and canvas with a diorama of real objects meant to extend the painting three-dimensionally. I find the theatrical staging of combat detritus in the foreground detracts from The Battle of Gettysburg, rather than adding to the effect.

The farthest point north that the Southern army reached at Gettysburg is often referred to as the “high-water mark

of the Confederacy.” The Battle of Gettysburg can be thought of as the high-water mark of panoramic painting. From 1883 well into the 1890s, crowds thronged to see versions of Philippoteaux’s masterpiece in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, and later in traveling shows around the country.

But the sad state of the Boston canvas in 1904 was emblematic of what had become of the cyclorama craze—it had been abandoned for a newer, more compelling visual entertainment: motion pictures. “Poor panorama, the joy of our grandparents,” Max Brod lamented in 1913, “today it is the cinema that makes our nerves tingle.”

Too big and expensive to store, the old cycloramas were dumped in vacant lots, or they rotted away in forgotten warehouses, or were ruined by rain or fire, or, in at least one case, cut up to make tents. Of the hundreds of panoramas produced in the nineteenth century, few survive, and fewer still are on display. (PanoramaCouncil.org maintains a list of the 360-degree paintings that can be seen worldwide.)

That makes The Battle of Gettysburg not just a remarkable feat of collaborative painting, but a rare relic of an artistic movement now largely forgotten, a work that is as much artifact as art.

Eric Felten is managing editor of the Weekly Standard and a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal.

NEH supports efforts to preserve and protect collections of material culture, such as at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, where a cyclorama measuring 8 feet by 1,275 feet was assessed for conservation with the help of NEH funding. The Battle of Gettysburg is, of course, a mainstay of many Civil War projects, including, in 2014, two one-week landmark workshops for eighty schoolteachers to study the history of this major battle.

HUMANITIES 27

Freedom of Mind

By Nancy Shepherdson

—Maria Biernik

Chicago Program Brings College-Level Humanities to Maximum Security

28 SUMMER 2016

—Maria Biernik

NOBODY ENTERS STATEVILLE CORRECTIONAL CENTER THINKING THEY WILL BE OUT SOON.

Almost every man at the prison, which is located about 40 miles southwest of Chicago, has been sentenced to a minimum of 20 years; some have been sentenced to life without parole. And because of Illinois truth-in-sentencing laws, many of those serving time for murder expect to remain behind bars for their entire sentence, with no time off for good behavior. It is a place that is ripe for desperation and despair. Yet, in a battered classroom on prison grounds, a serious college-level discussion is taking place.

Under exposed fluorescent lights, behind a barred door, fighting to be heard over a noisy fan, liberal arts professor Christina Gómez, of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, calls on Ruben Hernandez, who is serving a 60-year sentence. He is eager to read his homework essay: “How does language influence my identity? When I speak, people find out that I’m not that uneducated Mexican.

Yes, I’m from Durango and also from Chicago. Mi gente . . . we are all one people, Homo sapiens, and we all bleed the same.”

Gómez mildly criticizes him for “code-switching” in the Spanish phrase mi gente (my people), and thus using an idiom only some of his audience would fully comprehend.

Mi gente is well understood here, he argues. “People know what it means in here and you should make word choices to grab your audience,” he says, arching his eyebrows at his fellow students, emphasizing a concept Gómez has taught.

There are 15 other men in the class, most with black or brown faces, and many of them smile knowingly. They are halfway through their 14-week class in Latino history and culture and they know audience-grabbing when they hear it.

After Ruben speaks, Gómez moves into a discussion of a reading from a book she coedited, Mi Voz, Mi Vida (My Voice, My Life): Latino College Students Tell Their Life Stories, which is a collection of essays written by Dartmouth students. Many in the class identify with the student narrator Eric, who struggles with his beliefs after his mother dies while he is attending college. “How do we decide what we value in life?” Gómez asks the class. It’s a classic humanities question, incredibly broad, hard to answer, and yet very, very important.

Unlike many college students, who are sometimes unwilling to risk embarrassing themselves in front of their peers, the men in the class at Stateville are eager to share their views and what they have learned from the readings. Ruben and the other students discuss whether they are free to live as they choose or if their lives are determined by their place in “the system.” Ruben is convinced that his current troubles stem entirely from wanting more than he really needs. “My needs are simple now, but there is no doubt in my mind that if I wasn’t arrested for murder, I would have been murdered myself.” Carlos Priester, who has been in prison for 17 years and has 23 more to serve, has a more hopeful attitude: “You want to be able to supply your family’s needs, and I won’t let being a convicted felon stand in my way. I know people who are convicted felons and they own property.”

A New Normal

More than 550 inmates have taken humanities classes at Stateville since the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Program (PNAP) began in 2012. This year the program consists of 13 classes in culture, history, and art, but has proven so popular that 85 inmates were turned away for the summer session. PNAP was the brainchild of Sarah Ross, adjunct assistant professor of sculpture and art education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was supported by a $2,000 loan from her dad. Ross had volunteered teaching women in a county jail, and her first job out of graduate school was at a prison education program in Danville, Illinois. She wanted to try something similar but more ambitious.

The signature innovation of PNAP was to recruit professors to teach rigorous college-level courses. “In class, [prisoners] can be a student, an artist, a writer, and not just a prisoner,” says Ross. “Some sign up just because there is nothing else to do. Boredom itself is a form of punishment.

What they find out is that, really, it’s a way to be alive.”

Teaching humanities in prison is challenging, but not necessarily in the ways outsiders expect. Security is tight, of course, even for visitors; torn jeans are a reason to be barred from a visit and underwear is mandatory and checked for. Visitors—and that includes humanities professors, visiting journalists, and everyone else—must accept the possibility of being searched at any time. More crucially for today’s college professors, visitors are stripped of all technology upon entering the prison, including cell phones and laptops. But, in other ways, humanities class in a maximum-security prison is not unlike Humanities 101 on a leafy green campus.

“It’s very similar to teaching at the university except that there is no technology. It’s just the students, me, and the text,” says Gómez. She relies on photocopies and the occasional film on inmate closed-circuit TV. “This is learning at its purest.”

She would teach in the program even without the small stipend she receives, says Gómez.

“We don’t do it for the money; I gave half of mine to charity when I taught there last year.”

—Sarah Ross Stateville was built primarily in the 1920s, and it resembles a worn-down urban high school. Studying the humanities here—without the intrusion of bars, Plexiglas, or guards— is a privilege. Prisoners are aware that their continued participation depends on their own behavior. They must have no disciplinary actions against them in order to even qualify for the classes. According to Department of Corrections’ spokesperson Nicole Wilson, “Offenders who participate in PNAP often see it as an incentive to stay out of trouble because they understand that a major disciplinary infraction could lead to their removal from the course.”

“What they find out is that, really, it’s a way to be alive.”

HUMANITIES 29

Showing Up

Sarah Ross started volunteering at Stateville in 2011, teaching one art class. “I had conversations with students beforehand and asked them what they had here that allowed them to express themselves. ‘Nothing,’ was the common answer.” She knew right away that inmates would need to be able to depend on the program if it was to be effective.

“I wanted them to learn to think together, so it had to be stable. Not here today, gone tomorrow.” But inmates still worry. “Carlos asks me all the time if we’re coming back again.”

To maximize its chances for long-term success, Ross structured PNAP so that it would never cost the Illinois Department of Corrections a dime and give volunteer teachers a rewarding experience. After her first class, Ross started recruiting a rotating cadre of volunteer instructors who are now known as the PNAP Teaching Collective.

“We tell them to teach what you want to but not to ever underestimate the intelligence of their students.” Despite this warning, Christina Gómez, who taught her first class at Stateville in 2015, was a bit surprised by the intellectual capacities of her students. “Other professors told me that they were excellent readers, careful and detailed.” It turned out that questions about the text and discussions were on par with discussions in any university class, or higher. “They are brilliant, some of them, intellectually curious, and that doesn’t change just because they are in prison.”

Ross also embarked on a wide-ranging study of the few prison humanities programs that existed at the time, covering her travel expenses with a foundation grant. The words of a Sing Sing inmate, describing how studying the humanities changed his outlook, impressed her so much she can quote them today. “Before I would have jumped someone who said something to me wrong. Now I know where he’s coming from. People can learn to be more analytical instead of reactive.”

She also had the example of the late Margaret Burroughs, who ran an extensive educational program at Stateville for many years, offering college-level credit and even granting degrees. Some PNAP students remember receiving Pell Grants. That kind of money is gone, due to changing attitudes at the federal level about what is appropriate for the incarcerated. PNAP now depends on charitable donations and grants, including three so far from Illinois Humanities.

But Ross was careful not to forget that PNAP would be taking place in a maximum-security prison. “We had a few setbacks at first, so we established ground rules for the inmates almost immediately. The biggest problem was students who didn’t come to class. We’ve become better at laying out the expectations and the consequences. Come to class and do the work and you’ll be able to remain in class.” After the first year, Ross says, slacking off was no longer an issue. “If there are 70 guys being turned away and you got chosen, this becomes a highly-prized activity.”

The program has attracted instructors from Northeastern Illinois University, the University of Illinois at Chi 30 SUMMER 2016

cago, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as independent artists. This year, coursework choices include the Artistic Imagination, Religion and the Black Freedom Struggle, Black Women and the Justice System, and Words Free: An Exploration of Poetry and Poetics. In 2015, PNAP also got a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to fund an art program and guest lecturer series, set to begin in the fall of 2016.

Students in Stateville humanities classes write creative literature pieces like those in Mi Voz, Mi Vida for their final projects. The writings, along with inmate artwork, are displayed in a different art space in Chicago each year. In the spring of 2016, the exhibition, over a two-month period, was accompanied by poetry performances, a film of prison art projects, and scholarly panels on such issues as police and prison reform. Much feedback and rewriting is done on the final projects before everyone agrees they are ready for public consumption.

A Different Perspective

There are many rules at a maximum-security prison, for inmate and visitor alike. The inquiring journalist soon learns that gaining access is a very literal concern when your subject is behind bars.

Well after the Latino history and culture class was over for the semester, two inmates were finally granted permission to talk to me, which by itself did not enable an interview to take place. Prison regulations forbid any visitor like myself to return within three months or before another criminal background check is complete. Permission to return also required written authorization from the prisoners. To facilitate those authorizations, I sent my requests to the prisoners along with stamped, self-addressed envelopes. This was, unbeknownst to me, a violation of prison mail rules, and it caused the first set of letters to be rejected. In all, nine months passed before I received dispensation from the Department of Corrections to return.

I had requested permission to talk with five inmates, all of whom had stood out in class for intelligent and cogent comments, but one did not respond, one had used one of my envelopes to respond and was thus disqualified, and one had transferred downstate and was out of reach.

Needless to say, the process was an instructive look at the frustrations prisoners must face every day.

We finally meet one afternoon in the visitors’ area, on opposite sides of a table in a tiny cinder-block room with a barred window. Each prisoner comes in separately for a one-on-one interview and the guard withdraws, closing the door and apparently disappearing. It is a mark of trust, the guard tells me between interviews, not granted other prisoners unless they are meeting their attorneys.

Carlos Priester, 38, is a tall, polite, impeccably groomed African American who wouldn’t seem out of place working in a bank, except for his starched and pristine blue prison uniform. Convicted in 1999 at age 20 of “accountability” in a drug-related murder, Priester is serving 40 years. Before he was arrested, he had been expelled from the well-

regarded Evanston Township High School, for fighting.

He remembers that he had a job possibility with the City of Evanston when “somebody died” during a drug deal.

Priester did not pull the trigger but, under Illinois “accountability” law, was considered as legally responsible as his friend who did. He has taken three classes through PNAP since the program started.

“You get a different perspective on black people’s struggle. It’s not just us, it’s everybody,” says Priester.

“Reading the books and seeing movies lets you learn about how people live. That allows us to develop better relationships with people in class—you can find someone to share things with. Ruben [Hernandez], for instance—I never said a word to him until the class, but I found out he was a real smart dude, a good guy. I found out that you shouldn’t pass judgment.”

(It was not possible to follow up with Hernandez, who was granted a transfer to a medium-security prison shortly after we observed the class. Did the classes help him make his case for more lenient treatment? Nobody would say.)

Michael Sanders, serving life without parole, also for accountability for murder, didn’t say much in the class but had a lot to say afterward about the value of humanities classes. He had never been much interested in school before going to prison, he told me. After his mother ’s rapid decline and death from lung cancer, he began using drugs. At the time, he said, he was attending Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, nearing graduation, and working as a janitor in an upscale hair salon. His ambition was to be a lawyer. His whole life people had told him he was bright but undisciplined. His mother ’s death set him on a downward spiral that ended at Stateville.

On a February day in 1998, he said, after a 24-hour period of binging on cocaine and liquor and driving around Chicago and the suburbs, Sanders and friends stopped at a friend’s apartment to eat and crash. Sanders remembers passing out, but not much more. The next morning, Valentine’s Day, he said, the friends were out driving when they were pulled over by the police and handcuffed. One of them was charged with murdering a woman, and he said Sanders had been with him. Sanders says he was not there.

He has not been outside prison walls since.

“I try to stay positive, which is why I take PNAP classes,” says Sanders, who has taken four humanities courses so far. But staying positive while serving a life sentence, without chance of parole, is difficult. “If you don’t do something with yourself, you waste away.” Particularly valuable for him, he says, was an essay assignment comparing the educational philosophies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Washington advocated training young black men to be good farmers; Du Bois favored higher education and believed “you can accomplish anything.” Sanders chose Du Bois as a role model and recently served as a teacher ’s aide for the prison GED program.

Sanders is appealing his case on the grounds of actual innocence. The friend who originally said Sanders was present at the murder has recanted. Sanders’s lawyer

requested a new trial, but the motion had just been denied before Sanders and I talked, though his lawyer has vowed to appeal. Sanders claims to be hopeful but looks away for the first time and sighs as he talks about the legal battle.

His effort to clear his name, he says, has revived his interest in finishing his degree and his hope of actually becoming a lawyer. He shouts it: “I’d like college credits for this!”

Ross says she would eventually like to offer degree programs and that Northeastern Illinois University is prepared to do so if permitted by the Department of Corrections. Ross envisions it as a “competencybased program” requiring math, English, and other basic classes, while allowing inmates to create a major for themselves “based on the skills they have already acquired.” The Illinois state budget impasse is standing in the way, but, says —Sarah Ross, quoting a Sing-Sing inmate Ross, Ford, Mellon, and other foundations have supported prison-education programs in other states and could do so here.

“Yes, they have long sentences, but getting a degree is so important because most of them are role models for children,” says Ross in reference to the prisoners’ own children. “It is also important for self-esteem and coping skills, which will make Stateville a safer place.”

In the meantime, she says, “we are not therapists, but for sure the humanities give the men a lot of tools for relating the experiences of others to their own lives. It’s a way to survive by thinking things through.”

“Before I would have jumped someone who said something to me wrong.

Now I know where he’s coming from.”

Nancy Shepherdson is a writer, a political activist, and a board member of Illinois Humanities, where she learned about PNAP while reviewing grant applications.

The National Endowment for the Humanities supports Illinois Humanities with annual funding for its operating expenses and grantmaking. NEH has also made several grants to support the celebrated Clemente Course in the Humanities, whose founder, Earl Shorris, helped make college coursework in the humanities available to low-income adults. NEH has also supported humanities reading and discussion programs in juvenile justice facilities through People and Stories/Gente y Cuentos. In 2012, NEH made a $25,000 grant to the Bard Prison Initiative.

HUMANITIES 31

Endowment-Supported Events

An innovative educator fired from a conservative college in Florida went on to establish, in the early 1930s, an institution in western North Carolina that attracted young phenoms to both the faculty and the student body. The rise of Nazism sent Bauhaus profs Josef and Anni Albers there as well.

“Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957,” displaying the works of more than 90 alumni, travels to the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, and runs from September 17 through January 1.

Paintings by William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, John Singer Sargent, and their contemporaries will be on display in “Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas” at the New York Botanical Garden, the Bronx, through September 11. Visitors can also stroll through an American Impressionist garden.

—Edmund William Greacen, In Miss Florence’s Garden, 1913. Oil on canvas, 30 X 30 inches, private collector / courtesy New York Botanical Garden

32 SUMMER 2016

—Courtesy Minnesota Historical Society

—Leaf Study by Josef Albers / courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Calendar

A 10-minute video and 20 banners with text and images accompany “Why Treaties Matter: Self Government in the Dakota and Ojibwe Nations,” which continues through July 17 at the Minnesota State Community and Technical College in Detroit Lakes. Kevin Leecy of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe reminds, “The U.S. Constitution recognizes Indian Tribes as distinct sovereign entities on par with foreign nations.”

Summer 2016 by steve moyer

—Arthur F. Mathews (American, 1860–1945), Youth, about 1917. Oil on canvas, 59 ½ X 67 ¾ in. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California. Gift of Concours d’Antiques, the Art Guild, A66.196.24 / courtesy Denver Art Museum

Watercolors by Diego Rivera are among the many works on display in “Rhythm & Roots: Dance in American Art,” opening at the Denver Art Museum July 10. Paintings by John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and Mary Cassatt depict the myriad ways Americans have kicked up their heels, while work by moderns Isamu Noguchi, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol demonstrate their roles in shaping dance’s aesthetics.

—

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on

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Sober responses to America’s love of drink included, in 1873, “Mother Thompson’s Crusade”—a movement begun by prayerful women in Hillsboro, Ohio, that spread across the Northeast and Midwest. “American Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition,” opening September 24 at the Durham Museum, Omaha, walks a straight line through the room-spinning events that led first to ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 and its repeal in 1933.

HUMANITIES 33

Our objects tell amazing stories, not all of them accurate.

LANGSTON HUGHES AND A PRIZED POSSESSION HE DONATED TO THE OHIO HISTORICAL SOCIETY, A SHAWL HE RECEIVED FROM HIS GRANDMOTHER.

One of the most treasured objects in the “collection “ of the Ohio History Connection in columbus is item H 6806, which, at first, seems to be a rather ordinary handwoven wool twill shawl. Measuring 142 cm x 315 cm (about 56” x 124”), it is large enough to cover a dining room table and has a plaid pattern in blue and yellow. The edges are frayed. The color is faded and the fabric bears numerous holes of different sizes. The shawl seems to date from the early nineteenth century, its age evident from both its badly worn condition and the nature of its yarn and weave.

By Steven Lubet and Rachel Maines 34 SUMMER 2016

Langston Hughes’s

SHAWL Photo of Langston Hughes (1902–67) February 29, 1936 (gelatin silver print), Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) / private collection / Bridgeman Image; photo of shawl, courtesy of the Ohio History Connection

The object is so modest it hardly seems museumworthy.

But it came with a great story deeply rooted in American history and literature.

In 1943, the shawl was donated by Langston Hughes, the great African-American poet and playwright. In a handwritten note, Hughes explained that it had belonged to his grandmother’s first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, who had given his life in John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859.

Said Hughes, Sheridan Leary wore this shawl when he went from Oberlin, Ohio, to join John Brown in order to help him create the slave revolt which they hoped might free the Negroes. At Harper’s Ferry Leary was killed and left to lie for a long while in a muddy ditch, but some good person took this shawl and sent it back to Oberlin to his widow, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary, who later became Mrs. Langston, my grandmother.

The museum’s website says that the shawl “had been

handed down in the Leary family from Sheridan’s grandfather,” and adds that “we would be safe in dating the shawl at thirty to forty years preceding John Brown’s raid, certainly in the first quarter of the 1800’s.”

The shawl belonged first to the Leary family, then to the Langstons, and finally to the Hugheses. The poet also included a brief account of it in his autobiography, noting that Leary had left Oberlin without disclosing his destination, “except that he told [Mary] he was going on a trip. A few weeks later his shawl came back to her full of bullet holes.” Hughes’s biographer, Arnold Rampersad, wrote that “a friend brought [Leary’s] bloodstained, bullet-ridden shawl” back to Oberlin, and that it remained a symbol for Mary of his martyrdom. “She still wore it fifty years after his death, or used it to cover her young grandchild, Langston Hughes, while he slept at night.”

The Harpers Ferry raid and its aftermath are among the most evocative events in the long struggle to abolish slavery that led to the Civil War. To an African-American poet who wrote about the suffering of his people from the injustices of bondage and racial discrimination, the shawl had tremendous emblematic significance, not only of the quest for freedom but of his own ancestor’s sacrifice in the deeply unequal battle at Harpers Ferry. Hughes’s memories of being wrapped in it as a child lent even greater dramatic power to the story of the shawl, making it a part of his own origin story as well as a symbol of the family’s tradition of resistance to oppression and racism.

This shawl has the power to make the heart race and the imagination open wide to an incredible series of connections between a famous twentieth-century name and a significant nineteenth-century tragedy.

And yet, in all likelihood, the story that this shawl was at the battle at Harpers Ferry is not true.

The Hughes shawl is what museum curators call an “association object,” an item we value not for what it can tell us about the past or its aesthetic properties, but for its association, real or imputed, with someone or something imbued with sociocultural mystique. It is as if the artifact embodies the spirit of the person, place, or event, what the Romans called numen.

When objects are believed to have been present at an event with deep emotional significance, such as war, we perceive them as embodying the truth of the event, even if the association cannot be documented.

Such objects can pose ethical and cultural-sensitivity problems for museum professionals, who must balance respect for the documentary record with respect for family history and across identity groups with different agendas for the past. As a “numinous object,” the Hughes shawl occupies the intersection of several types of historical ambiguity.

The legacy of John Brown and the history of African-American slavery have been deeply contested. The South Carolina State Museum, for example, was stymied for decades in its efHUMANITIES 35

forts to develop an exhibit about the Reconstruction period, as the legislature refused funding for one proposed exhibit script after another, leaving a yawning gap in the museum’s permanent exhibit between April 1865 and the 1920s.

Over time, in most cases, there is a gradual softening of the harsh edges of traumatic historical memory into something acceptable to a broad range of human loyalties and sensitivities.

The American Revolution in such places as Schoharie County, New York, was a bloody civil war, but the war as a whole has been polished by more than two centuries of consensus into simply a battle for freedom. Slavery and the Civil War are still undergoing the process of reconcilement with our national ideals.

Evocative artifacts like the Hughes shawl support this process.

Its association with Harpers Ferry may not be supported by historical documentation, but ambiguities are common in the provenance of association objects. This does not mean we should discount their value or treat family history with anything but respect.

Conflation and confusion of events, persons, and objects in memory are normal and unavoidable features of the human capacity for remembering. According to psychologists and neuroscientists such as Daniel Schachter, Charles Weaver, and John H. Byrne, about half of what we remember, even relatively soon after the event, did not occur as we remember it.

This is especially true of highly “memorable” events, such as the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, participation in battle, or a traumatic personal injury.

Moreover, because we are a gregarious and social species, our memories and beliefs are easily influenced, distorted, and “improved” as stories by the influence of our peers. Thus, when an object comes to have even a notional connection to a historical event, it is unlikely ever to lose the association, even if the light shed by documentary evidence makes the association unbelievable.

This is what makes it nearly impossible for the National Park Service, even with the most conscientious curatorial truth-inadvertising, to convince visitors that the cabin at the traditional site of the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln is not, and cannot have been, the building in which Abraham Lincoln was born.

The urge to build historical monuments or attribute semisacred qualities to places associated with historical events is nearly universal among our species. The reflex to make civil religion of ordinary material culture is, as computer scientists say, “not a bug but a feature” of human nature. It allows us to build group identities that enable important human achievements, of which the Revolutionary War and the civil rights movement are but two of many examples. And, obviously, it helps identify history that is important to remember.

LEWIS SHERIDAN LEARY was broad-shouldered and muscular, with high cheekbones, dark eyes, arched eyebrows, and a light reddish complexion indicative of his white and Native American ancestors. He was known to sport a wide-brimmed hat, which he wore at a rakish angle, sometimes tilting his head to give it even greater effect. Leary was born in 1835, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to a prosperous family of “free Negroes,” who traced their ancestry to an Irish Revolutionary War veteran named Jeremiah O’Leary. Jeremiah married a free woman of black and Croatan Indian background named Sarah Jane Revels. Their “mulatto” son was Matthew Leary, who rose to prominence as a saddle and harness maker in Fayetteville. Matthew, in turn, married Juliet Anna Meimoriel, a French woman who had been raised in Guadeloupe. The 36 SUMMER 2016

couple became affluent, thanks to Matthew’s skill as an artisan and investments in land, and they lived in a fine house where they raised five children. Their youngest child was Lewis Sheridan Leary.

The Leary children had advantages undreamed of by most African Americans in the antebellum South. They were educated by private tutors, attended fancy parties, and were waited upon by black servants, some of whom were slaves. As did other prosperous free blacks in North Carolina, Matthew Leary was known to purchase slaves at auction, thereafter allowing them to work for their freedom.

In contrast to his parents, young Lewis was said to disdain any accommodation with slavery, which may have led to his departure from North Carolina in 1854. According to family lore, Lewis confronted an overseer who was whipping a slave and knocked the white man to the ground. After that, Fayetteville became extremely dangerous for him, and he was forced to flee in the dead of night. This story is for the most part apocryphal, however, seemingly derived many years later from the Book of Exodus. In fact, Lewis left Fayetteville for Ohio in broad daylight, along with two of his sisters and their husbands (who had relatives in Oberlin), after first obtaining transit papers from the governor. It may be that Fayetteville had become “too hot” for Lewis, as his widow later recalled, but the likely cause was a falling-out with his father, perhaps over the latter’s indulgence of slavery. For whatever reason, the elder Leary later disinherited his Ohio relatives, with no suggestion that it had anything to do with Moses-like resistance on Lewis’s part.

In Oberlin, Lewis made contact with John Anthony Copeland, his relative by marriage, and the two young men became active in Oberlin’s “Freedom School” and other antislavery organizations. Copeland was studious by nature, attending the Preparatory Department (that is, high school) of Oberlin College, where he studied composition and religion. Leary, the more worldly of the two, worked as a harness maker and filled his free time with horseback riding and music. Both young men frequently attended abolitionist meetings, which they occasionally addressed with great passion.

On May 12, 1858, Lewis married Mary Sampson Patterson, a student at Oberlin, who had arrived from Fayetteville the previous year. Little is known of their courtship, although it is likely that they knew each other as youngsters in North Carolina. Mary quit her studies soon afterward, and she gave birth to the couple’s only child—a daughter named Loise who would be Langston Hughes’s aunt—in February 1859.

It was not many months after Loise’s birth, in late August 1859, that John Brown Jr. arrived in Oberlin, seeking recruits for the liberation army that his father was assembling for the Harpers Ferry operation. He first sought out Charles and John Mercer Langston, two highly accomplished African Americans who were leaders in Ohio’s abolitionist movement. (It was Charles who would become the grandfather of Langston Hughes.) The two brothers demurred, but they offered to introduce Brown’s son to the two “bravest negroes” they knew: Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Anthony Copeland.

The two young men agreed to enlist in Brown’s command, although it would take them nearly a month to raise the necessary traveling funds from several of Oberlin’s leading citizens. During the entire time—as he corresponded with Brown’s lieutenants and solicited money from local lawyers and community leaders—Leary told his young wife nothing about his plans to head south. Copeland, too, kept mum,

—© 2016 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Art Resource, NY

THE LIFE OF JOHN BROWN, NO. 20, BY JACOB LAWRENCE, IS ONE OF 22 PAINTINGS IN A SERIES THE ARTIST DEVOTED TO LEADER OF THE RAID ON HARPERS FERRY.

although he did inform his parents that he was going to travel to Michigan in order to spend a term teaching in a “colored school.”

Only at the last moment did Leary confide in his employer, the harness maker James Scott, that he was embarking on a mission to “free the slaves” of Virginia. After that, Leary simply disappeared, without even a word of good-bye to Mary and Loise. Scott carried out the awkward task of explaining Leary’s sudden absence to Mary, who was left with no means of support for herself and her infant daughter. She would hear nothing more of Lewis until after his death at Harpers Ferry.

Leary and Copeland arrived at Brown’s headquarters—a farmhouse in rural Maryland, about five miles from Harpers Ferry—on Thursday, October 13, 1859. Most of the small army had already assembled. The force would ultimately total 22 men, including Brown as commander in chief, of whom five were African Americans. Leary and Copeland, however, had almost no opportunity to become acquainted with their new comrades, as Brown ordered the invasion to begin on the night of Sunday, October 16.

It took Brown’s men two hours to march the five miles into the sleeping town of Harpers Ferry. Crossing the Potomac River bridge, they were quickly able to take control of their main objectives: the federal arsenal and armory, and a nearby rifle factory. Brown set up his command post in the armory, where he gathered several dozen hostages whom he intended to trade for the freedom of local slaves. Leary and Copeland, along with John Kagi, a white man who was Brown’s adjutant, were assigned to the rifle factory, where they stood guard and awaited further orders.

Not all went as planned. Two of Brown’s men who had been left to guard the bridge were discovered by a railroad baggage agent—a free black man named Hayward Shepherd—whom

they mistakenly shot and killed. The sound of gunfire awakened others in the town, and church bells were soon ringing the alarm. The local militia assembled in response, surrounding Brown’s redoubt at the armory.

Meanwhile, another militia contingent rained fire on the rifle factory, where Leary, Copeland, and Kagi did their best to stand fast. They managed to repel six or seven attacks, holding firm until some time Monday morning, when their ammunition began to run low and their situation turned hopeless. In the face of mounting pressure from the Virginians, the three abolitionists fled through the factory’s back door, only to realize that their path to freedom was blocked by the fast current of the Shenandoah River.

Their “only means of escape, if any” was to swim for it, so they “turned and fired one round” before plunging into the water. Some of the militiamen waded in after them, while others stood on the riverbank and, as Copeland later put it, “opened a hot fire on us from all sides.”

Kagi was shot in the head and died instantly. Leary managed to reach a rock outcropping in mid-river, where he was “shot through the body” and collapsed. Copeland, too, reached the small island, where he was confronted by a militiaman. Realizing that he had no chance at escape, he dropped his rifle and surrendered.

The badly wounded Leary was dragged to the shore, where many in the enraged crowd called for his immediate lynching. Instead, he was taken to a nearby cooperage, where he suffered in agony for another ten or twelve hours before succumbing to his wounds. Before he died, Leary at last sent word to Mary and Loise by asking a newspaper reporter “to inform them of the manner of his death.”

Brown’s main force in the armory managed to hold out —Continued on page 44 HUMANITIES 37

Around Nation the

COMPILED BY LAURA WOLFF SCANLAN

A Roundup of Activities Sponsored by the State Humanities Councils

ALABAMA

Teachers from across the country gather for “Stony the Road We Trod: Alabama’s Role in the Civil Rights Movement,” an NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture workshop at historic sites in Birmingham from July 10 to 16. Workshop leaders include Martha Bouyer, Glenn Eskew, Charzetta Richardson, Joanne Bland, Ruby Shjuttlesworth-Bester, Doug Jones, and Carolyn McKinstry, a survivor of the Sixteenth Street Church bombing.

Participants will hear lectures, travel to Tuskegee, Montgomery, and Selma, and view archival film footage.

ARIZONA

The Arivaca Old School House hosts “From China to Mexico: A Journey of Decorative Arts” on Aug. 13, a presentation tracing the history of Mexican talavara design and Manila shawl surface embroidery.

Elsie Szecsy, author of The Cadet Nurse Corps in Arizona: A History of Service, gives a talk at Arizona Humanities in Phoenix on Sept. 15 about the establishment of the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps during World War II and their work in the state.

“On the Road with California Humanities: The Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires Initiative” presents two events featuring Pulitzer Prize winners: “California’s Water: Rivers, Oceans, and Our Future,” with journalist Bettina Boxall at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas on Aug. 27 and “The Farmworker Movement in California: From Chavez Onwards,” with author Miriam Pawel at the Fresno Art Museum on Sept. 28.

COLORADO

Chautauqua performances include the High Plains Chautauqua “The Power of Inspiration,” featuring historic portrayals of Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Betty Friedan, St. Francis of Assisi, Herman Melville, Michelangelo, Martin Luther King Jr., Catherine the Great, and William Shakespeare at Aims Community Col 38 SUMMER 2016

—University of North Texas Digital Library

CALIFORNIA

ALEXANDER ROSS’S 1945 POSTER ILLUSTRATES A TALK ON THE CADET NURSE CORPS IN ARIZONA.

lege in Greeley from Aug. 2 through 6, and Two Rivers Chautauqua “Characters Forged in Conflict,” featuring Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Nikita Khrushchev at the Cross Orchards Historic Site in Grand Junction on Sept. 16 and 17.

As part of the Pulitzer Prize centennial, the Bud Werner Memorial Library in Steamboat Springs continues its reading and conversation series “The

American West as Living Space” on July 25, Aug. 15, and Sept. 12. Additional programs will be held at Carbondale Branch Library and Vail Public Library during August and September.

FLORIDA

“Water/Ways,” the Smithsonian traveling exhibit, is on display at the High Springs Historical Society from July 16 through Aug. 27, and Curtiss Mansion Museum in Miami Springs from Sept. 3 through Oct. 22.

—Photo by Pat Jarrett

Military veterans tell their stories on stage in three presentations of “Telling: Orlando,” opening Sept. 30 at the John and Rita Lowndes Center.

Florida K–12 teachers are participating in weeklong residential seminars in July, including “Fluid Futures: Imagining Water in the 21st Century” in St. Petersburg, “The Civil War in Florida: Beyond the Battlefield” in Fernandina Beach, and “Florida Water Stories: The Indian River System” in Stuart.

Speakers Bureau events include “Remembering the Apalachicola River Maroons of 1816: Heritage, Archaeology, and Digital Reconstructions” at the Apalachicola Center for History, Culture, and Art on Aug. 13, and “Blue Revolution: A Water Ethic for Florida” at Rose Hall Auditorium in Marco Island on Sept. 6.

VIRGINIA HOLDS A CONCERT TRIBUTE TO MUSICIAN JOE WILSON.

IDAHO

INDIANA

“Next Indiana Campfires,” a program funded in part by the Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfire Initiative, features a scholar facilitator, includes a hiking and camping trip at MorganMonroe State Forest in Martinsville on July 9 and 10; a prairie walk at the Merry Lea Environmental Education Center in Albion on July 23; a boat tour on Eagle Creek Reservoir and Fishback Creek on July 29; a prairie hike at Prophetstown State Park in West Lafayette on Aug. 5; a bike ride on the Cardinal Greenway and Red-tail Land Conservancy in Muncie on Aug. 14; a walk along the Dunes Succession Trail in Porter on Sept. 10; and a paddle trip through Hovey Lake Bald Cypress Swamps in Mt. Vernon on Sept. 17.

KANSAS

“Vernon Rickman, Smithsonian Sculptor: Artful Life of an African-American Kansan” opens July 9 at the Carriage Factory Art Gallery in Newton.

A seminar, “Rendezvous 2016— Shadows on the Land: Women of the Santa Fe Trail,” takes place Sept. 22–24 at the Santa Fe Trail Center in Larned.

Ann Birney portrays suffragist and abolitionist Julia Archibald Holmes on Sept. 22. On Sept. 23, presentations include “A Portrait Gallery of the Women of the Santa Fe Trail” by Alice

Anne Thompson, “Lives of Cheyenne Women during the Period of the Santa Fe Trail” by Minoma Littlehawk Sills, “The Women of Missouri and New Mexico,” with Susan Boyle, and “African-American Women on the Santa Fe Trail” by Leo Oliva.

KENTUCKY

Marking the centennial of the Pulitzer Prize, political cartoonist Joel Pett gives the convocation speech at the Kentucky Governor’s Scholars program on July 18 at Murray State University. Pett will also talk in western Kentucky in July and at the University of Pikeville in September.

LOUISIANA

With support from NEH, “A More Perfect Union: Civic Education for American Families” will guide participants in the exploration of books, web-based video, online primary source documents, and news stories to identify and examine American principles at 17 parishes, beginning in September.

In conjunction with the Pulitzer Prize centennial, a panel discussion, “Satchmo to Marsalis: How Louis Armstrong helped shape the musician Wynton Marsalis,” takes place at the Satchmo Summerfest’s Just Listen symposium at the Old U.S. Mint in New Orleans in August, and the September issue of the Louisiana Cultural Vistas includes an essay on Robert Penn Warren by Nathaniel Rich.

portrayals of Duke Ellington, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ernest Hemingway at Garrett College in McHenry July 5–7; Montgomery College, Germantown, July 6–8; Center for the Arts Theatre at CCBC Catonsville July 8–10; Harford Community College in Bel Air on July 10; Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels July 11–13; and the College of Southern Maryland in La Plata July 12–14.

Literary Mount Vernon Walking Tours take place in Baltimore on July 16, Aug. 20, and Sept. 17.

Brendan Kiely and Jason Reynolds, authors of All American Boys, this year’s One Maryland One Book selection, will begin a statewide tour at the Baltimore Book Festival on Sept. 25.

—Courtesy Sonia Nazario

Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin delivers the Idaho Humanities Council’s 13th Annual Northern Idaho Distinguished Humanities Lecture in Coeur d’Alene on Sept. 8.

MARYLAND

Chautauqua 2016 celebrates 100 years of the Pulitzer Prize with “Masters of Their Craft,” featuring historic

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER SONIA NAZARIO GIVES A TALK IN NEBRASKA.

HUMANITIES 39 HUMANITIES 39

—Collection of Joan and Paul Gluck, courtesy Berkshire Museum

NEBRASKA

The Nebraska Shakespeare Company is staging preshow seminars during its annual Shakespeare on the Green event at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, on weekends through July 10.

The Elkhorn Valley Museum in Norfolk opens a new exhibit on July 1 which commemorates the town’s 150th anniversary.

A lecture on French music and culture takes place at the Meadowlark Music Festival in Lincoln on July 7.

Flatwater Shakespeare Company presents a youth production of The Taming of the Shrew at Roberts Park in Lincoln on July 14 and 15.

The Nebraska Writing Project offers a camp for young writers July 11 through 22.

Darger HQ in Omaha presents a talk by artists Kim Darling and JeanFrançois Leboeuf on Aug. 13.

The Genoa U.S. Indian School presents its 27th annual reunion on

BEAU DICK’S MASK, RAVEN STEALING SUN, IS PART OF AN EXHIBITION IN MASSACHUSETTS.

The House of Seven Gables in Salem hosts three talks: Ken Turino lectures on Aug. 11 on the history of the preservation movement, focusing on the work of William Sumner Appleton, founder of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities; Alexandra Piñeros Shields presents “Framing the Immigration Debate” on Sept. 15; and Anjali Mitter Duva offers “Bells of Change: Tracing the Story of India’s Classical Kathak Dance” on Sept. 21.

“Why Deprive the State of Her Service? The Nichols Women and Progressive Era Reform” remains on display at the Nichols House Museum in Boston through Nov. 19.

“Finding Raven: Art and Stories from the Northwest Coast” continues at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield through Oct. 30, featuring objects from the collection of Joan and Paul Gluck.

MICHIGAN

“Strong Foundations/New Possibilities: The World War I Years, 1914–1918” opens at the Chelsea District Library on July 30.

The Kerrytown BookFest takes place in Ann Arbor on Sept. 11. This year’s theme, “Travels with Books,” features authors, storytellers, booksellers, publishers, bookbinders, illustrators, poets, wood engravers, calligraphers, paper 40 SUMMER 2016

makers, librarians, teachers, panel discussions, and book signings.

MINNESOTA

The Smithsonian traveling exhibition “Water/Ways” is on display at the Nicollet County Historical Society in St. Peter from Aug. 13 through Sept. 25.

The Minnesota Humanities Center hosts the “Veterans’ Voices Award Ceremony” at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul on Sept. 11.

MONTANA

Speakers Bureau programs include “Dueling Paintbrushes,” the story of artists George Catlin and Karl Bodmer, by Kristi Hager at the Lewis and Clark NHT Interpretive Center in Great Falls on July 15; “Before the Horse: Northern Rockies Lifestyles”

by Kae Cheatham at Chief Plenty Coups State Park in Pryor on July 29; “Sixteen Tons: Songs and Stories of Work in America” by Bill Rossiter at the White Sulphur Springs– Castle Museum on July 15; “Women in Science” by Mary Jane Bradbury at the C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls on Aug. 20; “UFOs and Extraterrestrials in Montana” by Joan Bird at MonDak Heritage Center in Sidney on Sept. 9; and “Introducing Montana Native American Literature” by Dottie Susag at the Belgrade Community Library in Belgrade on Sept. 20.

—Catherine Walters

MASSACHUSETTS

DOTTIE SUSAG, BILL ROSSITER, AND JOAN BIRD GIVE TALKS IN MONTANA.

NEW JERSEY

Sarah Dash, a Trenton native who was a backup vocalist for Patti LaBelle and the Rolling Stones, will lead a panel of historians and musicians exploring the role music played in Trenton’s growth from the Revolutionary War through the nineteenth century, at the Conservatory Mansion in Trenton on Sept. 21.

The event will be recorded for a podcast.

A Taste of Paterson takes place on Aug. 25 at the Paterson Great Falls National Historic Park, featuring educational presentations by students.

NEW MEXICO

The Silver City CLAY Festival will be held from July 25 to 31 at venues in downtown Silver City and on the campus of Western New Mexico University. This year’s program, “From Oaxaca to Santa Fe,” features lectures, tours, exhibits, demonstrations, and hands-on activities.

Libraries offering book discussions as part of the Pulitzer Prize centennial include Lovely, Dark, Deep (Pulitzer finalist)

by Joyce Carol Oates at the Clovis-Carver Public Library in Clovis on July 14; The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever at Octavia Fellin Public Library in Gallup on Aug. 16; and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz at Marshall Memorial Library and Waymaker Bookstore in Deming on Aug. 24.

A public symposium is held on Sept. 9 and 10 in conjunction with the exhibition “Fractured Faiths: Spanish Judaism, The Inquisition, and New World Identities” on display at the New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe. NORTH DAKOTA

The Children’s Renaissance Faire

—Courtesy Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation

Aug. 13 in venues around Genoa, featuring scholar-led discussions, crafts, and tours.

The Jewish Community Center Theatre in Omaha presents My Broken Doll, a play about the Holocaust, on Aug. 18, and 21.

Author Geraldine Brooks delivers the 26th annual Women & Health Lecture at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha on Sept. 14.

The Plum Creek Children’s Literacy Festival takes place at Concordia University in Seward from Sept. 22 to 24.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sonia Nazario speaks about immigration issues for the 21st annual Governor’s Lecture in the Humanities at the Lied Center for Performing Arts in Lincoln on Sept. 27.

A TOUR TO PEARL S. BUCK’S BIRTHPLACE IS INCLUDED IN A CONFERENCE ABOUT THE WRITER IN WEST VIRGINIA.

celebration takes place on July 9 at the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck.

Sleepy Hollow Theatre in Bismarck presents Cabaret from Aug. 2 through 6.

Brian Palecek talks about the historical significance of the play before each performance.

The Visiting Writers Series, facilitated by the Dunn County Writers, offers public readings, panel discussions, and workshops, featuring Mark Trahant, Susan Power, Juan Carlos Peinado, Dakota Woodhouse, and Twyla BakerDemaray on Sept. 17 and 18.

The Theodore Roosevelt Humanities Symposium takes place in Dickinson from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1.

“Native American Stories of Resilience,” a Prairie Public radio segment, will air on Tuesdays during July, August, and September.

Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists Seymour Hersh, Elizabeth Fenn, Jacqueline Jones, Sonia Nazario, and Eric Schlosser will be interviewed at “GameChanger: The Annual Ideas Festival” presented by the North Dakota Humanities Council at Legacy High School in Bismarck on Sept. 24.

OKLAHOMA

The Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center in Enid hosts the “Keep ‘em Flying!” lecture series on July 13 and Aug. 10 with a discussion of prisoner of war camps in Oklahoma during World War II. The Jewish Muslim Film Institute screens Dancing in Jaffa followed by a

panel discussion at the Islamic Society of Oklahoma Mosque in Oklahoma City on Aug. 21.

PENNSYLVANIA

The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia hosts a panel discussion, “Ground Breaking News,” featuring Philadelphia Inquirer editor Bill Marimow and other Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists on Sept. 14; and Christopher Rawson of the Pittsburgh PostGazette moderates a discussion, “Can Art Capture the Essence of Place? A Close Look at August Wilson and His Plays,” in Pittsburgh on Sept. 26. Both events are part of the Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfire Initiative.

SOUTH CAROLINA

“Roots: The Lowdown on Lowcountry Cuisine” remains on display at the Morris Center for Lowcountry Heritage in Ridgeland.

TENNESSEE

“My Family, My Community, My World,” weeklong youth literacy and civics camps, take place at the East Nashville Hope Exchange through July 15.

Cumberland University in Lebanon hosts the 17th Annual Tennessee Young Writers’ Workshop from July 10 to 16.

“March to the 19th Women’s History Bootcamp,” a one-day workshop for museum and history professionals, will be held in Knoxville on Aug. 25.

Jonathan Safran Foer will discuss his book Here I Am for the Salon@615 HUMANITIES 41 HUMANITIES 41

—Photo courtesy of the Minnesota Humanities Center

“WATER/WAYS” EXHIBITION TOURS MINNESOTA.

author series at the Nashville Public Library on Sept. 15.

“The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966: 50 Years of Preserving Tennessee’s Historic Structures, Sites, and Landscapes” will be on display at Rutherford Co. Archives in Murfreesboro from Sept. 15 through Oct. 31.

TEXAS

Traveling exhibitions on display include “Alert Today, Alive Tomorrow: Living with Atomic Bomb, 1945–1965” at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg through Aug. 11; “Tropical [Im]pression: A Gulf Coast Hurricane Retrospective” at Lake Jackson Historical Museum July 6–Aug. 27; “Forgotten Gateway: Coming to America Through Galveston Island” at Morton Museum of Cooke County in Gainesville July 12–Aug. 19; “Images of Valor: U.S. Latinos and Latinas of World War II” at Eastland County Museum Aug. 8–Sept. 10; and “Voces Americanas: Latino Literature in the United States” at the Tahita Fulkerson Library in Fort Worth Sept. 15–Oct. 15.

UTAH

The Brigham City Library hosts two events: a book discussion led by Brad Carroll of The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution by Deborah Harkness on July 7; and a talk on Shakespeare’s Richard III with Sally Shigley on Aug. 7.

TEDx Salt Lake City offers a presentation on meraki, the creativity, soul, or love you put into something, at Kingsbury Hall on Sept. 17.

42 SUMMER 2016

“Tune in to the Beehive Archive,” a two-minute segment on Utah’s history, is broadcast on Utah Public Radio throughout July, August, and September.

VERMONT

Veterans Book Group discussions will meet at the VA Medical Center and the VA Women’s Comprehensive Care Center in White River Junction and the South Burlington Vet Center throughout the summer. Talks will be led by Michael Heaney, Marie Milord, Mary Lewis Webb, Suzanne Brown, and Carey Russ.

Communities across the state will take part in public readings in early July of Frederick Douglass’s “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro.”

Speakers Bureau talks include “Rosie’s Mom: Forgotten Women of the First World War,” with Carrie Brown at the American Precision Museum in Windsor on July 24; “Getting from Here to There: A History of Roads and Settlement in Vermont,” with Deborah Lee Luskin at Wilmington Memorial Hall on July 26; and “The Finest Hours: The True Story Behind the U.S. Coast Guard’s Most Daring Sea Rescue” by Michael Tougias at Davies Memorial Library in Lower Waterford on July 6 and Aug. 4, and Springfield Town Library on Aug. 31.

VIRGINIA

BackStory with the American History Guys, the history radio program featuring historians Ed Ayers, Brian Balogh, and Peter Onuf, will be broad-

cast on July 19 from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Blue Ridge Music Center near Galax hosts a concert and tribute to Joe Wilson on Sept. 3, featuring performances by Wayne Henderson, Helen White and Herb Key, Elizabeth LaPrelle, the Ingramettes, Jeff Little Trio, and Linda and David Lay. An NEH Public Square program, “A State of Many Nations: Immigration and the Changing Face of Virginia,” will hold book and film discussions at various locations and dates across the state.

WASHINGTON

Speaker Bureau events include “Ripe for the Telling: Surprising Stories of Washington Fruit,” with anthropologist Julia Harrison at Basalt Cellars Winery in Clarkston on July 12; “Seven Tongues of Flame: Ireland’s Easter Rebellion of 1916,” with historian Hank Cramer at Twisp Public Library on Aug. 11; and “Rap 101: The Message Behind the Music” by sociologist Eric Davis at Lakewood Pierce County Library on Sept. 13.

WEST VIRGINIA

A toll-free hotline has been established to collect information for the statewide folklife survey under way. The public is invited to call 844/618-3747 to share knowledge of traditional artists, craftspeople, musicians, cooks, and other folk practitioners in West Virginia.

“Way Back Weekends” presents storytellers Bil Lepp and Darci Tucker for “Stories of Appalachia” at the Heritage Farm Museum and Village in Huntington on Aug. 6.

The Pearl S. Buck Living Gateway Conference takes place at West Virginia University in Morgantown from Sept. 11 to 13 as part of the Pulitzer Prize centennial. Activities include a tour of the Buck manuscript collection at WVU, bus trips to her birthplace, a video uplink with participants in China, and a keynote address by Buck biographer Peter Conn.

As part of “The Eastern Pylons: Art History and Medicine” lecture series, Konrad Nau speaks on “Hippocrates: The Father of Medicine” at the West Virginia University Health Sciences Center in Martinsburg on Sept. 20.

Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, offers a weeklong residency for the Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence program at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, beginning Sept. 23, with a screening of Glory.

In Focus

BY LAURA AXELROD

Alabama’s Armand DeKeyser

ARMAND DEKEYSER RECENTLY WENT TO A FOOD FOR THOUGHT

—Courtesy Alabama Humanities Foundation

Lunchtime Lecture sponsored by the Alabama Humanities Foundation and the Friends of the Alabama Archives. While he ate a sandwich, he says, he listened to scholar Karen R. Utz discuss the music of the Birmingham District’s mines, railroads, and mills.

“I walked away learning about these various singers that I’d never heard of. . . . I love that kind of stuff,” says DeKeyser, executive director of the Alabama Humanities Foundation. “For an hour, I got educated. I didn’t know anything about Birmingham music, and it’s a very narrow area. And I had a blast doing that. I get to do that all the time.”

Until he joined the foundation, participating in humanities events was not an everyday part of his job. Self-described as an “inch deep, but a mile wide,” DeKeyser made his career in politics. He served as chief of staff for U.S. Senators Jeff Sessions and Bob Corker. During his eight-year tenure with Sessions, DeKeyser managed a 40-person staff and oversaw a $2.1 million annual budget. Upon DeKeyser’s departure from the job, Sessions went to the floor of the Senate to pay tribute to his expertise in both areas.

“As my wife says, I do like numbers,” DeKeyser says. “When I worked in the Senate office, I managed the staff. Obviously, a lot of it was budgeting. In the Senate you have a certain budget. If you go above that budget, the member pays for the rest of the staff. Well, Jeff said, ‘No, I’m not paying for that. Make sure you don’t go over budget.’ It wasn’t that hard.”

Before going back home to Alabama, DeKeyser spent time in the private sector. When he heard about the foundation’s executive director job, he wasn’t sure he was right for it. Although he has a degree in Spanish, the Auburn graduate didn’t consider himself a humanities expert.

The good news, he says, is that the board was looking for someone who could manage a staff and budget and move the humanities forward in the state. Understanding Alabama’s politics and knowing about its businesses were assets.

DeKeyser says, “It is helpful that I have that knowledge in Washington. And I can go to those people and say, ‘Hey, do you understand what we’re doing? I know to you, it’s just a really bitty line item in the budget, but let me tell you the impact it has.’’’

The foundation’s director doesn’t have to look far for impact. Across the state, Prime Time Family Reading Time encourages literacy for at-risk children by involving their caregivers. To make it easier for families to attend the reading and book discussion sessions, meals are provided. The program has helped families bond over books and made the local library a part of their lives.

Moving away from the traditional concept of a humanities activity and making programming accessible to all people remain a central focus of DeKeyser’s vision for the foundation.

For instance, he is excited about the foundation’s literature programs. As a veteran of Operation Desert Storm—DeKeyser was an activeduty and reserve Army officer for 28 years, retiring in 2000 as a lieutenant colonel—he sees a need to encourage projects that serve veterans throughout Alabama. Literature and the Veteran Experience uses poetry, essays, and fiction as the basis for discussion among small groups of veterans, as well as health-care workers. Health Care and the Humanities is a film- and literature-based discussion program for people living with HIV/AIDS. The foundation also has started groups for veterans in prison.

“The prison programming is not what you would normally think of as a humanities effort,” he says. “But the 15 prisoners who participated in this class for 17 weeks—almost a full semester—they really enjoyed it.”

DeKeyser says that one of his proudest moments on the job came during a session of the 2013 National Humanities Conference held at the 16th Street Baptist Church, site of the 1963 bombing that killed four girls. The meeting included poignant discussions of slavery, civil rights activism, and desegregation, and those discussions have continued to resonate in programming in other states.

Looking ahead, DeKeyser is planning an exhibition program for Alabama’s bicentennial. Similar to the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street, the exhibit will travel to all 67 counties in Alabama.

“Alabama didn’t just start in 1819 when the state was founded,” he says. “The Native Americans were here for a long time. Mobile was founded in 1702. We had a Civil War. We’ll obviously talk about state history, but it will also be a regional history.”

“The sense of place is really important in Alabama,” he says.

Laura Axelrod is a freelance writer and filmmaker in Alabama.

HUMANITIES 43 HUMANITIES 43

—Continued from page 37

until Tuesday morning, when they were routed by a contingent of United States Marines that had arrived under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee. Ten of the raiders had been killed in battle, five had escaped, and seven—including Brown and Copeland—were eventually captured, tried, and hanged.

LEWIS SHERIDAN LEARY DIED on Monday, October 17, 1859, having given his life in an attempt to bring freedom to Virginia’s slaves. A full understanding of the events surrounding his death, however, makes it all but impossible that a “friend” or some other “good person took this shawl and sent it back to Oberlin” a few weeks later with bloodstains and bullet holes, as Hughes and his biographer have written.

Leary spent his last hours in the rifle factory fighting off the assaults of the Virginia militia. A light shawl is not the sort of garment to wear when aiming and firing a rifle, and it would have been cumbersome to clutch while racing through the factory’s back door to escape the militia’s fusillade. The riverbank near the factory is fairly steep and the current at that point is swift. If Leary had worn a shawl as he attempted to swim for his life, it would have come loose in the rushing water.

Nor is it plausible that a “friend” would later have retrieved a shawl and sent it back to Oberlin, if only because Leary and the surviving raiders had no friends in Harpers Ferry. In the aftermath of the raid, the entire region, and much of Virginia, remained a virtual armed camp, and strangers—especially those suspected of Northern sympathies—were turned away at the border. The roads were lined with troops who interrogated travelers to determine their loyalty to the Commonwealth, and railroad passengers encountered “the scrutiny of an officer who passed through the cars to see if he could find, as they said, ‘a damned abolitionist.’” Even United States Congressman Harrison Blake, attempting to reach Charles Town where Brown had been sent for trial, was forced to turn back when he realized that he had been spotted as an Ohioan and his life was therefore in jeopardy. Well into late December, Oberlin professor James Monroe found it necessary to disguise his origin when he came to Virginia on a futile mission to retrieve the body of John Anthony Copeland, who had been hanged a week earlier.

An examination of the shawl also reveals no signs of either bullet holes or bloodstains. While there are holes in the shawl, their placement, shape, and edge characteristics are inconsistent with penetration by projectiles, a subject well understood by experts in textile and apparel forensics. Wear and moths are much more likely to have been the culprits, especially since the holes are on or near the fold lines, where the fibers weaken during long storage. Both light and insects have readier access to the folded edge than to the larger planes of the fabric.

Hughes himself once explained that he had exposed the shawl to a moth infestation, having stored it in a box along with a wool hat that was eaten “to a powder.” There are no obvious stains of any kind on the shawl, much less the characteristically brown, wash-fast imprint of blood, although there are faded areas, consistent with exposure to light.

There were numerous witnesses to Leary’s capture and death, but none of them—including the journalist who recorded his last words and a local woman who saw him floundering in the water—reported the presence of a shawl.

Mary Leary Langston herself made no mention of a shawl in her few recorded statements about the death of her first 44 SUMMER 2016

husband. In 1899 Mary sent a letter to Richard Hinton, one of Brown’s early biographers, noting that the bodies of Brown’s slain men had been retrieved from their common grave and reinterred on the Brown family property in North Elba, New York.

“I am the widow of Lewis Sheridan Leary [who] fell at Harpers Ferry,” she told Hinton, and “I remember with pride the name.” Moreover, “I am proud that [Brown] and his followers are not forgotten who braved death for Liberty,” she added, making no reference to any artifacts from Harpers Ferry. Likewise, in her 1908 interview with Katherine Mayo, who was then a researcher for Brown’s biographer Oswald Garrison Villard, Mary said nothing about owning a shawl or any other item of Lewis Sheridan Leary’s. Lewis’s sister Henriette, then living in Oberlin, was interviewed by Mayo in the same year. She also made no mention of any bullet-riddled artifact having returned from Virginia.

Loise Leary’s only known recollection of her father—an 1887 “Biographical Sketch” provided to the Kansas State Historical Society—says nothing about a bloodstained shawl, even though as Mary’s firstborn, and Leary’s only child, she would have been swaddled in her father’s shawl well before Hughes’s birth.

Some scholars have suggested that the shawl was presented to Mary at an 1859 commemoration in Oberlin. The actual event occurred on Christmas Day and featured an address by Professor James Monroe, who had recently returned from his failed mission to Virginia, where he sought to claim the body of John Anthony Copeland. If any friend of Mary’s had delivered Leary’s shawl, it could have been Monroe. The presence of a bloodstained relic from Harpers Ferry would have caused a stir in Oberlin. The printed accounts of Monroe’s speech, however, say nothing about the presentation of a shawl or any other piece of clothing; nor did Monroe include anything of the sort in his memoir, which included a lengthy account of his journey to Virginia.

As it happened, however, Leary did wear a shawl, at least briefly, at some point during the invasion of Harpers Ferry, although it was not blue and yellow. A few weeks before the raid, a Philadelphia supporter of Brown’s sent a shipment of “blanket shawls” to his headquarters. The shawls, which were heavy wool and dull colored, were worn by the men instead of overcoats on the late night march into Harpers Ferry. The raiders dropped their shawls at various times in the fighting, but at least one of them was retrieved and given to Copeland after he was captured, and he was seen wearing it during his arraignment a few days later in Charles Town. Four other raiders were arraigned that day, including Brown, but none of them wore shawls. It is possible that over time the two shawl stories became conflated in the way such narratives routinely are in human recollections.

By the time the survivors were arraigned, the remains of Leary and the other slain raiders had been interred, stuffed into two large wooden crates, and buried in an unmarked grave about half a mile from town. On July 29, 1899, the bodies were exhumed by Dr. Thomas Featherstonhaugh and his colleagues for a reburial on the Brown family farm in North Elba, New York. To his surprise, Featherstonhaugh discovered that the men had been buried with the blanket shawls as shrouds, “for great masses of woolen texture were found enveloping each body.”

The fact that gray woolen shawls were depicted on the defendants in newspaper images of the Harpers Ferry raid

trial, and later documented when their bodies were exhumed and reinterred, increases the psychological likelihood that the history of the gray shawls worn in court would adhere to the yellow and blue one in Oberlin. This effect, known as “misattribution,” is a common error in human memory, one with serious consequences for the reliability of eyewitness testimony and a hazard pointed out as early as 1959 by neurologist Lawrence Schlesinger Kubie.

MARY LEARY REMAINED IN OBERLIN following Lewis’s death, supporting herself and her daughter by working as a milliner. In 1869 she married Charles Langston, 20 years her senior. Langston had been a leader of Ohio’s black abolitionist movement, and he had been indicted and convicted under the Fugitive Slave Act for his role in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue of 1858. In fact, it was Langston’s stirring speech at sentencing, in which he vowed continued resistance to slavery, that gave Brown the idea of recruiting troops in Oberlin. And it was Langston and his brother who first introduced Lewis Sheridan Leary to John Brown Jr. Charles and Mary soon had a son, whom they named after the rebellious slave Nat Turner. Their daughter Carolina— known as Carrie—was born in 1873. The family eventually moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where Charles operated a grocery store until he died in 1892. In 1899, Carrie married James Hughes. The couple moved to Joplin, Missouri, where James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in 1902. Carrie and James did not have a stable marriage. They separated often, ultimately divorcing, while frequently leaving young Langston, as he chose to be called, to be raised by his grandmother.

For their entire lives, both Langston and Carrie Hughes firmly believed that the shawl had been sent to Mary, “bulletriddled and bloodstained,” after Lewis Leary’s death. They referred to it between themselves as the “Harpers Ferry shawl” and treated it with reverence. Langston repeated Mary’s story of the shawl in the early pages of his autobiography, including the sort of inaccuracies that are characteristic of human memories, especially those of childhood. According to Hughes, Mary “was with child . . . when Sheridan Leary went away” in September 1859, when in fact Loise was already six months old, having been born the previous February. There are other tales of long-ago claims to “Indian land,” much of the sort that grandparents tell children in every family.

In any case, Mary did not need a shawl to remind her grandson of his connection to John Brown. In 1910 she took him to hear former president Theodore Roosevelt speak in Osawatomie for the dedication of the John Brown Memorial Park, memorializing one of his Bleeding Kansas victories.

Only eight years old at the time, Hughes may not have fully understood Roosevelt’s promise that “the name of John Brown will be forever associated” with the “heroic struggle” for freedom. But he long remembered that Mary, as the last surviving widow of Harpers Ferry, had been given a place of honor on the platform, next to Teddy himself.

Quite apart from the provenance of his shawl, then, Hughes had good reasons to take enormous pride in the antislavery heroism of his grandmother’s two husbands—Lewis Sheridan Leary and his grandfather Charles Langston, for whom he was named. As his biographer put it, Hughes had been “born into a relationship with his family’s past, into a relationship with history, so intimate as to be almost sensual.”

He knew that Charles Langston had risked almost everything

in the fight against slavery, even defying the white judge of a United States court to declare that he would continue to resist with force, “if ever a man is seized near me, and is about to be carried Southward as a slave.” And of Leary, Hughes wrote, he was “shot attacking, believing in John Brown [because he] always did believe people should be free.” The old shawl may have provided a meaningful physical representation of his ancestors’ struggle, but it did not define Hughes’s admiration for John Brown and his men. In 1931 he wrote one of his most memorable poems, “October the Sixteenth,” commemorating the anniversary of the raid on Harpers Ferry: Perhaps You will remember John Brown.

John Brown Who took his gun, Took twenty-one companions, White and Black Went to shoot your way to freedom.

During his years in Harlem, Hughes kept the “Harpers Ferry shawl” in a safe deposit box, along with his manuscripts, at a Fifth Avenue bank. Carrie once suggested selling it to an antiques dealer in Cleveland, believing that it could bring as much as $500. Hughes declined, and instead donated the shawl to the Ohio Historical Society, where it can be appreciated today as an early nineteenth-century artifact, handspun, with soft yarns probably produced on a wool or “walking” wheel. Its faded yellow lines, or “tan” as the catalog record describes them, could have been made with any of a number of natural dyestuffs available in that era, such as walnuts or dandelions. The blue, which remains fast after nearly a century and a half, is almost certainly indigo. There is no doubt that the shawl belonged to Langston Hughes, and probably to Lewis Sheridan Leary, which alone would be enough to explain its presence in the collection. It remains a numinous object, even if its direct connection to John Brown and Harpers Ferry exists only in the historical imagination.

Steven Lubet, the author of John Brown’s Spy and The “Colored” Hero of Harpers Ferry, is Williams Memorial Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Rachel Maines is an historian of technology and an independent scholar. She is the author of three books and many articles on technology and material culture.

In 1973, NEH decided in favor of a grant to support Arna Bontemps, friend and collaborator of Langston Hughes, in the writing of an authorized biography of Langston Hughes. Bontemps, however, passed away of a heart attack before receiving the award. Numerous other scholarly and film projects on the life and work of Hughes were supported with NEH grants. The historically black college Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where Langston Hughes studied, has received three grants to support and preserve its collections and archives. Abolitionism, John Brown, and the Civil War figure prominently in the history of NEH grantmaking. Daniel J. Sharfstein received a research fellowship in 2004 for work that led to The Color Line: A History of Race, the Law, and American Lives, which described the abolitionist movement in Oberlin, Ohio. The Black Abolitionist Papers Projects and its director George Carter received six grants in the 1970s, while abolitionism, in general, has been the subject of numerous NEH-supported projects, including six summer institutes at Colgate University benefitting more than a hundred schoolteachers.

Several other projects touch on the life and influence of John Brown, including Henry David Thoreau’s support of him.

HUMANITIES 45

NOTEWORTHY CONSERVATION IN CUBA

HUMANITIES PROGRAM UNRAVELS PANAMA PAPERS

An NEH-supported software program is the virtual parent of Linkurious, a program that has helped analyze 11.5 million financial and legal records of an offshore law firm, resulting in the journalistic investigation of illegal activity called the “Panama Papers.”

In 2010 Stanford French Professor Dan Edelstein received a $99,000 NEH grant for “Mapping the Republic of Letters,” a project that set out to explore connections across intellectual communities in Europe and North America during the Enlightenment by, say, tracking letters of Voltaire or Benjamin Franklin, and then seeing what further correspondence brought their ideas to other individuals. The project took 50,000 letters and produced visualization software to graph the connections among 7,000 authors.

The open-source code for that software, called Knot, was used by French computer scientist Sebastien Heymann to launch Linkurious, the program that would unravel the enormous taxfraud data from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. “The fact that this tool has broader use than the ‘Republic of Letters,’” said Nicole Coleman, director of the Humanities+Design lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, “demonstrates that [a humanist’s] way of thinking about information has a really important part to play in the world of big data and how we analyze it.”

—Jean Melesaine

Following the historic visit of NEH Chairman William D. Adams with the U.S. Government’s cultural mission to Cuba this past April, NEH is helping U.S. art conservators travel to Cuba and learn more about the challenges of preserving its material treasures.

A $30,000 NEH grant is being awarded to the University of Delaware’s Department of Art Conservation, a partnership program with the Winterthur Museum that began in 1974. The group will be led by Delaware’s Debra Hess Norris and research scientist Jocelyn Alcántara-García.

“With this support from NEH, my colleagues and I look forward to learning from our Cuban counterparts about conservation challenges that arise from the warm climate and other issues that affect the preservation of their cultural heritage,” said Norris.

46 SUMMER 2016

HUMANITIES CONNECTIONS

A new NEH grant program offers up to $100,000 to colleges and universities to develop humanities courses with civic engagement. The program encourages the creation of a series of three or more courses that employ interdisciplinary aspects and incorporate student activities such as community- or sitebased learning. “The NEH Humanities Connections grant program will help prepare students in all academic fields for their roles as engaged citizens and productive professionals in a rapidly changing and interdependent world,” said NEH Chairman William D. Adams.

The application deadline for Humanities Connections, part of the NEH initiative The Common Good, is October 5, 2016. For more information contact the Division of Education Programs at humanitiesconnections@ neh.gov or look online at neh.gov for guidelines.

Also new from The Common Good initiative is Public Humanities Projects, offering funding for museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions for programming to connect in new ways with their communities. These connections can take the form of discussion series, permanent or traveling exhibitions, or interpretation of historic sites, neighborhoods, or regions. In addition, grants of up to $60,000 are available through Positions in Public Humanities to support the training of the next generation of museum professionals. The upcoming deadline for Public Humanities Projects grants is August 10, and more information can be found at neh.gov.

NEH EXHIBITION WINS PRIZE

“Pacific Worlds” at the Oakland Museum of California received a special achievement award for Contextualizing Collections with Community Voice from the American Alliance of Museums. The museum received a $40,000 NEH grant in 2014 to plan for its 8,000-square-foot exhibit exploring the historical and contemporary connections between California and the Pacific Islands. The exhibition ran from May 2015 to January 2016.

—AL

FIJIAN TATTOO ARTIST LOMANI GAUNAVINAKA OF SANTA ROSA SKETCHES TATTOO DESIGNS AS PART OF THE OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA’S “PACIFIC WORLDS.”

Deadlines EDUCATION PROGRAMS

Wilsonia Cherry, Deputy 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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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

DEADLINE

PROJECTS BEGINNING

March 1, 2017 Summer 2017 March 1, 2017 Summer 2018 March 1, 2019 March 1, 2018 June 22, 2017 January 12, 2017 November 2, 2016

Summer 2019 Summer 2019 January 2018 Fall 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 2, 2017 Preservation and Access Education and Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . May 2, 2017

Research and Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . June 15, 2017 Common Heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . May 11, 2017

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

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Karen S. Mittelman, Director • 202-606-8269 • publicpgms@neh.gov Public Humanities Projects Planning and Implementation Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 10, 2016 Media Projects Development and Production Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . August 10, 2016

April 2017 April 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 26, 2017 September 29, 2016 December 7, 2016 December 7, 2016 August 16, 2016 April 12, 2017 April 12, 2017 April 12, 2017 February 1, 2017

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

CHALLENGE GRANTS

Katja Zelljadt, Director • 202-606-8309 • challenge@neh.gov Creating Humanities Communities Grants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . February 2017 Humanities Access Grants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . May 2017 Next Generation Humanities PhD Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . November 2017

N/A 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 Advancement Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . January 11, 2017

September 2017 May 2017 September 2017

FEDERAL STATE PARTNERSHIPS

Scott Krawczyk, Director • 202-606-8254 • fedstate@neh.gov Planning Grant to Establish a Provisional U.S. Virgin Islands State Humanities Council . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . October 25, 2016 Each state humanities council establishes its own grant guidelines and application deadlines.

April 2017

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

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

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

www.neh.gov