Videos | National Humanities Center

Videos

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An Evening with Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist

Since first coming to prominence with his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the My Lai massacre and its subsequent cover-up during the Vietnam War, Seymour “Sy” Hersh has remained one of our nation's most important investigative journalists. Hersh recently published his tenth book, Reporter: A Memoir, in which he reflects on his long career as a journalist, shares behind-the-scenes accounts of the people and events who were central to his most important stories, and reminds us again of the vital importance of a free press.

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Tania Munz, “Nerds in the Woods, or Why the Humanities Matter”

Tania Munz, vice president for scholarly programs, recently presented a five-minute talk at RTP180, a monthly showcase for organizations in NC’s Research Triangle Park. In her talk, “Nerds in the Woods, or Why the Humanities Matter,” Munz discussed the Center's role in support of advanced humanities research and the ways this research contributes not only to researchers' specific academic fields but to broader questions and concerns.

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Tera W. Hunter and Andreá N. Williams, “African American Marriage in the Twentieth Century: A Conversation”

For centuries marital status has been an important social marker, providing access to a variety of legal rights and contributing to a sense of social stability. Further, since marriage has been seen as fundamental to preserving social and familial norms, it has been considered a central element for ensuring socioeconomic success and social respectability among African Americans and others. Two of this year’s Fellows will discuss the fraught history of marriage and marital rights for African Americans—as well as the ways cultural expectations about marriage have shaped the lives of African American women over the past century—with Tania Munz, vice president for scholarly programs at the Center.

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An Evening with Author Lee Smith

Since the publication of her first novel nearly fifty years ago, Lee Smith has established herself as a preeminent voice of the South through her award-winning and critically acclaimed fiction. Last year, with her very first work of nonfiction, Dimestore: A Writer's Life, Smith shared her own story, from growing up in a small coal-mining town in the Appalachian Mountains to becoming a writer and raising her family in North Carolina. Widely praised by critics across the country, Dimestore not only offers insight into the making of a great American writer but opens up a conversation about life in small towns across the nation.

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Peter Galison, “Wastelands and Wilderness: Nuclear Lands”

As they are usually understood, the designations “nuclear wasteland” and “pure wilderness” are opposites; when they converge into nature reserves on the sites of decommissioned nuclear weapons lands we often describe this circumstance as “paradoxical” or “ironic.” Peter Galison argues that the categories of wastelands and wilderness are far from opposites; that their relation is more intriguing (and disturbing) than a binary of purity or corruption. Removing parts of the earth in perpetuity—for reasons of sanctification or despoilment—alters a central feature of the human self, presenting us in a different relation to the physical world, and raising irreducible ethical questions about who we are when land can be classified, forever, as not for us humans.

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Elaine Scarry, “Imagining Color: Color Threads in Proust and Murasaki”

Literature, unlike the other arts, has no material content. The pictures are made on the mental retina. When we imagine a color, do we think of a piece of language that spells out the name of the color or does a physical (or quasi-physical) event take place in the brain? This lecture traces out the moments at which two great colorists, Marcel Proust and Lady Murasaki, summon color into being both in the worlds of their respective novels, and on the “mental retina” of the reader. Using contemporary neuroscience as well as classic experiments on the imagination from cognitive psychology, the lecture examines the phenomenon of color threads, the background colors against which our imagination carries out its acts of image-production, and the unexpected relationship between color and mortality.

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Maud Ellmann, “‘Vaccies Go Home!’: Evacuation, Psychoanalysis and Fiction in World War II Britain”

On September 1, 1939, the British government launched a program ominously codenamed Operation Pied Piper, whereby thousands of children were evacuated from the cities to the countryside. This operation brought class conflict into the foreground, laying bare the drastic inequalities of British society, but also provided the foundations for the development of child psychoanalysis. This talk by Maud Ellmann examines the impact of the evacuation crisis on psychoanalytic theories of the child, comparing these to the depiction of children in wartime fiction.

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Alan Taylor, “Educating Citizens and Reforming Generations”

​In the wake of the American Revolution, political leaders insisted that their new republic could not survive without improved and more comprehensive public education meant to create better informed citizens. But the push for educational reform often ran afoul of local legislators and voters, who balked at the taxes needed to fund expanded systems of education. In his talk, historian Alan Taylor discusses this​ ​intriguing irony—that republican reliance on popular sovereignty complicated efforts by elites to improve voters through education.