In this wide-ranging interview with Conversation host Mitchell Lewis, National Humanities Center President Robert D. Newman discusses the significance of the humanities in everyday life, the enduring importance of humanities scholarship, and the mission of the National Humanities Center to advance humanities research, teaching, and public engagement. This program originally aired on UNC-TV’s NC Channel on June 27, 2017.
As part of her ongoing effort to chronicle African American literary culture at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Elizabeth McHenry has been focusing on African American bibliographies, which emerged as experimental knowledge structures that provided ways of mapping and making sense of an emerging and rapidly evolving canon of “Negro literature.” These bibliographies were not just “lists,” but exploratory documents, where black intellectuals thought critically and advanced arguments about the boundaries and contours of black literature and authorship.
Popular sources present the Vikings as ruthless warriors yet also take great pains to portray their decorated weapons, jewelry, clothing, houses, and ships—that is, their art. In this talk Nancy Wicker will discuss the patrons who sponsored that art, the artisans who made the objects, and the men and women who used the works, at home in Scandinavia as well as across the diaspora where Vikings raided, traded, and settled, from the North Atlantic to Russia and beyond.
From the 1840s to 1910s, oysters flourished in the polluted estuaries of America's industrial cities. Their rise and collapse are equally astonishing. Today, oysters are once again on the menu. But what was once a staple of the urban working poor, grown within the city, has become a luxury, produced in rural places. The rise and fall of oysters is a microcosm of changes in food production and consumption in the modern era. It can teach us what people ate, where food was produced and how the city became a place solely for consumers.
Mark Twain called Joan of Arc, in complete seriousness, “the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.” Joan Hinde Stewart will discuss the historical Joan—her origins, clarity of purpose and gruesome death at the age of nineteen—along with the ways in which she has been imagined across the centuries and the myths that have grown up around her.
This talk will explore the writings, drawings, paintings, prints, and sculpture produced by African, African American, African Caribbean, and Black British women and men, enslaved and free, living and working across the Black Diaspora over the centuries. Living and dying against a white racist backdrop that sought to destroy Black bodies and souls, they generated alternative art-making traditions and experimental writerly practices that constitute nothing less than “declarations of independence.”
The banjo links disparate musical and cultural traditions — from Africa to the Caribbean to the United States — and its history is deeply interwoven with the history of those places. Recently, NHC Fellow Laurent Dubois and musician Joe Newberry participated in a “musical conversation” exploring this fascinating history and performed songs for NHC trustees, Fellows and special guests.
On October 5, 2016, NHC director Robert D. Newman delivered a keynote address as a part of the ongoing Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Speaker Series at North Carolina Central University. In his remarks Newman touched on events as seemingly disparate as the workings of the Continental Congress and the social media origins of the Black Lives Matter movement and discussed the ways that the humanities help us understand the world, relate to one another, and come to terms with the most profound experiences and questions — on the nature of beauty, the search for justice, and the meaning of life in the face of horrific violence and our own mortality.
Over the past fifty years, folklorist William Ferris has documented Southern culture, compiling a remarkable archive of images and stories from the South’s most accomplished writers and artists. In 2013, he shared his collection in the acclaimed book The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists and his images have been subsequently featured in an exhibit of the same name, which travels this fall to the NHC. In his talk, Ferris will discuss these distinctive figures whose work has informed American notions of the South and Southerners.
Among all the classic Broadway shows of the 1930s, a fair number stand out by engaging directly with the New Deal politics of a turbulent decade. Why did the likes of George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart take this leftist turn, and how should one read the great American songs that emerged?