The Center promotes understanding of the humanities and highlights their vital role in a vibrant, democratic society through a variety of public programs and initiatives, podcasts, and events.
Humanities in Action
Calling on the Humanities in the Midst of a Pandemic
What role do the humanities play in confronting a crisis like COVID-19?
Loss, Grief, and the Humanities in the Time of Pandemic
The humanities demonstrate we are never alone in our experience, but are always caught up in recurring and collective cycles of life, death, and suffering.
100 Years and Counting: The Continuing Struggle for Gender Equality
As we observe the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, it’s clear that the march toward equality is far from over.
(In) Security: How Does the Way We Think About School Violence Affect the Classroom?
What role can the humanities play in alleviating anxieties and making schools safe places?
Humanities Moments
Creating Shelter: Moments from Home
In this collection of moments, contributors imagine home as a place, a feeling, a set of relationships, and as a site of learning and personal growth.
Homeschooling and the Humanities
College freshman Isabella Kemp shares her self-realizations and new understandings gained through homeschooling family members during the quarantine.
Using Language to Humanize Healthcare
Dr. Michael Stanley celebrates a principle of healthcare that draws from philosophy, mythology, and literature to understand individuals and their circumstances.
Transforming Loss into Artistic Expression
Actor and musician Noah Reid describes the way that a Neil Young song allowed him to understand and portray the way that loss shaped Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Podcasts
Discovery and Inspiration
Podcast Series
What makes scholars so passionate about the subjects they pursue? What is it like for them to make a new discovery? To answer a confounding question? And what can we learn by taking the time to ask scholars about the research they are doing?
“The Poetry and Prose of Precarious Living: Black Women Writers and the Legacy of Segregated Urban Spaces”
Jennifer D. Williams (Fellow, 2019–20)
The experience of 20th-century life in segregated districts and public housing projects was chronicled by Black women writers of the era.
“Home Matters: Picturing and Understanding Place”
Confronting contemporary challenges is impossible unless we understand the ways that humans interact with their environments and the repercussions those interactions have both locally and globally.
“Excursions: Revisiting the History of the Caribbean”
This podcast features conversations with several recent Fellows whose scholarship deals with the Caribbean and its relation to the Atlantic slave trade as well as a birthplace for not only revolutionary democracy but reggae music.
Events
The NHC’s Virtual Book Club Series: Race and Injustice
July 15–August 19, 2020
This installment in our virtual book club series features six gifted scholars whose work helps illuminate the long history, bitter realities, and complex dynamics surrounding racial oppression in the United States.
For Ourselves and Our Posterity: The U.S. Constitution, Then and Now
January and February, 2020
NHC Fellows discuss how their work helps us better understand the creation and living legacy of the U.S. Constitution as we endeavor to form a more perfect union.
The Trial of Lizzie Borden
November 19, 2019 at 6:00 pm
Cara Robertson (Fellow 2004–05; 2005–06) discusses one of the most famous trials in American history, offering not only a detailed account of events but a window into life in America’s Gilded Age.
Beyond Despair: Theory and Practice in Environmental Humanities
April 3–5, 2019
This unique three-day summit of environmental humanities scholars and experts from across the country featured a dynamic intersection between discussion, presentations, and exhibitions, grounded in practical site excursions.
Videos
NHC Virtual Book Club: “‘Most Blessed of the Patriarchs’: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination”
Annette Gordon-Reed (Center Trustee) and Peter S. Onuf
How could one of America’s greatest champions of liberty be blind to the crime of slavery in his very midst?
NHC Virtual Book Club: “The Decameron”
Jane O. Newman (Center Trustee; Fellow, 2015–16)
What can we learn from those who lived through pandemics in the distant past?
Educating Citizens and Reforming Generations
Alan Taylor (Fellow, 1993–94)
In the wake of the American Revolution, republican reliance on popular sovereignty complicated efforts by elites to improve voters through education.
An Evening with Seymour Hersh
NHC Public Event
Seymour “Sy” Hersh, one of our nation’s most important investigative journalists, discusses his most recent book, Reporter: A Memoir.
