Teaching Langston Hughes
This webinar takes teachers step by step through Langston Hughes’ poetry to aid them in teaching the work of this literary giant. It analyzes some popular and lesser known works that demonstrate the breadth of Hughes’ work.
Poetry
Whitman, Alabama: A Portrait of America
America continues to fracture. Whitman, Alabama: a Portrait of America is a 52-part, Emmy-nominated work of documentary portraiture. The work spotlights contemporary Americans, their alienation from and forgotten connections to each other, and offers a tool for reconnection through the unique lens of artist, journalist, and filmmaker Jennifer Chang Crandall.
Nerds in the Woods
Join us as we take a series of virtual audio journeys through the intellectual woods with cohosts Robert D. Newman, Tania Munz, Matthew Booker, and Brooke Andrade as they survey some of the compelling topics being studied by historians and philosophers, scholars of literature, art, and other fields who come to the Center from all over the world.
NHC Virtual Book Talk: M Archive: After the End of the World
The second book in an experimental triptych, M Archive is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following the worldwide cataclysm we are living through now. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Alexis Pauline Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.
Purple Heart, Purple Prose
Griswold recalls how a childhood encounter with a sentimental, “middlebrow” poem about a dog and a veteran (which makes her cry to this day) tapped into wells of empathy. She explains how such responses to aesthetic experiences, so often downplayed in academic inquiry, deserve our sustained attention—and even respect.
The Beauty of Love and Human Connection
I could go on and on regarding literature or art that has altered my perspective on life. I was tempted to write about watching beautiful sunsets that show that even the worst day can have a happy ending. However, I had to choose a passage from Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey which taught me that … Continued
Poetry in Silence
Grace Momberger describes how the story of one woman’s ability to make poetry without sound altered the way she perceived the very meaning of communication.
“Fern Hill”: The Fleeting, Eternal Magnificence of Innocence
I could do several Humanities Hours out of Humanities Moments – there are so many passages and ideas that have animated my imagination. I first find myself drawn to the heart-wrenching climax of Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, but to describe that would be to reveal the ending, which I would feel queasy doing. So I’m … Continued
A Poem Remembered, a World Created
During the past several weeks I’ve been drafting some thoughts I’ve had for a number of years regarding the way we learn from nature and from other people’s thoughts and writing. My Humanities Moment is a poetic description of a memory I had that was prompted by a poem from Alfred Tennyson — “Flower in … Continued
“Three Mountain Pass” — Connecting to Vietnam
For teenagers, the world they live in is often described as “normal” and everything else is “weird.” One of my goals as a history teacher is to help my students recognize difference, but also to feel connected to people who lived in a much different place and time than them. Ho Xuan Huong’s poem, “Three … Continued