This webinar will invite participating teachers to explore teaching topics about health justice in the ELA or history classroom. Reading Martín Espada’s lyric reminiscence on work in a legal pad factory alongside Herman Melville’s diptych on New England mill girls, we will investigate the ways lyric poetry may not only engender student empathy and agency, but also historical curiosity. Was paper always dangerous to produce? Is it still? Whose physical suffering are we disregarding when we make economic choices?
As we probe the history of the paper manufacturing industry, dramatic readings by actor John Turturro, Martín Espada, historian Jill Lepore and others will allow us to explore the power of voice; archival facsimiles of Melville’s first magazine publication of "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," permit us to examine the power of print.