Blogs

The Equality Experiment

My first job was as a cowboy, or rather a horseboy (though that is another story). It was in the rump days of the late 1960s known as the early '70s, in the rump end of Huerfano County, Colorado, the county of orphans, of rolling mesas, silver and straw. Strung...

An Unlikely Veteran

My father, Hans Bouricius, was born in Delft, The Netherlands, in 1921. When the Netherlands were made part of the greater German Reich in May of 1940, he was nineteen, and about to join the navy. Unfortunately, the Royal Netherlands Navy had just moved to England....

Why Was the Stoic White Guy Crying?

11:00 P.M., November 4, 2008, the networks call Obama the victor. Was this real? Had Obama actually won the election? 12:02 A.M., November 5, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama is giving his victory speech when tears come to my eyes. This is real; Obama will be the...

“I could do that”

In art history survey classes, when I get up to Jackson Pollock, I invariably have a student who says, “I could do that.” And my response is always the same: “Go ahead. If you can make a credible Jackson Pollock, you’ll get an automatic A in my...

Ideologically Thomas

If you have a little boy or girl, then you probably know about Thomas the Tank Engine. No, I don't mean a character. And I don't even mean a show. And, no, I don't even mean a merchandise aisle at Target. I mean what becomes, so very easily, an entire way...

Dora the Earner

There have been times in the past year when I was grateful to Dora the Explorer. At the adult-hostile hour of 5:30 AM, I could, with eyes half shut, select an iTunes television episode on a laptop set up on a chair in front of the sofa, and half-snooze until 6:00...

The Media Knack and How to Get It

Up until ten years ago I used to get a phone call every week from aspiring filmmakers or parents of aspiring filmmakers (or were they aspiring to be parents of filmmakers?) asking me if their talented son or daughter should go to film school to become another...

Seeing the World–And Living In It

“Who you gonna believe, baby, me or yo’ lyin’ eyes?” –Richard Pryor, on being caught in flagrante delicto by his wife. Here’s how I lost my innocence about looking: I was teaching Social Studies to seventh graders at a Boston public...

Coming Together: Making Art for Change

Amongst Zen Buddhist lore, there is a mendicant monk who goes from village to village collecting useless things. He hauls them in a large cloth sack, wherefore his name, Hotei, meaning “cloth bag.” When he comes around, children follow him. When he sees...

International Justice in The Hague

The Hague is the seat of the Dutch government, although it is not actually Holland’s capital (that honor belongs to Amsterdam). It also functions as the center of a system of international courts and tribunals, established since World War II, that function...

The Serial's the Thing!

Imagine that you’re an artist painting a picture. You’ve made a start. You revisit your perspective… then voices from over your shoulder scream, “There, to the right! A little more azure! A little more shadow on the left. When will the red go...

Are We On the Same Page?

"We’re Reading Again!” The story hit the New York Times, Washington Post, and other major newspapers in anticipation of the release on January 12, 2009, of a new study from the National Endowment for the Arts, which is titled by its conclusion:...

Intersecting Art and the Humanities

A partnership between the state cultural agency (MCC) and the state humanities organization (Mass Humanities) on a literary event is kind of a no-brainer, literature being one of the “bigees” in the humanities gang. Even so, when not thinking about it too...

Portrait Painting and Coaxing History

I am an artist, and for the last three and a half years I have been engaged in a project entitled 100 Faces of War Experience. This project started as a purely artistic endeavor, but it has become increasingly engaged in the concerns of history and the humanities. As...

Chronicling the History of the Book as Object

Commentators, friend and foe, have made much of Barack Obama’s calculated appropriation of the legacy of Lincoln. What most struck me, as a book historian, was his decision to take the inaugural oath on the bible that Lincoln used in 1861.In the Senate Chamber,...

Maybe you can, but you MAY not!

Dependent Child: “Hey Mum, can I go jump off that cliff?”Custodial Parent: “Yes, you can. But you may not.”DC:Aw, that’s not fair. Why not?CP: Because I said so. There’s nothing quite as frustrating as being informed by an entity...

Recession and the Deepening of Poverty

The current economic downturn has forced a generation of Americans, many for the first time, to make hard choices and revise their expectations about the taken-for-granted prosperity of this nation. This recession has already caused many people, and we anticipate the...

Can Documentaries Change the World?

In the late 1970s Jimmy Carter was president, disco was in its death throes, wide lapels were all the rage, and I was a post-hippy child-lawyer living in wet and wild Portland, Oregon. I had moved there from western Massachusetts to take a job as a Legal Services...

Voices from the Port

In addition to describing two interesting and rich humanities projects funded by Mass Humanities, this post and the previous one by Harriet Webster provide examples of Mass Humanities’ Cultural Economic Development grants that are available to Massachusetts...

The Soul of a Nation

As reported in the New York Times, on Monday February 23, 2009, less than six years after it was looted in the initial invasion of Baghdad, the Iraq Museum reopened for visitors. The opening of the museum (also known as the Baghdad Museum), however, was limited to...

Romancing the Little Screen

Documentary film purists are apoplectic over the fractionalization and miniaturization of the media. We’ve gone from 35mm theatrical releases to 16mm school showings to television broadcasts and the final indignity, tiny private screenings on your computer...

Crossing Over

I was fascinated by filmmaker Larry Hott’s post about how online streaming of filmmakers’ content has the potential to upend traditional models of documentary filmmaking, fundraising, and distribution. Since my own interaction with Massachusetts filmmakers...

Liberal vs. Practical Education

Provide for the esoteric, exotic, and impractical in the curriculum; the practical and pedestrian will take care of itself. If it does not, you have not lost much anyway; so I think the impractical things are the most practical and important in the long run. (Herman...

The Marginalization of the Humanities

The pressures bearing down on colleges and universities across Massachusetts and the nation as a result of the country’s economic woes have reignited the long simmering debate about the marginalization of the humanities and the value of a liberal arts education....

The Checkered Past of Newspapers

When people ask me what the death of the newspaper means to historians, I respond, what do you mean by death? or newspaper? I’d say, first, reports of its death are greatly exaggerated because (unlike Mark Twain) it can exist simultaneously in multiple forms and...

Rediscovering Hawley's Old Town Common

But gradually, as people thought more of manufactures and less of husbandry, locations along the streams became important, and the settlements away from them, and often quite above them, were gradually abandoned.This transition had already been going on for some time...

Exceptionalism, Hopedale, Hope

There is something about western Massachusetts that seems to breed exceptionalism, exceptionally so, and I have struggled to figure out why. Over and again, I have heard from long-term residents how unusual the region is, and they seem to insist that something...

The Invention of Printing

All of us “know” that the invention of printing was an epochal development in human civilization. Gutenberg and/or his invention of circa 1439-40 ranked at the top or very near the top of the lists of “greatest” of the millennium that...

The Masculine Vision Quest that is LOST

The pop culture indulgence I’m most devoted to is LOST. For those of you who don’t know (do you exist?), LOST is an ABC prime time drama with a serial format. It piloted in 2004 and is currently in its fifth season. I caught up in ’06 and have been...

Freaks and Other Others

The phrase "binary thinking" is a curious one. Even just the sound of it is unpleasant, hardly inviting or comfortable – I mean, really, who is in favor of something called "binary"? Well, perhaps we should understand the term a bit. For all...

War Readings and Films

Historical Perspectives on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Coleman, Penny (2006). Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War. Boston: Beacon. Dean, Jr., Eric T (1997). Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War....

Why World Wide Views on Global Warming

On September 26, in forty-six countries, citizens will gather to discuss, deliberate and develop positions on core questions of global climate change policy. The outcomes of these deliberations will be made publicly available through the internet. They also will be...

The Work's the Thing

This past March, Mass Humanities awarded a grant to Actors’ Shakespeare Project for a broad-based, educational community partnership centered on a production of Much Ado About Nothing, which opens this week at Roxbury’s Hibernian Hall. ASP staff members...