The Public Humanist
Keeping it Relevant: A Look into the New Historic House
Wistariahurst Museum has been many things over 130 years: it was once a home; a facility; a natural history museum; a youth center; a reception hall; and finally, an interpreted historic house. But we want to be more than just a historic house, don’t we?...Historic House Museums: Sites of History and Sites of Conscience?
Let me say at the outset that 1) I love historic sites and house museums and 2) I believe that there is a woeful lack of creative thinking about how to address and find solutions for local, national and global challenges. With that off my chest, let me proclaim loudly...Justice in Capitalism and Monotheistic Religions
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and capitalism share a theme with immense potential power to protect against extremism; that theme is social-economic justice.Ancient Judaism had the idea of a Jubilee year when the playing field would be leveled. The Jewish prophets were...Revitalizing Cities: The Synergy of the Arts and Businesses
Those of us in the arts community clearly understand the important role that culture plays in the economic viability of a community. When there is a strong and stable arts and cultural community, people will come to take part in the programming whether it be theater,...American Limbo. Reflections on a Recent Journey to Guantanamo Bay
For most who have never been to Guantanamo Bay it is something of an abstract, a place defined by a disparate images of Al Qaeda prisoners in orange jump suits, barbed wire, guard towers and US Marines. It is more of a symbol, a 21st century Devil’s Island or an...Exploring Gitmo. The Pearl of the Antilles.
(Part two of a two-part essay; read part one here)I quickly learned that the Military Commissions were a lot of hurry up and wait. While I waited to give my testimony I was allowed to explore Guantanamo Bay for a couple of days. As I left my quarters to begin my...Finding the Sweet Spot between Individualism and Community: Bill McKibben's Deep Economy
“Economic growth” has long been a term that inspired questions for me. From NPR’s descriptions of the health (or lack thereof) of the US economy and stock market to local government candidates describing their plans for bringing this growth to my...Suspending the Rules of Civility
When Hayley asked me to write a counterpart to her essay–mine to take as its subject “rural” social responsibility, I was all ready to extol the virtues of the Town Meeting; to poll (polling being the word of the day) my friends and acquaintances on...Specialization vs. Generalization in Education
Everywhere we turn today we see specialization. The most respected and well paid doctors and dentists are often those who perform just a few procedures. Many attorneys cover just one area of law. Even kids are specializing in how they play! With the spread of...Guns Don't Kill People . . . People with Guns Kill People
I agreed to write a commentary on Dan Gordon’s March 10 post about specialization versus general education (which strikes me as cogent and wise), but I can’t get the image of Eve Marie Carson out of my head or the horror of her violent death out of my...Blogger as Supplemental Journalist
I started blogging as an outlet, and it quickly became an addiction, one with a peculiar relationship to a mostly lurking audience. The more I blogged, the more I wanted to test the limits of its purpose. The writing was a platform for focused thoughts about where I...Socrates on the Campaign Trail: Fear and Hope in the Public Realm
Here in America, we are, at least to all appearances, spoiled for choice in the wide, well-stocked aisles of our daily lives as consumers. Cars and computers, colleges and health clubs spread out across the open price range, each promising to be “worth...The Obama Campaign and the Possibility of Fear without Loathing
It is always a nice thing to see Socrates made contemporary. Or at least have something to say about about contemporary things, so I’m just so pleased to see Robert Meagher write this piece about fear and hope. The range – and so the possibilities –...The Mass. Memories Road Show: Some Notes on Bridging and Bonding
Four years ago, the Mass. Studies Project at UMass Boston launched a cultural heritage project that we dubbed the “Mass. Memories Road Show,” a real-world mashup of PBS’s Antiques Road Show (people bring their personal stuff to a local event for...The Digital Commonwealth
It’s spring! And if that makes you think about baseball, perhaps you’d be interested in seeing a photograph of the Peabody baseball team in 1899. Or if you’re more interested in gardening, you might want to check out the tulips at the Thayer Estate...Arguing with angry men and its discontents.
I’m faced with a dilemma right now. For the past few weeks, my “Masculinity and its Discontents” co-blogger Jamie and I have been writing, once a week, at GlennSacks.com, which is one of the focal points of the relatively small, but perhaps growing,...Engaging Non-traditional Audiences with History Exhibitions
As I travel back from a wonderful and successful annual meeting of the National Council on Public History, I think back to what I have learned about historical exhibitions in the past six years. There are certain expectations we in the public history and museum field...Same
In Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, there was a small Vermeer painting, of a woman at the harpsichord, and another, standing, silently singing, and a man in the center, maybe a lutenist, with his back to us. The daylight filters in from the left. A...On Women and Documentary Film
In my opinion, the most interesting work done by historians in the last fifty years has been the ambitious detective work required to tell history “from the bottom up” as well as “from the top down.” Social historians believe (and I...The Color Initiative
When I sat down with the editors of The World, the joint BBC/WGBH national radio program, my original idea was to embark on a series of stories about race relations across the globe. But the more we thought about the issue of race and all the social constructs...The Value of Beauty in Public Spaces
Whenever I teach an art history survey (as I have for a decade in at least five Boston area institutions), I begin by asking my students for definitions of art. Invariably, someone will note that art can be defined as anything found in a museum gallery. Fair...Storytelling as a Path to Justice
As a documentary filmmaker, naturally I am interested in telling a good story. My film subjects are often people who somehow ‘repurpose’ culture or history to address problems they face. So my curiosity was piqued when I learned that several very different...Thoughts on Architectural Preservation 2
It is 1975. I nose my car slowly into the mouth of a winding driveway in the mountains above Salt Lake City. My companion and I are in search of the only Frank Lloyd Wright building in the state of Utah, a hunting lodge built in the 1930’s for a U.S. Steel...Storytelling as a Path to Justice
As a documentary filmmaker, naturally I am interested in telling a good story. My film subjects are often people who somehow ‘repurpose’ culture or history to address problems they face. So my curiosity was piqued when I learned that several very different...Vulnerable Communities
Julie Mallozi’’s “"Storytelling as a Path Toward Justice”" wonderfully evokes a critically important issue for me as I begin a new research project, and more broadly, in regards to working with marginalized communities. As she clearly...The Economics of Slavery in New England
For years, here in New England, we’ve been able to feel a little smug with respect to the history of slavery: it was an issue that took place particularly in the old red states. We in Massachusetts, after all, pretty much got done with the peculiar institution...Maintaining Optimism in the Criminal Justice Classroom
My esteemed colleague John Hill suggested in an earlier post that capitalism, as envisioned by Adam Smith, should be restored to its roots. Smith envisioned a system of natural liberty allied with justice where both the ends and the means were important to the overall...Optimism and a Forgotten Revolutionary Value
Memorial Day is a time for reflection. Two items in the May 26, 2008, Boston Globe stirred some thoughts. One was the continuation of a series on the Defense Department’s efforts to find the remains of soldiers missing in action, in this case airmen lost during...The Uses of Historical Comparison
Obama leads by a nose length, Hillary on his tail coming around the bend in the last round; who’s on first, who’s on second? The race is really boring — the pundits called it quite a while ago. Still, in a desperate effort to keep everyone on the...Lessons from Looking Backward
Recently I have found myself more irate than usual about the lack of a living wage for all American workers; to me this is a moral issue that transcends all political posturing. A few weeks ago at my youngest brother’s college graduation Tavis Smiley spoke about...Should Public Universities have Religious Studies Departments?
Here at UMass Amherst we do not have a religious studies department, even though student interest in religion is on the rise. Courses on religion that are offered in the history department or part of the university’’s certificate program (a kind of minor,...Seeking genuine “catholicity” (or pluralism) in studies of religion
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are three major contemporary religions to come out of the Middle East, my region of focus as a scholar of contemporary law and politics. I study aspects of one religion professionally (Islam), experience the impact of another publicly...Picture This: Participatory History on the Web
On the web, history, like everything else, is a participatory activity. It’s not about visiting an online exhibit, it’s about engaging in an ongoing conversation. What do you see? Who is in this picture? Where and when was it taken? What is the story here?...Whither Digital Natives?
Whither Digital Natives? Rumor has it that the nature of human thinking is changing. As Nicholas Carr puts it in Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, "Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or...A Different Take on “Black Like Me”
Traveling on an air-conditioned bus along Malaysia’s North-South Highway to Kuala Lumpur several months ago could not sensibly be compared to the freedom ride from Selma to Montgomery. But for the dark-skinned man seated near me, it could well have been a...Seeing Differences: On Being an Artist and Identity Politics
From Asian American Comic Book by Wen-ti Tsen, AARW, pg. 63 My last blog post ended with us suspended on the ledge of a 3rd-story window of an old Chinatown building. Cleaning up, after finishing a mural on the building’s side depicting the coming of Asians to...Taking
I saw an old friend, John, whom I hadn’t seen in about five years, at Co-op Power’s Sustainable Energy Summit at UMass Amherst last weekend. He and I had been Green Party members in 2000, and were among the handful of faithfuls who gathered monthly,...Harvesting the Communes
From the Shakers to Transcendentalists and hippies, communes spring up in the fields of Massachusetts history like so many unkempt weeds, and like weeds, they have an extraordinary ability to flourish in the most unexpected ways. While many of these communes might be...Records & Public Property: Trash or Treasure?
Some recent posts, specifically Picture This: Participatory History on the Web, have caused a shiver to run up and down my spine, but only in regards to how it will affect the collection and keeping of soft, or online, records. While the historian in me regards the...Massachusetts Center for the Book, Chapter One
This is the first of what I hope will become regular posts to the Public Humanist. I’m writing from the new offices of the Massachusetts Center for the Book, which will officially open its doors this fall on the campus of Historic Northampton. The office was...“For heaven and the future's sake”
The starting point of the Lasting Legacies exhibition at the Lawrence Library opening October 25, 2008, will be two remarkable Williams and their wills: William Wolcott, whose last will and testament bequeathed a collection of impressionist paintings to the people of...Fact, Fiction, Chaos and Control
I have some very close friends who annoy me no end with questions such as, "When are you going to make a real movie." "What do you mean," I ask. "Aren’t documentaries real enough for you?" "Well, documentaries are OK, but why...Fiction, Facts, Film
How do documentary media differ from narrative media? STOP RIGHT THERE, my wife says. You are supposed to be blogging, not writing an essay, and a stiff, academic, atherosclerotic one at that. But, I whine, The Public Humanist is not really about blogging, which needs...Attie's New Neighbor Part 1
My mother has a new neighbor–again. Since I moved to the United States in 1981, my mother, Attie, and I talk on the phone every Sunday morning at 10 am. In June of 2001, she announced casually that she had a new neighbor.Attie and her husband Chris live in a...Attie's New Neighbor Part 2–The Keep
As chronicled in my previous essay, my mother’s new neighbor, Radovan Karad~i , was brought by helicopter to the prison now called "United Nations Detention Unit" in Scheveningen, across the street from my mother’s house. An "ordinary...Do You Have a License to Carry that Child?
I’m wondering why we need a license to get married, but we don’t need a license to have kids – especially considering the fact that a bad marriage is easily undone and does no irreparable harm, whereas bad parenting can create a legacy of misery that...Violent Play in a Violent World: Thoughts on Raising a Boy Child Who Plays with Guns
My father and I are sitting on his couch, watching the Bowling for Columbine on a large screen TV in his home in rural Michigan, about an hour away from Michael Moore’s hometown of Flint. My father and I don’t know each other very well yet –we met...New Avenues for Global Understanding
For nearly twenty years, the organization I work for has connected children with histories and cultures of the world through primary sources. Countless educators have used these resources to bring distant lands and far off peoples into the classroom; students’...Computers and Global Education in Practice
About two years ago I created a post on Craigslist Shanghai. It explained that I was a teacher in the US, looking for another educator in China who was interested in having his/her students communicate in English with my high school students. I figured that either no...Show Me the Money and Nobody Gets Hurt
What do you think is the first thing aspiring filmmakers want to talk about when they take workshops on producing documentaries? The process of self-discovery? How the observer affects the subject matter? The influence of the internet on editing style? Of course not....Calling the Tune or Tuning the Call?
The National Endowment for the Humanities and the state humanities councils . . . have been calling the tune for major Public Television documentaries for almost four decades. Heres how it works for us. Because the major source of funding is in the humanities we gear...Can We Connect? Some Reflections on E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (Part I)
Margaret greeted her [husband] with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks,...Can We Connect? Some Reflections on E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (Part 2)
"Obtuseness," the mental quality that E.M. Forster identified in Howard’s End, fairly abounds in A Passage to India. We see it in the obtuseness of the English with regard to the Indians, the Indians with regard to the English, Moslems with regard to...Educating Our Educators: Where Can We Find Humanities Resources?
The United States Department of Education website for Massachusetts claims that "every day we learn what works so students can make greater progress" learning reading and mathematics. They offer statistics on the number of schools making adequate yearly...Of Brown Bears and Mice and Picture Books: Reading Words and Pictures with Children
My favorite part of working at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is reading aloud with children. I lead The Carle’s regular storytime programs, and I’ve also traveled to hundreds of schools and libraries modeling The Whole Book Approach, an...Open Season on the First Amendment
In January of 1966, the Georgia House of Representatives voted to deny Julian Bond his fairly-won seat in that legislative body. The 26-year-old Bond was African-American, and no doubt his race played a part in the legislature’s actions. But the legislature...In Consideration of Exceptions to Freedom of Speech
I still remember to this day the feeling I had in class when Professor Jacobs returned the graded midterm exams. This take home exam consisted of only one question. It asked students to evaluate the first amendment rights of a described hypothetical...Slavery and Public History
Molasses, sugar, palm leaves, and cotton. Tea, coffee, rum. All of these were staples of eighteenth and nineteenth-century New England life. None of them were produced in New England, and obtaining them involved some practices we would now find morally objectionable,...Traces of the Trade: Massachusetts and the Economics of Slavery
On October 4 and 7, Mass Humanities starts its programming around the documentary, Traces of the Trade, to mark the 200th anniversary of the legislation that abolished the importation of slaves into the United States, as well as outlawed participation in the...E-Edition
Best Of 2024
Readers Choice 2024
