The Public Humanist

Thoughts on Preservation 1

I want to start with the notion of “preservation” in a non-architectural context. We say of someone – almost always a woman, because in our culture, a woman’s “looks” are still widely held to be her most important aspect – that...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

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’...

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...

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...

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,...