Fedwa Malti-Douglas

NEH, September 2015

As a child, she listened to her aunt tell stories like those from Thousand and One Nights and learned the traditions of her foremothers. Her father, a physician in the family’s hometown of Deir el-Qamar, would take her with him to his clinic in Beirut, where she got to know his patients. In general, she took in the world around her: the domestic ritual of soap-making, the slaughter of chickens for a meal, and the hills from which her village, once the summer retreat of emirs, had sprouted half a millennium earlier. “I could see the palace from my house,” she says. (read more)

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway

NEH, March 2014

Late last year, the Hemingway Letters Project and Cambridge University Press brought out the second of a projected seventeen volumes of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. Its 242 missives, telegrams, and book inscriptions (all with detailed annotations) cover the period from 1923 to 1925, when Hem was living the expat-artist’s dream: base of operations on the Left Bank; excursions to Rapallo, Pamplona, Schruns, and Provence; writing, drinking, skiing, fishing, and more drinking among the foremost of the Lost Generation. Taken together, the letters present a rich and, until now, unseen self-portrait of the not-yet famous Hemingway, a young man honing his craft with the help of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein and gathering material for his groundbreaking short story collection, In Our Time, and the novel that made his career, The Sun Also Rises. (read more)

To Be or …

Humanities, January/February 2014

“A finite universe”—that’s the phrase that Jim Kuhn uses to describe the surviving early quartos of Shakespeare’s plays. It evokes something that seems more expansive and dynamic than the estimated 777 paperback-sized volumes that, for the last four hundred years, have physically carried our most direct evidence of the Bard’s work. It also begins to suggest the appeal of those volumes in aggregate: There is an end to their universe, the texts that define it can be collected, and that collection, completed. (read more)

Natalie Zemon Davis

Humanities, July/August 2013

Few historians have combed the archives of the early modern world with the meticulous erudition of Natalie Zemon Davis. Fewer still have emerged from those archives with the embarrassment of gifts that, over the past five decades, she has presented to her discipline. Focusing less on the great moments and movers of history and more on the everyday lives of those relegated to the boundaries of power—peasants, artisans, women—and the opportunities that they made of their circumstances, Davis has tackled some of the most elusive facets of human experience. To get at her subjects, she has drawn on the resources of anthropology, literary scholarship, and film studies (to name just a few of her interdisciplinary excursions), producing seven books and numerous scholarly articles, nearly all of them pushing in some way at the limits of the historical enterprise itself. (read more)

The Agitator

Humanities, January/February 2013

On July 4, 1854, William Lloyd Garrison set fire to a copy of the U.S. Constitution. “A covenant with death,” he called it, “and an agreement with hell.” Holding the parchment above his head, he repeated forcefully a psalmic rouse to the hundreds of men and women gathered around him: “And let all the people say, Amen.” The crowd exploded: “Amen!” (read more)

Children of the Dust

Humanities, November/December 2012

The southern plains could have stayed what they always had been: an expanse of grass—one hundred million acres of buffalo grass, western wheatgrass, blue grama, and hundreds of other species. That was what the environment could support, flora-wise. Semiarid, constantly windy, and prone to droughts—with long dry spells coming along every twenty years or so—the grasses were what kept the land together, what kept it from deteriorating into outright desert. Their tangled roots held the topsoil in place, prevented it from blowing away and exposing the dense layer of hardpan underneath. But so much rich earth, left to the good graces of nature, is hard to resist. And in the late nineteen-teens and throughout the twenties, the grass was dug up and plowed over and the churned soil left behind planted in wheat, a booming crop at the time. It was, as Oliver Edwin Baker of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics put it in 1923, “the last frontier in agriculture”: sodbusting the ancient Plains for a buck—and there were plenty of takers. (read more)

Proactive Parents

D Magazine, August 2012

Sonia Kirkpatrick knew early on that something was wrong with her daughter. Megan had difficulty sucking on a bottle and didn’t walk until she was 19 months old. When she did finally get up on her feet, she fell down more often than other children her age. At 5, Megan still lacked the manual dexterity to operate a pair of scissors, and even the simplest playtime activities, like skipping and pedaling a bicycle, seemed beyond her. (read more)

The Body of Christ

Humanities, July/August 2012

Doomsday, 1433. In York, after dark. / A red curtain. Painted stars. Actors in hoses, wigs, and two-faced masks—some in angel wings, some with trumpets. Wooden clouds and pieces of rainbow, and an iron frame with pulleys meant to effect Christ’s movements between Heaven and Earth. A “hell mouth” billowing smoke and the smell of sulfur. Even a host of tiny puppet angels, set running about the firmament by means of rollers and a bit of twine. (read more)

The Business of Culture

D CEO, May/June 2012

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings doesn’t paint—not anymore, anyway. But he did study art during his undergrad days at Boston College and, until about 15 years ago, was known to dabble in oils. Now and then, he still gets the urge to pick up a brush. “The arts have been a driving force in my life since I was very young,” says the mayor, whose daughter, Michelle Rawlings, also is an artist and an MFA candidate at the Rhode Island School of Design. “To me, they’re a mode of self-actualization that can start to get to the place of a person’s faith. And I’m a person of faith.” (print only)

Underwater Clues

Humanities, May/June 2012

Resting on a shallow sandbar not far from from where the Bayou Texar drains into Pensacola Bay are two of Florida’s oldest shipwrecks. Archaeologists refer to them, for the site of their discovery, as Emanuel Point 1 and 2. The first is something big—a store ship or galleon measuring eighty to one hundred feet in length. The second is about half that size, its class unknown. Both, the evidence suggests, were part of an eleven-ship fleet commanded by Tristán de Luna y Arellano, a wealthy and well-regarded hidalgo, or member of the Spanish gentry, charged by King Philip II with colonizing the territory then known as La Florida. And both ships, it seems, were forced violently aground on the same night in 1559, victims of a hurricane that, despite the protective cover of the bay, scuttled eight of Luna’s ships and, with them, any chance of his mission’s success. (read more)

New Lives in New England

Humanities, March/April 2012

Imagine leaving your home, quickly, and with nothing, then crossing the border into Canada or Mexico, with no reason to believe you will return. It’s almost unthinkable, of course: a true refugee crisis in the modern United States, but there are more than ten million U.N.-recognized refugees in the world right now—all of them, by definition, fleeing persecution or violence. The vast majority live in squalid camps in neighboring countries, waiting for whatever upheaval drove them away to subside. Some—about 1 percent—will be resettled elsewhere. And, of that number, half will end up in the United States. (read more)

Ramón Saldívar

Humanities, March/April 2012

“From downtown Brownsville,” says Ramón Saldívar, “you can literally look across the river and, a hundred yards away or so, there’s Mexico. To me, growing up, that was always normal life, that was the way the world worked: bilingual, bi-national, transcultural in all sorts of ways.” A Texas border town in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Brownsville, in the 1950s and ’60s, was a particularly fertile zone of American-Mexican contact, of difference and assimilation, mergence and conflict—the perfect stomping ground for the bright young man who would become one of the nation’s foremost scholars of Chicano literature and the hybrid culture that it sprang from. (read more)

Michael Pollan Warns Against Nutritionism

SideDish, March 2012

Last night, after toting bagfuls of Tom Thumb groceries onstage at SMU’s McFarlin Auditorium, Michael Pollan opened this year’s Oncor Lecture with a familiar pronouncement: Americans have a disastrous relationship with food. Aside from an apple, the locally-bought foodstuffs—which, one after another, he pulled out of the bags and joked wryly about—were over-processed junk with appallingly misleading label copy. Holding up an almost neon-yellow tube, he said: “No one has ever confused Pringles with health food, right? But now you can get Pringles Multigrain. ‘Cheesy Cheddar,’ artificially flavored, but multigrain. So that’s a real winner. You put ‘multigrain’ on everything, because we’ve read that it’s good for you.” The audience laughed. (read more)

A Hardhat Tour of the Perot Museum

FrontBurner, February 2012

“A large cube floating over a landscaped plinth.” That’s one of the phrases that the public relations folks at the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science chose to describe the building that, over the last two years, has risen out of the ground in downtown Dallas. “Plinth,” the informational packet handed out at today’s media tour helpfully explained, means “roof” — at least, according to whatever dictionary the Perot PR team relies on, that’s what it means. So we’re to imagine this rather severe-looking, 170-foot-high, 180,000-square-foot hexahedron hovering just above its 4.7-acre site next to Victory Park. Yes, hovering. (read more)

Humanities on the Brain

Humanities, January/February 2012

Neuroscience is hot these days. The appeal of its explicatory promise—to reveal the electrochemical mechanisms undergirding such familiar, yet (for now) mysterious, phenomena as memory, attention, and decision-making—seems almost irresistible. Or, if not irresistible, at least unavoidable, cropping up well beyond the walls and rigors of the academy. Microsoft, Hyundai, and Frito-Lay, for example, have hired tech-savvy marketing firms to test the neurological effects of product designs and advertising strategies on consumers. Books devoted to brain health and fitness cram the self-help shelves of Barnes and Noble. Popular media outlets from FOX News to O magazine report regularly—and sometimes reliably—on the latest “breakthroughs” in neurobiology. And, as Deborah Jenson points out, there is even a new line of so-called health drinks trying to cash in on the current trend for all things encephalous. Feeling spent in the “playful energy” department? Try NeuroGasm—“passion in every bottle,” the company’s website claims. Need some stress relief? Pound a NeuroBliss.
(read more)

A Nation of Treaties

Humanities, November/December 2011

“I understand what you want . . . from the few words I have heard you speak,” said Chief Flat Mouth of the Pillager Band of Ojibwe to a group of U.S. government officials in 1855. “You want land.”
(read more)

Nevada’s Christina Barr

Humanities, November/December 2011

“I have a friend who says that we always think more deeply when we’re chewing,” laughs Christina Barr, executive director of Nevada Humanities. (read more)

Graphing Culture

Humanities, March/April 2011

“The problem with the humanities,” Lev Manovich told me over a quick meal at a strip-mall sushi joint in La Jolla last January, “is that people tend to worry too much about what can’t be done, about mistakes, problems, as opposed to just going and doing something.” (read more)

Mo Yan 101

Humanities, January/February 2011

Sometime in the late 1960s or early seventies, a neighbor told Guan Moye about a writer he knew whose work was so popular that he could afford to eat jiaozi—“those tasty little pork dumplings”—at every meal. For Guan, who was born in 1955 in the rural county of Gaomi, China, and had grown up knowing almost nothing but the devastating privations that followed in the wake of the Great Leap Forward, the story was an inspiration. “That’s all I needed to know,” he later wrote; “become a writer and you can eat meaty jiaozi three times a day.” (read more)

Gross Injustice

Humanities, September/October 2010

350 years. / 43,600 voyages. / 12.5 million Africans forced aboard European and American slave ships. / 10.7 million survivors of the Middle Passage disembarked in the New World. / Roughly. / When it comes to taking the global dimensions of so vast and enduring a phenomenon as the transatlantic slave trade, absolute precision is more a worthy dream than a practicable goal. Lost shipping records, suspiciously round inventories of human cargo, undocumented illegal slaving expeditions, and a number of other unknowns hinder the brute force methods of simple arithmetic from arriving once and for all at the grand total of Africans brought against their will to the Americas. (read more)

Black Mozart

Humanities, May/June 2010

“He was a superstar,” says Lincoln University music professor Charles Pettaway, summing up the career of perhaps the most unjustly forgotten composer of the classical period, Joseph Bologne, le Chevalier de Saint-Georges. In his day, he was known as much for his symphonies as his swordsmanship, as much for his violin virtuosity as his trendsetting dress, and as much for his equestrian skills as his many romantic dalliances. In fact, only one thing kept him from attaining the uppermost heights of his profession and immediately securing his place in music history—he was, in the parlance of his era, a mulatto. (read more)

Whaling the Old Way

Humanities, March/April 2010

“What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?” / “Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices. / “Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them. / “And what do ye next, men?” / “Lower away, and after him!” / “And what tune is it ye pull to, men?” / “A dead whale or a stove boat!” (read more)

David Levering Lewis

Humanities, March/April 2010

“History is a pretty good trade,” says David Levering Lewis. “It’s indoor work and you can go to interesting places.” Of course, this blithe summary hardly does justice to the rigorous work of a scholar whose books are regularly lauded in the academic and popular presses as “scrupulously researched,” “exquisitely detailed,” and, in the case of his biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, “definitive.” (read more)

Miami Rights

Humanities, November/December 2009

On February 12, 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a packed house at the Greater Bethel AME Church in Miami. A film of the event, preserved at Miami Dade College’s Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives, shows a youthful King standing calmly in a neat, dark suit against an unadorned backdrop, delivering one of the most powerful speeches of his career. Its central message is expressed in short, carefully intoned sentences: “We must, and we will, be free. We want freedom now. We want the right to vote now. We do not want freedom fed to us in teaspoons over another hundred and fifty years.” (print only)

Cowhunting in Florida

Humanities, November/December 2009

Tanned retirees, debauched spring-breakers, and oversized talking mice were probably the farthest things from Ponce de León’s mind when on April 2, 1513, he first caught sight of the land mass he would dub “La Florida.” But as the Spanish explorer gazed out from his ship to the lush stretch of newly discovered terra firma beyond, he may very well have thought: “vaqueros!” Cowboys!
(print only)

Swimming Through Libraries

Humanities, July/August 2009

“Call me Ishmael” is undoubtedly the most famous sentence of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; but it is not, despite popular belief, the first—at least, not exactly. (read more)