It’s almost our favorite time of year again! October marks National Arts and Humanities Month in the United States, a month-long opportunity to reflect and recognize how the humanities help … Read more
It’s almost our favorite time of year again! October marks National Arts and Humanities Month in the United States, a month-long opportunity to reflect and recognize how the humanities help … Read more
This six-episode season is about the role the humanities have played during the pandemic and in our recovery across the greater United States. Each episode balances two interviews: one that tells a story from a public humanities program about a specific topic and another that takes a broad-ranging look at it with a humanities leader.
L. Danyetta Najoli, co-founder of The Black American Tree Project, explains how the immersive story-telling project’s design evokes a sense of reckoning with slavery’s origins. Dr. Jack Tchen, the Inaugural Clement A. Price Chair in Public History and the Humanities and Director of the Price Institute at Rutgers University, takes a deep dive into histories of dispossession.
Where we are affects what we do, and that relationship extends to civic participation across the nation. From a rural island off the mainland of Amerika Samoa to Philadelphia, a city at the center of national news during the last election cycle, that environment will motivate people’s civic investment in different ways.
Last week, we spoke with Oregon Humanities Executive Director Adam Davis, Delaware Humanities Deputy Director and Senior Program Officer Ciera Fisher, and Humanities Montana Program Officer Samantha Dwyer about their recently launched virtual programs to gather their tips for making community conversations, Zoom calls, and other online discussion programs work for their states.
Those employed with the task of keeping American culture safe and vibrant carry a great, yet unrecognized burden. And in a crisis such as we now face, it is the proper role of the federal government to preserve the cultural fabric of the nation.
“This year’s winners reflect the intimate connections the state and US territory humanities councils have with their people,” said Esther Mackintosh, president of the Federation of State Humanities Councils. “From climate change and sustainability to addiction and recovery, these two programs focused on vastly different audiences and challenges, but were similar in their commitment to address critical issues facing their communities; bringing people together, through the humanities, to acknowledge and respond to their unique needs. We are pleased to present the 2019 Schwartz Prize to both Humanities Guåhan and Ohio Humanities for their outstanding programs.”
“These programs saw significant impact in their local communities, brought people together, promoted understanding and broke down conversation barriers resulting in real change, growth, and empowerment in their states and territories with reverberations that will be felt across the country.” – Esther Mackintosh, FSHC President
In partnership with The Pulitzer Prizes and supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, forty-nine councils will launch hundreds of programs and events exploring the importance of being an informed citizen and what that means in today’s society.
Whether through discussions of literature while hiking, performances of Chautauqua while basking in the sun, viewing documentaries geared toward urban environmental issues, or visiting a local humanities festival, council programs are complementing the adventurous spirit of summer by taking participants on an exploration of both the mind and the outdoors.
Through the use of documentary films, councils across the country are reaching new audiences and sharing previously untold stories of our nation in ways that challenge our understanding of history while promoting community engagement.