Humanities

Sponsored by the State Humanities CouncilsALABAMAA two-day symposium on the culture and history of the Alabama Choctaw will take place on September 23 and 24 at the Mowa Choctaw Center in Mount Vernon. The symposium will correspond with a festival featuring...

"Houston, we have a problem." So went the subject line of a February 2000 e-mail written by a graduate student at the University of Maryland. She and another member of our team had identified an error in my work editing Writings by Susan Dickinson, the...

This September the NEH celebrates its fortieth anniversary. To mark the occasion, the Endowment is printing in book form excerpts of the conversations that Chairman Bruce Cole has conducted in HUMANITIES about the nature of the humanities, from history...

A BANNER HANGING OUTSIDE the headquarters of the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C., reminds Joy Austin of what she tries to accomplish every day. It says, "Transforming lives through the power of the humanities," the mission statement for the council."I...

Shishmaref, just south of the Arctic Circle, has no paved roads, television, or running water. The villagers keep connected with the rest of the state with a radio show sponsored by the Alaska Humanities Forum.Like a dozen other state humanities councils,...

Forget the Pony Express.For a number of Guatemalan villages in the 1960s, the best postal service around was Nicholas Hopkins. Hopkins, then a University of Chicago graduate student, was traveling between towns to record different dialects of Chuj, the...

MODERN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY BEGAN WHEN humans started storing language in physical media-scrolls, stone tablets, steles-that existed separately from their brains. By Plato's time in the fourth century BCE, writing was already thousands of years old...

Remembering the 1762 Cherokee Delegation to London"AS TO THE MANNERS OF THE INDIANS, I GRANT THEY HAVE been often represented, and yet I have never seen any account to my perfect satisfaction, " wrote Virginia lieutenant Henry Timberlake in his 1765...

The Curious Creation of West VirginiaTHE CIVIL WAR DIVIDED A NATION, but it also divided a state. On April 22, 1861, five days after Virginia seceded from the United States, the northern and western counties of the state sent delegates to their own pro-Union...