Thursday, January 29, 2009
National History Day Invites Ideas
National History Day is a competition among students to create high-quality, high-interest projects. The State Historical Society of Missouri helps Missouri teachers become involved in mentoring students for this challenging competition, and the results have been truly exciting.
The call has gone out for ideas to inspire students in the 2010 competition. The national theme for 2010 will be Innovation in History: Expression, Ingenuity, Enterprise. In Missouri, the student projects will relate that national theme to Missouri history.
Can you think of how a person, place, or event had an impact on Missouri history through innovation; expression, ingenuity, or enterprise? If you've got an idea or two, please send a brief summary by e-mail to NHD Coordinator, Deborah Luchenbill at the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, before the end of April.
Oh, Mo!!
A Thousand Acres for ReadMOre
Why have the publishers of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres resorted to so many book-cover designs? That is the first interesting question in the new Reader's Guide by scholar Kathleen Butterly Nigro for the 2009 ReadMOre project. People in many Missouri towns will read and discuss Smiley's book about...about what? About keeping up appearances? About the culture of agriculture? About family life and its tensions?
Why does one cover show a lone woman "at sea" in an ocean of grain? Why does another focus on two women whose positions create an "X?" Why a quilt? Why a neat hayfield with one round bale?
Jane Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri but spent most of her writing career on the faculty of Iowa State University. A Thousand Acreswon the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. This spring, Jane Smiley will probably tour several of the communities where A Thousand Acres is being discussed. You can find program times and places -- once they are firmed up -- at the ReadMOre web site. You can also download Kathleen Nigro's wonderful discussion guide.
Heritage Tourism E-Community
A Weak Economy Needs Strengthened Humanities
The link below will take you to a long, quite fascinating article on MercatorNet, an ethics blog. It's an essay by John Armstrong, a philosopher-in-residence at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
I'll pull a few quotes from it to entice you to read the whole piece:
"Capitalism is the economic expression of individual liberty. The humanities are the roots of social and personal maturity. To flourish individually and collectively, we need economic liberty; but economic liberty on its own is not sufficient and can be disastrous. Freedom is good only when it is accompanied by maturity and wisdom."
"In the life of an individual, maturity indicates a group of virtues. It suggests the anticipation of danger and the capacity to cope with difficulties. Maturity is displayed in knowledge of one's weaknesses, and in the tailoring of behaviour in the light of this. It builds on education through one's own mistakes and the mistakes of others, and on the ability to hold long-term issues in view and to plan and act accordingly.
"Maturity is shown in the capacity to face unwelcome news, to analyse one's convictions and discover their blind spots. Above all, maturity involves directing one's energies and efforts towards genuinely worthwhile ends: building a real, solid and good life for oneself and one's dependents. But these are only the most obviously practical aspects of maturity. More subtly, wisdom concerns what you esteem: to what degree are your values in touch with the real lessons of experience? How wisely do you accord admiration to others, how independent-minded are you, how resistant are you to cheap seduction, flattery and group thinking?
"The general level of maturity or immaturity -- of wisdom or lack of wisdom -- has the greatest possible consequences for the economic health of a democratic, free-enterprise society. And the present economic crisis is a study in immaturity. This immaturity can be seen within the financial system and more broadly in consumer societies.
"Turning to the humanities, they can be listed under a series of formalised, academic names: history, philosophy, literature, the history of art. But what are the projects that lie behind these academic facades? History is the attempt to understand the past for the sake of accumulating an understanding of the collective human condition. It is, ideally, a school of wisdom in which one becomes mature by learning from the experience of others. Philosophy is, ideally, the project of piecing together our ideas about life, testing them against experience, sorting through their internal tensions; carefully pondering why one thinks what one thinks and attempting to improve one's view of life and the world.
"So it is too, ideally, a school of wisdom. The same holds for the study of art and literature: the project is to become mature, to speed up, enrich and greatly widen a process that we know occurs in individual lives. As we live, memory, thinking, enjoyment, worries and experiences accumulate. In making good sense of these, in digesting their lessons and putting those lessons into practice, we become wise. And we do so through discussion with and observation of those we know."
Yes, it is a long piece, but one I've read three times this morning. It restates and affirms something about the humanities that I came to see here in Missouri when I moved here in 1995 and experienced my "chance of a lifetime." The practice of teaching the humanities is an act of stewardship of intelligence. What we do in family reading, in museum activities, in book discussions is create good conditions for intelligence to grow roots, to expand outwards, to reach upwards for more light. We help unite a more absorbent mind with our capacity for empathy and our sources of energy.
Resolutions for my Imaginary Museum
Monday, January 12, 2009
A Feast of Deadlines
There is nothing like a close deadline to make the eggnog-saturated body rebound from the table or couch and do right now what has been put off too long! Thus, as we approach the final week of the year of 2008, we contemplate the open fields of possibility in 2009...if only we act.
- January 9 - the deadline for the annual Governor's Humanities Awards. This recognition ceremony in the Victorian splendor of our Governor's Mansion generates memories that last a lifetime. The guidelines have been clarified for 2009; there is still time!
- January 15 - the deadline for 2009 Book and Article Prizes of the Missouri Conference on History. The Book Award will be given to the best volume on any historical topic written by a Missouri resident and published in 2008. The winner will receive a $500 prize. Articles eligible for nomination must relate to a Missouri history topic and have been published during 2008 (no restriction on residence of the author). The author of the winning article will receive a $250 prize. Three copies of each book or article should be mailed to: Dr. Gary R. Kremer, Executive Director, The State Historical Society of Missouri, 1020 Lowry, Columbia, MO 65201-7298. For more information, contact: Laura Wilson, The State Historical Society of Missouri, (573) 884-7904, wilsonlo@umsystem.edu
- February 16 - the extended application deadline for the two Smithsonian traveling exhibitions, New Harmonies: Celebrating American Roots Music and Journey Stories. These exhibits, and the services we provide, are fantastic community experiences. Guidelines on our web site.
A Feast of Program Ideas
I'm delighted to report that the terrible economy has not stifled people in Missouri museums from thinking of good things to do! Here is a short list of grants we've made recently. Our grants help local people add value to local institutions. A project might help a museum become more interesting by involving people in the area. A project might help a library and historical society work together on a digitizing project. (I'm hoping to see great things in Poplar Bluff next year because of how the Butler County Historical Society is working with the library.) Here's what I mean about creativity:
- The Nodaway County Museum is trying to make better sense of the World War II material. The museum has created a program to generate oral histories from WWII veterans. Students at Northwest Missouri State University will help the museum in this community outreach. There are more and more good things happening in Maryville; a legacy of decades of "public history" work by Professor Tom Carneal, who was recognized at our Governor's Awards ceremony two months ago.
- The State Historical Society of Missouri launched a speakers bureau a couple of years ago, and the demand grew to exceed the funding. We've just added $10,000 to that bureau to help the State Historical Society in its statewide outreach.
- The Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal began to offer teachers' institutes a few summers ago. The idea is to help teachers from anywhere in the U.S. think of ways to use Twain's books with sensitivity to the treatment of race in the 19th century. The lesson plans from those institutes are on the museum web site, where 23.000 downloads took place in the past year alone! We've provided $10,000 to support three more institutes next summer.
Sameboatness in Missouri
Our museum services are coming together in several places to help local organizations plan together and work together to achieve common goals. Sedalia is one place where collective planning and thinking followed the magnificent restoration of the KATY Depot. Three years ago two gifted museum consultants (Alisha Cole of Kansas City and Carey Kaplan of St. Louis) created a planning exercise for a group representing all the cultural concerns in Sedalia. I was there to see the fruits of their labor, and the experience changed the way our museum services have evolved. Carey and Alisha developed activities that helped people imagine the motivations and interests of various kinds of visitors. By imagining the visitor (as well as who the visitor's aren't), the cultural leaders could develop a vision of a city that could generate better visitor memories. In most human enterprises, we have to remember that our product is a memory. Too many bad memories are toxic for our enterprise, whether we are a hospital, a museum, or a city.
Lately we've begun to nurture cultural planning in St. Joseph and Ste. Genevieve. For 2009, I pray that with "the saints on our side," we won't founder in talk of the economy. No matter how bad times will be, people will seek ways to make life interesting. Museums and libraries and schools and family networks are the institutions that make life interesting. In St. Joe and Ste. Gen, people know they are in the same boat. It's a leaky boat, and it has always seemed to have more than one rudder. Also, there is confusion about whether the boat moves because of sail, oar, or luck. Nothing new about that; it's part of God's plan, apparently. Life would be dull if we didn't have things to sort through and the hope that we can do what our predecessors couldn't.
We have a good list of client organizations for museum work in 2009, but there is room aplenty at this table. Come in, please. I want to bring the best consultants your way next year.
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