Providing a Path for Lifelong Learning
John and Tara got together before Fall Break and all the wild times that entails (eh…. grading, actually) to talk about Columbus Day and Northern Ireland’s Marching Season. What kind of factors motivate people to commemorate certain events or people, and why do we choose to use public space to do it?
If your facebook feed is anything like mine, you are seeing a number of memes about Columbus Day. This is one of the more popular: And also: Both of which make me laugh and make good points about the age of European exploration. There are a host of other memes about the holiday from the… Continue reading Why Columbus Day, Anyway?
John and Tara get together to talk about author Colson Whitehead’s visit to Centre's campus this past week and why his award-winning novel The Underground Railroad is so interesting as a contribution to wider historical discussion, our preparation for the semester to come, and some historical context for discussion of the Second Amendment to the… Continue reading Centre Trail Podcast 6: Colson Whitehead visits campus, the spring beckons
This past Monday Centre College hosted a Pulitzer Prize winner: Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad, for which he received this year’s prize for fiction, as well as the National Book Award. We invited Colson as the college had adopted the book as our choice for the first year common reading experience, a practice… Continue reading The Underground Railroad and Using History in Fiction
Last week the Centre College History Program hosted the first of three events this autumn featuring members of our program and colleagues invited from other programs to discuss large historical questions with our students. We chose as our first topic the question of what roles public monuments play in society and how different communities have… Continue reading Past and Present: Public Monuments
A New York Times op-ed published this past Monday has generated a considerable amount of attention, particularly in conservative spaces, with US Senator Ben Sasse among many complaining about its apparent glossing over of the grisly realities of Chinese Communist rule in China. "flaws" = approximately 100,000,000 killed by communism last century, half of them… Continue reading Women in Modern China: Presenting the Past
Jon Earle welcomes Centre student Evan Aroko to discuss representations of Africa in film, specifically around the upcoming release of the Marvel Studios film Black Panther. The film offers of a new and interesting framework for interpreting narratives of violence and Western intervention in Africa, and also fits into a specific present-day context of representations… Continue reading Centre Trail Podcast 5: Black Panther, Africa and Race
This weekend, I had the honor of talking about Governor Isaac Shelby at the unveiling of a memorial at his burial site. The Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) have worked for a long time to put memorials at sites of importance to the Revolution and this was a particularly nice event. It is always… Continue reading A Day with Isaac Shelby
Tara and John talk a little baseball in this episode of the Centre Trail podcast, before Tara hits the road, if only for a few minutes, to visit our colleague Sara Egge for some historical context on how Americans experience and talk about natural disasters.
I thought you all might enjoy a collection of articles and books centered around one person. Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and is also on the faculty in the school of Arts and Sciences. In 1997, she wrote Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, and… Continue reading Historian Spotlight: Annette Gordon-Reed
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