The national park idea has been credited to “a wonderful and interesting group of rugged western pioneers.” But as UVM historian Rolf Diamant explains, the inspiration of Central Park, the ending of slavery, and the remaking of government during the Civil War were all critical to the establishment of our first national parks.

In conjunction with her retrospective exhibition at Catamount Arts, Dona Ann McAdams discusses and shows her empathetic black-and-white portraits of performing artists, AIDS activists, political protests, people living with schizophrenia, Appalachian farmers, cloistered nuns, and others.

This event is free and open to the public. Handicapped accessible.

Series Underwriter: St. Johnsbury Academy

Henry David Thoreau advocated for both civil disobedience to unjust political authority and also for nature’s appropriate role in our economic, moral, and spiritual lives. UVM professor Bob Pepperman Taylor discusses the relationship between Thoreau’s political and environmental messages and how they resonate today.

Underwriter: University of Vermont Humanities Center

In this interactive workshop, educator and author Peter Gould helps participants access their own powerful voice by reading, reciting, and performing Shakespeare. Learn how to bring new life to immortal characters! No previous theater training necessary; observers also welcome.

Free to the public and handicapped accessible.

Series Underwriter: St. Johnsbury Academy

America’s growing diversity is changing its ethnic and racial demography for decades to come, with significant implications for human geography. Dartmouth professor Richard Wright discusses emerging patterns of diversity and segregation on national, state, and local levels.

In Willa Cather’s pioneer fiction, landscape is as important as any character in the story. Amherst College professor Michele Barale examines the relationship between Cather’s art and her very tangible earth.

First Wednesdays Series. Douglass and Lincoln — one born a slave, the other born dirt poor — became respectively one of the nation’s greatest orators and one of its greatest presidents. Harvard professor John Stauffer examines their friendship, the similarities in their lives, and their legacies.

Underwriter: Gil Steil Associates

Why do people hold false or unsupported beliefs that are so difficult to change? Dartmouth Professor of Government Brendan Nyhan looks at what makes people vulnerable to misinformation about controversial topics, why facts alone are frequently ineffective at countering misperceptions, and what approaches might be more effective.
Underwriter: Friends of First Wednesdays at the Athenaeum

Derek Boothby, former director of the UN’s Department of Political Affairs, considers how the determination of America’s original settlers to create a society different from the 18th century European model has fared in the long term, and offers a naturalized American’s assessment of whether modern America is all that different from anywhere else.

• “What, exactly, is ‘American exceptionalism’?” The Week, 12/21/2016
• “2017: A Momentous Year” by Derek Boothby, Bennington Banner, 12/28/2016

Statewide underwriters: The Alma Gibbs Donchian Foundation; Vermont Department of Libraries; National Life Group Foundation; Institute of Museum and Library Services.

See all First Wednesdays events HERE.

UVM professor Huck Gutman considers how William Carlos Williams changed American and world poetry forever by creating a new poetic language and new poetic forms.

Underwriter: Bill and Sharon Biddle

(Note: This event is on Thursday October 5!) Released fifty years ago this year, this iconic Beatles album is often regarded as the single greatest rock album ever made. In a multimedia presentation, Beatles music scholar Aaron Krerowicz discusses the album and illustrates the development of its songs.

Read more HERE.

From his birth in the Caribbean to death in a duel, Alexander Hamilton’s
life was part romance, part tragedy—and the inspiration for the
blockbuster Broadway musical. Hamilton biographer Willard Sterne
Randall discusses the man and the musical, with excerpts from its score.
Underwriter: Passumpsic Savings Bank

UVM professor Emily Bernard explores how Beloved argues that America
must reckon with the consequences of our nation’s original sin—slavery.
Underwriter: Gil Steil Associates

Whether around the caveman’s fire or the conference table, no signal is
more important to humans’ interpreting social interactions and future
behavior than the smile. Dartmouth Professor of Psychological and
Brain Sciences Paul Whalen explores how the human brain processes
the facial expressions of others and what these responses mean for
understanding our emotional lives.

Watch Paul Whalen's Ted Talk HERE.

UVM professor Emily Bernard explores how Beloved argues that America
must reckon with the consequences of our nation’s original sin—slavery.
Underwriter: Gil Steil Associates.

Visit Emily Bernard's faculty page HERE.

UVM professor Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio will explain how art influenced politics in Renaissance Florence in a talk at St. Johnsbury Athenaeum on December 7 at 7:00 pm. Her talk, “The Medici Grand Dukes: Art and Politics in Renaissance Florence,” is part of the Vermont Humanities Council’s First Wednesdays lecture series and is free and open to the public.

Professor Di Dio will consider how, despite scandals and even murder, the Medici Grand Dukes maintained their power and prominence for nearly two centuries by giving gifts of art by the great Florentine masters to kings, popes, and emperors.

Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Vermont.  She is a specialist of Italian and Spanish sculpture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; her research has been supported by fellowships from the Ministry of Arts and Culture of Spain, the Kress Foundation, the Medici Archive Project, and Harvard’s Center for Renaissance Studies “Villa I Tatti.”  In addition to many articles and essays, she has published several books: Leone Leoni and the Status of the Artist at the End of the Renaissance, Sculpture Collections in Early Modern Spain (with Rosario Coppel), Leone Leoni: Faith and Fame (with Rosario Coppel), and Making and Moving Sculptures in Early Modern Italy.  She has lectured at the Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Wallace Collection, London, the Istituto di Studi Rinascimentali, Ferrara, Italy, as well as at numerous conferences across Europe and North America.

Read more about the First Wednesdays series Here.

Author Ilan Stavans Shares Inmates' Insights into Hamlet

Celebrated literary critic Ilan Stavans will share his experience teaching Shakespeare in correctional facilities in a talk at St. Johnsbury Athenaeum on November 2 at 7:00 pm. His talk, “Hamlet in Prison,” is part of the Vermont Humanities Council’s First Wednesdays lecture series and is free and open to the public.

Stavans will discuss his teaching of Hamlet in correctional facilities, and share insights his classes have made about the play and revenge, freedom, and redemption.

Stavans is an internationally known, award-winning cultural critic, linguist, translator, public speaker, editor, short-story writer, and TV host, whose best-selling work focuses on language, identity, politics, and history. Born in Mexico in 1961 into a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe, he was raised in a multilingual environment. He is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and other honors, including an Emmy nomination, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Jewish Book Award, the Latino Hall of Fame Award, Chile’s Presidential Medal, and several grants. He is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His many books include Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language and Quixote: The Novel and the World.

Journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Rumor of War Philip Caputo will discuss the treatment of war in his writing in a talk at St. Johnsbury Athenaeum on October 5 at 7:00 pm. His talk, “Putting the Sword to the Pen,” is part of the Vermont Humanities Council’s First Wednesdays lecture series and is free and open to the public.

Caputo will reflect on how, in his work, war is a context in which our contradictory natures play out, often with stark clarity.

Caputo has written 16 books. His acclaimed memoir of Vietnam, A Rumor of War, has been published in 15 languages, sold two million copies since its publication in 1977, and is widely regarded as a classic in the literature of war. He has published dozens of major magazine articles, reviews, and op-ed pieces in publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and National Geographic. He has won ten journalistic and literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for team investigative reporting with the Chicago Tribune. He was born in Chicago, graduated from Loyola University, and served in the US Marine Corps from 1964 to 1967.

May 4 — The Memoir Boom: Who, What, Why
• Irene Kacandes

Dartmouth professor and experimental memoirist Irene Kacandes discusses current approaches to life writing and considers why we continue to love reading about others’ lives. Underwriter: Bill and Sharon Biddle