Spring Program 01.22

HUM NITIES NORTH DAKOTA MAGAZINE

the

01.22

SPRING PROGRAM issue

CONTENTS THE SPRING PROGRAM ISSUE 02 NORTH DAKOTA FAMILY ALBUM

by Roddy MacInnes

08 WHAT ARE FACTS FOR? AND WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

by David Bjerklie

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16 THE 10TH AMENDMENT: UNDERSTANDING THE FOUNDERS’ PLAIN MEANING

by David Adler

22 NICE FOR WHAT? INTO WHOSE HANDS SHALL WE COMMIT MYSHKIN’S LITERARY SPIRIT?

by Serge Danielson-Francois

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26 POPULAR V. CRITICAL LITERARY SUCCESS: WHO SAYS???

by Rebecca Chalmers

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32 TEACHING ABOUT THE VIKING PAST IN 2021

by Natalie Van Deusen

36 EMBRACE YOUR INNER HUMANITIES SCHOLAR

by Brian Palecek

HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA MAGAZINE is published by Humanities North Dakota.

To subscribe, please contact us: 701.255.3360 info@humanitiesnd.org humanitiesnd.org

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this magazine do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or Humanities North Dakota.

The Humanities North Dakota Magazine has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.

BRENNA GERHARDT

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR My rotary club recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. I joined the service group a few years ago at the suggestion of my dear friend Mike Mccormack, a retired history professor known for always being the life of the party. It’s hands down one of the best investments I’ve made in myself. While the club’s motto is “service above self,” I find the group enriches me far beyond the community service I offer through our club projects. Rotary is what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls “the third place.” Your first place is your home and family. Your second place is your workplace and coworkers. Your third place is where you gather to relax in public, meet familiar faces, and encounter new ones. It might be a church, a park, a public library, or a service club like mine. While you spend most of your time in your first two places, the third place is critically important to your wellbeing and, by extension, to the health of our civil society and democracy. The third space is an opening for creativity and dialogue that exfoliates your mind. It’s a place of both familiar rituals and unexpected encounters that lift your spirits.

Humanities North Dakota (HND) might be my second place, but I genuinely hope it is your third place. That’s our heartfelt intention when we curate classes and events for you. We try to design spaces where witty conversations and lighthearted banter are the hallmark, and the learning experience is as fun as it is rewarding. HND’s third space is somewhat unique as it exists both in person and online. What holds us together isn’t the state in which we physically live; it’s the state of mind we inhabit when we embrace a culture of curiosity.

There is always room for you at Humanities North Dakota, and I hope you will consider inviting others into our shared space. The company we keep gets better the more our laughter and love of learning amplifies.

Much heart, Brenna

STATEMENT FROM COVER ARTIST, MICHAEL PAUL The role of an artist is to move through life observing light, and smells, and sounds, and capture the essence on a piece of paper or linen, or in a musical score, or written word… It seems to be an impossible task. Often I relate it to dancing, slow dancing if you will. Webster defines dance as moving rhythmically to music. Nature has its own kind of dances. There is the Ice Dance, as it forms in late autumn, ice creates its own tinkling, shifting music. Waves dance with the shore, clouds with trees, light with shadow. I most enjoy the beautiful dance that quiet water makes with earth and sky.

Cover art: Giants That Walk the Earth, by Michael Paul

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Nina with friends. Ellendale, ND, 1917.

Nina Weiste, 1917.

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NORTH DAKOTA FAMILY ALBUM

by Roddy MacInnes

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xcitement builds as I plan to take another seven-hundred-mile road trip from Denver, Colorado to Ellendale, North Dakota. My Colorado home is only a few miles from where the Rocky Mountains rise abruptly from the vast prairie. Traveling West into the mountains, the beauty is everywhere and requires no effort to find. Unfortunately, everyone else is there finding the same beauty. It is the road most traveled.

Heading East and North from my home into the Great Plains, the roads are straight, flat, and empty, perfectly mirroring the landscape.

There’s magic out there, but it demands having no expectations. Nothing jumps out to say, “look at me.” The landscape requires you to meet it halfway. You must want to be there, to be in the mystery.

I put this to the test the first time I drove to North Dakota in 2003. I decided, whenever I felt connected, whenever I could really hear the music, I would stop and take some

photographs. Regardless of where this sense of connection occurred, even by a muddy field, the photographs successfully conveyed my heightened emotional state. I’ve attempted photographing muddy fields without that connected feeling, but those images merely illuminated my absence.

In my wildest dreams, I would never have considered conducting a photography project in North Dakota. Given the choice to work anywhere in the world, North Dakota would have been at the bottom of the list. However, due to the serendipitous—or so I thought—discovery of an album full of modest little photographs, North Dakota became a significant location in my life’s journey. Encountering the trace of a North Dakota woman’s existence in her unspectacular photographs fueled my imagination in the most spectacular ways.

Jim River, (officially the James River) is considered by locals to be the longest unnavigable river in the world. From its source 3

| SPRING PROGRAM ISSUE | in central North Dakota, it begins a lazy sevenhundred-forty-mile journey toward the Missouri River at Yankton, South Dakota. In 1917, sixteenyear-old Nina Weiste left her family farm on the banks of the Jim River near Ludden, North Dakota, and traveled twenty-two miles to begin teacher’s training at the State Normal and Industrial School in Ellendale, North Dakota.

Nina Weiste thrived during her time at school.

She was popular with fellow students and subsequently had many friends. Even though I’ve never met Nina in person, I can tell she was popular because she recorded her Ellendale memories using a Kodak Autographic camera.

I found her memories preserved within a small family photograph album. Because one of her photographs was labeled “Jim River,” we were eventually able to connect.

Photography became an extension of my being. I cannot describe how or why it happened. I simply felt the magic.

I discovered Nina’s family album seventy-six years after her journey to Ellendale in a Denver, Colorado, antiques mall. I was seduced by her images and purchased the album; I felt I was rescuing it from oblivion. Nina was not a skilled photographer, not experienced in basics such as composition and lighting, but she was an impassioned amateur captivated by the medium’s ability to freeze time. However, her reflection is in the faces of everyone she photographed.

My parents kept our family photographs in a cardboard box. Several times a year the box came out and we’d share stories about family history.

I don’t remember many of the stories, but those experiences gave me a sense of being connected to something larger than myself. Apart from a few professional studio portraits, most of our family 4

photographs are amateur snapshots and, like Nina’s family album, represent intimate glimpses into my family history.

As a child, growing up in Argyll, Scotland, I was inspired by how my relatives used photography in their lives. Most of my extended family lived in the city, and we lived in the country. There wasn’t much money, so during summer holidays our home was a popular destination. Typically, each person photographed what they wanted to remember, which is why everyone appears to be happy in the photographs. In my developing awareness, those recorded family memories established a profound connection between photography and happiness.

I began constructing my own family photograph album in 1964 when my Uncle Alex gave me a Kodak Instamatic camera. My first photograph was a portrait of Catriona, the girl next door, who was also my first girlfriend. I photographed her; then she photographed me. From the moment I pressed the shutter release to make my very first exposure, photography became an extension of my being. I cannot describe how or why it happened. I simply felt the magic.

In high school I spent more time looking out the window than at the blackboard. Primary school had been a positive experience, but high school was not. The only subjects I related to were geography and art. At age fifteen I dropped out and began to travel, taking a camera along to record my adventures. In the beginning my use of photography was casual and naïve, the family album genre my only reference. Just as my parents had done, I began filling a cardboard box with memories.

With minimal self-awareness, I put myself in many of my photographs. I now appreciate that doing so produced visual evidence of where I had been and, to the extent that any medium can, confirmed my existence. My parents were my primary audience for my photographs. The ones I chose to share illustrated happy memories but often didn’t tell the whole story.

Early in my adventures I was traumatized by a sexual predator. Incapable of processing the subsequent negative effect on my development,

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My photograph between Nina’s photographs. Our albums are connected. Ellendale, 1917 and 2003.

I consigned the experience to the primitive recesses of my brain. For twenty-five-years the pain festered in darkness. Alcohol became a coping mechanism. My condition was made worse by spending years living a nomadic existence as a minerals prospector in Canada and the United States. Ultimately, Denver, Colorado, became my base, but tents and motel rooms were my home. Unexpectedly, self-portraits portraying my relationship with alcohol and isolation began to appear in my family album, to reveal a more complex personal history.

By midlife, I was spiraling out of control toward self-destruction, but miraculously, a process of reconstruction began to emerge. I enrolled in an undergraduate photography program at Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland. There, my relationship with photography evolved into a more conscious practice. I became cognizant about how photography could function as a lens through which to contemplate my own existence. My perspective regarding what it meant to document life through photography matured—my family album was growing up.

As if I hadn’t convinced myself I’d had enough, after graduation I returned to the United States

and to the destructive lifestyle of isolation and alcoholism. I drank so much alcohol that panic attacks and depression dominated my life. My doctor presented an ultimatum: stop drinking or die. At the same time, I happened to find Nina Weiste’s family photograph album in a Denver antiques mall. Little did I realize the positive impact Nina and North Dakota would have on the continuation of my journey.

A few years later, I was accepted into the Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Midlife crisis became the theme for all my creative output. At the same time, I began a professional relationship with a psychotherapist, a relationship that continued for twelve years. I came to understand the devastating effects sexual trauma has on human development.

The therapist taught me how my mind worked, and photography became a mirror. Consequently, my perspective expanded, but more questions than answers began to emerge.

In 1998, shortly after graduating from Boulder, I secured a teaching position at the University of Denver. It was a period when my artistic output had dried up. I’d lost direction. Though photography had been an integral component of my existence 5

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One person would lead me to another, one place to another, and one idea to the next. I found myself celebrating interconnection.

John Wheelihan, Ellendale, 2007.

for thirty-five years, the confidence that I had known as an undergraduate evaporated in graduate school. I had developed a photographic voice but no longer had the confidence to trust that voice.

By this time, Nina’s family photographs were very familiar; I had been looking at them for ten years and had shared them with every student who visited my office. I felt so connected with the people and places in her photographs that I had an uncanny sense of knowing Nina. I decided to find out more about her and conducted an internet search. The image labelled “Jim River,” led me to the sites of the photographs.

When I arrived in North Dakota for the first time I had an uncanny sense of coming home, which substantiated my primary objective of becoming more conscious of interconnection or, rather, to become more connected. Until then, the project had existed only in my imagination, but now a series of chain reactions started to unfold. One 6

person would lead me to another, one place to another, and one idea to the next. I found myself celebrating interconnection, not as an academic exercise but as a life-enrichment experience.

Another project objective was redefining the concept of “family.” Since having been sexually molested at age sixteen, I have never felt safe or comfortable with intimacy. I live alone, which has benefits, but the downside is isolation. I decided I would set out to explore alternatives. As an experiment, I began to label my social media photo collections as “Family Albums.” Everyone I photographed from then on, whether they knew it or not, whether they wanted it or not, became a member of my extended family.

I have been traveling to North Dakota for many years now. My initial project objectives have been met and consequently enhanced my values. I have adopted a broader definition of what family can be and, by extension, have a heightened appreciation of how all things in the universe are connected.

Interestingly, because I have established such close friendships in North Dakota, my motivation to visit has become more personal.

Nina Weiste graduated from the State Normal and Industrial School in 1919. In attempting to construct a narrative from her photographs, I found that she spent a short time in Idaho before becoming a schoolteacher in Yuma, Colorado.

Apart from the Idaho photographs, and one photograph from Colorado, I have no visual record of Nina’s life after Ellendale. The US Census indicates that she married Jacob Stein, moved to Pueblo, Colorado, operated an insurance company, and died in 1983 at age eighty. Her only child,

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Jean, died in 1993. Jean had no children, so that was the end of Nina’s family line. It was after Jean’s death that I found her mother’s photographs, celebrating such happy memories, though sadly abandoned in a Denver antiques mall.

Nina’s photographs triggered a search that became deeply personal. They created a lens through which I could examine how family memories are constructed and reinforced and allowed me to extend that understanding to my own experiences. The general themes in our photographs are essentially the same and led me to invite Nina into my family album and me into hers. To acknowledge our collaboration, I selfpublished a book, written one hundred years after Nina made her Ellendale photographs. The book celebrates the intersection of our family albums.

Cultural conditioning has attempted to persuade me that I am a unique individual completely detached from everything else. I blame this backwards reasoning for my late arrival to the interconnection-believer’s party. But better late than never. And so, due to my relationship with Nina, I have become acutely aware of the occurrence of chain reactions and, by extension, how absolutely everything is connected. One thing leads to another, always has and always will.

Thanks also to Nina, family has become anything I want it to be. During one of my Ellendale visits, I was invited to participate in a séance with friends. I had not mentioned to anyone my project objective of redefining family. During the séance, it was revealed that, in a previous life, I was the child of two séance participants. They now call me “son,” and I call them “mom” and “dad.” Even in the spirit world, one thing leads to another.

The universe created photography, photography introduced me to Nina, and Nina brought me to North Dakota. When I first arrived, I attempted to see what I imagined Nina had seen.

However, I quickly realized how naïve that was because experience colors everything, especially what we see. The world appears similar but not the same. What I was really looking for in Nina’s photographs was myself. l

RODDY MACINNES has been teaching photography at the University of Denver since 2001. He considers himself to be an autobiographical photographer. In that capacity he has been documenting his life through photography since 1964. He received a Master of Fine Arts in photography from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, and a Bachelor of Arts in photography from Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland. His latest photography project, One Thing Leads to Another (working title) was inspired by an album of photographs he discovered in an antiques mall in Denver, Colorado. A North Dakota woman made the photographs in 1917. Through this project Roddy is exploring issues surrounding the relationships between photography and identity.

LIKE THIS ARTICLE? WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS TOPIC? Roddy is teaching a class called Family Photographs - Mining Personal History during spring 2022. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes 7

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WHAT ARE FACTS FOR? AND WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

by David Bjerklie

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n the past five years, the single piece of political wisdom most frequently quoted, whether in op-

ed pieces, internet forums, or by talking heads on cable news shows, has been this nugget from the late Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who famously advised, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Though Moynihan’s pithy nugget has been invoked countless times, the quote hasn’t been scrutinized as closely as it deserves.

If it had, we might realize just how naive the observation really is. [note to fact-checker: Ok, there’s really no way to confirm that this was literally the most quoted. But I think people will understand that I’m exaggerating for effect. And if there’s no way to confirm, who’s going to argue with me, right?] [note to fact-checker: As I’m sure you’ll quickly discover, attribution to Moynihan is a bit problematic. Almost identical versions of the quote are credited earlier to American financier Bernard M. Baruch (1870-1965) and James R. Schlesinger, U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1973 to 1975. But I think I finessed it with the qualifier “famously,” since it was Moynihan who got the most mileage out of it.] [note to fact-checker: Yes, I realize that “countless times” is hyperbole, but in a sense, it also just means that I can’t count them, right?]

I think about facts a lot and have for most of my adult life. A large part of my job as a freshly-

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hired reporter/researcher at TIME magazine in New York City nearly 40 years ago was to factcheck news stories, to make sure that anything and everything that could possibly be construed as a fact was nailed down or buttoned up. TIME relied on a collaborative approach, in which an entire team of people was thrown at every story.

Reporter/researchers worked with librarians to pull together all relevant background and send out queries to correspondents in the field; correspondents in the field reported the stories, but didn’t write them; writers wrote the stories, but didn’t report them; three levels of editors then edited the stories; after which the reporter/ researchers showed up again to make sure there wasn’t a single word in the story that could be challenged by disgruntled sources or nit-picky readers. This last stage of the process was when the fur flew, with everyone arguing over what was and wasn’t factually sound.

It was an adversarial division of labor that pitted colleagues against each other week after week. This, the powers-that-be had decided, was the most effective way to ensure accuracy. It involved a fair amount of wear and tear on staff, but it worked. Damn few mistakes got through, though when they did, there was hell to pay. It was the reporter/researcher (aka the fact-checker) assigned to the story who had to take the hit. This involved writing an errors report, in which the fact-checker had to explain how such a grievous failure had been allowed to happen. This typically involved a tortured explanation along the lines of “mistakes were made.” The weekly report was

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Illustration by Trygve Olson

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We live in a world in which there are very few claims that won’t be contested by some individuals or groups as fake, false or fraught.

circulated internally and read with fear and loathing, as well as glee. Fact-checking newbies were warned that the policy was three strikes and you’re out.

In any given story, there were easy facts to check: names, dates, titles, that sort of thing.

But the much harder–and far more interesting--challenges were to spot the errors and inaccuracies that snuck into stories via lapses in logic, leaps in reasoning, conclusions wrongly drawn, confusions of cause and effect, tautologies, and specious arguments. Some mistakes betrayed simple ignorance or an unconscious bias, some grew out of omission or the misuse of small facts to hide big facts. Others were purposefully obfuscating or vague, the grinding of various ideological axes, large and small.

I begn my life as a professional fact-checker in 1984. It was only a decade earlier that the factchecking ranks at TIME were exclusively female. And since jobs that are historically female are rarely given their full due, it was no surprise that factcheckers were perceived to be at the bottom of the editorial 10

hierarchy. [note to fact checker: I’m still working on how I can use the year 1984 to invoke George Orwell’s novel and the work of the Ministry of Truth; I’ll run it past you when I come up with something.] [note to fact-checker: No, I don’t have the numbers to support “exclusively female.”

You could maybe check the mastheads from that era and earlier, though I doubt the mastheads go that far back.

And I know the phrase “were perceived to be at the bottom of the editorial hierarchy” is unsubstantiated–as well as a bit defensive on my part. But at TIME, this was common knowledge. And if you think about it, how could that not be true?]

Ok. I promise I’ll stop with the annotation. My point here is that my experience as a TIME fact-checker has been hugely influential in how I look at the world, especially the written world. It has made me acutely aware of how and why facts are moving targets and how complicated the relationships are between facts and

evidence, facts and belief, facts and truth. And spoiler alert: I haven’t sorted it all out yet and doubt I ever will.

We live in a world in which there are very few claims that won’t be contested by some individuals or groups as fake, false or fraught. Have we given up on facts? And if so, how much does that really matter?

Is it futile to pine for a past when the request by Dragnet detective Joe Friday, “Just the facts, ma’am,” was understood by everyone as a perfectly simple proposition?

In a word, yes. It is futile to pine for Joe Friday and naive to subscribe to Moynihan’s view.

Because not all facts are equal.

And yes, there are “alternative facts” and, moreover, everyone (everyone) uses and misuses them. Are facts negotiable?

Sometimes yes. Is everyone entitled to their own facts? Also, sometimes yes, sometimes, no; it all depends. Understanding the nature of facts is a lot trickier than it appears.

We love the idea that facts should speak for themselves.

We tend to think of them as neutral; facts exist. Period.

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But it rarely works that way.

Most facts are moving targets, subject to change. Imagine the range of what you consider to be facts. Begin with physical facts. About the world, your country, your family, your town, your body, your mind. If I hear voices in my head, are those voices facts? Why or why not?

Are experiences facts? Are trauma, boredom, or serenity facts? What are the facts of joy, rage, shame, depression? Are prejudice and bigotry facts?

What are the facts of ideas, music, and art?

In A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Kciences of Wealth and Society, Mary Poovey begins with the question, “What are facts? Are they incontrovertible data that simply demonstrate what is true? Or are they bits of evidence marshaled to persuade others of the theory one sets out with? Do facts somehow exist in the world like pebbles, waiting to be picked up? Or are they manufactured and thus informed by all the social and personal factors that go into every act of human creation? Are facts beyond interpretation? Or are they the very stuff of interpretation, its symptomatic incarnation instead of the place where it begins?”

Poovey is particularly interested in the facts of numerical representation, from the invention of doubleentry bookkeeping to the institutionalization of statistics.

Even with seemingly dry numbers, says Poovey, “facts can never be isolated from contexts, nor can they be immune from the assumptions that inform theories. At the very least, what counts as a fact can never escape the idea that the knowledge that matters is systematic, not simply a catalog of observed but unrelated particulars.”

WHEN DO FACTS FAIL US? Facts do not exist in a vacuum. Facts are anchored in world views, they fit into larger pictures. And in doing so, they can serve–or undermine– different purposes. The 2012 book, Lifespan of a Fact, provides a knock-down, dragout commentary on how an essayist, John D’Agata, who prides himself on the pursuit of truth (with a capital T) while taking liberties with factual details, does battle with a tenacious fact-checker, Jim Fingal, who is determined to draw hard, clear lines between fiction and fidelity. D’Agata’s essay centers on the suicide of a young man in Las Vegas.

There is undeniable drama to how the essayist and factchecker square off over the art and ethics of the essay.

Given my own history as a factchecker, I found it hard not to take sides, but what surprised me was how the account kept prodding me to see the clash of journalistic responsibility and literary license with new eyes.

Were the standard operating procedures I learned as a factchecker and incorporated into my career as a science writer as necessarily set-in-stone as I thought? Was there a case for flexibility; and, if there was, why and when could it be exercised?

In 2018, the book was transformed into a Broadway play by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, and Gordon Farrell. Who knew that fact-checking was the stuff of theater! At one point in the play, after Jim has rattled off a litany of inaccuracies to John and editor Emily, demanding that John admit and rectify the errors, John defends his approach as dedication to a loftier ideal: JIM. If you say an event occurred, readers need to trust that it occurred. This piece rests on the weight of a lot of details; it’s problematic for you to wash your hands of their accuracy.

JOHN. Things don’t rest on weights. Weights rest on things. I’m not washing my hands of anything. I’m saying there’s a world of facts to choose from. The wrong facts get in the way of the story.

Jim and John continue to parry and thrust, but then John drops a bombshell: JOHN. I started with the facts.

I really did. But the more 11

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you know... I let go. [...] I’m not interested in accuracy; I’m interested in truth.

But why can’t the details still line up, asks Jim, who is not persuaded that changing the color of the bricks in the description of a building or stating that it took 9 seconds for the young man’s body to plummet from the Stratosphere Hotel, rather than 8 seconds, as cited in the coroner’s report, or changing the details of another suicide that took place that day in Las Vegas could possibly serve “the truth” of the essay.

What happens, asks Jim, when the “whole, insane internet” starts tearing into the accuracy of these details? “[T]hey’re not going to say ‘Wow, John D’Agata altered certain details in the service of poetic truth,’ they’re going to say, ‘Wow, John D’Agata lied.’” When John dismisses Jim’s concern, Jim answers that by misrepresenting details, “you undermine your argument, you undermine society’s trust in itself.

Which is why facts have to be the final measure of the truth.”

At this point, John asks Emily and Jim a question. Jim immediately knows what John is up to, but Emily is baffled.

JOHN. How long is the coastline of England?

EMILY. Where are you going?

JIM. The mathematician Mandelbrot.

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JOHN: Mathematician, yes, fine, but just listen to me–stop annotating and listen a minute! If you draw an oval around England, Scotland, and Wales and measure the circumference, you get one answer. And of course if you tighten the oval, hug the coast closer and closer, your answer gets more accurate and it also gets smaller. Makes sense.

You’re zeroing in on the truth.

But keep doing it–hug the coastline closer and closer, start digging into every cove and inlet and point and jetty, more and more ‘accurately,’ something strange starts to happen. The answer starts getting larger. Every inlet and jetty has inlets and jetties, and those in turn have inlets and jetties. A thousand miles turns into two thousand miles turns into ten thousand miles–the coastline never runs out of miles.

John’s rhetorical tack is an inspired maneuver, but is precision really the enemy of truth? Facts are what we know about the world right now. And yes, facts change over time, or are superseded by new facts.

We know this, and yet, we still have a hard time accepting them as provisional.

“Knowledge is like radioactivity,” according to Samuel Arbesman, in his book, The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an

Expiration Date. “If you look at a single atom of uranium, whether it’s going to decay–breaking down and unleashing its energy–is highly unpredictable.

It might decay in the next second, or you might have to sit and stare at it for thousands, or perhaps even millions, of years before it breaks apart.

But when you take a chunk of uranium, itself made up of trillions upon trillions of atoms, suddenly the unpredictable becomes predictable. We know how uranium works in the aggregate.”

This parallels what happens with knowledge, no matter what field. “It turns out that facts,” argues Arbesman, “when viewed as a large body of knowledge, are just as predictable. Facts, in the aggregate, have half-lives: we can measure the amount of time for half of a subject’s knowledge to be overturned.”

This constant churn of knowledge also applies to current issues. The facts of climate change, gun control, or Covid are dynamic, and when the facts change, it makes sense that debates should reflect that change. As William Macneile Dixon, a British literary critic born in 1866, once wrote, “The facts of the present won’t sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion.”

The problem, of course, is that we may not want to fit new facts into our views.

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This happens to all of us, including scientists. We all form hypotheses about how the world works; scientists just do it more consciously than the rest of us.

Problems arise, however, as we get increasingly invested in our hypotheses, which creates biases in the way we look at facts, which, in turn, makes it even more difficult to adjust our views. It is also the case that facts don’t necessarily point to a single conclusion. The same evidence that appears to support innocence may sometimes prove guilt when seen from another angle.

Evidence is also, at least to some degree, in the eye of the beholder, depending on whether the beholder is a judge or a jury, a historian, archaeologist, astronomer, psychiatrist, or philosopher. Different objectives demand different standards of evidence. Even in a court of law, the burden of proof between a civil suit and a criminal case is different. A civil case requires only that the preponderance of evidence be in favor of a verdict; in a criminal case, the prosecution bears the burden of proving the defendant is guilty “beyond all reasonable doubt.”

Evidence can vary in quantity and quality; it can be circumstantial or conclusive.

Sometimes there is just not enough of it. As Bertrand Russell famously replied, when asked what he would say to God if asked why he had not been a believer: “Not enough evidence,

God! Not enough evidence!”

Facts and evidence can also be stripped of their validity or made to disappear entirely. I was recently binge-watching the Amazon legal drama, Goliath, and one of the things I was most struck by was the effort that went into either getting testimony into trial or preventing such evidence from ever being considered. At a crucial point in one episode, after a key witness keels over in a medical emergency, the judge directs the jury accordingly: Mr. Cooperman’s health issue means the defense was not given the chance to cross examine him. Not giving the defense the right to confront the witness against them is prohibited by law, unfair, and unduly prejudicial. You are therefore instructed to disregard all of Mr. Cooperman’s testimony. It is not part of the trial record. It is not evidence. You may not consider it in any way. Put it out of your minds. By law it did not happen.

Even the familiar courtroom oath, in which a witness swears to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” can hold plot twists. I can remember when I thought that phrasing was oddly redundant. But like most teenagers, I would come to appreciate that telling only a portion of the truth is a tried and true method of avoiding larger and more problematic truths.

It’s easy to forget that this teen tactic is also routinely employed by experts arguing public policy matters.

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO JUST “STICK TO THE FACTS” AND THAT’S OK We use facts to bolster our arguments and positions, just as we ignore–or explain away– facts that might undermine our positions. At the same time, we almost invariably conflate and confuse facts, beliefs, and values.

And this happens to us in every realm, including our religious beliefs. While faith would seem to be belief or trust in the absence of facts, most believers–as well as non-believers–are more than happy to offer what they consider as evidence in their belief–or nonbelief–in God or human goodness or the soundness of spiritual teachings. Scientists, too, believe in things they cannot prove.

We wouldn’t expect that weighing the evidence for or against religious belief would ever be simple. But what about the evidence for climate change? Shouldn’t that be straightforward? Not necessarily.

There are many sources and categories of facts that apply.

Some facts are relevant to the question of whether climate change is happening. Other facts are relevant to the question of whether–and to what extent– climate change is caused by human activity. Still other facts are relevant to questions of timeframes and feedback 13

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We have a tendency to want to simplify hard problems by seeing them as confrontations between ignorance and knowledge. mechanisms. And still more categories of facts are relevant to the question of whether we can do anything about it, and, if we should, what action would be most or least effective.

And, of course, the issue of climate change is super-charged in ways that leave facts and evidence by the wayside. Michael Specter, author of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, seems to cry out in frustration: “No amount of data will convince climate denialists that humans have caused the rapid, devastating warming of the Earth.” But even if that’s true, it raises the question of what, then, are our options for any meaningful discussion of the issue?

First of all, we need to accept the reality that the facts of an issue are, for many people, superseded by other considerations. It is certainly possible to acknowledge the reality of climate change, for example, and yet want to do nothing about it because one feels it is futile or too expensive or not your problem. That might dismay us, but we need to recognize that it’s not about facts or evidence. Similarly, it’s 14

possible to acknowledge the usefulness of vaccines and yet not want to be made to comply. It is naive to think that the determining variable in all arguments could or should be facts and evidence. Values and self-interest, however narrow or misguided we judge them to be, are often key factors.

As someone who has spent his professional life writing about science, I will always be on Team Science. And yet it made me scratch my head to see all the yard signs during the 2020 election that proclaimed, “Science is Real,” or “I Believe in Science,” or, my favorite, “Science Doesn’t Care What You Believe In.” Though I certainly identify with the intent of those signs, I also believe they miss the larger point. “Believing in Science” doesn’t guarantee a course of action, let alone an outcome. It never will. We have a tendency to want to simplify hard problems by seeing them as confrontations between ignorance and knowledge. But most really hard problems can’t be solved by “The facts, ma’am; just the facts.”

Part of the problem is that our understanding of science is often naive. According to the late evolutionary biologist

Richard Lewontin, in a 1997 issue of The New York Review of Books, we are “faced with a contradiction for which there is no clear resolution. On the one hand science is urged on us as a model of rational deduction from publicly verifiable facts, freed from the tyranny of unreasoning authority. On the other hand, given the immense extent, inherent complexity, and counterintuitive nature of scientific knowledge, it is impossible for anyone, including non-specialist scientists, to retrace the intellectual paths that lead to scientific conclusions about nature. In the end we must trust the experts and they, in turn, exploit their authority as experts and their rhetorical skills to secure our attention and our belief in things that we do not really understand.”

So while we may believe we are following the facts of science–and want others to do the same–what we are actually doing is following the experts in which we have confidence.

Which is why most of us look for a consensus of experts, rather than attempt to pick and choose among outliers. But our own reliance on experts should nonetheless help us realize

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that mistrust and resentment of experts can fuel denialism. Or at the very least, a deep skepticism.

This goes for military experts as well. It was at a Pentagon news conference on Feb. 12, 2002, five months after 9/11 and a year before the invasion of Iraq, when a question from NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski prompted an answer by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that struck some as comic and others as unusually philosophical: JIM MIKLASZEWSKI: In regard to Iraq weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, is there any evidence to indicate that Iraq has attempted to or is willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction?

Because there are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations.

DONALD RUMSFELD: Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns–the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

It wasn’t the sort of answer

the reporters were looking for, so CNN correspondent Jamie McIntyre tried to press Rumsfeld further.

JAMIE McINTYRE: [...] He asked you if you knew of evidence that Iraq was supplying–or willing to supply weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

important role in the debate that preceded that military action.

But it was hardly the only factor.

Facts–and the experts who wield them–will never be as neat and tidy as we’d like. Not in science, not in medicine, and certainly not in politics. Facts rarely provide the last word. l

After McIntyre and Rumsfeld exchanged some backand-forth, Rumsfeld tried a rephrasing: DONALD RUMSFELD: I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.

JAMIE McINTYRE: But we just want to know, are you aware of any evidence?

Because that would increase our level of belief from faith to something that would be based on evidence.

DONALD RUMSFELD: Yeah, I am aware of a lot of evidence involving Iraq on a lot of subjects. And it is not for me to make public judgments about my assessment or others’ assessment of that evidence. I’m going to make that the last question.

It is clear that the U.S. invaded Iraq for complicated reasons. And evidence–or the lack of evidence–played an

DAVID BJERKLIE has been a science reporter, writer and editor at TIME Magazine, TIME For Kids, and TIME Books since 1984, as well as a freelance contributor to national and international magazines and newspapers.

He has been a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at M.I.T.; a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow; a National Association of Science Writers Travel Grantee, and a National Science Foundation Media Fellow at McMurdo and South Pole Stations in Antarctica. In recent years, he has written extensively on mental health, and is also currently developing a journalism mentorship program for indigenous Arctic youth.

LIKE THIS ARTICLE? WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS TOPIC? David is teaching a class called What Is A Fact? during spring 2022. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes 15

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The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

— Tenth Amendment to the Constitution

THE 10TH AMENDMENT:

UNDERSTANDING THE FOUNDERS’ PLAIN MEANING

by David Gray Adler

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ince the dawn of the republic, the 10th Amendment has been misconstrued, exploited and abused to advance notions of state sovereignty and revolutionary legal theories, which, if effectuated, would have turned the Constitution upside down. This last, seemingly innocuous, provision of the Bill of Rights has been invoked at various moments to justify nullification, secession, civil war and segregation.

At bottom, partisans have viewed the 10th Amendment as a second Supremacy Clause, a constitutional power designed to hobble the national government and render it subservient to states. There is no mystery to the manipulation of this amendment to such ends. It begins and ends with an indefensible reading of the provision.

It is a virtual certainty that no provision of the Constitution has been more frequently misquoted—innocently or deliberately—than the 10th Amendment. On any given day someone, somewhere, perhaps a U.S. Senator, state legislator, politician, pundit, or commentator will intentionally or inadvertently insert into the text of the 10th Amendment the word “expressly,” an adverb that was proposed, but rejected, by members of the First Congress that drafted the Bill of Rights. Such a facelift would render the 10th Amendment unrecognizable and dramatically change its meaning, scope, and impact. This version of the 17

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When the First Congress considered the 10th Amendment, the anti-federalists had proposed the insertion of the word “expressly” but the suggestion was defeated.

10th Amendment would strictly limit Congress to the exercise of those powers explicitly enumerated in the Constitution and eliminate altogether the doctrine of implied powers. In this alternative universe, the provision would read: “The powers not expressly delegated to the United States” are retained by the states.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court has committed this cardinal error in constitutional construction.

In 1918, in Hammer v. Dagenhart, Justice William R. Day recklessly declared that it should never be forgotten that “the powers not expressly delegated to the National Government are reserved” to the states and the people by the Tenth Amendment. Justice Day could not have reached this conclusion without misquoting the text of the 10th Amendment, since the word “expressly” is not mentioned in the text. He also had to ignore judicial precedent since Chief Justice John Marshall, in the landmark case of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), had held that the omission of the term “expressly” left questions of whether a particular power had been delegated to the national government to be answered by a “fair construction of the whole instrument.”

Justice Day also had to adopt a position that was historically inaccurate. When the First Congress considered the 10th Amendment, the antifederalists had proposed the insertion of the word “expressly” but the suggestion was defeated.

The campaign to incorporate the word 18

“expressly” in the 10th Amendment reflects historical disputes centering on the relationship between the national and state governments and their respective powers under the Constitution.

America’s first constitution, The Articles of the Confederation, adopted in 1783, declared in Article 2: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” In drafting the Articles of Confederation, states jealously guarded their sovereignty and thus grudgingly, indeed sparingly, delegated only a few expressly stated powers to the national government, which was, by design, weak and inferior to state governments.

James Madison introduced the Bill of Rights to his colleagues in the House of Representatives in June of 1789. On August 18 and 21, the House considered Madison’s proposal of what became the 10th Amendment. His proposal was embraced in language that barely differed from the final version. Thomas Tudor Tucker of South Carolina, however, introduced a motion to limit the federal government’s powers to those “expressly” enumerated in the Constitution. Madison was quick to object to Tucker’s proposal to add the word “expressly.” Madison stated on the floor of the House that “it was impossible to confine a Government to the exercise of express powers; there must necessarily be admitted powers by implication, unless the Constitution descended to recount every minutia.” Roger Sherman of Connecticut agreed with Madison, and drew a conclusion from what he considered common practice. “Corporate bodies,” he observed, “are supposed to possess all powers incident to a corporate capacity, without being absolutely expressed.” Tucker’s motion was defeated by a two to one margin in the House.

The overwhelming rejection of Tucker’s proposal was attributable to the widespread understanding in Congress that the insertion of the word “expressly” in the Articles of

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Confederation had so debilitated the national government as to render it incapable of handling the numerous problems and challenges that confronted the young republic. Justice Joseph Story, the most scholarly of Justices, observed in his magisterial three-volume Commentaries on the Constitution, published in 1833: “The consequence was, that congress were crippled at every step of their progress; and were often compelled by the very necessities of the times to usurp powers, which they did not constitutionally possess; and thus, in effect, to break down all the great barriers against tyranny and oppression.”

It followed, Justice Story stated, that the framers of the 10th Amendment studiously avoided repetition of the critical mistake that undermined the Confederation Congress. In contrast, in terms that reflected the arguments of Representatives Madison and Sherman in Congress, Justice Story declared that, in the drafting of the Constitution, “there must necessarily be admitted powers by implication.”

Story derided the efforts of those who sought to smuggle the word “expressly” into the 10th Amendment. He resented the “ingenious disguises” by which some attempted to import the word “expressly” as little more than an exercise in obfuscation, the distortion of the text that is “clear and defined.” He added, “no reasonable man would contend for an interpretation founded neither in the letter nor in the spirit of an instrument.” He eyed, warily, a future in which obfuscation of the text of the Constitution became a common interpretive method: “Where is the controversy to end, if we desert both the letter and the spirit?”

There is nothing in the history of the adoption of the 10th Amendment to indicate that it is anything more than a declaration of the relationship between the national government and the state governments, as established by the Constitution. The national government would enjoy those powers enumerated, and reasonably implied, in the Constitution. In fact, The Necessary and Proper Clause, found in Article

1, section 8, paragraph 18 of the Constitution, grants to Congress authority to pass laws to carry into execution its express powers. Given the clear aims of the Congress that framed the 10th Amendment, how can we, for purposes of determining which powers are retained by the states, understand its language, as set forth in three separate clauses?

The first clause of the 10th Amendment highlights the category of “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution.” Which powers are not delegated to the national government? Citizens can scan the provisions of the Bill of Rights to acquire a quick understanding of powers that may not be exercised by the national government. For instance, Congress is barred by the First Amendment from passing laws that “abridge” freedom of speech and freedom of religion, as well as freedom of the press. Congress, moreover, is prohibited from suspending the writ of habeas corpus. This question invites citizens to be interpreters of the Constitution to ascertain which powers are denied to the national government. Once more, the Constitution is personal; we readers are able to draw some pretty fair judgments for ourselves.

The second clause of the 10th Amendment speaks of those powers that might be granted to states if they are not forbidden by the Constitution. Again, we ask ourselves, which powers are denied to the states? In Article 1, section 10 of the Constitution, several powers are forbidden to the states. For example, states are prohibited from exerting control over foreign affairs, the monetary system, and both foreign and interstate commerce. And, among others, states may not interfere with the obligation of contracts.

Finally, a citizen-as-interpreter can discern the constitutional prohibition of powers to both the national and state governments. Thus, neither authority may enact bills of attainder, ex post facto laws or grant titles of nobility.

This simple exercise in deductive reasoning will equip American citizens with a working 19

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knowledge of which powers are reserved to the states, although, to be sure, in the litigious world that we inhabit, there will always be lawsuits asserting national or state control over various activities. It could hardly be otherwise when political agendas and dearly-held policies and programs are at stake.

What is clear to disciplined readers of the Constitution is that the 10th Amendment, as Justice Harlan Fiske Stone wrote for the Supreme Court in 1941, in United States v. Darby Lumber Co., “states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered. There is nothing in the history of its adoption to suggest that it was more than declaratory of the relationship between the national and state governments as it has been established by the Constitution before the amendment.”

The history of the 10th Amendment, including the role that it has played in the assertion of states’ rights controversies, the secession crisis and the civil rights struggles of the 20th Century, represents a fascinating chapter in our nation’s constitutional history. Those clashes and controversies, like the debates surrounding the scope and nature of other constitutional amendments, are worthy of further study and consideration.

That’s precisely what we will undertake in the winter and spring of 2022, in a class on constitutional amendments that I am fortunate to be offering through Humanities North Dakota. I hope you will enroll in our class and join our riveting discussion. I promise it will be a worthwhile intellectual journey. l DAVID GRAY ADLER is President of The Alturas Institute, a non-profit organization created to promote the Constitution, gender equality, and civic education. A recipient of teaching, writing and civic awards, Adler has lectured nationally and internationally, and published widely, on the Constitution, presidential power and the Bill of Rights. He is the author of six books, including, most recently, The War Power in an Age of Terrorism, as well as more than 100 scholarly articles in the leading journals of his field. He is currently writing a book on the landmark Supreme Court decision in Reed v. Reed, which had its origins in Idaho and transformed the law for American women. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will write the foreword to the book, the research and writing of which is supported by a research fellowship from the Idaho Humanities Council.

LIKE THIS ARTICLE? WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS TOPIC? David is teaching a class called Toward a More Perfect Union: Amending the Constitution during spring 2022.

Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes 20

The history of the 10th Amendment represents a fascinating chapter in our nation’s constitutional history.

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NICE FOR WHAT? INTO WHOSE HANDS SHALL WE COMMIT MYSHKIN’S LITERARY SPIRIT?

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Care for me, care for me, you said you’d care for me There for me, there for me, said you’d be there for me Cry for me, cry for me, you said you’d die for me Give to me, give to me, why won’t you live for me?

– Drake, “Nice for What?”

by Serge Danielson-Francois

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n a world that is sometimes cynical, often transactional, and occasionally cruel, why would anyone choose to be kind? Maybe religious conviction or moral yearning explain selflessness in the abstract, but a broken beautiful world breaks the earnestness of many and the steadfastness of most. We have, in general, become accustomed to the utilitarian calculus of “what’s in it for me?”

Dostoevsky and Kurosawa reject this morose disposition and offer, in their versions of The Idiot, two countercultural portraits of what it means to be human.

When Prince Myshkin introduces himself early in Dostoevsky’s work, he declares “I believe that I am the last and only one.” The reader comes to appreciate the singularity of a man who embraces meekness and naivete as guidestars in a world where Rogozhin, Nastasya Fiippovna, Totsky, General Epanchin, Ganya Ivolgin perform their expected social roles and forfeit authenticity in favor of advantage. They are egoists drawn to each other by ambition, avarice, and killer social instincts. Myshkin, by contrast, is portrayed as Christian love incarnate.

Dostoevsky, inspired by his reading of Renan’s Life of Christ, sought “to portray a perfectly beautiful man.” As we breach the second decade of the 21st century, we may rightly ask whether such perfect beauty still compels, still persuades.

We may wonder if the gravitational center of our shared longings has fundamentally shifted away

from “us” to “us vs. them.” Is it an illness to hold dear the welfare of all? Myshkin is sickly and pale as he enters St. Petersburg, and yet, he has the strength to be in communion with the world.

Myshkin creates community wherever he goes. Charism explains his charisma. He invites vulnerability because he himself is vulnerable.

As Aglaya, General Epanchin’s daughter, “an absolute beauty who had begun of late to attract considerable attention in society” observes, Myshkin is “a man, tremulously reaching out to the man in all who wish to listen to him, who have need of him.” When Myshkin recounts his memory of an execution by guillotine to Epanchin’s servant, he makes a stand against the existential anguish of dread and modernity’s lies about meeting the suffering of the world.

Myshkin reminds us that neither surrender nor indifference is an ethical response to this suffering.

Myshkin also answers the cry of dereliction of a nihilist world, a world that believes that nothing matters, that compassion is superfluous and human decency optional. Myshkin practices anticipatory forgiveness. He preaches genuine conversion. He finally meets the crowd (something Jesus avoids) at a disastrous debutante gathering where Aglaya and Nastasya trade barbs, and both trigger the novel’s tragic denouement. Myshkin cannot escape death, and the reader further succumbs to the centripetal 23

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pull of sacrificial love and fleeting hope.

Kurosawa transforms this Russian Christ-like figure into a postwar Japanese holy fool. Kinji Kameda comes to us from a mental asylum rather than from Switzerland. He both conforms to and defies modern expectations for a cinematic hero: he has an improbable origin story but responds to unearned suffering with charity rather than revenge. Defying convention, he is a wounded healer who seeks to make the dissolute Taeko (our Japanese Nastasya) whole. The near apocalyptic setting for this morality play mirrors fittingly the selfish wasteland that our recent pandemic laid bare: in our world, rather than Kinji Kameda’s, anxiety deepens social fissures, and scared, broken people find little bandwidth to appreciate the cross borne by another.

Kurosawa’s film invites us to reflect on the countercultural kindness of strangers. How shall we account for Kameda’s gift of self without any expectation of reciprocal love? The director makes no claim about whether such self-emptying is redemptive or whether it can balance out the passionate, rational egoism of Akama (our Japanese Rogozhin). Still, Kurosawa forces the viewer to witness “the destruction of a pure soul by a faithless world.”

Both Dostoevsky and Kurosawa are fascinated by a question that Drake rode up the music charts in 2018: “Nice for What?” When we consider the costs of selflessness through the lens of gender, we must acknowledge how often women walk in Myshkin and Kameda’s shoes. Rather than a woman’s precipitating the fall of a good man, women must overcome the “giving tree “ social expectations that demand their self-immolation.

This modern commentary on gender should prompt us to revisit the Aglaya, Nastasya, and Taeko characters in the literary and cinematic adaptations of The Idiot. We should consider more carefully whether readers and viewers make heroes of men who suffer on women’s behalf more readily than women who embrace caregiving out of love. Both the novel and the film seek to contrast spiritual and physical beauty, idolizing the former 24

in a man and disparaging the latter in a woman.

If beautiful souls still merit our praise, we should appreciate them everywhere they command our gaze.

Enlightened self-interest has political currency today. Rarely are we enjoined to cheer for the humble, to recognize the meek, to applaud those who draw attention away from themselves. The Idiot, in both its literary and cinematic guises, makes an argument for love as self-erasure. Such an argument is complicated by the historical evidence for disparate gendered assessments of what kindness entails. We can no longer settle for a lost woman inspiring the kindness of a found man.

Such kindness kills.

Myshkin may indeed be the only and the last prince if we fail to question our ethical commitments in a world where blinding abundance and eye-opening want are juxtaposed for our amusement. Kameda’s destruction may well be futile if we do not internalize the interdependence of all subjective beings, both men and women.

Our faithlessness is rooted in our reluctance to abandon ambition. When we embrace the alternate heroism of sacrifice and steer clear of the arrogance of self-immolation, we may approach the elusive perfection that so tantalized Dostoevsky and Kurosawa. l SERGE DANIELSON-FRANCOIS teaches Humanities at Academy of the Sacred Heart. He is a public intellectual who leverages classical Western philosophy to advance contemporary conversations about issues of conscience. Serge earned his degree in History (B.A.) from Swarthmore, in Information Resources and Library Science (MA) from the University of Arizona and in Educational Technology (MS) with a concentration in Training and Performance Improvement from Lawrence Technological University.

LIKE THIS ARTICLE? WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS TOPIC? Serge is teaching a class called Nice for What: Prince Myshkin/Kinji in Dostoevsky and Kurosawa’s Artistic Imaginations during spring 2022. Register at humanitiesnd.org/ classes

HUMANITIES ND

MEMBER PROFILE

RITA KELLY An oldie (1995) but a goodie: Retired Rita Kelly and granddaughter Demi pretend to be gargoyles on Rita’s deck. Demi was encouraged by Rita to imagine they were attached to the side of a building whose roof diverted runoff water through their mouths.

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ita Kelly takes a photo every five years so her obituary doesn’t run with a photo from 1954.

This project isn’t surprising if you know Rita.

In 2004, after working for thirty years as a teacher, Department of Public Instruction employee, assistant principal, and principal, she retired at the young age of 55. She was finished with her formal career, but her love of education kept growing in her retirement through travel, adventure, and engagement with the humanities.

As a Fulbright exchange teacher at Price’s College in Fareham, England, Rita had been delighted to learn that the English still had the tradition of naming their homes, not as an affectation, but as a belief statement. She embraced this tradition by naming her apartment Wnderer’s Cove and her car license plate became Wnderer as well. It is not a typo. “The missing vowel is both “o” and “a”,” Rita said. “Because I am a wonderer [and] I am a wanderer. And wandering always leads me to wonder ever more about the world in which I live.”

Rita estimates she has traveled to forty-five or fifty countries, five or ten of them multiple times to explore different parts. “I’m not traveling to tick off the boxes,” Rita said. “I need to learn the way I need to breathe.” Traveling also challenges Rita’s assumptions. “We are often afraid of, or critical of, what we don’t understand,” Rita said. “Travel is the enemy of ignorance. The more I travel, the more trusting and loving I become.”

And so is lifelong learning. Rita has been a member of Humanities North Dakota for ten years, and her favorite HND class so far is one she took on The Odyssey and Moby Dick, taught

by George Frein. “Participants represented farflung locales and backgrounds, and the course leader was not only a gifted 88-year-old professor, but also a curious, engaged, life-long learner,” Rita said.

“As I child I was struck by the verse, ‘For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,’” Rita said. “In recent years I have begun to focus on making more significant financial contributions to support those ventures that reflect and act on my values. It’s not about the amount of money you make but the ways in which you choose to allocate it.”

Education is Rita’s heartbeat. In fact, inspired

by Tom Brokaw, she and her husband had one of his quotes about the importance of a free, public education inscribed on their shared tombstone: “[Public education] is the underpinning of our cultural and political system. It is the great common ground. Public education . . . is the engine that moves us as a society toward a common destiny. . . . It is in public education that the American dream begins to take shape.”

Rita’s love for the humanities is best embodied in her belief that “American democracy depends on an informed society.” l 25

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POPULAR V. CRITICAL LITERARY SUCCESS: WHO SAYS???

by Rebecca Chalmers

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ecently, as we discussed a novel on the way to our parked cars, a close friend remarked, “You know, sometime, we need to have

a longer conversation about books, probably over a bottle of wine, so you can explain to me who decides what constitutes literature.” I recorded my response—woefully inadequate and far more smug than I had meant it to sound—as a swing and a miss (amiss). I chuckled, “We do,” by which I almost implied, and she almost certainly inferred, professors of literature. She sighed, “Right.” What I meant to say is that literature is whatever we, the whole collective “we,” decide it is, but I knew what she meant. Oftentimes books that most folks find off putting in the extreme achieve a sort of critical success or elevation to “classic” (whatever that term means) status that demands fuller exploration.

Part of the problem, of course, is the term “literature” itself and the indiscriminate way we use it to refer to pretty much any kind of written material. I’m reminded of a time when, on a college-visitation trip, I had ferried our younger daughter to a select gathering for potential students at a well-known, renowned North Carolina institution of higher education. At the end of a particularly informative presentation, the speaker noted that we could “find literature about the many grant opportunities on the table at the rear.” I murmured something sotto voce about who might have written such mesmerizing “literature,” whereupon my daughter whipped around, eyes rolling, practically hissing through gritted teeth, “Moooommmmm!” My sarcasm then, as is frequently the case with my offspring, had failed to amuse.

On the other end of the spectrum, we might also hear “literature” uttered in hushed tones with a decidedly clipped British accent and immediately discount the book being discussed by some academician or critic as too hifalutin or posh for us, eyes rolling like those of my then-teenaged daughter. When we reject such discussions so quickly, though, we may be shortchanging ourselves by ignoring wonderful, possibly life-changing, reading opportunities. How do we, then, decide what to read, what’s worthy of our attention?

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Even when I don’t feel at all judgmental about what anyone else reads—ever—I admit to what might look like snobbishness about the fiction I read. It’s usually the result of time and its inexorable passing that I find myself in a mad rush to read pieces worth the precious hours they demand and far more selective about my choices than I might have been at another time in my life.

For another, I sometimes dismiss whole genres from consideration: romance, fantasy, horror, sci-fi (Atwood and a couple of other futurists excluded), most historical fiction—generally, no, thanks.

A good mystery, well written and quirky—yes, please. I may own all of P.D. James’s output, for example. My personal selection process can, then, reduce my literary vision, keep me from paying attention to what’s popular or current,

and increase the likelihood that I could miss a potentially desirable read.

Once, with the Harry Potter craze at full intensity, a dear friend and university colleague noticed that Harry and his cohorts, though loved by many friends and family members, hadn’t made an appearance in my reading queue, that (Horror!) I’d never read a single one—“not even the first?” he queried—in the series, and decided to bring me into the real world. Not only did he purchase a book for me, but he went even further: he ordered a set of Hogwarts stationery and had Albus Dumbledore pen a short accompanying note of disappointment at my shortcomings.

My friend’s project wasn’t entirely successful.

I did read the book, recognized its appeal right

How do we, then, decide what to read, what’s worthy of our attention?

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away, but found it a bit too reductive and childish for my tastes. . . so shoot me. Every book isn’t for everybody. Still, popularity has its benefits; literary success in one’s own day is elusive enough that it should be celebrated. So I acknowledge, with profound respect, J. K. Rowling’s success with these popular books, I delight in the way that they promoted reading, and I rejoice at the way that they drew such anticipatory crowds to bookstores in advance of each release that they rivaled and surpassed the American crowds that had waited on docks over a hundred years earlier for the latest offering from another Brit, Charles Dickens.

Sometimes, like an eager Harry Potter fan, I get intrigued by the buzz surrounding a novel and decide to read it to see what all the fuss is about.

Thus, several years ago, much to my husband’s abject embarrassment, I sat on the beach one summer and read, without the protection of a plain-brown wrapper, Fifty Shades of Grey. When I returned to my university classroom in the fall, I confessed to my English majors that I’d done so, and he was distressed all over again that I’d even mentioned it. I shrugged. It was, in my estimation, the most poorly edited book I’d ever read and, sexual titillation notwithstanding, an easy dismissal. One of that trilogy was enough.

My husband liked the writing of another popular writer, John Grisham, and read his books eagerly as they were released. Both Rowling and Grisham have made gobs of money, not only because their books are popular and successful but also because Hollywood has adapted these books and made them into blockbuster films.

Although I have read one Grisham novel—his first, A Time to Kill—I did so because it was a component of a series of books on the theme of “And Justice for All” that I was teaching at the time, and it was made into a good film as well.

Otherwise, though I’ve watched some (most?) of the films, I’ve often steered clear of the novels.

For the most part, I am discriminating in my reading selections and make no secret of that practice. One of my closest friends goes nowhere 28

without access (digital, if not hardcover) to what she calls “trashy novels,” a designation imposed on her reading choices by another bookish sort. But the books she reads are not trashy, really, in any sense. She scours book reviews in The New York Times, routinely watches online author discussions, takes book suggestions from pretty much anyone or from any number of NPR programs she follows, and makes careful selections. She may well be the most inveterate reader I have ever known. Her yearly reading stats—from our local library alone—put me far, far behind her count. I am no competition at all. While she likes her easy, amusing reads (read: “trashy novels”), she reads the good stuff as well and lots of it. And even so, she has admitted several times—though I disabuse her of this notion each time—that she hesitates to recommend a book to me because she doesn’t want me to be disappointed. Really? She’s a reliable and invaluable source—much more than I would be—on what’s happening in the current literary marketplace, yet she doesn’t believe that her opinions matter. They do.

So what makes this issue of literature and how we think of it so problematic? Long ago, I heard/read/discovered—can’t recall now when or where—a good explanation about how to think about fiction of all kinds, and I use it frequently in discussions about what we read: fiction can, in almost all cases, be quite broadly divided into two general categories—escapist fiction or interpretative fiction. As a literary scholar with years of academic work and an excessively healthy appetite for literary theory, more often than not, I read and have taught interpretive fiction; but I am ever mindful that what has at one time been discounted as unworthy of critical attention could later make its way into the canon of literature to which most universities subscribe.

I’ve seen it happen with regularity.

The “canon debate,” as it’s known, goes on and will inevitably continue as we expand our thinking about the books we consider worthy

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of our scholarly attention. Literature—no matter the genre—reflects the time from which it arises.

For generations, universities taught a literary canon that comprised the work of dead, white, European men, which meant that the work of whole generations of women, people of color, indigenous peoples, people of other cultures around the world, LGBTQ+ people (if identified at all) were excluded and, with that exclusion, a wealth of important literary contributions, some of them lost forever. Literary scholars thankfully continue to expand the canon horizons with a variety of approaches, to dig for lost treasures that would not/did not conform at all to the expectations of earlier academic coursework, and our reading is the richer for such investigation and research. While academics do largely decide what they teach, they are ever mindful of the expanding canon and the omnipresent “fear of omission” in making course decisions: how to include the valuable texts of the past, while including the texts that were marginalized or ignored completely in the past, while staying current with newly-arrived important reads—it’s a genuine dilemma.

But, regarding escapist v. interpretative fiction, my friend’s “trashy novels” designation can prove instructive. Most of these easy-read novels provide readers what I’d call a “Calgon, take me away” experience. Anyone of a certain age will recall that old television commercial: a harried mother, seeking relaxation, sinks into a Calgon-infused tub while, outside the bathroom door, her family clamors for attention. Escapist literature provides us that kind of getaway. It may well surprise, intrigue, engage, amuse, horrify, titillate, and keep us in its thrall from beginning to end; but, once our reading is behind us, our commitment to the text is over. . . and we’re on to the next.

One of my mother’s longtime friends, Lucille, read incessantly, gobbling up a steady diet of romance fiction (bodice-ripping cover art was a dead giveaway). When I’d ask what she was

reading or who wrote it, she’d say, “Oh, I don’t know, Rebecca. I may even have read this one before. They all begin to read alike.” Then she’d laugh and keep on reading. Who wrote it or why made no difference at all, but, in the moment, she enjoyed these pieces of formula fiction in the same way that she might enjoy a television show but not be able to identify the names of its stars or much of anything else about it. They diverted and entertained her, and that’s all she asked of them.

As a rule, such escapist literature—formula fiction, in particular—won’t challenge us in any significant way. It easily entices us and demands very little of us. In such plot-driven texts, familiar diction is often cleverly rendered and can be delightful; the characters—even when somewhat out of the ordinary—will fall into easily manageable categories; and the piece as a whole will likely reinforce our own views of the world or, at the very least, not make us feel terribly uncomfortable about how we see it.

While we regularly see crossovers--books that achieve both popular and critical success--in fiction, bestsellers sell well for a reason: readers like them. Some bestsellers do meet the exacting standards of an academic critic/scholar. Many don’t. These books simply have to connect with their readership. Readers let authors know what they like, and many authors give it to them. . .repeatedly. As fans of the old Seinfeld would certainly tell you, “not that there’s anything wrong with that”; still, a bestseller-list approach to book selection can prove somewhat limiting.

Being popular with the reading public doesn’t guarantee that a book is necessarily good (See the aforementioned Fifty Shades of Grey) or, more importantly, intellectually stimulating or fulfilling.

Interpretive fiction, by contrast, will generally demand more of its readers. It takes us more deeply into an investigation of what it means to be human and forces us, sometimes reluctantly, to examine our lives in the context of characters 29

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Like all art, good books will often push the boundaries that we’ve come to expect. and situations we encounter on the page. Instead of escaping from the travails of life, it sticks our noses pointedly into them and seems to ask, “Okay, what do you make of this?” It is not always easy to grasp, frequently requires multiple readings, and begs us to inquire what’s meant by the way everything in it is presented. . . you know, the thoughtful, intellectual work that we often don’t feel like doing.

Though the benefits of such demanding texts come in the form of a kind of slow-gathering gratitude for their art, the rewards of this kind of reading experience are many and sometimes quite powerful. In this experience, we begin to see the power of interpretation, to read a text in multiple ways, to think in ways new to us. Long after the reading/study (yes, “study”) is behind us, we continue to reflect on texts that make demands of us.

And here’s the thing: most of the time, the novels that win awards like the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, or the Booker Prize fall into this latter category. They pose challenges to easy reading; they don’t always entertain in a lighthearted way; they impose obligations on us.

No surprise, then, that, for our routine reading diet, we might not immediately reach for national prize-winners.

Each year, I would ask my university English majors which book had won the National Book Award. More often than not, they’d have no idea; and, when I’d tell them, they often wouldn’t recognize either the title or the author. We shouldn’t be surprised. Despite their importance, these award-winning books, while highly regarded, will rarely sell as many copies as popular bestsellers precisely because they aren’t easy reads. Frankly, they may take more of a reading commitment than at times we want to make.

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A case in point: William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, when very few Americans had read much of anything by the author, and many of those who had didn’t find much to invite them in. It wasn’t until Malcolm Cowley, a prominent intellectual, created The Portable Faulkner in 1951, with introductions and contexts for the pieces he included, that the reading public began to pay attention to this award-winning author and to value his work.

Making reading decisions on our own can be tricky. I liken the book-selection process to food: I love chocolate. . . such an understatement that friends who read that sentence will laugh.

One year for Christmas, one of my sons spent a good bit of his hard-earned money on some extraordinarily exquisite chocolate, and, knowing that I would need to pace myself, I tried, with limited success, to sample a little piece of each offering without eating all of it on Christmas Day. It was delicious, every morsel. But, by the end of the day, my body was craving something else. I’m not much of a red-meat eater, but our family custom demanded standing-rib roast for Christmas dinner, and here’s what I discovered: I needed the protein.

Books are like that. If I fill up on my go-to choice, something that I know I like, something that tastes really good going down and satisfies temporarily, at some point I (my brain, at least) will need something more substantial, something that demands to be chewed on for a while.

Often, when it comes to art—and, yes, literature fits into that category—we fall into the familiar “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like” camp. Though we may not understand the choices that other people make, we know they may have different ideas about what they like—apparently (who knew?) there are people who don’t like chocolate—but we’re clear, we

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think, about what we do/don’t like. Lest we forget, though, the merits of literary texts don’t rely on what we like or what we prefer.

Art/literary/music critics can help to expand our views. Sometimes taking a simple art appreciation course will direct us to consider how the artist was working at the time that the work was created, to what or whom s/he/they might have been responding, what materials were available, how to evaluate the palette—a variety of perspectives that, without that guidance, we’d otherwise miss. Interestingly, having more information to filter and process can inform how we evaluate our own preferences or cause us to reevaluate them in a wholly new way. So, too, book/author studies, like the one that Cowley provided for Faulkner or as actual coursework does for students, can help us to see how and why we make our own reading selections and encourage us to hold ourselves to different standards—if not all the time, at least more frequently. After all, no one’s going to tell me I can’t ever again eat chocolate.

What gets tricky in the process of choosing a critically successful, award-winning book, as my friend’s original comment suggests, is that it involves who decides that it is. The answer is more than a little complicated. After all, decisionmakers are people, too, and can suffer from their own foibles and expectations. As far as the main awards are concerned, panels of judges read and read and read again in order to come to a consensus. While some squabbles have erupted over the years about certain awards decisions, such disputes are rather less frequent than we might imagine.

These judges are not uninitiated readers.

They are careful, studious professionals— academics, publishers, editors, critics—who recognize that, like all art, good books will often push the boundaries that we’ve come to expect and thereby challenge our comfortable reading spaces. Their rigorous process involves the creation of an agreed-upon short list and then

their final agreement on the best of the bunch.

In our troubling times, it’s often easier to reach for books that make us feel safe and comfortable, or at least those that don’t pose significant challenges to our reading habits. Perhaps, though, every once in a while, it might do us some good to be more daring in our reading choices, to select something new from the menu of options, to be a bit more experimental, to broaden our perspectives. Perhaps, with a little coaching, we could accept the idea that professionals may be onto something in the selection of winners and come to understand that award-winning authors and their books may reveal a good deal more about each of us than we might anticipate, about our critical reading habits, and about what it means to be more fully immersed in the human experience. The payoff is worth the effort. l

REBECCA CHALMERS has spent her adult life in the study of literature. A Ph.D. in English (with concentrations in American literature, film studies, and critical theory) led her to a rich and rewarding academic career, the last thirteen years of which were spent with the English program at the University of Mary in Bismarck, and in regular work with the North Dakota Humanities Council. Currently she resides on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where she works as an independent scholar, with occasional university classes, and in freelance editing and writing, all while she continues to pen her own poetry and short stories.

LIKE THIS ARTICLE? WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS TOPIC? Rebecca is teaching a class called Popular v. Critical Success: National Book Award winners and public reception during spring 2022. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes

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The dominant picture of the Vikings is as barbaric heathens.

TEACHING ABOUT THE VIKING PAST IN 2021

by Natalie Van Deusen

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hose of us who work in the humanities are accustomed to justifying the importance of what we teach and study, and medievalists and Scandinavianists are no exception. In fact, we find ourselves regularly navigating questions of why what we do matters. Such questions might be coming from a parent at a prospective student event or perhaps from a colleague in another department or even from our own families who have long puzzled at our fascination with what seems like such an obscure field.

Why would students be interested in studying Norse mythology and the Viking Age anyway?

Why is the material I teach and my larger research area—medieval Icelandic literature— of any importance to North American students in 2021?

I came to the University of Alberta in 2012, and the very first course I taught here was SCAND 341: Norse Mythology and Legend. That first semester, I had just over 50 undergraduate students; this current semester

(Fall 2021), I have a total of 134 undergraduate students enrolled in the same class. My course on the Vikings (SCAND 342) has followed a growth trajectory. When I offer courses on the Old Norse language, they are similarly wellenrolled. Clearly, the appeal of this type of course content is not an issue.

A quick scroll through the latest film titles available on Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services provides a hint for why students might be so eager to study the medieval Nordic world. From the Marvel films and American Gods to Vikings and the Norwegian Netflix series Ragnarok, the Viking Age and, in particular, Norse mythology are popular choices for content creators.

Bookstores, too, feature numerous titles inspired by the medieval Nordic world, as do many games—both board and virtual.

Norse mythology and the Viking Age, more broadly, hold a significant place in popular culture and indicate a major factor in enrollment in my classes. My challenge as I

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I am acutely aware of the dark shadow that white supremacy has cast over Norse mythology and the Viking Age.

teach this content is how to bring student interests and necessary historical knowledge together.

One of the first things we discuss in my courses is the matter of written sources. In short, there was no vernacular writing system in Viking Age Scandinavia (ca. 793-1066), aside from the runic alphabet, which, as far as we can tell, was never used for long narrative works. The long narratives from and about the Viking Age were therefore composed and transmitted orally; this took place primarily in Iceland, which was settled by Norwegians in the late ninth century and where there was a strong tradition of telling stories about the Viking Age and the first generations of settlers in Iceland.

When Christianity was introduced (around the year 1000 in Iceland), it brought with it the Latin alphabet and the technology of writing. Icelandic clergy were trained as scribes and, around 1200, after they had committed to parchment materials necessary for the newly formed church, they began writing down the narratives that had been circulating orally for 200-300 years.

As such, the vernacular literature on the pagan Viking past (the eddas and sagas) comes to us through a Christian intermediary of later medieval times. The only contemporary writings of any detail are foreign sources, which were generally written from the perspective of people whose view on the Vikings was hardly a positive one. The dominant picture of the Vikings is as barbaric heathens, who represent divine punishment for the sins of the country under attack.

It is therefore necessary to ask questions of the sources we have available to us for our understanding of the Viking past: 1. When was this source created?

2. Who eventually created it (if applicable), and when?

3. Why was it created?

4. What can the content tell us about the perception of Viking Age pagan Scandinavians in medieval Christian Iceland?

5. What image of the Viking is put forth, and why?

It is in this way that I approach modern depictions of Norse mythology in the Viking Age. After spending the majority of the semester covering and interpreting the various historical sources available to us, we turn to popular-culture portrayals that likely sparked student interest in course content in the first place. I reinforce the bottom line that all of the sources we encounter—whether they are contemporary foreign sources, later

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medieval vernacular sources, films, television shows, games—are interpretations of the Viking Age, which present Vikings from their own perspectives, and which often promote certain agendas, whether it be to scare the people of their country into adhering more strictly to religion by portraying the Vikings as agents of divine punishment, or to sell an entertaining movie.

When it comes down to it, the same questions of interpretation apply to popular representations of the Vikings as to “historical” ones.

When I teach these courses, I am also acutely aware of the dark shadow that white supremacy has cast over Norse mythology and the Viking Age, and the appeal that particular (and historically unfounded) ideas about the people who inhabited the Scandinavian region during this period of time has for those who wish to assert racial superiority over perceived “outsiders” (usually Jews, Muslims, and people of color). This is another matter of interpretation of the Viking past, but the consequences of this particular kind of interpretation are, and have historically been, both real and deadly.

In my view, these dangerous interpretations and appropriations of what life and belief in the Viking Age looked like are the most important reasons for teaching this content and for teaching how to think critically about the continued legacy of Norse mythology and the Viking Age, and it informs the types of materials I have my students read; these texts reflect the lives and belief systems of the Sámi, Finno-Baltic, and Greenlandic Inuit populations who also inhabited the Scandinavian region during the Viking Age and whose cultures and beliefs engaged in a process of mutual influence with the neighbouring Norse-speaking groups. The urgency of addressing this matter also underscores the need for focusing on source material other than written works, such as recent archaeological finds that highlight the ethnic hybridity of individuals living in Viking Age Scandinavia.

This approach to teaching courses related to the Viking Age is still a work in progress and is ever evolving. However, what has become clear to me in the nine years of teaching this content is that this material is not exclusively something of the past, and that teaching students how to read and analyze interpretations of this time period— whether medieval or modern—has immense value in pointing to the importance of not only studying the past, but thinking critically about how to interpret the past and the multifaceted role it plays in our world today. l

NATALIE VAN DEUSEN is the inaugural Henry Cabot and Linnea Lodge Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Alberta, where she teaches a variety of courses on Scandinavian language, literature, and culture. Her research interests include Old Norse-Icelandic paleography and philology, manuscript culture, hagiography and religious literature, womenʼs and gender studies, and disability studies.

LIKE THIS ARTICLE? WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS TOPIC? Natalie is giving a series of virtual lectures called Introduction to Norse Mythology during spring 2022. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes

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EMBRACE YOUR

INNER HUMANITIES SCHOLAR

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| SPRING PROGRAM ISSUE | A HUMANITIES DRAMA Setting: coffee shop, tables, chairs, original paintings on the walls Dramatis Personae: Case, Stace, Trace, three friends Curtain Rises Enter Stace, Trace, and Case who have just come from viewing the most recent James Bond movie, No Time to Die, starring Daniel Craig as Bond.

They sit at a table and drink coffee, cappuccino, and coke.

They are eating cookies.

Stace: What’d you think?

Case: Oh, I liked it. I thought it was better than Spectre.

Trace: Oh, yeah, why is that?

Case: Well, there’s quite a bit of action. But I’m getting tired of the big action scenes.

Trace: Isn’t the action, both the violence and the sex, the whole point?

Stace: Maybe. Don’t you think Sean Connery will always be the real James Bond?

Case: I’ve seen all the ones with Sean Connery and just a few of the others. I’ve heard Spectre and Skyfall are really good.

Trace: Well, I still miss Sean Connery but I’ve seen all the Daniel Craigs. I wonder what Ian Fleming thought about Sean Connery.

Case: Yeah. You know it wouldn’t be hard to find out. Just read a biography of Ian Fleming.

Trace: (picking up the phone) Well,

I’m going to check my phone. Do I dare look at Wikipedia?

what’s that about? They can be sexy killers.

Case and Stace: Oh, go ahead, no one will ever know. (They laugh.)

Trace: Who knows? I’m looking up stuff about our historian Jeremy Black. He wrote a book in 2019 called A History of the World: From Pre-History to the 21st Century.

Trace: Under James Bond.

Novels of Ian Fleming. Hey, the References. Do you two ever look at the references?

Case: Sometimes. What did you find?

Trace: Well, this is interesting.

There’s actually a book called The Politics of James Bond.

Stace: Wow. That does sound interesting.

Case: It’s written by someone named Jeremy Black. Here’s the subtitle: “From Fleming’s Novels to the Big Screen.”

Case: I’m checking under Amazon Overview for Black’s book on Bond. Listen to this: “…007 evolves from Cold Warrior foe of SPECTRE and eventually to world defender pitted against megalomaniacal foes…”

Trace: Sounds like Beowulf and Grendel. Hero and terrible bad guy.

Trace: Checking. Oh, wow.

This guy’s a British historian at University of Exeter. He has written 180 books.

Stace: Nice, Trace. Beowulf.

You get a point for that.

Megalomaniacal foes! I wonder if this historian guy has a theory of history, since he wrote a book on THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD (pronounces with exaggerated pomposity in posh British accent).

Case: Whoa, I wonder what he says about the politics of James Bond. I wouldn’t mind reading it if it’s not too hard. You know specialized and all.

Case: A theory of history. You are sounding pretty highfalutin’ - I’d rather read the book on Bond and politics. Maybe I can order it cheap. You know, $1.50.

Stace: Well, James Bond in the early movies seems to be fighting Russians. Yeah, I think Dr. No came out in 1962. That’s almost 60 years ago.

Strace: $4.00 postage and handling.

Stace: Who’s this Jeremy Black?

Case: And Chinese.

Stace: What about SPECTRE. What is SPECTRE anyway?

Trace: Wait, see if the library has it. Or if they can get it for you from interlibrary loan. It’s more fun to read a book you can hold in your hand.

Case: Yeah, and what about the women?

Stace: You think so? I don’t know.

I wonder if James Bond is still relevant. And if he isn’t, what is?

Stace: Maybe Spectre is the symbol of super modern masculinity. And these women,

Case: Excuse me for changing the subject. What I really love about the James Bond movies is the 37

| SPRING PROGRAM ISSUE | main theme. I could watch those movies just to see that opening and hear that music. I wonder who wrote it.

Trace: I’ll check… (Picks up phone.

Case and Stace take sips of coffee and cappuccino. Trace takes a bite of cookie).

Curtain closes slowly, Music playing the James Bond theme.

Cace, Stace, and Trace are doing a humanities thing: conversing (with beverages), responding to a work of art and letting that work of art pull them in directions that are ultimately endless.

Their conversation encompasses history, philosophy, literature, archaeology, culture and media studies, comparative religion, and the histories and theory of the arts. The group in the coffee shop could follow up by exploring more humanities topics like film history and evaluation, gender representation, spy novels in the Cold War period, authoritative sources of information, the role of the internet, heroes and monsters in English literature, music in film, sources and the price of books, popular culture trends, actors’ performances of the same character, the experience of reading, the philosophy of history, libraries, their own book collections, and more.

More than simply raising these topics, their conversation encourages them to examine their life experiences and life itself. In doing their “humanities thing,” they reveal their own “humanities histories,” which can be told as 38

personal stories. They have the freedom, time, and leisure to engage in this conversation, and to continue to explore human culture and history. Each has the potential to continue to tap in to and deepen their own “inner humanities scholar.”

I have my own “humanities story.” Here’s a simple version with relevant information. I was born and raised in a rural farming community in Kansas, a child and youth of the middle fifties and early sixties. I loved to read and learn things. My primary interests were history, music, arts, literature (already humanities areas). In college and in graduate school at the University of Kansas I was an English major. English language and literature became my academic focus. I eventually moved to North Dakota where I became an English teacher in high schools and colleges and the University of North Dakota.

In the 1970s something new came along. The National Endowment for the Humanities formed state affiliates. The North Dakota Committee on the Humanities and Public Issues was established in 1974, later becoming the North Dakota Humanities Council and now Humanities North Dakota. I became involved in public programs in the humanities in the 1970s under the directorship of a truly extraordinary North Dakotan, Dr. Everett Albers (his degrees were also in English). The public programs called for leadership and discussions directed by people qualified in the humanities.

Proposals for public programs

required the active participation of a “humanities scholar,” not just an English teacher or professor, historian, philosophy prof but a “humanities scholar.” Hence, I identified as a humanities scholar and still do.

Later in my work at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, my position was listed as “Instructor of English and Humanities.” I had the opportunity to teach courses focused on my literary specialization, for example “Reading in Native American Literature,” but also taught an overview of the humanities themselves, “Introduction to Humanities.”

When explaining the humanities, the author of our textbook (Philip K. Bishop, Adventures in the Human Spirit, Pearson, frequent new editions), for convenience and clarification, makes a distinction between Modes of Expression and Modes of Reflection. Modes of Expression cover the different arts that humans make. Modes of Reflection are ways of thinking.

Here’s a convenient way to visualize the distinction: MODES OF EXPRESSION pictures, paintings, photography sculpture literature and narrative music dance architecture film theatre (drama) MODES OF REFLECTION history archaeology philosophy comparative religion

| SPRING PROGRAM ISSUE | There is a humanities aspect to every cultural development, like mathematics and language; all sciences, like chemistry and cosmology; and professions, like law, medicine, nursing, farming, or criminal investigation. Question: How does the action in a James Bond novel or film relate to the actual business of espionage? Did Ian Fleming know anything about this, or is he just making it all up?

And what is a “scholar?” The word “scholar” itself gives us some insight. It comes from a Greek word (schole) meaning leisure. The scholar is a person who has time, freedom, and leisure to study, reflect, and explore. A “school” should be a gathering of scholars who want to think and learn, and they need time and space to do that. The Akademe park in Athens where Plato, a student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, held the gathering for those ancient scholars, who were thinking and conversing, getting to “know themselves” and “examining life.” The “Akademe” for Case, Stace, and Trace is the coffee shop in their community, their Athens.

Here’s the latest news: Case, Stace, and Trace are meeting this afternoon in a city park to discuss another recent film (maybe the new Dune). They will be joined by another friend, Mace. Stace bought Jeremy Black’s History of the World at the local bookstore. Case read Fleming’s Casino Royale, the first Bond novel. Trace has been watching documentaries on the Dust Bowl in the Great Plains.

Mace will remain a mystery. As the friends “embrace their inner humanities scholars,” they should sign this declaration with a bold, flowing signature.

I acknowledge my desire to learn and grow.

I am doing humanities things.

I have a humanities history.

I have humanities hopes and aspirations.

I am embracing my inner humanities scholar as a curious, open person who has the freedom, time, and leisure to actively pursue my humanities hopes and aspirations.

Go forth, independent scholar, today is a good day for your freedom, your leisure, in this park or on a path, to seek and find.

Converse with congenial companions; draw on the discoveries of those who know and love their field of study (they’ve dedicated their lives to it, documenting, perusing, pondering, eager to share their discoveries); let your imagination rove and roam; cross plains and mountain ranges of archives and books; sail in your raft down Amazons of galleries, museums, libraries, and book stores, be the meta of new horizons; survey your own well-stocked bending shelves; enter our Cloud of knowing and unknowing; navigate oceans and traverse the empty silence of space, les espaces infinis, to distant planetary places.

Yes, indeed, launch out, voyager of layers and layers of life experience; Open your inquisitive and unstoppable soul, yearning with Socrates “to know thyself.” with Aristotle “to know.”

Heed the one true command: Free spirit. O fervent human, in the park or on the prairie, among the tall trees, in solitude or with kindred spirits: Live Well and Learn. l

BRIAN PALECEK is a longtime participant in public humanities programs, since the inception of Humanities North Dakota and its forerunners in the 1970s. He is also a college English, Literature, and Humanities teacher, serving at United Tribes Technical College for 31 years until his recent retirement. His documentary film “Conversations on the Bench” received support from Humanities ND.

LIKE THIS ARTICLE? WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS TOPIC? Brian is teaching a class called Viva Humanities! Embracing Your Inner Scholar during spring 2022. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes 39

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ENCAUSTIC PAINTINGS OF MICHAEL PAUL

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hen I started my journey toward becoming a painter, a friend and mentor, Carl Oltvedt, suggested encaustic paint. He did not know much about it but thought it might be interesting to me.

The time was pre-computers and the internet, so it was a bit difficult in Fargo, North Dakota, to find information on an obscure subject. My search led me to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, then to the Chicago Art Institute, and on to the Metropolitan Art museum in New York. The Met holds some beautiful encaustic examples of the Faiyum Mummy Portraits which were painted around the time of Christ in the Acropolis of Faiyum, Egypt. The artists were Roman and influenced by Greek ideals of beauty. An interesting side note: While the earliest Faiyum portrait and earliest known encaustic painting dates to 60 B.C., some scholars believe that the Greek civilization used encaustic paint to embellish their white marble sculptures and buildings.

So began a long research journey into the history, technique, materials, and process of making encaustic paintings. The word encaustic derives from the Greek word ‘enkaustikos,’ meaning ‘to heat’ or ‘ burn-in’ to emphasize the heating process necessary to work with the medium. In its simplest form, encaustic paint is made from melted beeswax and powdered pigments. Beyond that there are dozens of various ingredients that have been added by artists to harden the wax, extend open working time, give it more or less body, etc., but the common ingredients are wax, pigments, and heat.

Individuals have widely divergent reasons for creating art. I am a bit of a mathematician and approach life and art in an orderly, craftsmanlike way. The materials and artmaking processes like encaustic painting and silverpoint drawing, the mathematics and the chemistry, attract me to the the craft of painting.The experience of making art can be described by intangible things like the sound of ripping canvas and the deep thumping it makes when stretched taught; the rhythmic swishing sound of a sharp plane on wood; the wonderful smells of oil of lavender, honey-laden beeswax, linen, spirits, and freshly cut

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lumber; the texture of handmade papers; and just working in the studio late into the night.

While many modern encaustic painters produce beautiful abstract work, I am clearly drawn to quiet land and cityscapes in a representational style.

The Northern Great Plains, in particular, portray a sort of beauty that holds my imagination. It is a place tortured by wind and hail, scorching sun and blizzards. It is a place defined by the horizon and punctuated by simple architecture. It is the floor of the sky. Easterners might think of it as flyover country, best viewed from an airplane window. Contrary to that view, I see it as resigned, comfortable within itself, a woven tapestry of land and sky best viewed from the dirt and grass in the middle of the floor. Rising from that tapestry are the barns, silos, grain elevators, churches, and homes that Scandinavian, German, and Slovak emigrants masterfully built.

Having grown up in an Air Force family and later serving in the Air Force myself, I have gone through life as something of a gypsy. Born in Helena, Montana, home for me has meant several regions of the United States, Europe, and the Far East. I do, however, have an abiding connection to the Dakotas. Elias Fagerland, my great grandfather, emigrated to New York City from Fagerland Island, Norway, in 1884. Two years later he made his way to Dakota Territory and settled on land near what is now Pierpont, South Dakota. He filed for a homestead of 120 acres in 1892 at a cost of $13.

Seven years later, on 21 January, he made his last payment of $3 to make it officially his. That same day Elias became a citizen of the United States.

He was a Norwegian fisherman, an emigrant, a pioneer, a sodbuster, and an American citizen.

Among the many influences on my art, I hold the Japanese aesthetic of beauty high on the list. While living in Okinawa, I was moved by the craftsmanship and the dedication to lifelong study of Japanese artists. They bring quiet beauty to block prints, paintings, pottery, boxes, stonework, timber buildings, gardens, and even utilitarian tools. Creative craftsmanship permeates their entire society. Encaustic painting fits nicely with the 42

Japanese philosophy of Wabi-sabi that embraces the flawed or imperfect nature of things, and Kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold dust. Japanese aesthetics embrace and value marks of wear from the use of an object. The surface of an encaustic painting is characterized by scrapes, pits, and gouges, never perfect. Even when new, it exhibits marks of wear from the constant heating and working of the wax.

Individual artists who have influenced me include Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Grant Wood, and Luc Lebon.

There are also numerous contemporary artists and collaborators who inspire and channel my work, like Anna Mae Paul (my mother and a master quilter), Karen Paul (my confidant and critic), Steve Fox (an astute designer), Tom Weis (master boat builder), Carl Oltvedt (painter and draughtsman), Sally Johnson and the late Wanda Flechsig (genuine art dealers and champions of artists), and Judy Klater (the first to mentor and encourage me). l Readers can find more information and examples of Mike Paul’s art on Instagram @mikepaul.art. His next exhibition will be at Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis.

The opening will be on 12 March 2022. More information can be found at www.grovelandgallery.com.

MICHAEL PAUL was born in 1956 in Helena, Montana.

He received his BFA from Minnesota State University Moorhead, and holds a BA in Art History and Mathematics from Concordia College. He studied painting conservation at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. After serving in the Air Force as a Geodetic Surveyor, Paul began painting professionally and established Flathead Studio in 1996.

Paul is best known for his paintings of the Northern Great Plains as well as his use of traditional encaustic materials. His paintings are included in numerous public collections including the North Dakota Museum of Art, the Plains Art Museum, the University of Minnesota, and the Center for Western Studies. Slow Dancing is his sixteenth solo exhibition. He resides and maintains a studio in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

ANNUAL REPORT 2021 STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL POSITION FYE October 31, 2021

Board of Directors & Staff HND Board of Directors CHAIR

Sarah Vogel, Bismarck

VICE CHAIR

Marilyn Foss, Bismarck Paige Baker, Mandaree Angela S. Gorder, Bottineau Lyle Best, Watford City Dina Butcher, Bismarck Dennis Cooley, Fargo Patty Corwin, Fargo Eric L. Johnson, Grand Forks Ann Crews Melton, Bismarck Jessica Rockeman, Richardton Prairie Rose Seminole, Garrison Barb Solberg, Minot Linda Steve, Dickinson Amy Stromsodt, Larimore

Staff Brenna Gerhardt, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Sue Skalicky, Program Coordinator Rebecca Chalmers, Editor, Humanities ND Magazine Naomi Vetter, Program Assistant Nick Glass, Fiscal Operations Assistant North Dakota’s Largest Lifelong Learning Community

800-338-6543 info@humanitiesnd.org

HumanitiesND.org

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ETHICAL EXPLORATIONS Kaylyn Bondy Wednesdays: 6-8 pm CST Jan 26, Feb 2, 9, 16, 23

This interactive, discussion-based course will guide participants through topics such as values formation, an examination of forming value judgments, an introduction to ethical theories, and their applications to contemporary moral issues. Enjoy a supportive environment to share perspectives and learn with others.

INTRODUCTION TO NORSE MYTHOLOGY Natalie Van Deusen Fridays: 2-3 pm CST Feb. 18, 25, March 4, 11

SERIES OF FOUR LECTURES: “Historical Background and Sources for Norse Mythology” This lecture provides an introduction to the history of religious belief in the Nordic region from the earliest evidence until the Viking Age. It also gives an overview of the various sources available to us—material and literary—for our understanding of religion in the Viking Age.

SPRING 2022 Public University classes are free for members Registration is currently open Class sizes are limited

“Introduction to the Norse Pantheon and Cosmos” In this lecture, an introduction will be given to the various gods and goddesses, as well as other beings (such as giants and elves) in the Norse cosmos. This lecture also provides an explanation of how the world came to be, according to Norse mythology, and highlights some key myths surrounding the gods and goddesses.

“Ragnarok” Apocalypse according to Viking Age Norse belief is the topic of the third lecture. Here, we will learn about various concepts that are key to understanding the world’s end (such as fate and vengeance) and will discuss the events leading up to and then following the event often referred to as the “doom of the gods.”

“Modern Interpretations of Norse Mythology” This final lecture covers modern interpretations of Norse mythology, from literature to film and television. Here, we will discuss the appeal of Norse mythology in the 20th and 21st centuries, and will also focus on some of the ways in which the material has been historically misappropriated.

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Jeff Rotering Wednesdays: 5:30-7:30 pm CST March 30, April 6, 13, 20, 27, May 4

A 6-week online adult course on civic education. This course takes you from the philosophical foundations of the U.S. Constitution through the modern interpretation and application of its ideals. The course follows the We the People: The Citizen & the Constitution Level 3 textbook, which has been used throughout the country to further understanding of our government and its fundamental principles.

TOWARD A MORE PERFECT UNION: AMENDING THE CONSTITUTION

David Adler Mondays: 6:30-8:30 pm CST Jan. 10, 17, 24, 31, Feb. 7, 14, 21, 28, March 7, 14, 21, 28 Toward a More Perfect Union: Amending the Constitution: The framers of the Constitution incorporated Article V—the Amendatory Clause—into the Constitution to empower subsequent generations of Americans to improve upon their work and form a more perfect union. This class will focus on the history, concerns, motives and debates that lay behind the Bill of Rights, and the Reconstruction Amendments—the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments—to better understand how the sovereign people over the course of our nation’s history have decided how to create a better, more democratic America. The class will include lectures and extensive Q & A opportunities, with the hope that students will be engaged and eager to participate in discussion.

WHAT IS A FACT?

David Bjerklie Sundays: 1-3 pm CST April 3, 10, 24 What is a Fact? We live in a world in which there are very few claims made that won’t be contested by some individuals or groups as fake, false or fraught. Have we given up on facts? Is it futile to pine for a past when the request by Dragnet detective Joe Friday, “just the facts, ma’am,” was understood by everyone

as a perfectly simple proposition? In a word, yes. Because not all facts are equal, and yes, there are “alternative facts” and moreover, everyone (everyone) uses and misuses them.

Are facts negotiable? Is everyone entitled to their own facts? Sometimes yes, sometimes, no; it all depends. The truth (careful here!) is that understanding the nature of facts is a lot trickier than it might appear. This class will look into why it is so difficult–and yet crucial–to see how we combine and confuse facts, beliefs, and values.

DOES THE PRAIRIE MAKE THE PAINTER? David Bjerklie Sunday: May 1, 1-3 pm CST

Does the Prairie Make the Painter? The environment in which we grow up can wield an enduring influence. What could be more obvious, right? And yet, is it possible to literally see the imprint of this influence in the work of James Rosenquist, the Pop Art icon, who grew up in North Dakota and Minnesota and who honed his craft painting billboards in Minneapolis and Manhattan’s Times Square?

This class will look at Rosenquist’s Midwest roots and what he brought from them to his life in art in New York and beyond.

S P R I N G 2 0 2 2 Public University Classes

CONSTITUTION 101 ADULT CIVIC EDUCATION

FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS - MINING PERSONAL HISTORY

Roddy MacInnes Tuesdays: 2-4 pm CST Jan 11, 18, 25, Feb 1, 8, 15, 22, March 1 The intimate connection between family photographs and memory became obvious to me when I served as a visiting artist at a retirement community in Ellendale, North Dakota. Most resident’s rooms resembled shrines to their existence. Walls were adorned with framed photographs of significant people and life events. What’s worth remembering was abbreviated to a handful of photographs.

Our eight-week class will capitalize on the connection that exists between photography and memory. More specifically, how family photographs function to preserve memories, and thus become catalysts for sharing life stories. Inspiration for our class assignments will include revisiting old family photographs plus making new ones. Open to all ages and all levels of photographers - beginners to advanced. Cell phone cameras are ideal for 45

S P R I N G 2 0 2 2 Public University Classes

this class. Cell phone camera instruction will be given as needed.

OJIBWEMOWIN 1

Alex Decoteau Mondays: 6-8 pm CST Jan 10, 24, 31, Feb 7, 28, March 14, 21, April 4, 11, and 25 Ojibwemowin l This is a student driven, beginner/intermediate course in the Ojibwe language, based on an Indigenous pedagogy (how one learns).

Student driven means, students are encouraged to ask questions to drive the curriculum and accommodate the students’ learning interests.

Indigenous pedagogy means the learning is co-created by all. “Gikinoo’amaading”, the Ojibwe cultural concept of learning means “learning from one another.” Another Indigenous aspect of learning is that there are no “mistakes”. There are only teachings (learnings from so called ‘mistakes’). In an Indigenous pedagogy, students support one another mutually (wiidookodaading). There is no competition or hierarchy in the learning environment.

Each weekly class will consist of a preview of last lesson vocabulary, introduction of new vocabulary, practice of new vocabulary, and questions from students.

VIVA HUMANITIES! EMBRACING YOUR INNER SCHOLAR Brian Palecek Mondays: 6-8 pm CST Jan 24, 31, Feb 7, 14, 21, 28, March 7, 14

In this course, you will enrich your humanities experiences and develop personal plans and strategies to experience more of the richness of human cultural history and artistic achievements. Working with humanities scholar/teacher Brian Palecek you will develop and deepen your own Humanities Way. Activities will include readings, internet explorations, the art of discussion and conversation. Resources will include personal and public libraries; community resources like galleries, theaters, museums; and guest 46

presenters. The major humanities fields such as history, literature, art histories, archaeology, philosophy, and comparative religion will come into play. Philosophers Socrates and Montaigne will join us in our humanities dance.

A THOUSAND POEMS

Brian Palecek Tuesdays: 6-8 pm CST Jan 11, 18, 25, Feb 1, 8, 15, 22, March 1, 8, 15 Participants will read dozens of mostly English language poems from Old English to current Rap and everything in between with a focus on the short lyric poem with some longer narratives. The course will emphasize the reading experience, discussion, exploring diversity of styles, forms, and poets throughout history and the contemporary poetry scene.

NICE FOR WHAT: PRINCE MYSHKIN/KINJI IN DOSTOEVSKY AND KUROSAWA’S ARTISTIC IMAGINATIONS Serge Danielson-Francois Wednesdays: 7-8:30 pm CST April 6, 13, 20, 27

Does goodness still matter? Who would notice selfless acts of kindness in a world grown cynical? In this class, we will use Dostoevsky and Kurosawa to examine these questions about goodness today. We will read excerpts from the book and watch scenes from the movie to appreciate the Russian and Japanese Christ figures of Price Myshkin and Kinji. No previous experience with the book or movie required.

POPULAR V. CRITICAL SUCCESS: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERS AND PUBLIC RECEPTION

Rebecca Chalmers Wednesdays: 2-4 pm CST Jan 26, Feb 2, 9, 16, 23, March 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 Popular v. Critical Success Why do certain novels win highly esteemed awards for fiction, and what do their selection tell us about our reading habits? Through an exploration of six National Book Award fiction winners, over a 50-year period, we’ll examine why these novels may have won the award and how they reflect a kind of American sensibility at the time of their release. Perhaps more importantly, we’ll delve into what constitutes

National Book Award Winners from 1970-2020: 1970 – them by Joyce Carol Oates 1980 – Sophie’s Choice by William Styron 1990 – Middle Passage by Charles Johnson 2000 – In America by Susan Sontag 2010 – Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon 2020 – Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

CONTESTED HISTORIES, CONFLICTED SPACE: UNDERSTANDING HISTORIC SITES AND MONUMENTS

Raffi Andonian Thursdays: 6:30-8:30 pm CST Jan 13, 20, 27, Feb 3, 10, 17, 24, March 3, 10, 17 We can better understand the world today by studying the provocative people and events of the past. Learn about the differences between historic sites and monuments, what makes some of them so controversial, and how we can better understand each situation.

Conflicts over the spaces derive from their contested narratives, but how do we decide which perspectives are appropriate in each circumstance? We will examine a number of major case studies, develop strategies for evaluating their histories, explore tools for helping us understand beyond our own opinions, and discuss as a group how we can all learn more and contribute constructively around us.

LEARNING FROM INDIGENOUS ELDERS THROUGH THE NORTH DAKOTA NATIVE AMERICAN ESSENTIAL UNDERSTANDINGS Scott Simpson and Sharla Steever Tuesdays: 6-8 pm CST Feb 1, 8, 15, 22, March 1, 8, 15

In the spring of 2015, the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction brought together tribal Elders from across North Dakota to share stories, memories, songs and wisdom in order to develop the North Dakota Native American Essential Understandings (NDNAEU) to guide the learning of both Native and non-Native students across the state.

This Learning From Indigenous Elders course, led by Dr. Scott Simpson and Sharla Steever, the Learning Specialists who helped facilitate the process as the Elders wrote the NDNAEU,

will guide participants in exploring all seven of the essential understandings through reading the document and through engaging in journaling and conversations around selected examples from the more than 300 Elder interview video clips compiled on the www.

TeachingsOfOurElders.org website. We will explore ideas and stories presented by these Elders in the context of the NDNAEU while making personal connections through the Circle of Trust process developed by Parker Palmer and the Center for Courage & Renewal (www.CourageRenewal.org).

END OF LIFE DUTIES: IS THERE A MORAL IMPERATIVE TO HAVE A WILL AND ADVANCE DIRECTIVE? Dennis Cooley Sunday, Jan 23, 3:30-5 pm CST

S P R I N G 2 0 2 2 Public University Classes

critical as opposed to popular success in the fiction market.

Everyone seems to agree that putting together a will and advance directive is important and something each person should do, but then always manage to find excuses not to do either. So, since they know that they are going to die, why don’t they carry through putting thought into action? This event will try to answer that question by thinking about how we view becoming mentally incompetent and our deaths, as well as why we have duties to have wills and advance directives. Attendees might even get some ideas of what they want to see in their wills or advance directives.

PUBLICS AND COUNTER-PUBLICS: CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL ISSUES AND MOVEMENTS Robert Mejia Mondays: 6-8 pm CST March 14, 21, 28, April 4, 11, 18

From anti-vaccination conspiracies to QANON, the present social and political arena seems awash in misinformation and disinformation.

This course will situate our current social and political moment within the modern history of propaganda and public truth-telling, so as to better understand how members of various communities come to make decisions about matters of public and personal concern.

This course will be structured around key contemporary issues and the social movements that have initiated and organized around them.

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GET

IN The game of lifelong learning.

Brought to you by

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Happy New Year FROM THE STAFF AT HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA! In 2022, we invite you to “Get Clued In” to all the possibilities for lifelong learning we offer. Whether you want the interactive experience of a class discussion or to tune into an event while cooking dinner, we offer programs to fit your schedule and learning style. We’ve created a “Get Clued In” game guide to walk you through all of our programs, events, and membership benefits. It will be in your mailbox soon! If you are not yet a member, sign up and we will get a package out to you right away. We hope you have as much fun investigating it as we had creating it.

Not only does your membership benefit you, but your donation also supports our high school We the People civics education program and enables us to make all of our programs either low cost or free. You don’t have to be a member to join our classes and events, but we are so thankful you’ve chosen to donate and help make lifelong learning available and accessible to more people.

Don’t be puzzled about lifelong learning. If you have questions about your membership or any HND event or class, please reach out to us at membership@humanitiesnd.org or (701) 255-3360.

MOTIVES The disciplines of the humanities lurk behind everything we do at HND. So what are the humanities? If you want to get technical, the term ‘humanities’ includes, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of

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the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life. To make it simple we like to say, the humanities help us unravel the mystery that is life.

INSTRUCTIONS You can find tutorial videos on how to access The Vault, sign up for classes, register for events, and more at www.humanitiesnd.org/tutorials OFFICE HOURS Once a month the HND staff is available via Zoom to answer any questions you might have about our program, classes, events, or membership. No matter what’s puzzling you, drop in and get clued in. You can sign up at www.humanitiesnd.org/ about ONLINE CLASSES HND offers online classes through our Public University program during the Fall & Spring semesters. As soon as we post our classes we email members, so you have the first chance to register.

Class sizes are limited and take place over Zoom. Classes are always free to members. Just use your membership number to sign up.

HOW TO REGISTER FOR CLASSES You can sign up for classes three ways.

• Log on to www.humanitiesnd.org/ classes and register online; • Email memership@humanitiesnd.org, tell us your full name and the classes(s) you would like to register for; • Call 701.255.3360 and the staff will register you over the phone.

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GAMEBOARD

PUBLIC UNIVERSITY

Our Public University takes lifelong learning to a deeper level by offering six to eight-week courses by some of the nation’s most engaging faculty. We offer classes on a variety of humanities subjects.

Limited class sizes, structured teaching, and engaging dialogue without grades or tests make learning fun and stress-free. Public University classes are offered virtually and are always free to members. Nonmembers pay a small registration fee.

GAMECHANGER IDEAS FESTIVAL

A series of webinars where big ideas take center stage, the GameChanger Ideas Festival invites some of the most provocative and inspiring thinkers in the world to share their ideas with attendees. This online program is always free and open to the public.

PAGE TURNER

An entertaining and inspiring hour with North Dakota authors reading excerpts from recently published or soon-to-be-released books. This online program is always free and open to the public.

ONE BOOK ONE NORTH DAKOTA

Featuring best-selling authors in a 60-minute webinar, One Book One North Dakota is a monthly event.

Attendees are encouraged to participate in Q&A with the author.

This online program is always free and open to the public.

ideas

festiv

al

LITTLE MO WRITERS

A low-residency writing program designed to guide and support writers on a book project. This intensive seven-month program is limited to twenty participants. Program costs vary, but the $50 application fee is waived for members.

MARILYN HUDSON BRAVE CONVERSATIONS PROJECT

Brave Conversations build community through conversation. Today’s leading problem-solvers take center stage offering a thought-provoking presentation and then turning it over to authentic, moderator-led discussion in small groups. A dynamic opportunity to explore new ideas and meet interesting people, this program is a hybrid, meaning it is offered in-person and livestreamed online. Program costs vary, but members received discounted admission.

WE THE PEOPLE

This comprehensive civics course starts by teaching the philosophical and historical foundations of the U.S. political system and ends by addressing the challenges American constitutional democracy faces in the 21st century.

HND supports this program in schools across the state, by offering free textbooks and teacher training institutes to high school teachers. In addition, we offer this course online to adults. This program is always free and open to the public thanks in part by sponsorship from Bravera Bank.

CHAUTAUQUA & CHAT

Each Chautauqua & Chat webinar features a 60-minute performance by a scholar who impersonates a significant historical figure (Mark Twain, Sacagawea, Frederick Douglas). Attendees have the opportunity to ask questions of both the

historical character and the scholar. This online program is always free and open to the public.

THINK & DRINK

Our virtual pub event, Think & Drink events bring curious people together to connect, question, and learn through moderated scholar presentations and engaging conversation in a B.Y.O.B setting.

This online program is always free and open to the public.

HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA MAGAZINE

Humanities North Dakota magazine is a quarterly publication sent to our members. Our annual Sense of Place issue features some of the best writing on the Great Plains. Other issues feature thought-provoking articles by our Public University instructions, Brave Conversations speakers, or GameChanger Ideas Festival thinkers.

HNDREAD WATT PODCAST (COMING SOON)

An entertaining and engaging audio podcast (pronounced Hundred Watt) for lifelong learners featuring upcoming Brave Conversation speakers and other inspiring and provocative thinkers.

Available for free download.

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THANK YOU FOR BEING

LIKE IRIS! Have you ever imagined a world without the guidance of history, the wisdom of our greatest literature, the understanding of different religions, the ability to communicate in other languages, the engagement of citizens in the democratic process, or the ethical foundations of our legal system? These pursuits form the humanities and without them we would not know who we are or what we stand for.

DONATE AND HELP HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA CREATE A MORE THOUGHTFUL AND INFORMED WORLD.

800-338-6543 info@humanitiesnd.org humanitiesnd.org

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RENEWING AND NEW MEMBERS

(since August, 2021)

$5,000 and above Fintan L. Dooley Angela S. Gorder Blaine Johnson Rhoda & Douglas Sautner $1,000 to $4,999 Melanie Carvell Network For Good Nancy Cronquist Sarah M. Vogel Larry R. Peterson & Jamie Stewart Mary C. Struck Christie Iverson Edna Sailor

Kjersti Hintz $500 to $999 Paula Sperle Janet Daley Jury & Sara Nimis George Jury Jessica Ackerman George & Cheryl Mizell Kaye Carlson Anna Rathbun Laura Schield Mary Ann Johnson Tove Hoff Bormes Camilla Wilson $100 to $499 Andrea Denault Barbara & Steven Andrist Cherilyn Hersrud Patty Corwin Ceil Anne Clement James & Mary Olson Dennis Cooley Erin Wood Earl & Patricia Donaldson Eleanor & Bill Goodall Margaret Hagler Joseph Richardson Judith Maxson Byron Danielson Bonnie Smith Ron & Nancy Saeger Sean Cleary Rebecca Matthews Bill Knudson Prairie Rose Seminole Joanne Britton Melissa Gjellstad Paul Govig & Julie Krenz Dennis Berg Christine Kujawa Robert & Laurel Weigelt Janel Schiff Sonja Prestangen Three Rivers Arts Council Brenda K. Marshall Carol Christianson Mike & Kathy Schneider John Clayburgh Paige & Joan Baker Bob & Jill Grzadzielewski Kate Haugen Kathleen Jones Lynn Lahren Paula Martin Randy & Bridgette Readel Susan Schlecht Danette Halloran Dale Sandstrom Mary Frojen Beth & Tim Huseth Della & Wayne Martinsen Cleo Kirkland Carol Hart Joseph & Katherine Satrom Verlaine Gullickson Mr. David Nix Cathie and David Lutgen Jim & Myrna Stephens Judith Ziegler Eric & Lisa L. Johnson Nick & Ene Vogel Naomi Thorson & Keith Amy Ingersoll-Johnson Fernsler Janell Marmon Joseph C. Jastrzembski Sharon Espeland Susan Bicknell

Wollom A. Jensen Kara Geiger Mark E. Clemons Gregg Lukenbill Marie Halstead Darrell Dorgan Dan Vogel Karen Ryberg Ellen Chaffee Matt Elbert Susan McNeil-Conley Robert Franek Bruce Berg Erin Ceynar Ruby Grove Nancy Koupal Faye M. Miller David R. Solheim $99 and below William R. Caraher Elizabeth Sund Shari Powell Susan & John Helgeland Joshua H. & Sara M. Simmers Ann Crews Melton Barbara Koenig Crystal Michels Anonymous Donor Sheila McJilton Jared Neumann Catherine Campbell Judith Hammer Jackie Stebbins Gale Stahl Linda Olson & David Leite Denise Lajimodiere Nancy Molstad Mary Leff Jane LaFazio Nancy Yoder-Bidwell Carole Jacobsen Deborah Elhard West Fargo Public Library Irene Askelson Ms. Carole Barrett E. Bruce Hagen

Arvid & Darlene Knutson Jane Williams Tamara Waters-Wheeler Emily Vieweg Lisa Lunde Barbara Ahlquist Ellen M Bjelland Elaine Babcock Pamela Wheeler Jamee Larsonn James & Gail Sperry George Freeman Betty Svihovec Arne & Gayle Selbyg Kathryn Strand & Jon Wahlgren Susan Lundberg Molly Soeby Karen Busse Jill Denning Gackle Joyce Krabseth Kayla A. Schmidt Erin Laverdure Hariett & Jim Davis Lillian Crook & Jim Fuglie Laurel Jones JoAnn Alger Dennis & Diane Schill Barbara J. Evanson Marita B. Hoffart Dina Butcher in memory of Lowell Latimer Dorothy J. Bischoff Mary J. Davies Eidler Clinton & Joyce Esckilsen Ms. Joyce Markell Roxy Boelz Paul Koetz Dennis Romfo Carlyn A. Stevens Jessie Fuher Robin Gense Shelley Lord AmazonSmile Foundation Kathy Coates

Humanity is messy and so are our offices. Because of this, we occasionally misspell or omit a donor’s name. If you are the recipient of our human frailty, please let us know so we can learn from our mistakes and correct our errors.

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Iris has the solution!

LIFELONG LEARNING DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A MYSTERY! Just enroll in one of the many spring class offerings at Humanities ND Public University online and enjoy the benefits!

HND members are free. Not a member?

No worries. Use the promo code IRIS to take your first class absolutely free!

Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes