Fall 2021 Program Issue

HUM NITIES NORTH DAKOTA MAGAZINE

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SARTEE’S BAR & GRILL & TAXIDERMY

by Nita Ritzke BRENNA GERHARDT

WHAT A WRITER NEEDS

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

by Deb Marquart

EIGHTY YEARS AFTER THE ATLANTIC CHARTER, WESTERN DEMOCRACIES FIND THEMSELVES BACK WHERE THEY STARTED

by Jason Matthews

WAKING UP TO MODERNISM

by Rebecca Chalmers

CIVIC EDUCATION: IT’S NOT JUST FOR THE YOUNG

by Chris Cavanaugh

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Someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to.

One of my late father-in-law’s favorite quotes was, “you need three things in life to be happy: someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to.” I’d always wondered where it came from, but the internet hasn’t been much help. It attributes variations of the quote to a range of historical figures from Elvis to Immanuel Kant. I’ve decided it doesn’t matter where it came from; it’s decent advice.

This issue of Humanities North Dakota (HND) magazine features so many things I’m looking forward to in the fall, including a semester full of online classes and a series of thought-provoking events. The staff at HND will spend the summer coordinating these offerings, which will keep us out of trouble and give us something to do. Of course, I love our community of lifelong learners and all the ways you expand my mind and heart with your questions, stories, wisdom, and humor. Of the three things needed to be happy, this last one makes me happiest.

If we haven’t run into each other in an online class yet, I hope we do soon.

Much heart, Brenna Gerhardt Executive Director & Fellow Lifelong Learner

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.

COVER ARTIST Trygve Olson has lived his entire life on either side of the Red River of the North. For more than 37 years he has been a freelance artist and editorial cartoonist (The Forum newspaper). Trygve lives in Moorhead, Minnesota with his wife Cheryl and their two cats, Gunnar and Marte.

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SARTREE’S BAR & GRILL & TAXIDERMY

by Nita Ritzke

Welcome, welcome. Come in an take a load off.

What’s in the gunny sack? Somethin for mountin?

ReeNay! Come up ere.

Be jussa a sec. ReeNay be right witch ya.

ReeNay! Come on now. Customer waitin!

A three-legged dog walks into a bar.

Bartender says, “Can I help you?”

Dog says, “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw.”

There ya go.

ReeNay! Watch the drippin! I just cleaned them floors!

Take yer pick. Sit wherever. Sam’s behind the bar or take a booth.

Them two in the corner?

Them two with the silo lookin hats bowlers I heared em called.

Don’t mind them. They won’t bother you none.

Regulars. Here all the time waitin.

They quiet most times but other times fight over the dumbest just to clear their pipes I reckon.

A grasshopper walks into a bar.

Bartender says, “Hey, we have a drink named after you.”

Grasshopper asks, “You have a drink named Walter?”

Sam! Get this one a whistle-wetter.

Beer?

Beer. E.A. No, E.A.’s yer pilsner. Mostly smooth. Little bitter.

E.A.’s short for Excess Central Angst.

E.A. shoppin for them trendy drinkers.

You hungry? We got the best burgers around.

Grind our own gore-may patties. Ask anyone.

Dolly? We got the best burgers around?

See?

Sam, we got the best burgers around?

See?

Hey. Hey you two. Hey. Hell they never listen.

Meat comes from locals.

A horse walks into a bar.

Bartender says, “Hey!” Horse says, “You read my mind.”

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Day-night, night-day. All looks the same under these neons. Take your time.

We’re open twenty-four seven three sixty-five.

A cheetah walks into a bar looking for a poker game.

Bartender kicks him out and says, “We don’t play with your kind.”

I haint always had this here. Can’t member what I used to do.

Sam! You recollect what I used to do?

Sam came with the place.

Sam! What was I before this here?

Sam remembers every story he’s ever heared.

Sam? What was it brought me here?

You can ask Sam anything; he’ll be the one to know.

Sam? Where the hell he’d go?

Dolly, I done warned you agin an agin. Git. Sorry about that. All the time muckin with that old Hamm’s clock.

Git now. Why you so persistin?

What was I sayin? Now I forget.

A weasel walks into a bar.

Bartender asks, “What’ll you have?”

“Pop,” goes the weasel.

You goin?

Well, come back when it’s done. We’ll be here.

Twenty-four seven three sixty-five.

We close on three sixty-six.

Yep, jus go right back out the way you come in.

Exit at the entry.

Welcome, welcome. Come in an take a load off.

Whatcha got there? Possum? Just playin.

ReeNay! Come up ere.

Be jussa sec. You hungry?

NITA K. RITZKE earned a B.S. in English and Communication Arts, an M.A. in Theatre and a Ph.D. in Communication Studies. She has studied absurdism through performance, literary, visual art, historical and philosophical lenses and describes the absurdist aesthetic as the combination of fatigue and silliness--like taking a long road trip with very little scenery. Ritzke gratefully acknowledges “Laser” for the voice of Johnny Sartree.

Did you like this article? Register for this class at humanitiesnd.org/classes That’s Absurd!: Absurdism in the Arts (not “funny ha-ha”, “funny hmm”) | Instructor Nita Ritzke We will study the philosophical and performance history roots of absurdism from its comic seeds in Ancient Greece to its embrace by Modern artists to its presentday representations including the works of Samuel Beckett, Rene Magritte, Douglas Adams, Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, Salvador Dalí, the Coen Brothers and others.

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WHAT A WRITER NEEDS

Every book that anyone sets out [to write] is on a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot.

Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourage the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don’ts of voyaging.

—Wallace Stegner,

On Teaching Creative Writing

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n the spring of 1975, I was walking back to my dorm room at Bismarck Junior College and studying the comments my Freshman English teacher had written on my final paper. All semester, the class had written pragmatic compositions, mostly research papers, but for this final assignment, our teacher asked us to write a personal essay.

I wrote about my hometown, Napoleon, North Dakota. Growing up, my

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one ambition was to escape this place.

Napoleon seemed claustrophobic when I lived there, but when I was asked to write something personal, it was the place that seemed the most interesting to me.

Although my hometown was still there— unchanged and intact as when I left it a few months earlier—I already felt the distance, an ache of the place receding from me, and my instinct was to record something of what I remembered about home.

I did not have a declared major, because I had no idea what people did for a living. My parents told me that I could go to college, but that I had to pick a major that would allow me to finish in four years and get a job after graduation.

I was mostly interested in fashion, music, and boys, but I could not imagine that anyone pursued these things for money. My parents were farmers, as were my grandparents and their parents.

I could only say for certain that I wouldn’t

Debra Marquart, circa 1976. Photo Credit: Richard Larsen

by Debra Marquart

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be a farmer’s wife. I’d figure out the rest as I went along.

Walking down the sidewalk toward Swensen Hall, I turned to the final page of my personal essay and read my teacher’s comments: “You use the leitmotif to advantage,” she wrote. “No one will ever accuse you of sentimentality.” Then at the end, she added: “I think you could be a writer.”

A writer? I remember thinking.

What the heck kind of a job is that?

I will sound naïve when I confess that I had no idea how books were made back then.

Sure, I adored books. I read every one I could get my hands on, but I did not understand that books were being written in our time. I thought that all of the books were written, all the writers were white, male, and dead, and it was up to us to just read what they’d left behind.

And even though I had no concept of what a writer did in the world, I was already a pretty good writer, mostly because of Mr. Olig, a notorious librarian and teacher at Napoleon High School who taught Senior English like Cerberus guarding the gates of Hades. No one graduated from NHS without passing Mr. Olig’s meticulous inspection.

He was nothing like our other teachers who smoked in the teacher’s lounge and talked about football and kids and gardening.

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Mr. Olig was as thin and straightbacked as an ironing board with skin as pale as parchment. He wore a black business suit to school each day, with a crisp white shirt and a skinny black tie. He had a particular way of standing in front of class—with his left arm tucked around the back of his waist, disappearing under the flare of his suit coat, and his right hand raised to his face, two fingers resting on his cheek in an “I’m listening” gesture.

Fridays were theme day in Senior English. Those afternoons, Mr. Olig’s ghostly hand floated to the chalkboard and wrote an aphorism—something like “actions speak louder than words” or “he who hesitates is lost”—and we would have the rest of the period to write down our thoughts on the subject. Our themes were turned in at the end of class, graded over the weekend, and returned to us on Monday.

Mr. Olig had three hard-andfast writing rules. No matter how eloquent your thesis, if you wrote a sentence fragment, you got an F. If you incorrectly used the generic pronoun you, when you should have used the formal singular impersonal third-person pronoun one (as in, “one should take care to never incorrectly use the pronoun you”) you got an F. If you wrote a run-on sentence, you got an F. Other than that, Mr. Olig judged us on our sense of organization and on the quality of

our thoughts.

As soon as the aphorism appeared on the chalkboard, a first wave of terror washed over me. Would I have a single thought worth writing about? Then a second wave of terror rushed in when I heard my classmates, all around, put pencil to paper and start scratching away. How could they know their thoughts so quickly, enough to write them down?

Most of the time, I sat in complete silence for at least twenty minutes, staring into space and sorting through my ideas. I only started writing when I heard audible lines rise up in my head— in a voice that was mine, but a voice meant for the page. I still listen for that voice when I write.

Often when I’m invited to read from my work at a bookstore or university, I’m asked if I have any advice for young writers. My first answer is always “read widely and deeply.” By deeply, I mean read everything creative—not just novels if you’re a novelist, or poems if you’re a poet. But read plays and memoirs and biographies and stories by writers from diverse backgrounds, and the classics from past centuries, and especially world literatures.

By widely, I mean read intensively across the disciplines— economics, philosophy and history; evolutionary biology, engineering, and physics.

I don’t know who told me to read the short stories of Raymond

Carver and the novels of William Faulkner and Willa Cather; or the poems of Rita Dove and Mary Oliver and Anne Carson; or the essays and memoirs of Terry Tempest Williams and Joan Didion and Maxine Hong Kingston, but I can’t imagine my life as a writer without them as guides and standardbearers.

I would never have written my first book of poems, Everything’s a Verb, if I hadn’t first learned about semiotics and the concept of the “floating signifier” from the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. I would never have written my music book, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, if I hadn’t first read Noise: The Political Economy of Music, a book by the French economist Jacques Attali, about who patronizes music, and how that patronage shaped and changed music through the ages.

I’m not sure who told me about the work of Mircea Eliade, a Romanian-born philosopher and historian of religion, but I would never have written my environmental memoir of place, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, if I had not first read Eliade’s books about the idea of “the sacred and the profane” and his influential work about patterns and repetitions, The Myth of the Eternal Return.

Who told me about these strange books that I would never have encountered on my own? It was other writers, sitting around in classes and cafes and bars, talking about writers and writing and books.

So, this is something that a writer absolutely needs—close proximity to other writers who will turn to you after you’ve told a story, and say, “that’s really interesting, you should write about that.” And writers who will talk with you long into the night about this book and that other book.

This is something that a writer absolutely needs—close proximity to other writers.

Because one of those books is likely to be the very one you need to read to help you finish the book you’re trying to write.

So, although writing is a solitary activity and writers are often introverts, writers thrive best in communities containing all kinds of people with deep expertise in many fields, as well as people who know how to find anything you need to know, which is why librarians are the very best friends any writer can have—and especially reference librarians.

Before the days of google, I used to take all of my thorniest research questions down to the Ames Public Library in the college town where I live and approach the research librarians behind the counter with my questions about age demographics and census figures in California for the years between 1880 and 1900 or about land prices in the Midwest in the 1950s or about the cost of a quart of milk or a bushel of wheat in 1920. I’d watch their eyeballs reel like a Vegas slot machine spinning oranges and apples and cherries until their mind settled on the exact shelf, the exact folio where the data I sought was located.

One of the best pieces of luck I ever had was making acquaintance with Susan Dingle, a reference librarian at the North Dakota State Historical Library. Initially, I contacted her about old Northern Pacific railroad brochures from the 1880s, and soon I was being shown pioneer letter collections, and sod house photograph albums, and historical articles about German internment 7

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Most of the time, just the name of a single author occupies the cover of a book, but books are written by entire battalions of people.

camps in North Dakota during World War II, and boxes and boxes of microfiche archives of WPA interviews. So many of these tips from Susan led to authenticating details that went into my memoir and my subsequent research. Similarly, Michael Miller, a bibliographer at the NDSU Library’s Germans-from-Russia collection has curated thousands of documents, taped interviews, and cultural objects related to our ethnic group—as well as produced a stellar series of documentaries about German-Russian culture and history in partnership with Bob Dambach at Prairie Public Television—that will keep writers telling stories and filling books for generations to come.

Bless these people who keep track of where things are stored and who answer when you knock on their door or call with your bonehead questions. I’ve been helped by state geologists and anthropologists, professors of botany, agronomy and meteorology, all of whom offered key bits of information that I needed, a small brick on the path that led me to find the story I was telling.

This is why acknowledgments pages in published books get longer and longer— almost as long as those Oscar night acceptance speeches where actors thank their agents and producers and make-up artists; their parents and their children (who need to go to bed now), until the orchestra raises the volume of the music to drown out their voices and they are pulled off the stage.

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Most of the time, just the name of a single author occupies the cover of a book, but books are written by entire battalions of people. If you assembled all those people on the street at one time, you would have a parade of vintage cars with beauty queens waving from the back seat, with clowns throwing candy, and farmers on John Deere tractors, and cowboys on horses, and a marching band led by drum majorettes and cheerleaders, all of them shouting, Writer, keep going. You can do this!

Around the time I published my second book in 2000, a collection of rock and roll short stories entitled The Hunger Bone, I started trying to find the name of my Freshman English teacher from Bismarck Junior College to thank her in the acknowledgments page.

I am still able to quote verbatim from her comments on my college essay—I think you could be a writer—because I have saved the paper and kept it filed and close by as I’ve moved from state to state, acquiring one college degree after another.

I tried to remember her name—was it Mrs. Hanson or Mrs. Olson? I called the English Department at the school, which was now Bismarck State College, and asked around. No one remembered a teacher by that name, but they thought that she was probably a lecturer who had taught there temporarily, so there would be no record of how to find her.

When my third book was published in 2001, a poetry collection entitled From Sweetness, I asked my former creative writing teacher from Moorhead State University, Mark Vinz, how I might go about finding the name of my teacher at Bismarck State.

“I know some people over there,” Mark

said. “Let me do some checking.”

But he called back a few days later and said, “they think there was a teacher named Hanson, but she died a few years ago.”

I resigned myself to leaving the debt unacknowledged.

Generosity is an underlying premise of teaching. We give our time and encouragement in exchange for a living wage, of course, but most teachers I know are committed to the profession, are committed to investing in the future of the young people in our classes.

At the end of each semester, we release them back to the world and their families. We may remember their stories and some of their faces, but we will probably forget their names, just as they will forget ours, although hopefully something of what we taught them will prove valuable in moving them forward into their lives. That’s what we hope as teachers.

In the fall of 2006, shortly after my book, The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, a memoir about growing up a rebellious farmer’s daughter on a North Dakota wheat farm was published, I was invited back to my alma mater, Bismarck State College to give a public reading. It was a big deal.

My mom and several of my family members made the trip up to Bismarck with me for the event.

What an incredible homecoming.

When I walked into the foyer of the auditorium where I was to give the reading, an older woman rushed up to me. “I have to talk to you,” she said and reached for my arm. “I have been following your career,” she said with excitement.

“I was your English teacher when you were a student here at BJC.” “Oh my god,” I said. “I have been trying to find you for years,” I said, “so that I could thank you.”

We hugged, and we were both crying pretty hard by then.

Our reunion was brief because I had to get inside the auditorium to do the reading. Bismarck State had arranged for me to be introduced by Clay Jenkinson, the distinguished historian and humanities scholar, who writes so extensively about North Dakota history. In his introduction, he spoke movingly about the themes in my memoir, especially my complicated feelings about whether or not it was possible to go home again. He quoted the following passage from The Horizontal World: Perhaps it’s true that, as Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You can’t go home again.” Mostly because, as in Wolfe’s case, after you write about the place you’re from, people are waiting at the city gates with pitchforks and burning torches the next time you try to visit.

After reading this passage, Jenkinson brandished a pitchfork that he had hidden behind the

podium and raised a red Bic lighter in the air, flaring the tip of it, then called me to the stage: “Please join me in welcoming home, the author Debra Marquart.”

It was a moment that any writer can only dream about.

But most indelible remains the moment when I was finally able to acknowledge my former writing teacher and say her name—Judith Swartz, a longtime teacher of English at Bismarck State College. I asked her to rise, and people applauded, and everyone was impressed that I could quote verbatim the words of encouragement that she had written on my college paper all those years before. The entire night stands out in my memory as luminous, as if lit by fireflies.

About a year later, in the fall of 2007, I received an email from Jane Schreck, a professor in the BSC English department, telling me that Judith Swartz had recently passed away. Jane thought I would want to know. My memory is that Judith had been ill for some time and that made the fact that I was able to publicly thank her all the more poignant.

I suppose it’s part of aging, but one begins to look back with fondness and nostalgia on the experiences and people who were so important in one’s life at certain points. What became of them? What are their lives like?

Would they remember us?

When The Horizontal World 9

| FALL PROGRAM ISSUE | was published, I was also finally able to thank my high school English teacher, the formidable Mr. James Olig, in the acknowledgments page of my book. I wrote him a note and sent an inscribed copy of the memoir, feeling a bit sheepish about the fact that the book opened with a sentence fragment—the single word, “Farmboys.” Would Mr. Olig send back a corrected copy marked in red ink bearing the letter grade F on the cover?

But no, he replied with a gracious card celebrating the book and bragging about another one of this students, Ronald Vossler, who had also become a published author. His writing on the notecard was a little shaky, but still recognizable as Mr. Olig’s elegant hand.

I recall my pulse quickened as I opened the envelope to read his words. My palms got a little sweaty. l DEBRA MARQUART is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University and Iowa’s Poet Laureate. She is the Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment. A memoirist, poet, and performing musician, Marquart is the author of six books including an environmental memoir of place, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere and a collection of poems, Small Buried Things: Poems. A singer/songwriter, Marquart continues to perform music solo and with her jazz-poetry performance project, The Bone People, with whom she has recorded two CDs. Marquart teaches in ISU’s interdisciplinary MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment and in the Stonecoast LowResidency MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. Her next two books, Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars: New & Collected Poems and The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays of Exile & Belonging, are forthcoming in 2021.

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ARE YOU A WRITER? One begins to look back with fondness and nostalgia on the experiences and people who were so important in one’s life at certain points.

The Little Mo Writers Incubator Project is a sevenmonth low-residency writing workshop designed to guide and support the work of writers engaged in research nonfiction projects that focus on a person, place, or event in North Dakota or bordering regions.

Two cohorts of up to eight writers in each cohort will be selected. One incubator is for beginners and one is for more advanced.

IS THIS EXACTLY WHAT YOU'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR? Did you like this article? Apply to the Little Mo Writers Project at humanitiesnd.org/event-details/little-mo-writersincubator-project-1

Little Mo Writers | Incubator Project DESCRIPTION Intensive writing workshop for writers, scholars, and historians to hone and improve their writing while bringing to fruition a 1) research nonfiction project, defined as biography or profile writing, reportage or immersion journalism, cultural history or archival research writing; 2) historical fiction; or 3) memoir. Preference given to projects involving a person, place, or event in North Dakota or region. Other project subjects and genres considered as space and cohort composition/affinity allow. Two cohorts of 8 writers will be selected via a formal application process. Cohorts will participate in scheduled online workshops, including an orientation day the last Saturday of September, writing workshops every other week from October to March, with a break for December and early January, and a final public reading and individual meeting with an assigned mentor.

INCUBATOR OPTIONS BEGINNER INCUBATOR This incubator will start with a “boot camp” model on writing craft (establishing point of view, form, character development, tense, etc.) and will utilize various exercises and prompts for generating writing. The second half of the incubator is a workshop format where participants will submit writing for critique and feedback, putting into practice what’s been learned in boot camp. The goal here is a full draft of a shorter piece (e.g. essay, short story, chapter) rather than book-length project.

ADVANCED INCUBATOR Apply to this incubator if you have a start on or idea for a book-length project. Each participant will submit 50 pages of writing for one workshop in the fall and again in spring.

THEN APPLY TODAY at www.humanitiesnd.org/classes

APPLICATIONS DUE AUG. 1, 2021 INCUBATOR BEGINS SEPT. 25, 2021

Humanities North Dakota virtual programs and events are accessible to all.

To stay informed, update your contact information at:

HumanitiesND.org

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EIGHTY YEARS AFTER THE ATLANTIC CHARTER,

WESTERN DEMOCRACIES FIND THEMSELVES BACK WHERE THEY STARTED

by Jason Matthews

2021 is a year of anniversaries. This year marks the anniversaries of three significant events in modern history, each of which gives context to the tumult of our current times.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the red bannered hammer and sickle was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time on Christmas Day 1991, policy makers and scholars heralded the moment as the ultimate triumph of western liberalism. Marxism and Leninism had in fact been relegated to, in Ronald Reagan’s words, “the ash heap of history.” Democracy and free markets had prevailed. This sentiment was widely held and best articulated one year later by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his work The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama argued that the Soviet collapse not only ushered in a new global era, but it ended humanity’s search for a viable political organization. As Fukuyama wrote: What is emerging victorious, in other words, is not so much liberal practice, as the liberal idea. That is to say, for a very large part of the world, there is now no ideology with pretensions to universality that is in a

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position to challenge liberal democracy, and no universal principle of legitimacy other than the sovereignty of the people… The growth of liberal democracy, together with its companion, economic liberalism, has been the most remarkable macropolitical phenomenon of the last four hundred years.

The world had reached the point where liberal democracy and economic liberalism were the only path forward for the world. Fukuyama argued, and many in the West agreed, that one cannot improve on a system that aims to deliver material wellbeing at the same time as largely preserving the freedom of its members. For the average American at the time, it was hard to argue otherwise when McDonald’s opened up near Red Square, when you could eat Kentucky Fried Chicken in Shanghai, and purchase a pair of Levi’s in Dubai.

Major events would soon make a mockery of Fukuyama’s idea. The Tiananmen Square Massacre, the war in the Balkans, and the Rwandan Civil War gave fuel to Fukuyama’s critics. Chief among them was Samuel Huntington who argued that history had not so much ended as humanity reverted back to its tribal impulses. For Huntington, the Cold War’s end simply marked passage into a global 13

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“The core of our society is Americans enjoying the freedom to express themselves and doing what’s in them to do.” clash of civilizations. In his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Huntington challenged the prevailing sentiment that western liberalism had prevailed, arguing: In fundamental ways, the world is becoming more modern and less Western… Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes, and the clash of civilizations is tribal conflict on a global scale…

The dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic (Chinese) assertiveness.

But in the 1990s, American attitudes to external events were, perhaps, best captured by none other than Jeane Kirkpatrick, the quintessential neoconservative Cold Warrior and Ronald Reagan’s first ambassador to the United Nations. For Kirkpatrick, it was time for America to become “a normal country in a normal time.” It was a compelling argument in an America that was enjoying historic prosperity propelled by low interest rates, near record low oil prices, free trade, and newly invented information technologies. Walter Russell Mead, Bard College professor and scholar at the Hudson Institute, observed that America is “not Sparta” – a society organized for war, conquest, and foreign policy.

“When things don’t seem that urgent we want to get back to watching TV.” Without an enemy or existential threat to organize against, America and the West did just that. The West turned to materialism, consumerism, and consumption.

After all, wasn’t 75 years of fighting fascism and communism enough? Had not America earned a respite from history? “The core of our society is Americans enjoying the freedom to express themselves and doing what’s in them to do,” Mead noted. “But then someone comes along and whacks 14

us on the head with a two-by-four and reminds us there’s a world out there.”

On September 11, 2001, the two-by-four didn’t hit America on the head – it hit us in the gut. Our holiday from history was over.

Twenty years now removed from the events of that day, the world looks nothing like the one imagined by Fukuyama and eerily like the one envisioned by Huntington. In many ways, it appears even worse. Freedom House, a U.S.-based nonprofit and nongovernmental organization, founded in 1941, had as its first co-chairs Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband’s 1940 election opponent, former Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie.

Freedom House conducts ongoing research on the state of democracy, political freedom, and human rights around the world. For the last 15 years, the group’s annual reports have shown a consistent decline in global freedom. Each year’s report is more troubling than the last. It’s 2021 report, released in February, is the most ominous yet. Its title says it all: Democracy Under Siege.

The report’s executive summary alone should come with a warning to read only with a stiff drink in hand. As the report states: A lethal pandemic, economic and physical insecurity, and violent conflict ravaged the world, democracy’s defenders sustained heavy losses in their struggle against authoritarian foes, shifting the international balance in favor of tyranny… The countries experiencing (democratic) deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began in 2006.

Freedom House finds the impact of long-term democratic decline is increasingly global in nature and felt worldwide with nearly 75 percent of the

world’s population living in a nation that experienced democratic deterioration last year. Among these nations is the United States. As the report so depressingly and matter-of-factly states: The long democratic recession is deepening…

The ongoing decline has given rise to claims of democracy’s inherent inferiority.

Proponents of this idea include official Chinese and Russian commentators seeking to strengthen their international influence while escaping accountability for abuses, as well as antidemocratic actors within democratic states who see an opportunity to consolidate power. They are both cheering the breakdown of democracy and exacerbating it… The malign influence of the regime in China, the world’s most populous dictatorship, was especially profound in 2020… Meanwhile, the Chinese regime has gained clout in multilateral institutions such as the U.N. Human Rights Council, which the United States abandoned in 2018, as Beijing pushed a vision of so-called noninterference that allows abuses of democratic principles and human rights to go unpunished while the formation of autocratic alliances is promoted.

Democracy is in its most precarious state since the 1930s. From U.S. presidential elections to Brexit to disinformation through social media and the dark web, a resurgent Russia foments nationalism and domestic discord from within western democracies.

For its part, China exports its autocratic capitalism abroad as an alternative to the West’s liberal democratic economy. China is asserting itself militarily in Asia and, through business contracts and economic agreements, is gaining a foothold in Africa

and South America. Against this bleak backdrop, America and her allies would do well to use the 80th anniversary of the Atlantic Charter as an occasion for reflection and reassessment. The Charter is, tragically, little remembered today and has seldom been fully appreciated. But it deserves to be placed alongside other seminal documents in western history.

Developed and issued on August 14, 1941, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Atlantic Charter established the Allied Powers’ goals for the global order after the end of the Second World War. Even three months before its formal entry into the conflict, the United States was preparing for the postwar world. The joint statement set forth sweeping goals.

In the immediate, it called for the total defeat and disarmament of the Axis powers. In the long-term, it cemented the values that would eventually underpin the moral, political, and economic objectives of the western world from then on: political selfdetermination for all peoples, freedom of the seas, equal access to trade and raw materials, and global cooperation.

Three years after being issued, in 1944, the Bretton Woods Agreement expanded upon the Charter’s economic objectives. The Agreement – struck in, of all places, rural New Hampshire – created the liberal international economic order anchored in the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, the tearing down of trade barriers, and the establishment of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The Charter’s moral and political objectives underpinned the western political and military alliance against Soviet Communism starting with the Truman Doctrine in 1947.

America and her allies would do well to use the 80th anniversary of the Atlantic Charter as an occasion for reflection and reassessment.

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We have traveled far in the 80 years since the Atlantic Charter, but, in many ways, the West has come right back to where we started in 1941.

The liberal international order was born with the issuance of the Atlantic Charter. It was secured by America and guaranteed political and economic stability backed by American military protection. It ushered in the era of Pax Americana. Unlike Pax Romana or Pax Britannica, America became an “empire by invitation.” On the whole, this order, while far from perfect, served the world well for 80 years. But the world it was created for and applied to has dramatically changed. Historian Niall Ferguson argues we are now at the end of the West’s 500-year dominance. As Ferguson hypothesizes, the West’s advantage over “the rest” resided in its six – to borrow the tech term – “killer apps”: competition, science, property rights, medicine, a consumer society, and the Protestant “work ethic.”

Now, the rest of the world has either accepted or co-opted these killer apps. As a result, the Washington Consensus on free market economic policy is disintegrating due to Middle Class stagnation throughout the western world and the example of the Chinese alternative to the developing world. This failure to manage downward pressures on the Middle Class is partly fueling the rise of nationalism and populism, which as Edward Luce notes in The Retreat of Western Liberalism, is quickly replacing the West’s faith in reason and linear progress. “Chaos, not China, is likelier to take America’s place (in the world)…

The West’s crisis is real, structural, and likely to persist.” But, as Luce notes, the West’s fate is not entirely out of our hands. “Some of what ails the West is within our power to fix” so long as the West rejects complacency about democracy and seeks “understanding exactly how we got here.”

The COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol may finally have jarred the West out of this complacency. We are 16

already witnessing changes, albeit rhetorical ones, from policymakers. President Joseph Biden now frequently invokes Chinese and Russian competition in rhetoric reminiscent of the Cold War. You could hear the change one month into Biden’s presidency in his remarks to the Munich Security Conference: We must demonstrate that democracy can still deliver for our people in this changed world…

That, in my view, is our galvanizing mission.

We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future and direction of our world, between those who argue that… autocracy is the best way forward and those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting these challenges… [and] prove our model is not a relic.

It does not take too great a leap to imagine similar words being uttered by democratic leaders eight decades earlier during democracy’s darkest crisis.

We have traveled far in the 80 years since the Atlantic Charter, but, in many ways, the West has come right back to where we started in 1941.

Granted, the world is not at war, but democracy is in retreat, authoritarianism is on the rise, and the scourge of nationalism is spreading. The West in 2021 suffers from what many rightfully categorize as a crisis of self-confidence. External threats that threaten 80 years of geopolitical stability have now emerged. But these threats also offer western liberalism the opportunity to break out of its torpor.

Whether the United States and the western world will rise to meet the moment will determine the fate of the 21st century.

There’s no question the challenges are multifaceted and complex. The battles are now very much within western democracies themselves

with identity, nationalism, ethnicity, and culture wars dominating politics. The old left-versus-right framework is increasingly replaced by nationalistversus-globalist and democratic-versus-antidemocratic. The destabilizing effects of social media and the effectiveness of propagandist cable news outlets stifle civil debate and close off once traditional avenues for consensus. Adding to this witch’s brew is climate change and automation, which will both further alter societies in ways we have yet to fully comprehend.

The outlook may look bleak, but history tells us that the West – and the United States in particular – will eventually rise to the challenge. Unfortunately, it will do so after it has confirmed Churchill’s observation and has “exhausted all alternatives.”

So the question in this year of anniversaries is not whether western democracies will meet the moment, but, rather, will the West do so before it’s too late?

Unfortunately, that is very much an open question. l JASON MATTHEWS is an adjunct political science instructor at Bismarck State College, teaches for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), and is a strategic planning and public affairs consultant. He resides in Bismarck.

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What the Hell is Happening? | Instructor Jason Matthews

In recent years, one common question has been frequently asked by millions: What the hell is happening? This course will seek to answer this question by examining the geo-political, economic, social, and cultural forces driving today’s global and domestic disruption. This course will examine the world and United States at this moment. Among the topics that will be examined in this series is the reordering of world power in the 21st century, the rise of China, Russia’s challenge to the West, the crisis of confidence plaguing western nations, and the precarious state and uncertain future of democracy abroad and, most concerning of all, here in the United States.

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The Odyssey and Moby Dick

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I was actively looking for a different kind of reading experience.

WAKING UP TO MODERNISM

by Rebecca Chalmers

I

can’t recall precisely when I first encountered The Grapes of Wrath. I’m pretty sure I was 13, and I know it was summertime. It was certainly during an adolescent year that came a bit before the time when I’d spend most available summer hours—after devoting a substantial number to the beach—at local ballgames, where a current boyfriend would dazzle me with his skills, or on car rides with friends, windows down and music blaring, in an attempt to attract the attention of other boys. Those later, boy-crazed teenage years were on the horizon. But during that earlier summer, I had outgrown all the books that would today be identified as “young adult” and some other “classic” texts that I’d been offered; and, frustrated by the limitations of available bookmobile choices, I was actively looking for a different kind of reading experience.

Reading was a prized, highly esteemed activity in my family, almost an obligation, right up there with church attendance. We all read, but my mother, an inveterate reader, had a profound influence on the direction

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The kind of in-your-face challenge posed by this novel demanded a whole new level of thought from my 13-year-old brain.

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my life would ultimately take, though neither she nor I would know that then, and, in any case, I would certainly have resisted the idea of her influence. It was she who introduced me to John Steinbeck. She had grown up during the Great Depression in a family of musician tobacco farmers in North Carolina, she knew about self-sufficiency and self-denial, she treasured books, and she despised indolence. I had learned quite early on that, if I was reading, she didn’t think me lazy; she considered reading a productive enterprise, and it could potentially keep me out of trouble or, even better, help me avoid chores of some kind.

Besides, I loved to read and routinely stepped off the bookmobile loaded down with so many books that my slight frame could barely support them and that the lady who brought the bookmobile to our small Virginia town was certain I couldn’t read in the two weeks before her return and said so. I always did.

And so it was that, as I searched for more meaningful and fulfilling reads, my mother suggested The Grapes of Wrath. My life would never be the same, and, yes, I know what you’re thinking, and, no, it isn’t an overstatement. Before that moment, I had been a plot enthusiast: if it involved a mystery to be solved or an adventure to be completed or a romance to be reconciled, the work of the book—sometimes cleverly accomplished and sometimes more ploddingly constructed—was, as far as I was concerned, done. If a book had amusing, relatable characters, so much the better, and it would receive my hearty endorsement. I didn’t think much about authors. Occasionally I’d find books by the same author, know what to expect from them, and enjoy them well enough, but the effect of Steinbeck’s novel was completely unanticipated.

For one thing, I knew right away that I didn’t have the language to apprehend it—not that the writing was difficult or dense, really, but how did one think about or talk about this novel? It wasn’t enough to say it was a story about the misbegotten Joad family and a move to California to escape the ravages of the Dust Bowl. What was I to make of this plot? What got resolved, if anything? And how did these interchapters—I didn’t yet have that word, for sure—which interrupted the story of the Joads, with descriptions of landscape or commentaries on politics or reflections on the difficulties of real-life situations, function? Couldn’t Steinbeck simply have gotten on with the Joad story and eliminated some of that stuff?

I can still see my early teenage self, cross-legged on my bed at night, bent over the novel, rereading whole sections of it. Rereading! Who did that?

Something important was happening in this novel, and, both fascinated and puzzled, I needed to discover what it was. This new reading experience took me back to an early memory, when, as a very young girl, I’d see my father read the comics in the Sunday The Virginian Pilot and then chuckle at something he’d read. I’d ask him what was funny; he’d show me the strip;

and, though I could read the words, I didn’t get the joke. They held a secret code that, I thought, only older people understood, and I resented and envied their ability to decipher it. This time, I wasn’t going to leave the book until I had the decoder key.

And then it happened. One night, as I explored how the Joad narrative gets picked up and dropped off between sections, I experienced an epiphany: the interchapters, I realized, reflect the Joads’ experience at the same time that they expand the family story to encompass a much larger human concern, a connection with the earth and with all people everywhere, with people who might experience distress, displacement, disenfranchisement, in situations over which they have little, if any, control.

They connect and reflect the politics of human experience—especially the economic, spiritual, familial realities of a failed hope in and quest for the illusive and legendary American Dream. The Joads could be any family that falls on impossibly difficult times, and Steinbeck’s novel, with the Joads at its center, raises a set of complex questions: how could society, especially one that prides itself on its religious underpinnings and social justice, justify its ill treatment of the least among us? What could we do to help people avoid the harsh and, to me, unthinkable systems and conditions that preyed on the Joads? Must such calamities and hardships really befall people? Can we the people rest comfortably on the notion that the impoverished will always be among us and simply shrug off the implications of such thinking? The kind of in-your-face challenge posed by this novel demanded a whole new level of thought from my 13-year-old brain.

Now, to be clear, I couldn’t then have articulated such impressions in the way that I just did, nor could I have explained how imagism or symbolism or experimentation with form marks the work of American and other

modernist writers. I felt them, intuited them, but couldn’t yet put them into words. Many years later I would develop the language that would allow me to discuss the traits of the modern novels I love, but I already felt the effects of such texts, deeply. Steinbeck’s book demanded a more readerly commitment than any book I had yet experienced; it was clearly written for adult thinkers about adult situations; it provided a thrillingly vicarious experience that both frightened and excited me. I loved the challenge, the way that, bit by bit, I could see how and, perhaps, why this text was important.

Moreover, I immediately and almost inherently reevaluated the work that novels did: they did more than amuse or divert or entertain. They did all of those things, of course, but, quite suddenly, I appreciated that they could do more, much more than I had thought: they could carve out an identity from difficult places and circumstances, acknowledge both the fullness and the brokenness of problematic characters, explore the deepest and darkest sides of the human underbelly, all without fully wrapping up conflicts in a tidy or pretty package. They didn’t compromise with or back away from dysfunction or ugliness; instead, they forced readers’ noses into it. They exposed the glaring alienation and disaffection that result from societal illness: the abuses and frequently unexamined travails of segments of the population, the reality of a longignored bias, the harsh personal consequences of socio-political conflict, or the wanton disregard of humanity in the face of undeterred greed—the difficult issues we almost refuse to tackle—at least not readily. They were unflinching in raising issues that begged examination and discussion. They could make me feel the depth of their importance, even if I didn’t fully understand it. And, more than anything else, they were powerful, with a capital “P.” I credit The Grapes of Wrath with establishing 23

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My readerly expectations and my world view were changed forever that summer.

the trajectory of my life, though realizing its fulfillment took a more indirect and circuitous route than I could then have imagined. Many years and graduate programs and university positions later, I am still devoted to modernist authors and to texts of all kinds that force me to work with them in unexpected and exciting ways. I still feel the same thrill—the exhilaration of exploration and discovery—that I first experienced many, many years ago now. Though it’s clear to me that this life-defining experience was a genuine gift, it could certainly be argued that my mother made a bold, even daring, suggestion to encourage her young daughter to read such a provocative and challenging text. It would be quite a long while before I’d read books like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse or William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or James Joyce’s Ulysses, but my readerly expectations and my world view were changed forever that summer as I traveled across country with the Joads and grew up a bit in the process. I had started the journey as a naïve reader; but, as I slowly digested Steinbeck’s novel, I began to awaken to modernism, to an intellectual pursuit that would guide and inform my professional life…and still does. l REBECCA CHALMERS is currently an independent scholar and professional editor who lives on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Her primary scholarly interests include late19th and early-20th Century works written in English, literature and film, and literary theory. After a number of years as a university professor in various locations—the last 13 of which were spent at the University of Mary in Bismarck—she continues to teach occasional university classes, enjoys her work with Humanities ND, spends time on a variety of writing projects, and treasures her time near the Atlantic Ocean.

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Working with our state’s civic teachers, Humanities North Dakota is bringing the comprehensive course on the history and principles of the US Government to adults. The We the People Adult Civics Course will take you from the philosophical and historical foundations of the U.S. political system to the challenges American constitutional democracy faces in the 21st century.

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American Literary Modernism | Instructor Rebecca Chalmers When we say “modernism,” what do we mean exactly, and when we add “American” to the mix, which issues get reflected in the books of writers like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wharton, Faulkner, Cather, and Steinbeck? How are American cultural expectations explored, challenged, or affirmed in the texts that American authors write during the first part of the 20th century? Come along as we explore some of these amazing books.

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CIVIC EDUCATION: IT’S NOT JUST FOR THE YOUNG

by Chris Cavanaugh

M

ore than 220 years ago, Ben Franklin said, “Nothing is more important for the public welfare than to form and train our youth in wisdom and virtue.” Those words still ring true today; however, the questions this idea begs are how we go about “training” our youth in wisdom, virtue, and civic awareness. Is that training only for the young? What does it mean to be a citizen of the U.S. today, and, with that citizenship, what rights, as well as responsibilities, do we possess? James Madison, along with his friend and colleague Thomas Jefferson, felt it imperative that the citizens of the United States “be enlightened” when it comes to the workings of government and the protection of their rights. Education, therefore, is essential to preserving liberty in the “hearts of men.”

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The best way to do this is to teach our citizen-students to think critically. Think back to your time in high school. What do you remember? Time with friends, that favorite teacher, or the time “Jimmy” fell asleep in Algebra and fell out of his desk? Those are the things we remember. When we get our citizen-students to think critically we are teaching them a way to think that they can use as active citizens, no matter their chosen profession.

We must learn to be critical thinkers and not cynical citizens. The cynicism that abounds today is a tide that civic education must try to stem. It is imperative that citizenstudents be shown that what they think matters and provide for them avenues for their voices to be heard. This is also the goal of Humanities North Dakota through the 27

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“Who are the best keepers of the people’s liberties? The people themselves.

courses and programs it offers.

The free online course, “We the People: Adult Civic Education,” is an attempt to bring together adult learners who want to revisit the founding documents in American history. The class uses the “We the People… The Citizen and the Constitution” curriculum established by the Center for Civic Education. This approach to American government lets the students explore the philosophy behind the Constitution. After covering the philosophy, students look at the history of European and colonial rights. This history leads to the writing and ratification of our Constitution and then the practical application of our laws in modern-day society.

We discuss the struggle of what has been described as “expanding the ‘us’ and reducing the ‘other.’” In other words, how has the U.S. gone from a society that only allowed white, property-owning men to hold power to trying to give all citizens, regardless of gender, orientation, or social status a “seat at the table”?

This process may involve looking at a speech by Malcolm X at the University of Oxford where he said a man was justified in using “any means necessary” to bring about change when the laws and the government won’t address the inequalities in society, then draw on what Machiavelli wrote in The Prince many, many years earlier, that the “ends justify the means.” Then we must consider Jefferson’s words (borrowed from the natural rights philosopher John Locke) in the Declaration of Independence, that, whenever 28

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a government fails to protect the rights of its citizens, those citizens have the right to “alter or abolish it.” There are no easy answers but the students must think, and they must strive to see the relationships between these ideas as they come into play in our society time and time again. And they must listen to those with whom they may disagree.

When leaving the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Franklin famously replied to a woman who asked him what kind of government they had devised, “a republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

The republic can only be preserved by an emphasis on civic education for all persons in the nation.

The concerns over our current state of civic education are real, but how do we as a nation deal with these serious issues? Testing data showed that students were grossly deficient in civic knowledge and discourse; following that revelation, there was a K-12 push for reform. Unfortunately, testing data released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), even as late as May 2008, showed that students tested at almost the same levels. According to Charles Quigley, the former Executive Director of the Center for Civic Education, “America’s school children are woefully unprepared to take their place as informed, engaged citizens.” The NAEP results show that only 24% of students tested were rated at the “proficient” level. With the high stakes emphasis in math and language arts, civic education classes have been phased out.

Current spending levels show the investment decline in the last 50 years to the point where civic education programs now attract just 1/1000 of the money spent on STEM subjects.

James Madison once wrote, “Who are the best keepers of the people’s liberties?

The people themselves. The sacred trust

can be no where so safe as in the hands most interested in preserving it.” Madison went on to explain how this “sacred trust” can be protected: “The people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government they should watch over it, as well as obey it.” When we fail to act in that common education for citizenship that Madison called for, we do so at our own peril, and at the peril of the republic.

Constitutional Scholar David Adler coined the term “Madisonian Monitor,” in that all citizens must have a basic understanding of the workings of government and then to hold those we elect accountable to following the founding principles. Madison realized that a common education for citizenship, regardless of age, in a democratic republic was needed to establish an enlightened and united people, who could interact intelligently with their constitutional government and each other to secure natural rights and promote the common good. So, in response to a legislator from the neighboring state of Kentucky, who sought advice about the public education of citizens, Madison wrote: “A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

This is exactly what “We the People: Adult Civic Education” and Humanities North Dakota try to do. l

CHRIS CAVANAUGH is a long time civic educator who is currently teaching at Bismarck High School, in Bismarck North Dakota.

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Constitution 101 Adult Civic Education |

Instructor Jeff Rotering

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.

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Amena Chaudry Sundays 1-3 pm CST Sept. 12, 19, 26, Oct. 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, Nov. 7, 14 It’s hard to talk about racism in the United States. The topic is complex and controversial, and can easily trigger strong emotions. While racism is one of the major causes of economic inequality and social tensions, some are convinced that it ended with the civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

The protests and civil unrest in the past few years, as well as our ongoing political polarization, provide sufficient reasons to take race and racism seriously. It is clear that we cannot move forward as a nation unless we face the reality of race, develop a common understanding of its impact, and learn ways to have effective conversations so that we can collectively develop strategies to make sustainable changes to how this social system in the US negatively impacts so many lives.

WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING?

FALL 2021 Public University classes are free for members Registration for HND members begins July 25 Registration for the general public begins Aug 1 Class sizes are limited HND members enjoy early registration and free classes

Jason Matthews Thursdays 6:30-8:30 pm CST Sept. 9, 16, 23, 30, Oct. 7, 14, 21, 28

In recent years, one common question has been frequently asked by millions: What the hell is happening? This course will seek to answer this question by examining the geopolitical, economic, social, and cultural forces driving today’s global and domestic disruption.

This course will examine the world and United States at this moment. Among the topics that will be examined in this series is the reordering of world power in the 21st century, the rise of China, Russia’s challenge to the West, the crisis of confidence plaguing western nations, and the precarious state and uncertain future of democracy abroad and, most concerning of all, here in the United States.

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Let’s get that creative magic flowing! This 30

writing workshop is for my lovely LGBTQIA+ high school/early college humans, ages 16-19. Open to writers of any genre—poet, novelist, journalist, diarist, songwriter, if you write or want to write, you’re in! Participants will be asked to create and share one short piece for workshop. Learn new craft tricks, make some new writing friends, and enjoy a safe, supportive environment for sharing and nurturing your creative self.

THE ART OF MEMOIR

Tayo Basquiat Wednesdays 7-9 pm CST Sept. 29 & Oct. 13 Working on a memoir? Think you might like to write your story? This class is for you! We’ll consider memoir as a form, the relationship between identity and memory, key elements of great literary memoir, the connection between the particular and the universal, catharsis and conflict. We’ll dissect a few models and end with generative exercises to get you started on your own memoir.

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This workshop is for post-high school writers of any genre—poet, novelist, journalist, diarist, songwriter, if you write or want to write, this is for you! Participants will be asked to create and share one short piece for workshop and in return you’ll get reader-response feedback.

Learn new craft tricks, make some new writing friends, and enjoy a safe, supportive environment for sharing and nurturing your creative self.

CONSTITUTION 101 ADULT CIVIC EDUCATION Jeff Rotering Wednesdays 5:30-7:30 pm CST Sept. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, Oct. 6

A 6-week online adult course on civic education. This course takes you from the philosophical foundations of the U.S. 31

F A L L 2 0 2 1 Public University Classes

CALL MY AGENT: CONVERSATIONS ON CONTEMPORARY FILM AND RACE Serge Danielson-Francois Saturdays 1-3 pm CST Sept. 18, 25, Oct. 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, Nov. 6, 13, 20, 27

THE VIRTUOUS LIFE

To what extent has the decolonization of Hollywood race films over the last five years promoted cultural discourse offscreen about colonized male and female agency and advanced the cause of racial equity? During this course we will apply the insights from scholars (Sharpe, DuBois, Memmi, Thiongo) to several contemporary films.

For ancient philosophers, a good life meant a virtuous life: for Plato, virtue was the state of harmony achieved in the tripartite soul; for Aristotle, virtue was both an end-goal of a life well-lived and for every constitutive action along the way, the exercise of prudence determining right action in the right way at the right time. For the stoics, four virtues stood above all others: wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. The course is an invitation to think about virtue: what are virtues? What are the virtues of a good leader? What does it mean to practice specific virtues like wisdom or justice? How did these philosophers aspire to virtuous action and lives in the midst of pandemics, war, leadership crises, fear of death, loss, ugly rumors . . . sound familiar?

THAT’S ABSURD!: ABSURDISM IN THE ARTS (NOT “FUNNY HA-HA”, “FUNNY HMM”)

Nita Ritzke Mondays 6-8 pm CST Sept. 13, 20, 27, Oct. 4, 11, 18, 25, Nov. 1, 8, 15 We will study the philosophical and performance history roots of absurdism from its comic seeds in Ancient Greece to its embrace by Modern artists to its present-day representations including the works of Samuel Beckett, Rene Magritte, Douglas Adams, Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, Salvador Dalí, the Coen Brothers and others.

PROPHETIC LEADERSHIP

Ahmed Afzaal Saturdays 3-5 pm CST Sept. 18, 25, Oct. 2, 9, 16, 23 The purpose of this course is to provide a space for conversations about “prophetic leadership” and its relevance for the contemporary world. As we shall see, prophetic leadership emerges in response to an acute awareness that things are not as they 32

could have been, or as they ought to be. It is a response, in other words, to a sense of crisis.

Today, as we face the numerous overlapping crises of our own time, we are in dire need of prophetic leaders and role models. The prophets of the Old Testament, and all those who have sought to follow in their footsteps, can provide some of the guidance and inspiration we so desperately need today.

Tayo Basquiat Wednesdays 7-8:30 pm CST Sept. 1, 8, 15, 22

THEMES IN AMERICAN INDIAN HISTORY Joseph Jastrzembski Tuesdays 6-8 pm CST Sept. 21, 28, Oct. 5, 12, 19, 26, Nov. 2

From creation accounts to modern tribal governments, explore themes in American Indian History. Through lectures, guided readings/videos, and discussions, this course will introduce you to an overview of American Indian History, examining such topics as origins; encounters and exchanges; tribes, confederacies, and identity; land and land use; and political and cultural sovereignty.

VIVA HUMANITIES! EMBRACING YOUR INNER SCHOLAR Brian Palecek Mondays 3-5 pm CST Sept. 13, 20, 27, Oct. 4, 11, 18, 25, Nov. 1

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 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 Thursdays 6-8 pm CST Sept. 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, Oct. 7, 14, 21, 28, Nov, 4 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.

WENDELL BERRY: STORIES AND ESSAYS Jane M. Schreck Tuesdays 3-5 pm CST Sept. 7, 14, 21, 28, Oct. 5, 12, 19, 26

fiction and philosophy and his belief in humanity’s responsibility to care for each other and for our world.

AMERICAN LITERARY MODERNISM Rebecca Chalmers Wednesdays 2-4 pm CST Sept. 8, 15, 22, 29, Oct. 6, 13, 20, 27, Nov. 3, 10

When we say “modernism,” what do we mean exactly, and when we add “American” to the mix, what issues get reflected in the books of writers like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wharton, Faulkner, Cather, and Steinbeck? How are American cultural expectations explored, challenged, or affirmed in the texts that American authors write during the first part of the 20th century? Come along as we explore some of these amazing books.

F A L L 2 0 2 1 Public University Classes

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.

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

Brad Kroupa Wednesdays 5:30-7:30 pm Sept. 8, 15, 22, 29, Oct. 6, 13, 20, 27, Nov. 3, 10, 17 This course is designed to introduce students to the most important issues facing Native Americans as individuals, communities, and Nations in the contemporary world. Discussion topics will include selected economic, social, political, and educational issues, as well as contemporary cultural revitalization movements of tradition, language, and ceremony. Contemporary Issues of Indigenous Peoples will offer an Indigenous perspective and provide a window into the modern Native American experience.

This course will celebrate a selection of stories and essays by writer-thinker-farmer Wendell Berry. In an ongoing career that has spanned over 60 years, Berry has told stories and penned essays that express his agrarian philosophy of community and the human scale of work. With discussions and readings, students will explore the alignment of Berry’s 33

JUNE 27

William Kent Krueger This Tender Land

A magnificent novel about four orphans on a life-changing odyssey during the Great Depression.

JULY 25

SPONSORED BY THE PARIS FAMILY FOUNDATION AND PRAIRIE PUBLIC BOADCASTING

Michael Patrick Smith Good Hand

A vivid window into the world of working class men set during the Bakken fracking boom in North Dakota.

AUG. 29

Melissa Gould Widowish

Melissa Gould’s hopeful memoir of grieving outside the box and the surprising nature of love.

SEPT. 26

Melanie Carvell Running With the Antelope

Running with the Antelope inspires readers to begin a program of athletic training, weight loss, or general self-improvement.

OCT. 24

CJ Wynn Wilder Intentions

ANGILA WAS STABBED 44 TIMES. THIS WAS PERSONAL.

NOV. 21

Josh Garrett-Davis What Is a Western?

Richly illustrated, primarily from the collection of the Autry Museum of the American West, Josh Garrett-Davis’s work is as visually interesting as it is enlightening, asking readers to consider the American West in new ways.

DEC. 19

LeAnne Howe Savage Conversations

The 1862 mass execution of thirty-eight Dakotas haunts Mary Todd Lincoln, institutionalized and alone with her ghosts.

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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.

RENEWING AND NEW MEMBERS $5,000 and above Paris Family Foundation Rita Kelly

(since March 15, 2021)

$500 to $999 Thomas & Michelle Matchie

Karla R. Hanson Mary Galbreath Mary Liz & Ron Davis Naomi Nakamoto & Terry Adams Patricia Grantier Rachel A. Johnson Robert Dambach Ruby Grove Stephanie & Deland Weyrauch Suzanne Kelley Virginia Duval

$100 to $499 Jon and Betsy Ewen Julie Burgum Thomas A. Wentz George Frein Leslie Peltier Luise Beringer Impact Foundation Adele Gabriel in memory of Kipp Gabriel Amy Ones Elizabeth & Richard Gross Erv Bren Jim & Loah Clement Joseph & Marsha King

$99 and below Mary & James MacArthur Arnold & Donna Wallender Bottineau County Public Library Charlotte Olson Darlene Musland David Olson David Suko June Y. Enget in memory of Ruth Meiers, Former Lieutenant Governor Katherine Slaughter Kelli Hively Kyle Jansson Marilyn Weiser

$1,000 to $4,999 Many Dances Family Fund of Oregon Community Foundation in honor of Marilyn Hudson

MaryAnn Armbrust Megan Sletten Meridee Erickson-Stowman and Patrick Stowman Sandra Hoffman Tamara Uselman Elizabeth Sund Jane E. Nissen William R. Caraher Lowell & Karen Jensen Ann Crews Melton Rhonda R. Allery Courtney Schaff Dolores Walls Elizabeth A. Lucas Howard W. Langemo Kristen Borysewicz Laura Hjelmstad Erin Huntimer Hariett & Jim Davis Karen C. Nitzkorski Kayla A. Schmidt Paul Koetz Molly Herrington

MAJOR SPONSORSHIPS PROVIDED BY:

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

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Bush Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation David & Karla Ehlis American Bank Center NDNA Education Foundation Prairie Public Broadcasting Linda M. Steve Big Stone Giving Fund Paris Family Foundation Bismarck State College Foundation Sarah M. Vogel Christie Iverson Connie M. Hildebrand

Rita Kelly McQuade Distributing Company Jamie Stewart George & Cheryl Mizell Robert & Susan Wefald Thomas & Jane Ahlin Many Dances Family Fund National Endowment for the Humanities 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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HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA PRESENTS

THE BENEFITS OF LIFELONG LEARNING It's easy to find a gym to keep your body healthy, but what about your brain? At Humanities North Dakota, we create events and programs that are like group fitness for your mind. Join the exercise of ideas and turn your gray matter into what matters.

Every time your heart beats, 25% of that blood goes right to the brain. But while exercise is critical, it may be education that is more important. In the 21st century, education and information may become for the brain what exercise is for the heart.

Paul Nussbaum, Ph.D., director of the Aging Research and Education Center in Pittsburgh 38

Lifelong learning can benefit you in every aspect of your life:

SOCIALLY

Taking classes and attending educational events creates opportunities to meet new friends, improves your interpersonal skills, and makes you a more interesting conversation partner.

EMOTIONALLY

Lifelong learning improves your mental health by reducing stress, increasing happiness, and bolstering resilience in the face of change. Not only that, but growing in knowledge brings a deep and lasting sense of fulfillment and purpose.

PHYSICALLY

An investment in lifelong learning is an investment in your health. Numerous studies show that as your education increases, your likelihood of developing common chronic diseases decreases. In fact, lifelong learners have longer lifespans.

ECONOMICALLY

Continual learning and personal growth translate to career advancement and innovation. In a rapidly changing world, equipping yourself with a broad range of knowledge will give you a competitive edge.

A BRAVE CONVERSATION WITH ELI SASLOW Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist

ELI SASLOW will speak about his experience interviewing former White Nationalist Derek Black, David Duke’s godson and former leader of the youth White Nationalist Movement. Through compassion and education Black renounced his involvement in the movement risking his life and walking away from the family and community he grew up in. This event will explore the rise of white nationalism and political polarization in contemporary America and point toward overcoming divisions and hatred.

OCTOBER 14, 2-5PM Live at The Sanctuary, Fargo Doors open at 1:30 pm Members can register July 25.

Opens to the general public Aug 1.

HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA WELCOMES PAIGE BAKER, PHD

PAIGE BAKER, PHD, MANDAREE Prior to retiring three years ago, Paige Baker served nearly four decades in various capacities throughout the US including the Council of Energy Resources Tribes (CERT), Bureau of Indian Affairs, NDSU, the National Park Service in Arizona and South Dakota, and Baker Consulting, his father and son energy consulting business. Paige is an enrolled member of Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold Reservation and of Mandan/Hidatsa culture. He holds degrees from University of Mary and a doctoral degree from Pennsylvania State University. Paige is excited to join the Humanities North Dakota board. He is looking forward to exploring new ideas, inclusivity, encouraging dialogue, and education opportunities. Paige is a committed and passionate lifelong learner.

CRUSH YOUR COMFORT ZONE AND BECOME WHO YOU’RE MEANT TO BE

THURSDAY, OCT. 7, 2-5PM

Board of Directors & Staff HND Board of Directors CHAIR Sarah Vogel, Bismarck

VICE CHAIR Marilyn Foss, Bismarck

Paige Baker, Mandaree Lyle Best, Watford City Dina Butcher, Bismarck Dennis Cooley, Fargo Patty Corwin, Fargo Eric L. Johnson, Grand Forks Joan Locken, Oakes Ann Crews Melton, Bismarck Leslie W. Peltier, Belcourt Jessica Rockeman, Richardton Prairie Rose Seminole, Garrison Barb Solberg, Minot Linda Steve, Dickinson Amy Stromsodt, Larimore

MICHELLE POLER is the Founder of

Staff Brenna Gerhardt, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Sue Skalicky, Program Coordinator Rebecca Chalmers, Editor, Humanities ND Magazine Alexandra Skalicky, Social Media and Content Creator Megan Sletten, Membership Assistant

North Dakota’s Largest Lifelong Learning Community

800-338-6543 info@humanitiesnd.org

HumanitiesND.org

Hello Fears, a social movement that has reached over 70 million people worldwide and has empowered thousands to step outside of the comfort zone and tap into their full potential.

Michelle is also the creator of the project 100 Days Without Fear.

Her work has been featured on The TODAY Show, Forbes, CBS, CNN, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Fox News, Telemundo, Glamour, Elle, The Rachael Ray Show, Refinery29, and Daily Mail among many others.

LIVE AT THE BISMARCK EVENT CENTER DOORS OPEN AT 1:30PM

Members can register July 25. Opens to general public August 1.

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ideas festival

HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501

NON-PROFIT ORG US POSTAGE

PAID

BISMARCK, ND PERMIT NO. 433

It’s easy to find a gym to keep your body healthy, but what about your brain?

Humanities North Dakota creates events that are like group fitness for your mind. Join the exercise of ideas and turn your gray matter into what matters.