Using the humanities, we connect with people across Vermont to create just, vibrant, and resilient communities and to inspire a lifelong love of learning.
Dive into our two humanities podcasts to engage and learn about new perspectives.
June 14
How can we tell good sources from the bad ones, discern fact from assumption, and distinguish “fake news” from the real thing? And how can we effectively communicate with others when discussing or debating public issues in the news? Veteran journalist and educator Mark Timney will explore these questions and share strategies for evaluating news sources in the rapidly changing digital information age.
June 14
Vermont sent far more sharpshooters to the Union armies than any other state, on a per capita basis. Sharpshooters from this state played a little-known but major role at Gettysburg. Historian Howard Coffin will discuss his recent research into this little-recognized group and consider the reasons why Vermont may have been so well-represented in this elite group of marksmen.
June 15
Bill Mares, writer, and a beekeeper for 45 years, will tell of the origins and evolution of beekeeping, sometimes referred to as “farming for intellectuals,” with a particular emphasis on his new book, with Ross Conrad, and others, “The Land of Milk and Honey, a History of Beekeeping in Vermont.”
June 21
Paradoxically, the Internet has made it both easier and harder to find “truth.” Almost everything we could ever want to know is available online, but how can we tell the good sources from the bad ones, discern fact from assumption, and distinguish “fake news” from the real thing? And how can we effectively communicate with others when discussing or debating public issues in the news? Veteran journalist and educator Mark Timney will explore these questions and share strategies for evaluating news sources in the rapidly changing digital information age.
June 25
Toby MacNutt is an author, artist, and teacher based in Addison County. Their work engages themes of embodiment, space and relationship from a queer and disabled perspective. Toby’s debut poetry and short story collection If Not Skin was published by Aqueduct Press in 2018; more recently their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from magazines such as Liminality, Strange Horizons, and Vulture Bones, and as a self-published chapbook, “what cannot be held”. Find out more at www.tobymacnutt.com.
June 28
Vermonters have strong ideas about the importance of their mountain topography. Where did our pride in Vermont’s landscape come from, and why is it that we see our shared identity as rooted in the land? This lecture by historian Jill Mudgett is timely and relevant in its relationship to current interdisciplinary scholarship, and offers us tools to understand the origins and meaning of our own strongly-held attachments to the Vermont landscape.
July 15
Linda Quinlan’s book of poetry “Chelsea Creek” was published by Brickhouse Press. She won the “Wicked Women’s” poetry award and was Poet of the Year in Wisconsin. She published in many journals some of which include Sinister Wisdom, New Orleans Review and Black Mountain Press. She cohosts a T V Show All Things LGBTQ and lives in Montpelier with her partner.”
July 16
Vermonters have strong ideas about the importance of their mountain topography. Where did our pride in Vermont’s landscape come from, and why is it that we see our shared identity as rooted in the land? This lecture by historian Jill Mudgett is timely and relevant in its relationship to current interdisciplinary scholarship, and offers us tools to understand the origins and meaning of our own strongly-held attachments to the Vermont landscape.
July 20
Singer and historian Linda Radtke, in period garb and a “Votes for Women” sash, celebrates the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave the right to vote to white women.
July 22
Monica Ferrell is the author of a novel and two books of poetry, most recently the collection You Darling Thing, which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Believer Book Award. She has taught fiction and poetry for the MFA programs at Columbia University and Bennington College, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Purchase College (SUNY).
July 22
This presentation examines the many meanings of maple sugaring. Maple is enormously important to Vermont’s economy, ecology, and heritage. Champlain College professor Michael Lange will discuss sugaring ethnographically, based on over five years of research among sugarmakers all over the state, to learn from them what sugaring really means to Vermont.
August 2
Bill Mares began making his own beer 45 years ago, when home brewing was illegal and there were no microbreweries in America. In this presentation, he offers a short history of beer itself and discusses Vermont’s small but significant contribution to the American beer revolution.
We recently gave a $5000 project grant to the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction to print and distribute a comic to schools and literacy organizations throughout Vermont.
How We Read, A Graphic Guide To Literacy will help kids experience the joy of reading and overcome the stigma of struggling to read.
Learn more about our Project Grants
Image courtesy Center for Cartoon Studies
Vermont Humanities has developed a broad range of programs that serves Vermonters of all ages and backgrounds. In 2021, 31,365 people took part in 562 activities hosted by us or by our community partners.
The Anne Commire Fund for Women in the Humanities supports projects that focus on women writers. Anne (at far left) is shown with the cast of her play “Melody Sisters” in 1984.
The fund was created through a legacy gift of $125,000 from Anne’s estate, one of the largest individual gifts ever made to Vermont Humanities.
By giving to Vermont Humanities, you support education for people of all ages through early literacy programs, Humanities Camps for middle-school children, and programs held in libraries, community centers, schools, and correctional facilities.
Poet Sarah Audsley joined us at the Taconic Mountains Ramble State Park for Words in the Woods.
Humanities Camps are filled with reading and writing projects, field trips, and outdoor activities.
We won a 2020 Schwartz Prize for best public humanities programming in the U.S. for Vermont Reads 2019: “March: Book One.”
We supported Historic New England’s “More than a Market” project that explored the experiences of new Americans through food markets.
Our free public events help bring the power of the humanities to communities across Vermont.
