First Wednesdays

A Humanities Lecture Series, October through May

2017-2018 First Wednesdays Talks Online

Here are the talks from our 2017-2018 First Wednesdays series that were video recorded.

Return to the First Wednesdays home page.

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An Emerson for Our Time
Video: Drawing on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays “The American Scholar,” “Self-Reliance,” and “Experience,” Amherst professor Barry O’Connell explores the many ways Emerson’s writings continue to offer insights that can make our lives more open and fruitful.
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Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Still Funny After All These Years
Video: Dartmouth professor Peter Travis discusses the genius, literary achievement, and enduring humanity of Geoffrey Chaucer, the fourteenth-century “Father of English Poetry.”
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Einstein in a Nutshell
Video: Einstein’s most famous contribution to science—his theory of relativity—is based on an idea so simple it can be stated in one sentence. Yet from that simple idea, explains Middlebury professor Richard Wolfson, follow conclusions that have revolutionized our notions of space, time, and causality.
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Fallingwater
Video: Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece Fallingwater is often ranked number one in the AIA ratings of America’s most important structures. Former Executive Director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, H. Nicholas Muller III, shares stories about this legendary property and its creator.
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Georgia O’Keeffe: A Critical Look
Video: Georgia O’Keeffe lived 99 years and produced over 2,000 works in her 75-year career. James Maroney, the former Head of American Paintings at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York who conducted her estate appraisal after her death, presents a critical evaluation of her best work.
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Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
Video: Douglass and Lincoln — one born a slave, the other born dirt poor — became respectively one of the nation’s greatest orators and one of its greatest presidents. Harvard professor John Stauffer examines their friendship, the similarities in their lives, and their legacies.
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J. D. Salinger’s Family Dramas
Video: Why did Salinger write novels that sound like plays, begging to be acted out? Yale Professor of English and Dean of Humanities Amy Hungerford explores the voices and dramas of the Glass family at the heart of Salinger’s work and his themes of love, religion, and the power of human performance.
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Lessons Learned from the Holocaust for Today’s World
Video: The UN High Commission for Refugees calculates that there are more people forced from their homes and on the move today than following the disruptions of WWII and the Holocaust. Holocaust scholar and Dartmouth professor Irene Kacandes offers seven lessons she has learned from studying the Holocaust and considers how we can apply them to today’s crises.
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Love and Marriage in the 21st Century
Video: Dr. Polly Young-Eisendrath looks at the transformation of marriage over the past century from a traditional contract between families to one that celebrates idealization in the form of “true love,” and suggests why the latter may be harder to fulfill than many thought.
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Luther and the Reformation: A 500-year Appraisal
Martin Luther’s posting of the Ninety-five Theses on the cathedral door at Wittenburg five hundred years ago launched a movement that utterly transformed Western society and our notions of authority, culture, art, and tradition. Dartmouth Religion professor Randall Balmer assesses the Protestant Reformation half a millennium later.
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Memoirs of an Art Dealer
Video: Former Head of American Paintings at Christie’s and Sotheby’s James Maroney shares stories of his experiences in the art world of the 1970s when American art began to come into its own.
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Mourning Lincoln
Video: Public responses to Lincoln’s assassination have been well chronicled, but New York University Professor of History Martha Hodes is the first to delve into personal and private responses—of African Americans and whites, Yankees and Confederates, soldiers and civilians. In this talk, she investigates the reaction on a human scale to America’s first presidential assassination, when the future of the nation was at stake for everyone whether they grieved or rejoiced at the news.
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Nothing to Fear, But Fear Itself: FDR and the New Deal
Video: From 1929 to 1939, the US experienced the longest and worst economic depression in its history and the first in which the federal government acted decisively to reverse it. UVM History Professor Emeritus Mark A. Stoler discusses how Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal changed the government’s role in the economy and affected the lives of Americans in ways that are still with us today.
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Physicists’ Dream of a Theory of Everything
Video: Theoretical physicists have long dreamt of a theory of everything that encompasses all particles of matter and their interactions. Dartmouth professor Marcelo Gleiser describes how physics and astronomy obtain knowledge of the natural world and how their limitations preclude us from ever getting to a “final” theory.
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Poetry and Song
Video: Celebrating forty years together, the Thetford Chamber Singers present powerful literary texts with complex choral arrangements, including the work of Wendell Berry, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and others.
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Presidents Appointing Judges
Video: As UVM professor Lisa Holmes explains, while presidents have long used judicial appointments to tilt the judiciary in one direction or another, less common historically have been presidents gaining great political benefit from appointing judges for ideological reasons. Its impact on the health of the judiciary remains to be seen.
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Race at Ground Zero: Integration in Leland, Mississippi
Video: Pulitzer-winning historian and filmmaker Douglas Blackmon speaks about and offers a sneak peek of his documentary film The Harvest. It looks at the failure of public school integration and its relation to our nation’s current racial turmoil, as seen through the eyes of people born in 1964 in his hometown of Leland, Mississippi—the state’s first students to attend integrated classrooms from K to 12.
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Race, Nation, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Video: UVM professor Emily Bernard explores how Beloved argues that America must reckon with the consequences of our nation’s original sin—slavery.
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Reformation and Response: What Luther Did to Art
Video: Dartmouth professor Jane Carroll examines how the Reformation, driven by Martin Luther’s rejection of the establishment Church, brought into question the assumptions by which most Europeans had lived, and how this played out in the art of the time.
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Rembrandt and Vermeer in their Place and Time
Video: Middlebury professor Carrie Anderson explores seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Delft through the eyes of Golden Age artists Rembrandt and Vermeer, who lived, worked, and painted in these prosperous Dutch cities.
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Rowing Against Wind and Tide: The Journals and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Video: Author Reeve Lindbergh discusses collecting four decades of her mother’s previously unpublished diaries and letters—shedding light on her mother’s marriage to Charles Lindbergh and her take on world events.
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The Different Strains of American Evangelicalism
Video: Dartmouth professor and historian of American religion Randall Balmer both looks at the internal diversity of American Evangelicalism, which is generally seen as monolithic but that includes a progressive strain focused on personal and social reform as opposed to theological orthodoxy, and reflects on its theological insights and contradictions.
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The Indian World of George Washington
Video: Dartmouth College professor Colin Calloway discusses the first president’s relations with Indian peoples and considers how Native American nations and lands shaped the man who shaped the republic.
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The Legacy of Rachel Carson
Video: "Silent Spring" not only launched the environmental movement but also laid out the fundamental problems with our relationship to nature. Dartmouth professor Nancy Jay Crumbine celebrates scientist and poet Rachel Carson’s clarity, courage, and brilliance.
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The President’s Global Policies
Video: Veteran American diplomat George Jaeger discusses President Trump’s America First global policies, the changes they may entail, and their possible implications.
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The Voyage of the St. Louis and American Refugee Policy
Video: Keene State professor Paul Vincent tells the story of the 1939 voyage of the St. Louis, which carried mostly Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. Turned away by Havana, despite holding Cuban landing permits, the ship sailed for the US, where passengers were also denied entry. Vincent discusses the event in the context of the history of US immigration policy.
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The Writing Life
Video: Writer, humorist, and regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1963, Calvin Trillin takes an antic look at writing as an occupation in a country in which the shelf life of a book is “somewhere between milk and yogurt.”
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Transatlantic Traumas: Endangering the West
Video: The West has been challenged by President Trump’s policies, Russian covert actions, and domestic politics. Stan Sloan, Visiting Scholar at Middlebury and author of Defense of the West, asks if a perfect storm of external threats and internal politics is undermining Western values and interests.
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Understanding Scripture
Video: Middlebury professor emeritus John Keenan considers how we come to understand scripture and gain an interfaith reading of the text by stepping back to see it in context and by stepping aside the text to see parallels and similarities with other traditions.
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Willa Cather’s Prairie Landscapes
Video: The European immigrant farmers in My Antonia and Cather’s other novels fail as often as they succeed. Amherst College professor Michele Barale examines the relation between Cather’s art and her very tangible earth.
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William Carlos Williams: America’s Most Revolutionary Twentieth Century Poet
Video: UVM professor Huck Gutman considers how William Carlos Williams changed American and world poetry forever by creating a new poetic language and new poetic forms.
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World War I and American Writers
Video: Dartmouth professor Barbara Will discusses the effect of the war on American writers, particularly John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein, and explores how the war changed American literature and made it “modern.”