In conjunction with her 45-year career retrospective exhibition at Castleton University, Dona Ann McAdams sits down with curator John Killacky to discuss her work, and shows her empathetic black-and-white portraits of performing artists, AIDS activists, political protests, people living with schizophrenia, Appalachian farmers, cloistered nuns, and others. Read More »

Using as inspiration Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 speech “The Other America,” author Mitchell S. Jackson reflects on his childhood in a poor, black community in Portland, Oregon—where he witnessed drug use, gang violence, and sexual exploitation—and reveals how he transformed despair into hope. Read More »

Renaissance portraits were serious undertakings, carefully crafted to indicate wealth, status, interests, trade, and family ties of the subject. Dartmouth professor Jane Carroll leads a visual exploration of the messages encoded in these portraits. Read More »

Reuben Jackson, jazz scholar and former host of VPR’s Friday Night Jazz, shares some evocative Ellington recordings and discusses Ellington's love for trains and the role they played in his orchestra's work in the then-segregated United States. Read More »

Martin Freeman was the second black graduate of Middlebury College (1849) and the first black president of an American college. But he left to teach at Liberia College in Monrovia, Liberia. Middlebury professor Bill Hart discusses what eventually convinced Freeman that he could only experience freedom, full citizenship, and self-determination in exile in a black republic. Read More »

Drawing upon Thoreau’s journals and letters, Dartmouth professor Nancy Jay Crumbine examines the spirituality, inherent and explicit, in his walking and writing life. Read More »