Celebrating the humanities
WASHINGTON, D.C. — If scholars were celebrities, life might look a little bit like it does on the day of the annual Jefferson Lecture (May 2), with interviews and toasts in anticipation not of a concert or play but a speech on the humanities. For Harvard President Drew Faust, chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to give its 2011 Jefferson Lecture, the day began with a round of media interviews and ended with a reception in her honor on the balcony of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts overlooking the Potomac River. The centerpiece of the day: a well-received address, “Telling War Stories: Reflections of a Civil War Historian,” delivered to an appreciative Kennedy Center audience. “Uniquely powerful dimensions of the Civil War have rendered it of outsized importance to historians,” Faust said. “For Americans, it was and is a special war with special meanings. But an essential aspect...
