Discovery & Inspiration
Discovery & Inspiration asks “What can we learn by talking to scholars about their research? What makes them so passionate about the subjects they study? What is it like to make a new discovery? To answer a confounding question?” For over 40 years the National Humanities Center has been a home away from home for scholars from around the world—historians and philosophers, scholars of literature and music and art and dozens of other fields. Join us as we sit down with scholars to discuss their work—to better understand the questions that intrigue and perplex them, the passion that drives them, and how their scholarship may change the ways we think about the world around us.
Episodes
January 30, 2025 • 45 mins
Bill Leuchtenburg speaks about presidential history at the National Humanities Center Board of Trustees reception at the Morgan Library, New York, NY on June 8, 2016.
Mark as Played
November 3, 2023 • 22 mins
Theatrical productions allow playwrights and audiences alike to engage with historical and contemporary social realities. But what are the consequences when particular types of dramatic texts and performances are inadequately disseminated and preserved? Elena Machado Sáez (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is analyzing the ways that Latinx theater in the United States depicts forms of activism and resistance while building shared archives and c...
Mark as Played
November 3, 2023 • 21 mins
In March 1850, five men and two women were photographed in the studio of South Carolina artist Joseph Zealy. When these daguerreotypes were uncovered in 1976, they quickly became some of the best-known pre-Civil War images of enslaved African Americans. Gregg Hecimovich (NHC Fellow, 2015–16; 2022–23) is asking important questions about why these images were captured, how they were lost for so long, and what they might tell us about...
Mark as Played
November 3, 2023 • 19 mins
As an art form, opera has proven to be simultaneously entertaining and relatable to diverse audiences, even though it has also been characterized by associations with whiteness and elitism. Naomi André (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is working to tell a more comprehensive and inclusive story of this genre by constructing a history of Blackness in opera from the nineteenth century to the present.
Mark as Played
November 3, 2023 • 25 mins
The British writer, reformer, and criminologist George Cecil Ives lived through a transformation in our collective understanding of sexuality. Born in 1867, Ives found early inspiration in the Classical tradition and witnessed the rise of sexology and psychoanalysis before his death in the mid-twentieth century. But Ives did not simply observe these social changes; he chronicled them exhaustively through his published works, corres...
Mark as Played
November 3, 2023 • 22 mins
In 1996, an exhibition entitled “Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists,” was produced for the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art’s contribution to the Olympic games held in Atlanta, Georgia. Today, Jontyle Theresa Robinson (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is undertaking a multi-tiered initiative to reflect upon and advance the work of that exhibition thirty years later.
Mark as Played
October 28, 2023 • 19 mins
The influence that Nina Simone and Langston Hughes have had on American music, literature, and culture can hardly be overstated. However, the relationship between these two figures has received little to no attention from scholars to date, despite their long history of collaboration. W. Jason Miller (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is conducting research into this partnership in order to inform new understandings about the intersections betwe...
Mark as Played
November 21, 2022 • 43 mins
This lecture illuminates the field of international possibility seen by a leading fraction of young Americans in the 1920s. It offers a counter-narrative to the well-worn account of American “expatriates” who succumbed to the seductions of Paris and soon returned home chastened. A far larger stratum of would-be writers lived outside the United States without desire to be “expatriates,” found vocations in journalism, brought the wor...
Mark as Played
November 7, 2022 • 27 mins
When the Panama Canal opened in 1914, it not only revolutionized international trade, but brought about new developments in public health. While diseases like yellow fever and malaria were seen as an inherent threat of “the tropics” by the Americans and French, the process of constructing the canal actually created conditions in which such diseases could proliferate more freely.
In this podcast, Paul S. Sutter (NHC Fellow, 2021–22...
Mark as Played
October 31, 2022 • 25 mins
For the past twenty years, Nigerian filmmaking has dominated media production in Africa and among African diasporic communities. One of the most influential figures in this industry is the writer, director, and producer Femi Odugbemi, whose work is an example of the "socially responsible cinema" that has been under-explored in scholarly analyses of Nollywood.
In this podcast, Paul Ushang Ugor (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate profe...
Mark as Played
October 24, 2022 • 21 mins
Nineteenth-century American paintings frequently depict foreign settings, from the Caribbean to the Arctic. Many of these artworks seem to reveal moments of cultural exchange or scientific inquiry, but they have rarely been seen as evidence of the growing imperialist tendencies of the United States throughout this century.
In this podcast, Maggie Cao (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at the University of North ...
Mark as Played
October 17, 2022 • 22 mins
In the early twentieth century, psychoanalytic ideas based on the work of Sigmund Freud were taken up, translated, and even challenged by practitioners from a variety of geographic regions and backgrounds. However, the importance of psychoanalytic thought in China has not always been given adequate attention.
In this podcast, Howard Chiang (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis...
Mark as Played
October 11, 2022 • 24 mins
Widely understood as a destination for leisure and pleasure, the Caribbean has drawn visitors from the global north for over a century. Women have played a central role in establishing this image of the islands, from the proliferation of women's travel writing beginning in the late nineteenth century to their active roles in shaping the tourism and hospitality industry.
In this podcast, Elizabeth S. Manley (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), a...
Mark as Played
October 4, 2022 • 14 mins
In the 1772 court case “Somerset v Stewart,” an English court found that the concept of slavery had no basis in English law. Although this case has long been linked to the eventual abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in Britain, the emancipation of enslaved persons was a long and complex process.
In this podcast, Tony Frazier (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at North Carolina Central University, discusses th...
Mark as Played
September 29, 2022 • 64 mins
Joy Connolly (NHC Trustee), President, American Council of Learned Societies
A distinguished classics scholar as well as an accomplished academic administrator, Connolly argues in her most recent book, “The Life of Roman Republicanism” that “Cicero, Sallust, and Horace inspire fresh thinking about central concerns of contemporary political thought and action” including the role conflict plays in the political community, the condit...
Mark as Played
September 29, 2022 • 57 mins
Cara Robertson (NHC Trustee; NHC Fellow, 2004–05; 2005–06)
When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Everyone—rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and laypeople—had an opinion about Liz...
Mark as Played
September 29, 2022 • 64 mins
Andrew Delbanco (NHC Fellow, 2013–14), Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University; President, The Teagle Foundation
For decades after its founding, the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the “united” states was actually a lie. By awakening northerners to the true nature of slavery, and by enragin...
Mark as Played
September 29, 2022 • 59 mins
Jane O. Newman (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 2015–16), Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine
As constructed by Boccaccio, “The Decameron” is a classic collection of fourteenth-century stories, one hundred tales shared by a group of young men and women sheltering in a secluded villa outside Florence to avoid the Great Bubonic Plague. Organized around timeless themes such as the power of fortune and human wil...
Mark as Played
September 29, 2022 • 60 mins
Martha S. Jones (NHC Fellow, 2013–14), Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University
In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women’s movement did not win the vote for most Black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. In “Vang...
Mark as Played
September 29, 2022 • 52 mins
Mia Bay (NHC Fellow, 2009–10), Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History, University of Pennsylvania
From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, “Traveling Black” explores when, how, and why racial restrictions took shape and brilliantly portrays what it was like to live with them. It also recounts the many forms of resistance deployed in the prolonged fight for freedom of movement across the United St...
Mark as Played
Popular Podcasts
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!