What-are-you-reading-Wednesday: The Lost Symbol

I just read Dan Brown’s newest book, The Lost Symbol — even though it was published in September. Here’s why: I like to buy the editions of Brown’s books that come out after they make the movie, with all the gorgeous illustrations and photographs of locations like Rome and Paris. Knowing that I will eventually purchase such a volume for The Lost Symbol, I decided to get the first edition out of the library. I put my name on the reservation list, where I was number 749 in line, and I just got a copy. Loved it, love all his books, usually read them in a day or two (509 pages), and evidently so do a lot of other people.

Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times: “Brown has always written screenplays masquerading as novels.” Clearly, that’s the first type of appeal in Brown’s fast-paced, suspenseful stories. He has a knack of ending a chapter with one of his characters in such a predicament that you have to skip ahead and find out how they got out of it. The second attraction in Brown’s novels is provided by Robert Langdon, his Harvard professor hero (played by Tom Hanks), in the form of arcane but fascinating historical, cultural, and artistic trivia. This erudition did not impress Time Magazine’s Lou Grossman, who commented: “Brown’s scholarship reads like the work of a man who believes what he reads in Wikipedia.”

I, however, enjoy the places Brown takes you in his whirlwind tours of famous cities. In the case of The Lost Symbol, the story is set in Washington, D.C., a place whose treasures are far more valuable than whatever the villain and hero are chasing after in the novel. Behind the scenes at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the United States Capitol, there is a world of documents, artworks, and artifacts, amazing in its scope and depth. To meet the people who care for and know about them is a true pleasure. The book’s website includes a Reader’s Guide to Washington, D.C., with more about these national landmarks.

I also like Brown’s puzzles, codes, and encryptions, which are always entertaining. The key puzzle in The Lost Symbol is “a perfectly square grid of symbols from every tradition imaginable — alchemical, astrological, heraldic, angelic, magical, numeric, sigilic, Greek, Latin.” The 64 symbols in the 8 by 8 grid are somewhat familiar: a row of symbols for the planets, symbols of the great religions, astrological signs. (Mine is Gemini, which looks like the Roman numeral II.) You probably have access to many of these symbols — just open up Word and change your font to Symbols or Wingdings, and you may be able to recreate Brown’s code!

Anyway, I should stop here and return my copy to the library. There’s still a waiting list with 372 eager readers on it.

Sail the ocean blue…or at least search the Resource Connection

“In 1492 Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue …” Many of us learned that rhyme as small children or taught it to our children, but few of us have really pondered the relevance of the man behind the “discovery” of the America. To celebrate Columbus Day, (Oct. 12), we traversed the mighty Resource Connection.

The Resource Connection has a lot of great resources to help you learn more about Columbus, including lesson plans from the National Endowment for Humanities and Center for Innovation in Assessment, and a Seeds of Change Garden online exhibit from the Smithsonian Institute that lets you learn more about the types of food the explorers grew.

Check out these resources and find out more about the man behind the nursery rhyme.

31 ways to experience the humanities

October is Arts & Humanities Month, which means 31 days of thinking, reading, talking and listening. Check out our guide to humanities experiences around Indiana for each day of the month.

Here are some of my favorites:

IDADA (Indianapolis Downtown Arts and Dealers Association) First Friday tour. There’s no better way to spend a Friday night in Indy than to wander from gallery to studio to performance space. Start at our place—the Meredith Nicholson Home (1500 N. Delaware St.)—for a discussion about how schools can serve as catalysts for urban renewal.

Wallow in your Hoosier-ness. Indiana authors, artists, musicians and poets will showcase their talents at An Evening in Brown County on Sunday, Oct. 11. I’m looking forward to Hoosier wine and beer, plus tapas made from locally grown food. Get more info here.

Travel back in time. Explore the religious and visual culture of 17^th-century Spain and Latin America–for free. Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World, opens Oct. 11 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It features 80 works of art, including the legendary Crown of the Andes, an actual crown set with 450 emeralds.

Start a book club. If you’re like me and haven’t joined or started a club yet, it’s time. The Indiana Humanities Council will even lend you the books, for free. Check out our lending library.

Take a road trip. Take advantage of the great weather and scenery that October offers and head north, south, east and west, knowing that wherever you go, you’ll find a great museum or Hoosier landmark.

Meandering Indiana 16 – Spencer County

Spencer County, Indiana, is Abraham Lincoln country, the locale of his boyhood home. In preparation for the Lincoln Bicentennial, I have had the opportunity to take many trips to Spencer County, but two were especially memorable.

My first visit to the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial was a tour guided by site superintendent Randy Wester. From the memorial building, with its large sculptured limestone panels depicting phases in Lincoln’s life, we walked across a landscape designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., then up a hill to the Nancy Hanks Lincoln gravesite. A sense of peacefulness and remembrance seemed to hold these places apart from time. Randy pointed out that the site was a National Memorial, not a park or a monument.

The second occasion I remember vividly was a tour led by Bill Bartelt, author of There I Grew Up: Remembering Abraham Lincoln’s Indiana Youth. Bill, a teacher who spent many summers as a park ranger, had studied not only the life of Lincoln but also the land he must have walked in southern Indiana.

Crossing over to Lincoln State Park, which adjoins the National Memorial, Bill led us to a wide path in the woods that was once a primitive road connecting one frontier settlement to another. As we stood among the trees, with hardly anything modern in sight, it was not difficult to imagine a teenaged boy of the 1820s, sauntering along this path on his way back from an errand.

Last night Ken Burns’ latest project, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea premiered on PBS. Lincoln Boyhood was the first national park established in Indiana when, in 1962, it was transferred from the jurisdiction of the state to the National Park Service. Not only are our national parks amazing resources that we all can share, but we can also access NPS.gov, a rich online resource for discovering history, exploring nature, and continuing to learn about our country.

Find Peace in the Resource Connection

Today is the International Day of Peace, so we took a look at the various resources in the Resource Connection that centered on learning about peace. Here’s what we found:

• An excerpt from George Rogers Clark’s memoir that details peacemaking with the Indians.
• An overview of the Fall Creek Massacre, which took place in Madison County, Indiana.
• President Woodrow Wilson’s 14-points speech for world peace.
• Eight U.S. soldiers, some who killed and some who said no, reveal their inner moral dilemmas in Soldiers of Conscience.
• A Road Map to Peace in the Middle East—Can it be followed?
• A lesson plan to investigate whether media play a role in wars and conflicts.

Plus, much, much more. Check out the more than 40 resources that investigate peacemaking (and lack thereof) from various perspectives at the Resource Connection.

What-are-you-reading-Wednesday: There I Grew Up

The long weekend gave me the chance to finish William E. Bartelt’s book on Abraham Lincoln’s Indiana years. At almost exactly the time when Indiana became a state (Dec. 1816), the Lincoln family moved across the Ohio River to their new home in southwestern Indiana. Abe was 7 years old. He remained a Hoosier until the Lincolns moved west to Illinois when he was 21.

Bartelt has collected much of the original source material related to what we know about Lincoln in Indiana, but he has also researched and interpreted those stories and testimonies, with additions and corrections. The result is a readable, well-illustrated text that describes this extraordinary individual in the context of his family, his community, and his moment in Indiana history.

Hoosier Youth by Manship

Lincoln wrote about himself: “We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.” And also: “He settled in an unbroken forest; and the clearing away of surplus wood was the great task ahead. A. though very young, was large of his age, and had an axe put into his hands at once . . . .” The natural environment and frontier conditions were primitive, but soon a small community around Little Pigeon Creek began to form as families claimed land in early Perry and Spencer counties.

If young Abe had an axe in one hand, he had a book in the other. With little formal education, he nonetheless learned to read, write, and cipher. Determined to improve himself, he read all the books he could beg or borrow. Bartelt provides a list of books he probably read, including Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and biographies of Washington and Ben Franklin. Abe also read newspapers and wrote essays (on temperance and animal cruelty, for example). Popular and well able to hold an audience, he used his natural gifts to entertain and to persuade by making speeches and telling stories.

It was both a privilege and a pleasure to spend some time getting to know a young man on his way to history and a young state on its way from woods to fields.

William E. Bartelt. “There I Grew Up”: Remembering Abraham Lincoln’s Indiana Youth. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2008.

Explore the origins of Labor Day in the Resource Connection

Sure, Labor Day is a great Holiday because most of us get the day off of work, but do you ever wonder where the tradition began?

According to our resource partners at the Gilder Lehrman Institute, Labor Day has been a significant celebration for American workers for many years: “In the 1880s a surge in growth of the American labor movement led to the creation of two workers’ holidays, Labor Day and May Day. May Day soon spread abroad, as European unions and socialist groups adopted it as an occasion to display their strength. Eventually the holiday came to be celebrated in almost every part of the world.

In the United States, however, workers more broadly celebrated Labor Day, successfully pressing to have it made a national holiday. Today, Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer and a chance for a final bit of vacation as much as it commemorates the toils and achievements of workers and their organizations.” Want to learn more, check out the entire resource from the Institute. And make sure to stop by the Resource Connection while you are at it!

Conner Prairie’s Spirit of the Prairie Award: Honoring America’s Innovators

By Ellen M. Rosenthal, President and CEO of Conner Prairie

As the President & CEO of Indiana’s only Smithsonian affiliate, Conner Prairie, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to honor some extraordinary American trailblazers at this year’s Spirit of the Prairie awards dinner, September 12.

The annual Spirit of the Prairie dinner is Conner Prairie’s opportunity to recognize those who have created a distinctly American story with their vision, passion, dedication and courage. The honorees exemplify the spirit of endeavor that created the rich and ever changing tapestry of the United States.

Through the years Conner Prairie has given the Spirit of the Prairie Award to remarkable Hoosiers, talented, accomplished people with foresight, brilliance and perseverance. I’ve always loved the awards dinner, but I’ve never been as excited as I am this year.

Hoosier Heritage honorees include international opera star and Indianapolis native Angela Brown; Emmy-nominated journalist Janet Langhart Cohen; preservationist, philanthropist and Indiana native Richard E. Ford; and U.S. Senator Richard G. Lugar.

This year Conner Prairie has created a new award reaching beyond Indiana’s borders to honor someone who has fanned widespread interest in American history. The inaugural History Innovator Award will go to Pleasant Rowland, founder of Pleasant Company now known as American Girls, to whom I have a personal connection. In 1985 I was hired as one of several consultants to advise on the development of the history based stories and dolls. Quite frankly, I never suspected that Americans would be as wildly enthusiastic about the products as they turned out to be. Pleasant introduced an entire generation of girls to stories of American life in the past 250 years. I’ve waited nearly a quarter of a century to thank Pleasant for pursuing a dream that has had positive impact on our country – and on my life. Because of Pleasant, I learned that it’s the story that matters in inspiring an interest in history. The details, the facts are essential – but only as background.

It takes countless hours of dedication, work and commitment by our staff, volunteers and board members to pull together such a momentous event. We hope that you will join us for this truly amazing celebration as we honor an astonishing group of people on September 12. The cocktail reception begins at 5:45 p.m. and dinner at 7 p.m. For additional information and reservations, please visit connerprairie.org/spirit.aspx or call 317-776-6000 before September 4.

As we begin to think about awards for 2010, we would love to hear who you would choose as an American trailblazer.

Green thumbs (and not so green) welcome at the Resource Connection

Before the warm days draw to a close, why not drop by the Resource Connection and check out all of the great gardening resources we have to offer?

Learn what gardening was like 500 years ago when Christopher Columbus arrived in America with the Seeds of Change online exhibit from the Smithsonian Institution.

Don’t have a green thumb? Why not help the kids create a Japanese Rock Garden with these resource provided by the East Asian Studies Center?

The Three Great Myths in Indiana History

Here are the “Three Great Myths in Indiana history” as reported by those who wander the state talking to Hoosiers, looking for and hearing all kinds of stories for the radio show Hoosier History Live!   Some are accurate and some are not so accurate. 

1. ”My house was on the Underground Railroad.”

2. “John Dillinger robbed this building and escaped out the back window.”

3. “The meaning of the Indiana State Seal is that–  a woodsman has to get up pretty darn early in the morning to catch a buffalo in Indiana!”

This week’s show addressese one of those myth vs. reality topics: the Underground Railroad.

Oral histories, diaries, notations in family Bibles, and letters. All of those have been crucial in figuring out which historic homes, inns, taverns, and other buildings may have been stops on the Underground Railroad – and which ones probably were not, according to Indiana Freedom Trails, Inc. But exaggerations and misconceptions abound. To hear some folks tell it, almost all 19th century homes with cellars, attics or other hiding places were used in the crusade to help African-Americans escape from slave owners in the South. How do we separate myth from fact? How can you verify folklore about an old building? And did you know that one of the nation’s best-known abolitionists and women’s rights activists Sojourner Truth had connections to Indiana?

To share insights on these and other aspects of the Underground Railroad, historic researcher and genealogist Dona Stokes-Lucas of Indianapolis will join Nelson in studio. Dona, who is on the board of directors of Indiana Freedom Trails, Inc., is helping organize a national Underground Railroad Conference 2009 set for Sept. 16-19 at the Hilton Indianapolis North, 8181 N. Shadeland Ave. Indiana Freedom Trails is a diverse group that seeks to identify, verify and preserve Hoosier sites that were part of the Underground Railroad network. If you ever have wondered about – or heard folklore concerning – a historic site and its possible link to the Underground Railroad, this compelling show will be for you.

Tune in at 11:30 a.m. Sat. on WICR 88.7 fm or listen online anywhere during the live broadcast by clicking here at  WICR.