Spring 2001: Social Changes
February 15, 2001
Rediscovering Jacob Riis: An Illustrated Lecture
A slide lecture-discussion on the pioneering turn-of-the-century documentary photographer and journalist Jacob Riis, who probed the immigrant neighborhoods of lower Manhattan to display "how the other half lives."
Speaker Daniel Czitrom, professor and chair of
history, Mount Holyoke College; author of Media and the American
Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (1982); coauthor of Out of Many: A
History of the American People (1999). Current projects include
Mysteries of the City: Culture, Politics, and the Underside of
New York, 1870-1920 and Rediscovering Jacob Riis (written with
Bonnie Yochelson).
Speaker Bonnie Yochelson, historian of photography
and author of Berenice Abbott: Changing New York.
March 8-9, 2001
Frances Perkins and Her Legacies: Labor, Women and the Unfinished
Business of the New Deal
A symposium celebrating the centenary of Frances
Perkins' graduation from Mount Holyoke College.
This symposium provides a forum for discussing the impact of
Frances Perkins and her legacies on current debates about welfare
reform, health care, Social Security, and working women. Speakers
and panelists include historians Linda Gordon,
Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jennifer Klein;
political scientist Gwendolyn Mink; sociologist
Jill Quadagno; writer Barbara Ehrenreich;
Vice-President of the AFL-CIO Linda Chavez-Thompson;
author Penny Colman; and others. Present and
former Frances Perkins scholars will also participate in a closing
roundtable on women and work.
Sponsored by The Weissman Center for Leadership, the Frances
Perkins Program, and the Alumnae Association at Mount Holyoke
College.
April 12, 2001
Reading and Discussion by Susan Sontag
Novelist and essayist Susan Sontag will give a public reading of excerps from her National Book Award novel "In America" and work in progress.
Susan Sontag is the internationally acclaimed author of the 2000 National Book Award winner In America. Her works include four novels, a volume of stories, and six collections of essays. In 1990 she received a five-year fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in New York City.
Description of "In America": In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalewska, Poland's greatest actress, travel to California to found a "utopian" commune. Maryna, who has renounced her career, is accompanied by her small son and husband; in her entourage is a rising young writer who is in love with her. The novel portrays a West that is still largely empty, where white settlers confront native Californians and Asian coolies. The image of America, and of California-as fantasy, as escape, as radical simplification-constantly meets a more complex reality. The commune fails and most of the migrs go home, but Maryna stays and triumphs on the American stage. In America is a big, juicy, surprising book about a woman's search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism, about the world of the theater that will captivate its readers from the first page. It is Sontag's most delicious, most brilliant achievement.
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413-538-3071