Tag: events

First “Honors Footnotes” Event Is a Hit!

On Thursday, October 18th, Honors Core Faculty member and chair of the Magazine Journalism Department, Melissa Chessher, hosted the inaugural “Honors Footnotes” event – a guided tour of Oakwood Cemetery, led by Sue Greenhagen, a member of the Historic Oakwood Cemetery Preservation Association, a local historian, and a retired librarian from Morrisville State College .Designed by one of America’s earliest landscape architects, Howard Daniels, Oakwood Cemetery opened its gates on November 3, 1859. The 160 acres of this outdoor museum feature a Gothic style mortuary chapel, 19th- and 20th-century architecture styles, including works by Horatio Nelson White and Archimedes Russell, and hundreds of 150-year-old trees, which showcased their fall colors. Sue Greenhagen (who, along with her sister, are known as “the cemetery chicks”) has spent years researching those buried in Oakwood. In addition to the general history and featured architects just mentioned, the tour highlighted a few of the more notable characters including an abolitionist, a robber baron, a Civil War commander, and several celebrated writers, artists, and philanthropists!

In a sentence: “Honors Footnotes” are small events hosted by Honors faculty or staff that encourage informal interaction around a variety of topics! Stay tuned for future opportunities!

Oakwood Cemetery - Honors Footnotes
Inaugural “Honors Footnotes” group posing during their tour of Oakwood Cemetery
Honors group listens to guide during Oakwood Cemetery tour
Honors group listens to guide during Oakwood Cemetery tour

But What ARE the Commons?

18th Century graphic of lord and commonersSo Honors keeps sending messages about this thing called the commons because there will be a talk Thursday, November 8th at 8pm in LSB 001, but what ARE the commons?
One answer comes from history and the enclosure movement which was a land grab by the moneyed class that denied predominantly rural citizens the rights to public lands–or, the commons:

A significant precursor to the Industrial Revolution was the end of the so-called “open field system” during the Enclosure Movement in England during the 18th Century. Many families lost their traditional holdings and ultimately drifted into the growing industrial cities in search of work.

Further answers are available at a very popular location within the rubric which we call the commons–Wikipedia. Here you will find the wisdom and editing labors of a collective of commoners among them author, George Orwell (of 1984 and Animal Farm fame):

Stop to consider how the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure of the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even have the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.
—George Orwell, As I Please, Tribune, 18 August 1944

2012-13 Ray Smith Symposium Presents ‘Positions of Dissent’

 

 Ray Smith Symposium

 Helen Horowitz

The Battle over Sexual Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America

 Is a “new reticence” creeping back into public discourse? Are we returning to issues faced in an earlier America, when open, fluid conversation about sex was shut down? Helen Horowitz believes that words matter, and that to forbid key words from public discourse has serious implications both for intelligent discussion and human freedom. An exploration of what happened in the nineteenth century may allow us to see more clearly the issues at work today.

 PUBLIC LECTURE

September 20, 6 p.m.

Peter Graham Scholarly Commons, Bird Library, First Floor

 MINI-SEMINAR

September 21, 10 a.m.

Lemke Seminar Room, SCRC, Bird Library, Sixth Floor

 Public lectures and mini-seminars are free and open to the public. Due to limited seating, advance registration is required for the mini-seminars. To register, contact Barbara Brooker at bbbrooke@syr.edu or at 315.443.9763.