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

Honors senior requests survey participants!

Dana Senderoff, an Honors senior enrolled in Prof. Thompson’s HNR 360 Presidental Election and the New Media, has a request for you!  She writes, “The presidential election is coming very soon, and the winner of this election will determine the future of health care in America. It is very important that we all understand the changes in health care that will come about from the two candidates, but it seems as though not everyone is properly informed. The media is our main source of information, but it does not always provide trustworthy information. I am conducting a term project on the portrayal of the Affordable Care Act through new and social media. In addition to my research, I have created a survey to help gather information from SU students. Please take my survey, it will only take two minutes!”

Thanks for participating!  You can access the survey at the link below:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/K3W2GJ6

 

Honors Community Outing

We in the Honors Program are always impressed by the bonds created between our students and professors. It is no wonder we call it an Honors COMMUNITY. We wanted to share these wonderful photos of a recent trip that our Honors professor and Core Faculty member, John Western, took with his former students to the Whetstone Gulf Gorge. Yes, former students. We are proud that the bonds in the classroom lead to relationships well after our students have left the seats of their former classes. This recent trip just goes to show what wonderful friendships can be created here in the Honors Program!

Students on Nature Walk
Students on the lip of the Whetstone Gulf Gorge.     

Group on the very northern end of the 15 miles or so of continuous sand dunes at the eastern end of Lake Ontario. This place is called Black Pond, a couple of miles north of Southwick Beach State Park.
Dramatis personae: Hannah Louys, John Western & Belle, Paige Jarmuz, Bo Stewart, Andrew Frasier, Margo Woodring, Brian Cheung.

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