Below is Dr. Rhodes' response to CivicStory's three long-form humanities-based stories by Deborah Yaffe. Her review articulates the many ways that humanities subjects allow us to interrogate and discuss big ideas in public forums.

After the violent shooting death of his student Maura Binkley in the fall of 2018, Gary Taylor, Shakespeare scholar and Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University, published an opinion piece in the Tampa Bay Times titled “Death of an English Major.” Stepping out of the classroom and into the public forum of journalism, Taylor found eloquence in his grief, using Shakespeare references to mourn the senseless loss of life. In doing so, he wondered how the humanities might contribute to efforts to end America’s mass shooting epidemic. Ultimately, he suggested that “these men were trying to kill generalities. The man who stands accused of murdering Maura was not seeing a luminous living individual; he was seeing a specimen of the category ‘woman,’ a category he hated… Before the gun killed Maura, the generalization did.”

In confronting this idea, Taylor recognized the societal need for curiosity and open-mindedness to flourish. “What we do, in English, and in the humanities more broadly, what we teach, what we celebrate and investigate, is human particularity… It’s why I, personally, have always been most fascinated by playwrights, from Aeschylus to August Wilson: Dialogue releases us from the monologues of one mind, clan, tradition.”

By framing humanities subject matter within the real-life work—public and private—that the humanities do, Taylor provided a model for marrying journalism and the humanities in urgent conversations (like those around gun violence). The three articles produced for CivicStory’s Humanities Reporting Project in fall 2023 are aligned with Taylor’s piece in spirit and in practice, offering insight into humanities subjects and the tools they give us to form a dialogue around such topics as race, property, and education.

For example, “Forgotten History: Center Highlights Civil Rights Pioneer T. Thomas Fortune” and “Free Acres: A Wooded North Jersey Enclave with a Utopian Past” focus on individual figures and their “particularities,” as Taylor might say, to examine social justice and economics from multiple points of view. In fact, many humanities disciplines do this, historicizing modern issues so as to place them in useful context. When we consider the historical timeline of an idea, person, or place, we can see how it has changed over time.

The Humanities Reporting project utilizes this idea to great effect. These are articles that could be used in humanities classrooms from high school to college—teaching students about important historical figures and ideas and demonstrating why it is important to know their stories and legacies. At the same time, they are accessible to the general reader, who will encounter them in the press and be edified. If nothing else, they bring us further from generalization and closer to what Taylor celebrated about Maura Binkley five years ago: “the particulars of beautiful promise.”

Dr. Kim Rhodes is serving as a public humanities expert on the CivicStory Humanities Reporter project team.

The 2023 Humanities Reporting Project Review: Finding beauty in the particulars