Discovery & Inspiration

As executive director of Tulsa Educare, Cindy Decker leads one of the nation’s premier early childhood education programs which aims to break the cycle of poverty in Tulsa.

Writer and political commentator Jim Hightower has garnered a national following as a radio personality, syndicated columnist, and author speaking to the concerns of everyday Americans in much the same way as Woody Guthrie, the artist and activist who inspires him.

As Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, Chuck Hoskin Jr. has not only helped improve the economic and physical well-being of his fellow Cherokees, he has also secured the largest language investment in the tribe’s history to expand Cherokee cultural preservation.

Jeff Stava is Chief Program Officer of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, Chief Operating Officer at the Tulsa Community Foundation, and Executive Director of the Gathering Place, Tulsa’s 100-acre, riverfront park which was named USA Today’s top new attraction for 2019, and one of Time Magazine’s 100 Greatest Places in the World.

Best-selling author Michael Wallis is a leading chronicler of the American West and its place in the American imaginary—with books on everything from Billy the Kid, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and Wilma Mankiller to the legacy of America’s “Mother Road,” Route 66.

Community activist and entrepreneur Onikah Asamoa-Caesar is the founder and CEO of Fulton Street Books & Coffee, a retail business and gathering place in the heart of Tulsa’s historic Greenwood neighborhood.

Bill Leuchtenburg speaks about presidential history at the National Humanities Center Board of Trustees reception at the Morgan Library, New York, NY on June 8, 2016.

Theatrical productions allow playwrights and audiences alike to engage with historical and contemporary social realities. But what are the consequences when particular types of dramatic texts and performances are inadequately disseminated and preserved? Elena Machado Sáez (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is analyzing the ways that Latinx theater in the United States depicts forms of activism and resistance w...

In March 1850, five men and two women were photographed in the studio of South Carolina artist Joseph Zealy. When these daguerreotypes were uncovered in 1976, they quickly became some of the best-known pre-Civil War images of enslaved African Americans. Gregg Hecimovich (NHC Fellow, 2015–16; 2022–23) is asking important questions about why these images were captured, how they were lost for so long...

As an art form, opera has proven to be simultaneously entertaining and relatable to diverse audiences, even though it has also been characterized by associations with whiteness and elitism. Naomi André (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is working to tell a more comprehensive and inclusive story of this genre by constructing a history of Blackness in opera from the nineteenth century to the present.

The British writer, reformer, and criminologist George Cecil Ives lived through a transformation in our collective understanding of sexuality. Born in 1867, Ives found early inspiration in the Classical tradition and witnessed the rise of sexology and psychoanalysis before his death in the mid-twentieth century. But Ives did not simply observe these social changes; he chronicled them exhaustively...

In 1996, an exhibition entitled “Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists,” was produced for the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art’s contribution to the Olympic games held in Atlanta, Georgia. Today, Jontyle Theresa Robinson (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is undertaking a multi-tiered initiative to reflect upon and advance the work of that exhibition thirty years later.

The influence that Nina Simone and Langston Hughes have had on American music, literature, and culture can hardly be overstated. However, the relationship between these two figures has received little to no attention from scholars to date, despite their long history of collaboration. W. Jason Miller (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is conducting research into this partnership in order to inform new understan...

This lecture illuminates the field of international possibility seen by a leading fraction of young Americans in the 1920s. It offers a counter-narrative to the well-worn account of American “expatriates” who succumbed to the seductions of Paris and soon returned home chastened. A far larger stratum of would-be writers lived outside the United States without desire to be “expatriates,” found vocat...

When the Panama Canal opened in 1914, it not only revolutionized international trade, but brought about new developments in public health. While diseases like yellow fever and malaria were seen as an inherent threat of “the tropics” by the Americans and French, the process of constructing the canal actually created conditions in which such diseases could proliferate more freely. In this podcast, P...

For the past twenty years, Nigerian filmmaking has dominated media production in Africa and among African diasporic communities. One of the most influential figures in this industry is the writer, director, and producer Femi Odugbemi, whose work is an example of the "socially responsible cinema" that has been under-explored in scholarly analyses of Nollywood. In this podcast, Paul Ushang Ugor (NHC...

Nineteenth-century American paintings frequently depict foreign settings, from the Caribbean to the Arctic. Many of these artworks seem to reveal moments of cultural exchange or scientific inquiry, but they have rarely been seen as evidence of the growing imperialist tendencies of the United States throughout this century. In this podcast, Maggie Cao (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of h...

In the early twentieth century, psychoanalytic ideas based on the work of Sigmund Freud were taken up, translated, and even challenged by practitioners from a variety of geographic regions and backgrounds. However, the importance of psychoanalytic thought in China has not always been given adequate attention. In this podcast, Howard Chiang (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at t...

Widely understood as a destination for leisure and pleasure, the Caribbean has drawn visitors from the global north for over a century. Women have played a central role in establishing this image of the islands, from the proliferation of women's travel writing beginning in the late nineteenth century to their active roles in shaping the tourism and hospitality industry. In this podcast, Elizabeth...

In the 1772 court case “Somerset v Stewart,” an English court found that the concept of slavery had no basis in English law. Although this case has long been linked to the eventual abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in Britain, the emancipation of enslaved persons was a long and complex process. In this podcast, Tony Frazier (NHC Fellow, 2021–22), associate professor of history at North Carolin...

Andrew Delbanco (NHC Fellow, 2013–14), Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University; President, The Teagle Foundation For decades after its founding, the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the “united” states was actually a lie. By awakening northerners to the true...

Cara Robertson (NHC Trustee; NHC Fellow, 2004–05; 2005–06) When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Everyone—rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and...

Joy Connolly (NHC Trustee), President, American Council of Learned Societies A distinguished classics scholar as well as an accomplished academic administrator, Connolly argues in her most recent book, “The Life of Roman Republicanism” that “Cicero, Sallust, and Horace inspire fresh thinking about central concerns of contemporary political thought and action” including the role conflict plays in t...

Jane O. Newman (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 2015–16), Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine As constructed by Boccaccio, “The Decameron” is a classic collection of fourteenth-century stories, one hundred tales shared by a group of young men and women sheltering in a secluded villa outside Florence to avoid the Great Bubonic Plague. Organized around timeless themes such as...

Martha S. Jones (NHC Fellow, 2013–14), Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women’s movement did not win the vote for most Black women. Securing their rights required...