The National Humanities Medals
On September 9, 1999, President Clinton awarded eight Americans the National Humanities Medal for their outstanding efforts to deepen public awareness of the humanities.
Patricia Battin is a pioneer in the field of library science. As planning director for Emory University's Virtual Library Project, she helped establish the Center for Library and Informational Resources, which is overseeing a long-term, multi-institutional effort to make library resources available to everyone on the Web. Battin was president of the Commission on Preservation and Access, which has microfilmed more than 769,000 embrittled volumes printed between 1850 and 1950. Now retired, she co-authored The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the Twenty-first Century.
Taylor Branch brings people back to the sights and sounds of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. His comprehensive book about the movement's rise, Parting the Waters, earned Branch the Pulitzer Prize in History. Branch did graduate work at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University before joining the staff of Esquire and later Harper's Magazine. In 1998, Branch published the second volume of his Civil Rights trilogy, Pillar of Fire, focusing on the years 1963 to 1965; the years 1965 to 1968 are the subject of a final volume, At Canaan's Bridge, now in preparation.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall lets people tell their own stories. As founder of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she and her colleagues have collected and archived more than two thousand interviews from the people who were part of history—-from white female activists to laid-off Southern textile workers and African American Civil Rights leaders. Hall is Julia Cherry Spruill professor of history and the author of numerous articles and books, including Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill, which earned her the Albert J. Beveridge Award for History.
Garrison Keillor contributes to the cultural life of America through his story-telling, humor, and writing. Born in Anoka, Minnesota, Keillor is perhaps best known as the host of a long-running weekly public radio program, A Prairie Home Companion, which features the lives of a fictional town lost by errant mapmakers in the heart of Minnesota, Lake Wobegon. The recipient of a George Foster Peabody Award and a member of the Radio Hall of Fame, Keillor also hosts The Writer's Almanac, which fosters public awareness of poetry and literature.
Jim Lehrer is the host of public television's award-winning nightly news program, News Hour With Jim Lehrer. Lehrer got his start in print media as a reporter and editor with the Dallas Times-Herald after graduating from the University of Missouri and serving in the Marine Corps. The recipient of more than thirty awards for journalistic excellence, including several Emmys and a George Foster Peabody Broadcast Award, Lehrer also has written novels, dramas, and memoirs.
John Rawls is James Bryan Conant professor emeritus at Harvard University. In A Theory of Justice, widely considered one of the most important books in twentieth-century philosophy, Rawls outlines a method for achieving "fairness" by ignoring personal particulars such as race, gender, and religion in ethical considerations. Rawls attended Princeton and then served in the Pacific theatre in World War II. He returned to Princeton to complete his doctorate before taking up teaching appointments at Cornell and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Rawls is a member of the British and Norwegian Academies of Arts and Sciences.
Steven Spielberg is the renowned director of a group of films that reads like a bibliography of popular culture: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Color Purple, and Jurassic Park; but in films like Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, and Amistad, Spielberg preserves pieces of the past. He established the Righteous Persons Foundation, a grant-making organization that funds, among other things, an archiving project called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. The idea, says Spielberg, is "to create a body of living history" by recording the testimony of more than fifty thousand Holocaust survivors, witnesses, liberators, and rescuers from fifty-seven countries.
August Wilson inaugurated the Pittsburgh Public Theatre in 1999 with King Hedley II, the eighth play in a series examining the African American experience in the twentieth-century, one decade at a time. The recipient of many accolades, including two Pulitzer Prizes and five New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, Wilson is co-founder of the Black Horizons Theatre Company in Pittsburgh, where he grew up and sets most of his plays. He is also founder of the African Grove Institute of the Arts, which supports African American artists in writing and staging their own productions.