HUMANITIES: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities

Cover Story

The Value of Difference

A conversation with Ruth J. Simmons, the 2023 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities

Shelley C. Lowe

A graduation hug from an appreciative student

A graduating student at Prairie View thanks President Simmons for her leadership.

—Courtesy Ruth Simmons

Current Issue

2023 Jefferson Lectuer Ruth J. Simmons

Ruth J. Simmons is delivering the 2023 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.

—Rocky Knete

Volume 44, Issue 4

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Classics

How Black Suffragists Fought for the Right to Vote and a Modicum of Respect

Hallie Quinn Brown and Other "Homespun Heroines"

Martha S. Jones

A Lot of What Is Known about Pirates Is Not True, and a Lot of What Is True Is Not Known.

The pirate next door.

Texting in Ancient Mayan Hieroglyphs

What Unicode will make possible

Edmund Wilson’s Big Idea: A Series of Books Devoted to Classic American Writing. It Almost Didn’t Happen.

The origins of the Library of America were a messy business.

Why Spinoza Was Excommunicated

How America Became “A City Upon a Hill”

The rise and fall of Perry Miller

Abram Van Engen

The Messy Genius of W. H. Auden

A disheveled poet crafted verse of exquisite order.

World War I Changed America and Transformed Its Role in International Relations

So why don't we pay more attention to it?

Meredith Hindley