This Month’s Featured Articles…

Residents of Litchfield County opened their newspapers in the early fall of 1918 to find stories about a French army band playing concerts across the region to celebrate the alliance of the two nations in the Great War, and about efforts in North Canaan to construct a wall of honor to commemorate those serving in the war, and lists of the newest draftees. They did not read about a silent killer spreading across the state. Wartime censors would not risk lowering morale with reports of [...]

An epitaph written by a man named Charles Sedgwick in 1829 for a family friend reads: “She neither wasted time, nor property. She never violated a trust, nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial, she was the most efficient helper, and the tenderest friend.” This humble, if not innocuous sentiment only vaguely belies the woman who carried the distinctions throughout her life. Those distinctions would also help that woman, known as Elizabeth Freeman, fight for the most basic of human [...]

A week on, the vacuum still picks up the occasional wiry hair. It would seem that the dining room rug has been crisscrossed 20 times, and yet the mementos of our nighttime guest persist. But, in fairness, back to the beginning. For those of us who have chosen to live in the country, whether it’s a weekend and summer getaway or year round, proximity to wildlife seems to be part of the charm. We’ll often overhear snippets of conversations spiced with “our deer…” or “our [...]

Academia, stuffy lectures, silos of thought, ivory towers – these visions of scholarly pursuits are not the pillars of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. In contrast, the Center dedicates itself to open, bold and diverse thinking, active questioning, and deepening an understanding of our collective political lives. Dark times light the way The Center grew out of a conference in 2006 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Arendt’s birth. Bard is the location of the Hannah Arendt Library, a [...]

Food is easy – right? Its sustenance is directly related to our survival as a species and yet, the ways in which we choose to procure that nourishment and our philosophies on cooking remain as varied as society itself. In fact, the term “nourishment” has often found itself wedged apart from food thanks to modern eating habits. While the proliferation of exposé style documentaries like Super Size Me and Rotten have raised the public’s awareness of some of the less-than savory practices involved in commercial [...]