National Humanities Medals On September 29, 1997, President Clinton awarded ten Americans the National Humanities Medal for their outstanding efforts to deepen public awareness of the humanities. The bronze medallion, designed by David Macaulay, a 1995 Frankel Prize winner, replaces the Charles Frankel Prize, named for the Columbia University professor who was the first president of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Nina M. Archabal is the first woman director and chief executive officer of the 147-year-old Minnesota Historical Society, one of the largest in the country. The society administers the Minnesota History Center with its 165,000 artifacts and one million archeological items, and the Mille Lacs Indian Museum, a joint project with the Mille Lacs Chippewas. Archabal chaired the board of the American Association of Museums and serves on the board of directors of the American Folklife Center. David A. Berry is executive director and chair of the board of the Community College Humanities Association (CCHA), which he helped form to further humanities programs in two-year colleges across the country. Berry is a professor of history at Essex County College in Newark, New Jersey, and an adjunct faculty member at New York University. Berry directed a joint project of CCHA and Phi Theta Kappa, the honor society for two-year college students, as part of the National Conversation Initiative. Richard J. Franke is a founder of the Chicago Humanities Festival, a four-day, citywide event involving twenty-six cultural institutions and attracting 25,000 people annually. A retired investment banker, Franke has energetically promoted the humanities throughout his career. He was chair of the Illinois Humanities Council from 1988 to 1990, and was appointed in 1990 to the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and chair of the National Trust for the Humanities. William Friday is president emeritus of the University of North Carolina and executive director of the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trusts, which establishes professorships on college campuses. Friday has championed the humanities throughout his career. He has served on the Carnegie Committee on Higher Education, the President's Task Force on Education, and the Commission on National Changes in Education. He heads a national commission to strengthen the Fulbright overseas scholarship program. Don Henley has used his public role as a songwriter and founding performer with The Eagles to advance environmental causes. In 1990, Henley founded the Walden Woods Project, a not-for-profit organization that protects the historic woods surrounding Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He raised $17 million to purchase land slated for commercial development, and bought a historic eighteen-room Tudor mansion near the pond to house the Thoreau Institute, which provides scholars with a library and archives. Maxine Hong Kingston won a National Book Critics Circle award for her book, The Woman Warrior, in which she chronicled the lives of Chinese Americans facing ancestral ghosts in present-day America. One critic wrote that Kingston "blends myth, legend, history, and autobiography into a genre of her own invention." Her other books -- China Men, which received the American Book Award, and Tripmaster Monkey -- also explore the struggles of immigrants. Kingston is a senior lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. Luis Leal has spent his academic life expanding Americans' knowledge of Mexico and the Chicano experience. He has written sixteen books, including Decade of Chicano Literature, 1970-79, and No Longer Voiceless. In 1992, Leal was awarded the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle, its highest honor to a citizen of another country. Leal teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which in 1995 established the Luis Leal Endowed Chair in Chicano Studies, the first of its kind in the United States. Martin E. Marty has spent much of his life studying the role religion plays in American culture. A former Lutheran minister, Marty is now the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Among his fifty books are Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America, which won the National Book Award, and Pilgrims in Their Own Land: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America. He recently completed Under God, Indivisible, volume three of the Modern American Religion series. Paul Mellon has given vast amounts of his family fortune to help culture flourish in the United States through the donations of important works of art, history, and literature to museums and libraries. In 1941, Mellon and his sister Ailsa established the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the nation's largest nonfederal funder of the humanities and higher education programs. Mellon was influential in constructing the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which his father founded in 1937, as well as art centers in Connecticut and Virginia. Studs Terkel is a master in the art of oral history. At age eighty-five, he has conducted nine thousand hours of interviews on radio, often choosing ordinary people because they "articulate what others feel but can't say." Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1934, but chose the uncertain life of actor, playwright, jazz columnist, and disc jockey. For forty-five years he has broadcast from Chicago's WFMT-FM, combining music and interviews. Several bestsellers have come from his program including: Hard Times, Working, and The Good War.