President Clinton and First Lady Award National Humanities Medals at White House Nov. 5
WASHINGTON, Oct. 28, 1998 -- President William J. Clinton and
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday, Nov. 5, at 9:30 a.m.
awarded the 1998 National Humanities Medal to nine distinguished
Americans at a special ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House.
A White House dinner in honor of the recipients was held that evening.
The 1998 National Humanities Medal recipients are:
- Stephen E. Ambrose (Helena, Mont.),
biographer of Eisenhower and Nixon; author of Undaunted
Courage, Citizen Soldiers and D-Day, three
historical books simultaneously on the New York Times
bestseller list; principal commentator in the PBS documentary films
Lewis and Clark and Eisenhower; chief historical advisor
on the Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan.
- E. L. Doctorow (New York, N.Y.),
author of many popular and critically acclaimed novels about America’s
last 100 years, including Ragtime and Billy Bathgate;
many of his novels have been adapted to film, and a musical version of
Ragtime is currently running on Broadway.
- Diana L. Eck (Cambridge, Mass.),
creator and director of the Harvard-based Pluralism Project, which
documents and analyzes America’s religious diversity and produced an
acclaimed CD-ROM that is now in wide use as a resource for studying
the role of religion in American culture.
- Nancye Brown Gaj (Raleigh, N.C.),
founder and president of MOTHEREAD, Inc., a national family literacy
program that enables newly literate adults to improve their reading
skills while helping them encourage and guide the learning of their
preschool-age children.
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.),
director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American
Research; author of the best-selling Loose Canons: Notes on the
Culture Wars and Colored People: A Memoir; coeditor of the
Norton Anthology of African American Literature.
- Vartan Gregorian (New York, N.Y.),
educator, administrator and philanthropist; former president of Brown
University and of the New York Public Library; current president of
the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
- Ramón Eduardo Ruiz (Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.),
scholar and professor of the history of Hispanic America; author of 12
books, including in-depth studies of the Cuban and Mexican
revolutions.
- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (New York, N.Y.),
prolific scholar and professor of American history; two-time Pulitzer
Prize winner, for The Age of Jackson and A Thousand Days:
John F. Kennedy in the White House; author of The Disuniting of
America.
- Garry Wills (Evanston, Ill.),
syndicated columnist, essayist and cultural critic; Pulitzer Prize
winner for Lincoln at Gettysburg; author of numerous acclaimed
books on American culture and history.
"The 1998 National Humanities Medalists represent virtuosity in the
humanities in a variety of ways -- through writing and teaching,
scholarship and literary creation, and public outreach and
philanthropy," said William R. Ferris, chairman of the National
Endowment for the Humanities. "Their work demonstrates the vital role
of the humanities in American life. Their ideas and insights have
touched untold millions of our citizens and have shaped a clearer
understanding of who we are as a nation. It is a great pleasure to
announce the distinguished recipients of this year’s highest national
honor in the humanities."
The National Humanities Medal honors individuals or groups whose work
has deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities, broadened
citizens' engagement with the humanities or helped preserve and expand
Americans' access to important humanities resources. The humanities
are areas of study such as history, literature, philosophy and
languages that form the record of human cultural heritage.
Recipients of the National Humanities Medal are selected by the
president of the United States. Annually the National Endowment for
the Humanities assists in the selection process by soliciting
nominations for the medal from the humanities community. These
nominations are first reviewed by the National Council on the
Humanities, NEH's presidentially appointed board of advisors. The NEH
chairman selects a list of the most highly qualified candidates, whose
names are then forwarded to the White House for final consideration by
the president.
Stephen E. Ambrose
Helena, Montana
Stephen Ambrose is one of the nation’s leading scholars of
military and diplomatic history. A professor emeritus of history at
the University of New Orleans, founding director of the Eisenhower
Center there and founder of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans,
he has written numerous books, including Citizen Soldiers: The U.S.
Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of
Germany, June 7, 1944-May 7, 1945 (1997), Undaunted Courage:
Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American
West (1996) and D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of
World War II (1994). These three books were simultaneously on the
New York Times bestseller list, with Citizen Soldiers listed in
both the hardback and the paperback categories. Other important books
by Ambrose are Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy, 1938-
1997 (the standard textbook on the subject, now in its eighth
edition), Crazy Horse and Custer (1975) and multivolume
biographies of Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower. Ambrose has also
reached a broad public audience as a historical advisor and
commentator on the PBS documentary films Eisenhower, Divided
Highways and Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of
Discovery. He was the historical consultant for the film
Saving Private Ryan, and he has been frequently interviewed on
television and radio.
(photo © Helena Photography)
E. L. Doctorow
New Rochelle, New York
E. L. Doctorow is a celebrated author whose novels have the
distinction of being both popular and critically acclaimed. Taken as
a whole, his work might be read as a spiritual history of America’s
last hundred years. With The Waterworks (1994), set in post-Civil
War-era New York City; Welcome to Hard Times (1960), set in the
Dakota Territory in the late 19th century; Ragtime (1975), depicting
the pre-World War I period; Loon Lake (1980), World’s Fair (1985)
and Billy Bathgate (1989), all set in the 1930s; The Book of
Daniel (1971), portraying the politicized 1950s and '60s; and Lives
of the Poets (1984), reflecting the nervous national self-examination
of the 1980s, he would seem to have the muralist’s sense of the big
canvas, with its commingling of past and present, public and private,
its love of narrative and linguistic figuration. Doctorow is
published in 30 languages. His honors include the National Book
Critics Circle Award (twice), the National Book Award, the
PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction and the
American Academy of Arts and Letters’ William Dean Howells Medal.
Film adaptations have been made of his work, and a musical version of
Ragtime is currently running on Broadway. Doctorow is a professor
of English at New York University.
(photo ©Jerry Bauer)
Diana L. Eck
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies
at Harvard, is a scholar of the religious traditions of India who has
turned her attention for the past decade to the United States. In
1991, she developed and became director of the Pluralism Project, a
Harvard-based research project aimed at studying and documenting the
rich religious diversity of America, with a special view to the
nation's new immigrant religious communities. Through this project,
Eck has fostered a better understanding of how the American religious
landscape has diversified in the past 25 years, how various religious
communities function within the greater society and the ramifications
of increased religious diversity for American public life. She and
her student research team have studied hundreds of religious
communities from the Sri Lakshmi Hindu Temple in Boston and the Sikh
Gurdwara of Oklahoma, to the All Nations Pentecostal Church in Denver
and the Cambodian Buddhist Temple in Long Beach, California. The
Pluralism Project's multimedia CD-ROM, "On Common Ground: World
Religions in America" (1997), features portraits of some 400
communities and an in-depth analysis of the 15 major religious
traditions in the United States. This resource has been credited with
generating a greater understanding of how religious communities act
and interact in America's pluralistic society.
(photo by Jon Chase, Harvard News Office)
Nancye Brown Gaj
Raleigh, North Carolina
Nancye Gaj is founder and president of MOTHEREAD, Inc., a
national family literacy program designed to improve parents’ reading
and language skills while helping them encourage and guide their
children’s learning. Gaj, an adult educator, founded the organization
in 1987 by first working with incarcerated women in North Carolina.
She discovered that, regardless of their reading ability or prior
educational experience, parents were powerfully motivated to read and
talk about stories that they could share with their children. She
knew that this was also true for families outside of prison walls.
So, with funding from the Z. Smith Reynolds and Mary Reynolds Babcock
Foundation, the North Carolina Humanities Council and the National
Endowment for the Humanities, her organization developed a curriculum
based on multicultural children’s literature. The curriculum uses a
contextualized approach to literacy instruction that empowers parents
to learn while teaching their children. These materials are currently
being used by trained instructors throughout North Carolina and 18
other states with state humanities council affiliates in California,
Minnesota, Utah, Virginia and Washington state. MOTHEREAD’s
nationwide success is a tribute to Gaj’s educational vision,
administrative skill and philanthropic spirit.
(photo by Steve Gaj)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the
Humanities, chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies and
director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at
Harvard University, is one of the nation’s leading black intellectuals
and critics. He is coeditor of Encarta Africana, a forthcoming
CD-ROM encyclopedia of the history and culture of the black world, and of
Africana, a forthcoming encyclopedia in book form. He is also
coeditor of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature
(1996), a major compendium that has introduced black writing to the
literary canon and helped reshape the teaching of American literature.
Gates is the author of Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the
'Racial' Self (1987), The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of
Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988), Loose Canons: Notes on the
Culture Wars (1992), Colored People: A Memoir (1994) and Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997). An influential social and
cultural critic, Gates is a staff writer for New Yorker magazine and
contributes regularly to other mainstream publications as well as
scholarly journals. His honors include a MacArthur Prize (1981),
recognition as one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential Americans
(1997) and Phi Beta Kappa. He is the host and narrator of Into
Africa, a film series on ancient African culture to be released in
1999 by PBS and the BBC.
(photo ©1994 Mark Morelli)
Vartan Gregorian
New York, New York
Vartan Gregorian has had an exceptional career dedicated to
creating a broadly educated citizenry and mutual understanding among
all peoples. Former president of Brown University (1989-1997) and the
New York Public Library (1981-1989), he is currently president of the
Carnegie Corporation of New York, a general purpose philanthropy
founded by Andrew Carnegie "for the advancement and diffusion of
knowledge and understanding." Author of The Emergence of Modern
Afghanistan (1969), he has been a professor of history at San
Francisco State College, the University of Texas at Austin and the
University of Pennsylvania. An administrator since 1969, he was
founding dean of the faculty of arts and sciences and provost at the
University of Pennsylvania (1974-1980). At Brown, he strengthened the
research, teaching and public service activities, and tripled the
institution’s endowment. At the Library, he was instrumental in
reviving the system. Gregorian has been recognized by Change magazine
as one of the most influential educators in the U.S. and by Who’s Who
as one of 50 great Americans. He is pro bono advisor to the Annenberg
Foundation’s $500 million Challenge the Nation school reform
initiative. His honors include Phi Beta Kappa, the American Academy
and Institute of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal for Service to the Arts,
the Pennsylvania Humanities Council’s First Humanist Award, Portugal’s
Grand Oficial da Ordem do Infante D. Henrique, France’s Officier de
l’Ordre des Artes et Lettres and the Italian Ministry of Foreign
Affairs’ Silver Cultural Medal.
(photo John Forasté/Brown University)
Ramón Eduardo Ruiz
Rancho Santa Fe, California
Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, an emeritus professor at the University of
California, San Diego, is a distinguished historian of Hispanic
America. He has had an influential career as an educator, scholar and
intellectual. Author of a dozen books and numerous articles, he has
written on multiple aspects of Mexico’s history and on the two most
important upheavals in Hispanic America, the Cuban and Mexican
revolutions. These studies are now standard reference works. His
books include Cuba: The Making of a Revolution (1968), The Great
Rebellion: Mexico, 1905-1923 (1980), The People of Sonora and Yankee
Capitalists (1988), Triumphs and Tragedy: A History of the Mexican
People (1992) and On the Rim of Mexico: Encounters of the Rich and
Poor (1998). Ruiz has taught at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México and other Mexican institutions. A former president of the
Chicano/Latino Faculty Association of the University of California
system, he has been honored for his contributions to education by the
Chicano Federation of San Diego and by his students at UCSD.
(photo University of California, San Diego)
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
New York, New York
Since the appearance more than five decades ago of his Pulitzer
Prize-winning The Age of Jackson (1945), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
has remained one of America’s most widely known historians. A special
assistant to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963, in 1966 he won a
second Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for A Thousand
Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965). His other books
include three volumes of The Age of Roosevelt (1957-60), for which
he won both the Francis Parkman and Bancroft prizes; The Imperial
Presidency (1973); Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978), for which
he won a National Book Award; The Cycles of American History (1986);
and The Disuniting of America (1991). In 1980, Schlesinger founded
the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award with proceeds from his best-selling
biography. Each year, the internationally recognized award is given
to a book that "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert
Kennedy’s purposes." A former president of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, Schlesinger is a frequent contributor to magazines
and newpapers. He taught history for many years at Harvard and the
City University of New York, where he is now Albert Schweitzer
Professor Emeritus of the Humanities.
(photo ©Dominique Nabokov)
Garry Wills
Evanston, Illinois
Garry Wills, an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern
University, has had a distinguished career as a professor and visiting
professor at many colleges and universities, as an author of many
widely read books on American culture and politics and as a syndicated
newspaper columnist. His Lincoln at Gettysburg (1993) won a
Pulitzer Prize for its close textual analysis of the Gettysburg
Address, words that Wills argues remade modern America. His other
books include Nixon Agonistes (1970), Inventing America:
Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1978), Explaining America:
The Federalist (1980), The Kennedy Imprisonment (1982), Reagan’s
America (1987), Under God: Religion and American Politics (1990),
Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1994) and John Wayne’s
America: The Politics of Celebrity (1997). He taught the classics at
Johns Hopkins University for many years and was Henry R. Luce
Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern. In
addition to the Pulitzer Prize, he has received the National Book
Critics Award twice, the Organization of American Historians’ Merle
Curti Award and the Yale Graduate School’s Wilber Cross Medal. A
member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a frequent contributor to
newspapers and magazines.
(photo Natalie Wills)
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