Next year the citizens of North Dakota will join their neighbors in Montana and South Dakota in celebrating the first century of their statehood. As part of the observances of the occasion, the North Dakota Humanities Council (a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities) will be sponsoring a statewide program that will operate under the title, “The World of 1889 and the Rest of the Story.”
Composed essentially of a traveling exhibit and a reading and discussion program at North Dakota’s public libraries, the year-long endeavor has been made possible by an exemplary award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to the North Dakota Humanities Council. In order to gain this funding, the North Dakota council was obliged to prepare a proposal for the Endowment, which was then judged excellent from among more than a score of projects submit ted by state councils in the competition.
What is distinctive about “The World of 1889” is not merely its notion of presenting major elements of world culture in exhibit form to audiences in approximately twenty shopping malls and bank lobbies across the state. Equally as important is the project’s underlying assumption that it is important to focus the public’s attention beyond the state’s borders, beyond the limitations of the celebratory and self-congratulatory spirit of the centennial of statehood.
The design of the exhibit and the library program is being formulated by a European historian from the faculty of the University of North Dakota, as well as by scholars in the fields of art history, literature, music, and the history of science.
To reacquaint North Dakotans with the cultural trends shaping the world a century ago, the participating scholars, working closely with the North Dakota Humanities Council, have devised a two-sided traveling exhibit. On the outside there will be a treatment of the theme, “The World in 1889,” featuring such items as illustrations from Harper’s magazine of the period and reproductions of pages from 1889 newspapers that will be arrayed in such a manner as to touch upon some of the major news events of the year. Visitors, therefore, will learn of the three-power naval confrontation at Samoa, the exploits of Cecil Rhodes in southern Africa, Japan’s adoption of a constitution with the blessings of the Emperor, the convening of the first Pan-American Conference in Washington, and labor unrest in Germany, Britain, and Australia (where sheep shearers demanded higher wages).
The interior panels of the exhibit, displayed under the title, “The Rest of the Story,” will focus more upon cultural topics. For example, visitors walking through this portion of the exhibit will be greeted by a panel dealing with the censorship of Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata” by Russian authorities who were shocked by the story’s frank discussion of sex and marriage. Another includes a photograph of T.H. Huxley and selections from his Agnostica, while still another panel will describe the pioneering medical discoveries of the epoch by Kitazato in Japan and Koch in Germany.
Naturally, the exciting developments of the period in the arts will also be represented in this portion of the exhibit. Recordings of Mahler’s “First Symphony,” Dvorak’s “Fourth,” and Franck’s only symphonic composition (which failed abysmally in its 1889 premiere) will be played for visitors walking through the interior displays. Its photo graphs and texts will be supplemented by vibrant reproductions of such masterpieces as Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” his “Blue Wheatfields,” and his “Self-Portrait.”
While the exhibit travels to at least twenty different localities in North Dakota, the humanities council will also underwrite reading and discussion programs in eight of the state’s public libraries. Designed for a general audience of adult readers, the series will provide humanities faculty to lead evening discussions of such representative works of the era as Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” (noted in the exhibit), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and even Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. To augment these discussions, participating faculty will be supplied by the project with a video documentary on the life of Van Gogh and a recording of selections of music from 1889 with a scholar’s interpretation of its meaning.
William Gard is an associate professor of history at the University of North Dakota.
