Tag Archives: benjamin franklin

Today we’ll revisit our interview with historian Nancy Isenberg about her book, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. But there’s a twist – I’ve re-edited the program to make use of a broader musical perspective, feeling like I had betrayed the spirit of the program in my original choices. Isenberg’s 2016 book dissects the stereotype “white …

From Alexander the Great’s “pillow book” (The Iliad) to the Mayan Popul Vuh; from Gilgamesh to Harry Potter by way of Goethe and the notion of “world literature”–tonight we contemplate The Written World. World Literature is a concept first expressed by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1827: If we Germans do not look beyond the narrow circle of our own environment, …