Can Historical Newspapers be an Antidote to the Environmental Crisis?

Please join NEH Division of Preservation and Access and the Serial and Government Publications Division at the Library of Congress for a very special event on Wednesday, September 20, 2022, 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm EDT.

In the plenary address “Can Historical Newspapers be an Antidote to the Environmental Crisis?”  at the annual conference of the National Digital Newspaper Program, author Kerri Arsenault considers how our environmental crisis is tethered to an aesthetic and rhetorical crisis. So many institutions grant the public “free” access to archives, but what if—as an ordinary citizen—you can’t even find the door? This talk will consider barriers to information, how such obstacles may exacerbate the environmental crisis, and what newspapers can do that many resources cannot to help unlock knowledge for those who need it most.

Kerri Arsenault is a literary critic, codirector of The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University, contributing editor at Orion magazine, and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains (2020), which won the Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award (2021) and the Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction (2021) and was a finalist for the Connecticut Humanities Book Award for Nonfiction (2021). Recently, she was a Democracy Fellow at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and a fellow at the Science History Institute. Her writing has been published in the Boston Globe, the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

The virtual plenary address is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Please register for the event. 

Sponsored by NEH and the Library of Congress, this talk is free and open to the public.