January/February 2016

Ballerinas standing in window alcove of ballet school

Photo caption

Ballerinas adorn the window of the School of American Ballet, started by the Russian-turned-American choreographer, George Balanchine.

Alfred Eisenstaedt, The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images

Volume 37, Issue 1

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HUMANITIES: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities

In This Issue

George Balanchine rehearses Slaughter on Tenth Avenue with Suzanne Farrell

George Balanchine and the United States

An Artist in Love with His Adopted Country

Peter Tonguette

Henry VIII played by Donald Sinden, 1969, in Elizabethan costume

Did He Even Know He Was Shakespeare?

What the history of the First Folio tells us about our greatest playwright

David Scott Kastan

The Young Woman in a Georgian Costume; she is dressed in rich red and gold robes, with heavy gold earrings, holding a golden bowl above her chest

“Pearls on a String” Shows How Artists, Patrons, and Intellectuals Fused Traditions Across the Islamic World

Courting beauty at the Walters Art Museum.

David Soud

Mayor-elect Tom Bradley shaking hands with a crowd of people, reaching out their hands to him

Tom Bradley’s Los Angeles

Los Angeles elected its first black mayor with a multicultural coalition.

Catherine Wagley

Also in this issue

The Man Who Made American Modernism and Modernism American

James Laughlin, champion of literature

Greg Barnhisel

My Own Private Williamsburg

A writer goes in search of W.A.R. Goodwin

Andrew Reiner

The Humanities Are More Economical

What Teaching Political Philosophy and Efficiency Have to Do with Each Other.

Danielle Allen

The Grown-Up Saint-Exupéry

The Little Prince author, a famous pilot, wrote for adults too.

Meredith Hindley

The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Found at Sam Phillips’s Sun Records

Anyone could walk in and record their song at small studio in Memphis.

Laura Wolff Scanlan

In the Land of Snow and Fargo, a Legacy of Black Writing Emerges

A new anthology of African-American writing reveals black lives in the Midwest.

Jael Goldfine

Dumbarton House in Georgetown Obliged Washington, D.C.’s Expanding Street Grid in 1915 by Moving a Few Hundred Feet

Steve Moyer

Curioldy

First in a series: Revisiting the Spring 1971 issue of Humanities

David Skinner

Papa Wheelie

Hemingway on a bicycle

Steve Moyer

Impertinent Questions with Alan Kahan

Tocqueville is still trenchant.

Anna Maria Gillis

Briann Greenfield of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities

She takes a public historian's view of the world.

Mary Jo Patterson

Editor’s Note

David Skinner