Peter Gilbert
CommentatorPeter Gilbert is executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council.
For commentaries from Peter before April 2013, visit the VPR Archive.
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This is the hundredth anniversary year of the Pulitzer Prizes, and to celebrate the Pulitzer Prizes Board and state humanities councils across the…
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It was August 1968, and Chicago was hosting the Democratic National Convention, an open convention without a clear nominee. I was a freshman in a suburban…
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2016 is the four hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death - a milestone being marked in myriad ways, including with copies of Shakespeare’s…
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As Hitler’s army swept across Europe with lightning speed, the political dynamic in the U.S. changed rapidly as a result.After German land grabs in…
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Joe Hill was born Joel Hagglund, or Hillstrom, in Sweden. He emigrated to the US at 23 and became a migrant laborer. Often unemployed, he wrote songs and…
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At the dedication in 1897 of the Civil War monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry that stands on the Boston Common, the keynote…
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Fifty years ago this fall, federal legislation established the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was created for many reasons, including these…
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In 1815, two hundred years ago today, the American brig Commerce, with its two square-rigged masts, was wrecked on the northwestern coast of Africa. The…
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In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, Atticus Finch tells his daughter, Scout, “You never really understand a person until you consider…
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I recently learned of two real events that reportedly inspired the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s masterpiece “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,”…