Virtual Chautauqua to Begin Thursday After In-Person Event in Ashland Delayed

July 29, 2020, 6:45 a.m. ·

50%27s%20Graphic.jpg
(Photo illustration of Thurgood Marshall and Rose Parks courtesty of Humanities Nebraska)

Listen To This Story

The pandemic has caused a change in what was supposed to be an in-person Nebraska Chautauqua this week in Ashland. Chautauquas are educational gatherings popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that have been continued in Nebraska. This year’s abbreviated Chautauqua has been moved online and will focus on the 1950’s. NET’s Jack Williams spoke with Humanities Nebraska Executive Director Chris Sommerich about the virtual Chautauqua tomorrow and Friday and how it will work.


NET News: Let’s talk about the decision to turn Chautauqua into a virtual event. Was that really the only option here as we continue to deal with the effects of the pandemic?

Chris Sommerich: Originally when things were really cancelling this spring we thought there might be a chance we could do Chautauqua as planned because it was later summer and hopefully things would be better, but as things moved along, a big event like that takes so much advanced planning and we felt it really wasn’t fair to the community of Ashland, who is hosting Chautauqua this year, to have to try to navigate that alongside us and just to put anybody at any kind of risk. And so the Ashland community was more than happy to just postpone it to next year as far as hosting it in person, but we also felt like we wanted to still have something go forward with this. We had been dabbling with some different virtual online programming and thought well, we could do a couple of aspects of that this year to just bridge things until we can all be back together in person with it next year.

NET News: Thursday’s featured talk is especially timely in this moment that we’re in right now. The 1950’s really were an extremely important time for the fight for racial equality and a lot of what happened then translates to the efforts going on now. Why is this so important and what are you going to get into Thursday?

Humanities Nebraska Executive Director Chris Sommerich (Photo by Jack Williams, NET News)

Chris Sommerich: Thanks for asking that and I agree it could not be a better time to really drill into that discussion and especially to look at some the historical context. Lenneal Henderson and Becky Stone are scholars who portray Thurgood Marshall and Rosa Parks as part of our Chautauqua on the 1950’s. They were gracious enough to sit down with us and kind of talk through how could we do a program online this time that really looks at both of those historical figures of Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall, but more broadly, the civil rights movement in the 50’s and then connect things to where we are now. We are also bringing in Patrick Jones, who is a professor of history and ethnic studies at UNO, who does a lot of work in the area of race relations and movements and so forth and he’s going to moderate the discussion with them. So we’ll have a mix of discussing those figures, because a lot of people think about the 60’s as the civil rights movement, but really some important things were happening in the 50’s. How did that lay the groundwork for the 60’s and on through to now and what kind of issues, what can we learn from history to take us forward.

NET News: On Friday, a shift in focus to President Eisenhower and politics in the 1950’s, another timely subject as we enter the homestretch of this year’s presidential election. Why President Eisenhower? Obviously an interesting figure, but why that?

Chris Sommerich: President Eisenhower is fascinating and I think one of the things is that perceptions of him have evolved over time. He’s kind of often overlooked in the 50’s in general, often overlooked for so many groundbreaking things that were going on and what our country was going through. If you think about the Cold War and the Korean War and nuclear weapons and social issues and just cultural issues and so many things that were happening and Eisenhower was in office through that and really shaping a lot of the country’s actions in those areas. So it seemed like a really good time to remind people of what was happening in our country in the 50’s and Eisenhower is a great lens to look through and see it all very broadly because he was part of all of that.

NET News: In this time of Zoom and Facebook Live, how will these virtual presentations actually work? Where do people need to go and what time of the day to they start the next couple of days?

Chris Sommerich: We’ve been learning along with a lot of organizations and as a humanities organization, we’ve always seen ourselves as bringing people together to discuss and explore different topics. So this idea of pushing more of them virtually right now online, we’ve had a lot of discussion about how to best make that work. We still really want audience interaction, but of course there’s limitations, so what we do is we have the program participants on Zoom, which a lot of people use for video conferencing of course, but we have that connected to our Facebook page, so our audience, whether or not you’re on Facebook as a registered user or not, you can get on Humanities Nebraska’s Facebook page live and watch these and also pose questions through the chat online with Facebook and we will help pose audience questions to the speakers during the program. We’ve done some of these, we’ve been calling them Humanities at Home, with various speakers and it’s fun because you can connect with people all over the state and see different people who are participating and getting to ask questions that way.

Editor's Note: The virtual talks start at 4 pm Central Thursday and Friday. And by way of full disclosure, Humanities Nebraska provides funding for humanities reporting on NET Radio.