"That evening I sat on my driftwood pile admiring my cabin. Pale blue wood smoke rose up through the dark boughs of the spruce, and beyond, looking huge and majestic, the jagged peak of Crag Mountain. The cabin was complete now except for the fireplace and, maybe later on, a cache up on poles. It was a good feeling just sitting and reflecting, a proud inner feeling of something I had created with my own hands. I don't think I have ever accomplished anything as satisfying in my entire life."
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— Richard Proenneke, One Man's Wilderness
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Richard Louis Proenneke (pronounced Pren-uh-key) lived alone for thirty years in Twin Lakes, Alaska. This is his journal covering the first 18 months of the odyssey.

Originally from Iowa, Proenneke served in World War II as a carpenter in the U.S. Navy and later became a master mechanic. Trading in his tool belt for a time, he moved to Oregon, working as a sheep camp tender on a ranch for several seasons. In 1950, at the age of thirty-four, he went north to Alaska. There he stared a cattle ranch venture with a friend on Shuyak Island. It failed, but he rebounded nicely into commercial salmon fishing for a time, before setting out once again to the sticks. Finding a specially secluded bight of Twin Lakes, Proenneke picked up his tool belt once more to start on a cabin.  

Dick's journal entries track his progress, from cutting beams and notching logs to meeting many woodland friends and foes as well as testing mouth-watering recipes. "For supper, I cut the trout into small chunks, dipped them into beaten egg, and rolled them in cornmeal. They browned nicely in the bacon fat, and my tender crusted sourdough did justice to the first fish fry of the season." The only help Proenneke accepted were food and mail deliveries from a float place piloted by his friend Babe twice a month. That and some tar paper and polyethylene for the cabin roof so it wouldn't leak. 

Twin Lakes offered Proenneke the seclusion from people he that we wanted and demanded from him an incredible degree of self-sufficiency. He hunted, gathered, gardened, expanded his homestead to include a stone chimney, food cache on stilts (pictured below), some gravel trails, and a canoe. He trekked his backyard, clocking-in thousands of miles in the first 18 months alone, and 3,000 feet of Kodiak 8mm and 16mm footage. He chased of mischievous squirrels, rescued a caribou calf from a bear, and shot a mountain ram cleanly with his ought-six rifle. 

I loved the journal format of One Man's Wilderness and can't wait to go visit Twin Lakes for myself and stop into Dick's cabin, which is now a National historic site. Proenneke passed away in 2003 in Hemet, CA. Reading just some of the highlights of his modern, wilderness odyssey has whetted my appetite to venture out farther than the safe, popular trailheads and tamed parks I'm accustomed to. ​[JG]

"When a man climbs high it always seems an amazement, as he starts down, to realize the distance he has covered." 

​— Richard Proenneke, One Man's Wilderness
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​— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

I finally took the plunge into Ender's Game. The classic sci-fi novel has been recommended to me since the 7th grade by friends who loved—and hated—to read. The premise is that aliens have attacked Earth twice now and nearly destroyed the entire human race. The remaining world governments, in a last ditch effort, have begun breeding military geniuses and inculcating them into a Spartan-esque training on the art of war in a space station. The main game is low-gravity laser tag involving battle suits, geometric obstacles, and a capture-the-flag type objective. Ender Wiggin is the best. Game after game he out-smarts and out-maneuvers new and veteran players alike. He even overcomes the massive handicaps placed on him by commanders—no sleep between matches, 5-minute slow-starts, reduced team sizes, etc. The ultra-competitive training is depicted though as brutal brainwashing that destroys the children bit by bit as they race in the space station to intercept the third wave of aliens en-route to kill Earth.

Equally interesting is the side-story back home. Ender's two siblings, Peter and Valentine, are also both geniuses, but not quite up to Ender's level of ability. Thus, they didn't make the cut. Peter resents this and channels his skills to manipulating, bullying, and eventually even world politics. Valentine is empathetic and caring—the foil to Peter—and a constant check against her older brother, working to keep Peter's ambitions from actualizing his motive for political power. This manifests in their dueling media columns on Earth, which they write under the pseudonyms Demosthenes (Peter) and Locke (Valentine). Their essays on the alien invasion duel for the soul of the planet. I really enjoyed this aspect of the story and imagine it's sowing the seeds for the rest of the Ender's five-book series. Although written in 1977, just two years after the official end of the Vietnam War, this exploration of media manipulation and the intellectual fronts back home struck me as relevant to today's state of modern journalism and representations of 'the other' in times of war. 

Lastly, I really appreciated the fast pace and bare-minimum approach to world-building in Ender's Game. [JG]

— Ted Kaczynski, 1998, quoted in Alston Chase's Harvard and the Unabomber

Between 1978 and 1995, Harvard-graduate and former math professor, Ted Kaczynski, mailed or planted a series of increasingly sophisticated homemade bombs to science labs and government offices across the USA. All told, he killed 3 people and injured 23 others. 16 bombs were ultimately attributed to him. His 35,000 word manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, was published in part by The Washington Post and The New York Times in 1995 under the promise of him "desisting" from future bombings. A writer of The New Yorker called the manifesto a "carefully reasoned, artfully written paper..." The manhunt for Kaczynski, then known only as "the Unabomber," was the longest and most expensive in FBI history. It probably would have continued for years—as would have the bombing, but came to an end when Kaczynski's brother shared his whereabouts with law enforcement: a remote cabin in Montana. Inside were various pipe bombs waiting for postage, bookshelves of philosophy, literature, and diaries written in secret code, and an unkempt hermit-like psychopath. 

In Harvard and the Unabomber (2003) author Alston Chase offers an exhaustively researched and distinctively new interpretation of the America's worst homegrown terrorist. Far from being a deranged, lustful serial killer or a radical Luddite as the media portrayed him, Chase argues that Kaczynski embodied the ideas and psychology of the Silent Generation of the '50s and, ultimately, the activism of the counter-cultural '60s. Kaczynski was radically average; his future actions chillingly mirrored the intellectual diet of his Harvard education and the isolation felt by young, bright minds of the 20th century. Upon examination of the student life at Harvard—and America en masse—Chase finds a dangerous concoction for anti-technological and morally neutral sentiments on campuses. As the Cold War raged, "General Education [courses] delivered," Chase writes, "a double whammy of pessimism. From humanists we learned that science threatens civilization. From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied there is no hope. Gen Ed had created what would become a permanent fixture at Harvard, and indeed throughout academe: the culture of despair." This despair included moral subjectivism, summed up in then-Harvard President, Derek Bok's view that "ethical neutrality is the guiding rule for the historian or scholar." 

Perhaps, worst of all, Kaczyinski's manifesto was read sympathetically by radical environmentalists and Marxist professors, yes, but also by many Americans concerned about swift technological progress and growing government control. "The Unabomber episode...is a demonstration of how ill prepared modern society is for new, unfamiliar confrontations...the awkward denials and embarrassed cringing...all flow from a central fear that modernity is not up to the argument [to refute Kaczynski]," Chase writes. If Kaczynski's views have sympathy, do his methods? For anarchists and anti-globalists who write him in prison and eco-saboteurs and terrorists of the 21st century, yes. What say the rest of us? It's tragically  too quiet, and as Chase shows through Kaczynski's upbringing and Ivy League education, ideas—and the lack of good ones--have consequences. [JG]
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Alston Chase is a writer and independent scholar who has spent a career specializing on intellectual history. He is the author of six books, including Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park, and In a Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forest and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology. Chase lives in Paradise Valley, Montana. ​
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— Alston Chase, Harvard and the Unabomber

— Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? (1852)

Earlier this year, I read Frederick Douglass' autobiography in which he recounts his adolescence as a born slave in Maryland and his eventual escape. In part, he owed his liberation to the secret project of learning to read and write. This essay, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? was an additional reading in the back, but a powerful speech that Douglass gave on July 5, 1852 in Rochester, New York at the Ladies Antislavery Society. It's heralded now as a "rhetorical masterpiece of American abolitionism," and is thought to be a key work in building momentum to unite the northern states in the face of the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise made slavery illegal in Washington, D.C. and welcomed California into the Union as a free state, but it also expanded the infamous Fugitive Slave Act, increasing penalties for runaway slaves and any citizen, including northerners, who helped them. When Douglass gave this speech, Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, published just months earlier was a bestseller and conversations about whether to expand slavery into the west were "tearing apart American political parties." 

Douglass probably made the 600+ New York audience squirm. In it, he indicts much of the north for economically and morally supporting the slave trade—even those who call themselves abolitionists and Christians, those who benefit from southern-made products and services and those who enjoy their own religious liberty. He closes by exonerating the U.S. Constitution, which he believes does not support slavery and calls for Americans to uphold their own rule of law. 175 years later, I found Douglass' fiery passion and his cited historical specifics helpful for me to appreciate how unjust this country used to treat some of its own and how far its come since then. [JG] 

"Nearly sixty years have passed since, as a teen, I last attended a class at the Children's Art Centre. But the special feeling I enjoyed as a I passed through its brick archway, entered the grass courtyard, and viewed that beautiful front wall composed of five massive French doors is vivid in my memory. It was such a contrast to the South End streets of Boston of the 1950s."

— Nick Haddad, former Children's Art Centre student

This is the untold story of The Children's Art Centre of Boston's South End and Charlotte Dempsey who ran it for nearly forty years. In 1918, its doors opened, marking the first and only museum designed for children. Artwork was hung at child-height on the wall and allowed to be touched by small hands. Children were free to explore sculptures and paintings on the walls and tables. Some were created by the local talent and others came from around the world on loan from international museum and collections. There had never been anything like the Children's Art Centre in America before then. 

In 1930, Charlotte Dempsey came in as the Director. She revolutionized the classrooms. She encouraged children to make with new materials and not merely copy with pencils various great works, ushering in an explosion of color and energy and innovation. Dempsey also integrated all classrooms within the Centre's iconic five French doors. All creeds and backgrounds were welcome, even those who could not pay. Children would finish school and come over to work and look at other creations. 

Prior, Dempsey was a student at the College of Massachusetts in Art and Design. She never married, instead devoting herself to her career, which in the '30s and '40s was unconventional. Typically, women only lasted two years at the Art Centre because they got married or pregnant. According to other children, Ms. Charlotte was very serious and not as seemingly child-focused as other staff. In reality, she was juggling operations, managing staff, and finding funds. 

Dempsey toured the children's art to over thirty countries as far as South Korea. She also brought in art from other countries. Her students had access to an impressively diverse array of culture—from Egyptian and Native American art to Japanese watercolors. This cultural exchange expanded children's vision of what was possible beyond Boston's poor South End. ​[JG]

Julia Glatfelter previously studied Art Education at Gordon College in Massachusetts and taught art to youth in settings on the North Shore and in Boston's South End. Julia's work has shown in the greater Boston area, southeastern Pennsylvania, and Baltimore. You can explore her visual arts and projects here. I also really enjoyed hearing her talked about The Little Glass Treasure House on Hub History, a Boston-based podcast. Oh, and she's also my sister—so proud! 
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