The Nashville Connection

Most people don’t know it, but Nashville was in many ways the birthplace of Civil Rights.

College students from Fisk University, Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee State), and American Baptist College were trained in nonviolence by Rev. James Lawson. Then they held sit-ins at Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960, formed the core of the Freedom Riders after the confict in Anniston, Alabama, and provided leaders in the movement, including John Lewis, Diane Nash, and others.

To learn the story of Lewis, Nash, and their friends, read David Halberstam’s wonderful book The Children, inspired by Halberstam’s experience in the early 1960s as a reporter on the Nashville Tennessean.

Highly recommended!  

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Who was Alexander von Humboldt? 

I had no idea until I read this fascinating and important biography, The Invention of Nature. Humboldt, a contemporary of Thomas Jefferson, was called “the Shakespeare of the sciences.” He taught and inspired Darwin. He deeply influenced Goethe, Wordsworth, Thoreau, Simon Bolivar, and John Muir.  

Humboldt was the quintessential scientist before the word scientist had even been coined. He climbed the Chilean peak Chimborazo to 19,000 feet in 1802, higher than any person had ever gone, and from that vantage point confirmed his unique and world-changing view of nature as a system of interrelated pieces, of which humans are a part. 

In 1869, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, huge celebrations were held in Paris, London, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Moscow, Alexandria, Mexico City, and from New York to San Francisco, and yet in the U.S. today he is almost unknown. I’m hopeful Andrea Wulf’s book will help to change that.