We typically hear that American environmentalism was born in late-nineteenth-century America from a nostalgia for wilderness that accompanied a rampantly expanding industrialism. We also typically hear that American environmentalism is the intellectual legacy of a handful of white, educated men (Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt)–and that it emerged from their experiences of uniquely American landscapes (Walden Pond, the Sierras, Yellowstone). The life of Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894) enriches this intellectual legacy, illustrating additional origins of environmental thought in the United States. While less familiar today, in the nineteenth-century Susan Fenimore Cooper gained wide recognition as an important natural historian and a prescient environmental thinker—one noted by the likes of Spencer Fullerton Baird, who directed the Smithsonian, and Charles Darwin. Little known is that, as a young girl, Cooper traveled to Europe with her world-famous father (the author James Fenimore Cooper), and her experiences of European cultural sites and historic landscapes profoundly impacted her later groundbreaking environmental writing. This lecture explores Cooper’s early European experience in light of her prescient recognition of the fragility of her new nation’s landscapes. We come to see that American environmental thought emerged in the minds of both men and women, based on experiences both inside and outside of the nation’s bounds. Cooper’s particular contributions to early American environmentalism reflect deep engagements with various civilizations throughout history, and they grew from her witnessing firsthand how various human cultures had altered the physical world over time.
“Optimizing Good Stress and Minimizing Bad Stress to Promote Health and Well-Being” with Dr. Firdaus Dhabhar
Casting for Recovery, Expedition Inspiration, and River Discovery, three organizations working in the Idaho outdoors with cancer survivors, have partnered to present lecture events in Boise and Ketchum.
This partnership is thrilled to bring Dr. Firdaus Dhabhar, Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Miami Health System, in Miami, Florida, to present, Optimizing Good Stress and Minimizing Bad Stress to Promote Health and Well-Being.
Dr. Dhabhar will discuss research on the previously unappreciated protective effects of short-term, fight-or-flight stress, and their practical applications, key characteristics of chronic stress and its harmful effects, the concept of the Stress Spectrum that explains the balance between the protective versus harmful effects of stress, and ways to optimize your Stress Spectrum in order to harness the beneficial/protective effects of short-term stress and to minimize/eliminate the harmful effects of chronic stress. This lecture is meant to be conversational and provide opportunity for questions.
For more information about these events, please visit www.riverdiscovery.org.
Casting for Recovery is a non-profit organization providing educational, recreational, and emotional support programs to breast cancer survivors for over 20 years.
Drop-In: CollaborARTe Day
Drop-In anytime today in The Children’s Library and contribute to our collaborative art projects. Come create!
Nintendo Switch LABO Class with Paul Zimmerman
Tech guru Paul Zimmerman will lead a class on building games using the Nintendo Switch LABO systems on Day 1. Day 2 will be run by our librarians and be dedicated to play using the Nintendo LABO creations. This is a 2 day class from 2:00 – 3:30 pm on Monday, March 25th and Tuesday, March 26th. Class is open kids in 4th grade and up. Space is very limited to sign-up is required. Please call the Children’s Library at 208-726-3493 x 2 to reserve and commit to a slot.
Snacks will be provided.
2019 Hemingway Seminar: For Whom the Bell Tolls
This year the seminar will celebrate Ernest Hemingway’s seminal text, For Whom the Bell Tolls. For three days we will explore this text, the history surrounding it, and Hemingway’s local and regional connection to it. In addition to a dynamic array of talks/lectures and opportunities for discussion, we will enjoy some film, good food, fellowship and local history, all of which make this Hemingway seminar unique.
Click HERE to register and review a detailed program of speakers and events, as well as information on this year’s pre-conference workshop, “Writing Like Hemingway” to be held on Thursday, September 5th preceding the opening reception and talk. The pre-conference workshop is sold out, but if you would like to be placed on our waiting list please contact Martha Williams, mwilliams@comlib.org.
“How Bipartisanship Saved the Supreme Court” with Marc Johnson
The United States Supreme Court has long been the subject of intense partisan political battles, but never more so than when President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to “pack” the Court in 1937.
Even though Roosevelt enjoyed huge majorities in both houses of Congress his proposal failed due primarily to bipartisan opposition from an Idaho and a Montana senator.
Marc C. Johnson, an Idaho writer, political observer and one-time aide to Governor Cecil D. Andrus, tells the story of how bipartisanship saved the Supreme Court in his new book Political Hell-Raiser: the Life and Times of Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
Wheeler, a progressive Democrat, joined with his close personal and political friend William E. Borah, the legendary Idaho Republican, to thwart Roosevelt’s plans to enlarge the Supreme Court in what was one of the most bitter fights of FDR’s presidency.
Johnson will present a talk on role Senators Wheeler and Borah’s played in what one historian has called the greatest Constitutional crisis since the Civil War.
Copies of Johnson’s book will be available for purchase.
