Gospel Choir to Benefit Hynson Scholarship Nov. 3

Chestertown, MD–The 100-Voice Choir and special musical guests will raise their voices and lift spirits in Decker Theatre on the Washington College campus Saturday, November 3, 2012 at 3 p.m. (doors open at 2:30 p.m.) to celebrate the life and example of the late Rev. Vincent Hynson. A 1987 alumnus of Washington College, Rev. Hynson was a dedicated and beloved teacher, coach, pastor and community leader in Kent County who died of cancer in 2004.  The gospel concert in his honor will benefit the Vincent Hynson ’87 Scholarship at the College. 

Special guest artists will include gospel comedian Michael Hynson, The Gospel Sheppards of Kent County, Serenity, and Washington College’s WACappela.  Vivian Garnett will serve as emcee.

Founded in 2005, the 100-Voice Choir is the vision of Sylvia Frazier, a gospel music producer and promoter who runs S&B Productions with her husband, Bill Frazier. The annual fundraising concert in honor of Vincent Hynson is co-sponsored by Washington College and the Kent County Arts Council and is organized by S & B Productions.

Tickets, at $7 a person, will be available at the door. Decker Theatre is located inside the Gibson Center for the Performing Arts on the campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

For more information, contact S & B Productions at 410-778-6006 or the Kent County Arts Council at 410-778-1149.

George Washington Book Prize Celebration Honors 2012 Winner Maya Jasanoff, Nov. 8 and 9

Prize winning author and historian Maya Jasanoff.

Click here to listen to Tom Hall's interview with Maya Jasanoff for the WYPR show Maryland Morning. 

CHESTERTOWN, MD— History, they say, is usually told by the winners. But the winner of the 2012 George Washington Book Prize, author Maya Jasanoff, has uncovered the compelling and often moving stories of men and women who found themselves on the losing side of the American Revolution.

Jasanoff will share stories and insights from her book Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World at this year’s George Washington Book Prize Celebration at Washington College, on Thursday, November 8 and Friday, November 9. All events – which are hosted by the College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience – are free and open to the public.

The main event, “Making History: A Conversation with Maya Jasanoff,” will take place on Thursday, November 8 at 5:30 p.m. in Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts, and will be followed by a reception. Guests who arrive early will have an opportunity to enjoy a book signing with the author and a performance by the Maryland Loyalist Battalion, a reenactment group.  The full schedule is as follows:

Thursday, November 8, Gibson Center for the Arts

4:15 p.m. - Book signing 

5:15 p.m. - Salute by the Maryland Loyalist Battalion

5:30 p.m. - “Making History: A Conversation with Maya Jasanoff and Adam Goodheart”

6:30 p.m. - Public Reception

Friday, November 9, The Egg, Center Stage, Hodson Hall Commons

9:30 a.m. - “Authors in the Egg: How Books Are Born.” Washington College students, faculty, and members of the public are invited to an informal conversation with Maya Jasanoff. A light breakfast will be served.

 “Maya Jasanoff vividly tells the stories of individual people swept up in the treacherous – and sometimes fatal – currents of history,” says Adam Goodheart, Director of the Starr Center, who will lead the November 8 conversation. “She brings the past to life by putting readers in the shoes of these characters, from wealthy merchants to African-American slaves.”

Jasanoff received the $50,000 prize at a black-tie dinner at George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate Museum and Gardens last June. Sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington's Mount Vernon, the Washington Book Prize is one of the largest literary prizes in the nation. Given annually for the year’s best book about America’s founding era, it particularly recognizes well-written books that speak to general audiences and contribute to a broad public understanding of the American past. 

In addition to the 2012 Washington Book Prize, Liberty’s Exiles also received the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction and was shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize in Nonfiction. “At the heart of this smart, deeply researched and elegantly written history is Jasanoff’s re-creation of the lives of those who emigrated — rich and poor, white, black and in some cases red,” wrote New York Times reviewer Thomas Bender.

Jasanoff, a Professor of History at Harvard University, was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize for her first book, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850, which was a book-of-the-year selection in numerous publications, including The Economist, The Observer and The Sunday Times. She has contributed essays to The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine and other publications.

Created in 2005 to honor the year’s best book about America’s founding era, the George Washington Book Prize was presented that year to Ron Chernow for Alexander Hamilton. Subsequent winners have included Stacy Schiff (2006), Annette Gordon-Reed (2009), Richard Beeman (2010), and Pauline Maier (2011).

Washington College’s Starr Center administers the Book Prize, which is co-sponsored with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate & Gardens.

About the Sponsors of the George Washington Book Prize:

Washington College was founded in 1782, the first institution of higher learning established in the new republic. George Washington was not only a principal donor to the college, but also a member of its original governing board. He received an honorary degree from the college in June 1789, two months after assuming the presidency. The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, founded at the College in 2000, is an innovative center for the study of history, culture and politics, and fosters excellence in the art of written history through fellowships, prizes, and student programs. www.washcoll.edu.

Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization supporting the study and love of American history through a wide range of programs and resources for students, teachers, scholars, and history enthusiasts throughout the nation. Gilder Lehrman creates and works closely with history-focused schools through its Affiliate School Program; organizes teacher seminars and development programs; produces print and digital publications and traveling exhibitions; hosts lectures by eminent historians; administers a History Teacher of the Year Award in every state and US territory; and offers national book prizes. The Gilder Lehrman website, www.gilderlehrman.org, serves as a gateway to American history online with rich resources for educators designed specifically for K–12 teachers and students.

 Since 1860, over 80 million visitors have made George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate & Gardens the most popular historic home in America.  Through thought-provoking tours, entertaining events, and stimulating educational programs on the Estate and in classrooms across the nation, Mount Vernon strives to preserve George Washington’s place in history as “First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Hearts of His Countrymen.”  Mount Vernon is owned and operated by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, America’s oldest national preservation organization, founded in 1853.  A picturesque drive to the southern end of the scenic George Washington Memorial Parkway, Mount Vernon is located just 16 miles from the nation’s capital.  www.MountVernon.org

Preparing for Hurricane Sandy

CHESTERTOWN, MD – Washington College is monitoring the progress of Hurricane Sandy and preparing campus for the potential high winds and flooding rains it might bring to the Chestertown area.

Under the current scenario, Sandy may reach our shores Tuesday morning as a Category 1 Hurricane or a Tropical Storm. It could bring winds up to 74 m.p.h. and last 24 to 48 hours, bringing extremely heavy rainfall and major coastal flooding.

Dining Services plans to stay open, Public Safety officers will be on campus and available, and Residential Life staff will be on duty to help students during the storm and its aftermath.

Any changes in campus operating hours or news of power outages, etc,. will be sent to the campus community through the WAC Alert system, campus emails and this Web Site.

Speaker to Examine Phillipine Politics

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Gary Gador Dionisio, a professor of diplomacy and a consultant on Phillippine politics and legislative affairs, will speak at Washington College on Monday, Oct. 29, on “Shaping Philippine Politics in 2012-13; State and Religion Nexus.”

            Sponsored by the Near Eastern Studies Program, the talk will take place at 5 p.m. in Hynson Lounge, Hodson Hall, on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue. It is free and open to the public.

            Dionisio is an assistant professor in the Consular and Diplomatic Affairs Program at De La Salle–College of St. Benilde, in Manilla. His consulting clients include the City Government of Pasay, the National Union of Workers in Hotel Restaurant and Allied Industries, and the AKBAYAN Party.

Professor and Cantor Gary Schiff Shares Family Stories in His Sweeping History of Poland's Jews

Speaking at Chestertown Book Fair on Nov. 3

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Each summer for the past several years, Washington College adjunct professor Gary Schiff has traveled to a European country to study the history and fate of its Jewish populations, experiences he later shares with the Washington College and greater Chestertown communities through slide-show lectures.  In 2007, it was Spain. In 2008, Germany. Most recently, he traveled throughout France (2010) and England (2012).

But his 2009 trip to Poland with his grown daughter sparked not only the expected hour-long lecture, but also a 286-page book, In Search of Polin: Chasing Jewish Ghosts in Today’s Poland.  It is the inaugural book in a new series called Washington College Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture, published by the distinguished, peer-reviewed Peter Lang Academic Publishing Group Press. 

The story of Europe’s Jews has always been a compelling topic for Schiff, who teaches Jewish and Middle Eastern history at the College and serves as cantor and religious leader for Chestertown’s Jewish community. He grew up in a Jewish home, was educated in Jewish schools, earned his undergraduate degree from Yeshiva University (and then received master’s and doctorate degrees at Columbia University), and served as president of an independent college focused on Jewish studies, Philadelphia’s Gratz College, before moving to the Chestertown area in 1997.

But the trip to Poland was especially significant for Schiff on several levels. As he states in the first line of the book’s introduction: “It is difficult, if not impossible to exaggerate the importance of Poland in Jewish history.”  Up until the early 1900s, Poland was for centuries home to the largest Jewish population in the world. Three million of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust were Polish Jews, while many other Jews also were murdered in its death camps or ghettos, having been transported there by the Nazis from their homes all over Europe. “For many Jews, … Poland looms as one big Jewish graveyard, a place of bad memories, a place to be forgotten, a place never to be visited,” he writes.

But Poland also was where Schiff’s own family tree had deep roots. His father’s ancestors were among the first families to settle in the rural town of Ostrow-Mazowiecka (or Ostroveh in Yiddish) in the 1760s. “I had heard many stories about the homeland from my grandmother’s family, the Feinzeigs,” he says. “But it was hard to imagine these stories were from real places.”

During his travels Schiff was able to visit the surprisingly numerous remaining Jewish sites in Poland such as synagogues and cemeteries, interview local Poles who had known Jews and who had witnessed their destruction during the Holocaust, and examine public records to confirm many of the tales he had heard as a child from great aunts and uncles. It helped his research immensely that, among all the towns of Poland, Ostroveh had preserved the most complete records of its Jewish population. Along with his grandparents’ 1910 marriage certificate, he found evidence of the expulsion of Ostroveh’s 7,000 Jews by the town’s German occupiers in September 1939. He also heard how some 500 stragglers who refused to leave were later executed en masse in the woods outside of town, a site now marked by a monument in their memory.

Schiff mixes the intimate stories from Ostroveh with broader historical research to paint a portrait of the thriving Jewish communities that had contributed to Polish life for centuries, the patterns of both tolerance towards and prejudice against them, and the horrors of their ultimate eradication. 

As was the case with his trip to Germany the previous year, he began his trip to Poland with great trepidation, fearing the raw emotion it might unleash. “At every step I found myself having to re-balance my scholarly, historical objectivity with my personal and emotional involvement, not always an easy task,” he writes. But by immersing himself in the land and finding the physical traces of his own ancestors and millions of other Jews, Schiff has created a valuable addition to the historical record. “By combining the academic discipline of history with an intimate family story and my illustrated travel experiences, I hoped to give the reader a more nuanced understanding and appreciation of the thousand-year history of this once-great Jewish community.  I’m so glad that I confronted my own anxieties and witnessed for myself some of the triumphs and tragedies of the Jewish people there.”

           

The Washington College Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture book series under which In Search of Polin was published is a joint project of Peter Lang Academic Publishing Group and the College’s Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture (IRPC). The director of the IRPC, assistant professor of political science Joseph Prud’homme, serves as general editor. A variety of other books by scholars from major universities are under contract for publication.

Dr. Schiff will be speaking about his book at the upcoming Chestertown Book Fair on Saturday, Nov. 3, from 3:15-3:45 p.m., at the Parish Hall of Emanuel Episcopal Church in downtown Chestertown.  He also will present a PowerPoint talk on his 2012 trip to England on Thursday, Nov. 15, at 4:30 p.m. in the Casey Academic Forum at Washington College, 300 Washington Avenue.

For more information about these events, email Dr. Schiff at gschiff2@washcoll.edu.