Tag: culture

EPL Welcomes the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian

October 4, 2016

toptentruths_001Local Art @ EPL is proud to welcome a special traveling exhibit from the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian.  Titled “Deconstructing Stereotypes: Top Ten Truths About Native Peoples,” the display is based on a 2011 survey in which the Evanston museum asked Native American and Indigenous Canadian peoples to identify the biggest misconceptions about their heritage and culture.  Using quotes from Native peoples, photographs, and materials from EPL’s collection, the thought-provoking exhibit works to dispel stereotypes related to mascots, casinos, addition, and treaty rights.  You can catch the display on the 2nd floor of EPL’s Main Library through October 31, and make sure to check back with Off the Shelf later in the month for a featured interview with Kathleen McDonald, Executive Director of the Mitchell Museum.  Stay tuned!

Steinbeck on language

March 18, 2010

This excerpt from John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley: in Search of America” started me wondering about the impact of media and technology on our speech, especially given the vast changes we’ve witnessed since this was written in 1962.
“It seemed to me that regional speech is in the process of disappearing, not gone but going. Forty years of radio and twenty years of television must have this impact. Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process. I can remember a time when I could almost pinpoint a man’s place of origin by his speech. That is growing more difficult now and will in some foreseeable future become impossible. …Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.”

Shira S, Reader’s Services

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