Hidden sketch revealed beneath Rembrandt’s The Night Watch

Who knew chalk could talk? Amsterdam restorers certainly did, as they discovered Rembrandt’s original chalk outline of The Night Watch.

“You may ask why is this so important? Well, it gives us the feeling we can peek over Rembrandts shoulder while he was working on The Night Watch.”

Read it here:Hidden sketch revealed beneath Rembrandt’s The Night Watch

Rembrandt's The Night Watch. The hidden sketch reveals evidence of a series of changes the artist made as he went along. Photograph: Peter de Jong/AP

Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. The hidden sketch reveals evidence of a series of changes the artist made as he went along. Photograph: Peter de Jong/AP

An Analysis of Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” from the Wall Street Journal

Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal on Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", where the writer, Benjamin Shull, analyzes the poem's timelessness and human truths.

"So often in his poems, Whitman begins from particulars -- individual people and the jobs they perform, fleeting impressions of nature -- and then proceeds to meditate more broadly on the commonalities he feels with humanity, nay, the whole cosmos." - Benjamin Shull



You can access the article through the Wall Street Journal website with a subscription:https://www.wsj.com/articles/crossing-brooklyn-ferry-walt-whitman-east-river-leaves-of-grass-1163856926

Or through a BU database with your username and password:https://www.proquest.com/docview/2605868475/359D213AC6AD489EPQ/1?accountid=9676

Land Acknowledgments Are Just Moral Exhibitionism

Here's a powerful reminder of our concerning actions as a nation in retribution to the immemorial owners of the lands we occupy.

These statements relieve the speaker and the audience of the responsibility to think about Indigenous peoples, at least until the next public event.


original

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/against-land-acknowledgements-native-american/620820/

 

Core Tuesday Cultural Report

Hi fellow scholars! Here's the Core Office bringing you once again the wonders of modern day interpretations of our beloved classics. We wanted to share with you a couple of clips referenced today in Prof. Hamill's lecture on"Witnessing Tragedy in Euripides' Hecuba". Enjoy!

Queens of Syria tells the story of fifty women from Syria, all forced into exile in Jordan, who came together in Autumn 2013 to create and perform their own version of the Trojan Women, the timeless Ancient Greek tragedy about the plight of women in war.

What followed was an extraordinary moment of cross-cultural contact across millennia, in which women born in 20th century Syria found a blazingly vivid mirror of their own experiences in the stories of a queen, princesses and ordinary women like them, uprooted, enslaved, and bereaved by the Trojan War.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuBeBjqKSGQ

This last video is taken from the most famous aria from Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute, where we can see another "queen", the Queen of the Night.

 

Playlist to study as an empiricist

Looking for an interesting, yet calming playlist that you can listen to while doing work? Well, look no further, as the Core Curriculum's Professor Hamill has found this 11 hour playlist of ambient songs to transport you as you study:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r0ax76pg8w

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Students interested in learning more about empiricism can come to the Core Office, or contact us at core@bu.edu !

Age of Viking settlement revealed using trees and astrophysics

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Samus Bellamy writes on dig site evidence that can place the date on the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland that was discovered six decades ago.

To find out the details and see how he dissects a New York Times article on the story, check out this link.

A RECKONING IN BOSTON Film Screening Comes to the BBF

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What was supposed to be a documentary about Dorchester residents enrolled in a humanities course turned into an exploration of racism, violence, and justice in Boston

James Rutenbeck, a white filmmaker from the suburbs, had the intention to simply document the Clemente Course in Dorchester, and to better understand the impact of this academic curriculum on the community. But he discovered much more than students just interacting with the great works of literature. Instead, he found students grappling with the realities of racism, homelessness, violence, and gentrification that surround them, students who face existential threats every time they stepped out of the classroom.

For more information check out this link

How to Map a Myth

Ever wondered where, exactly, in the Mediterranean Odysseus travels took place? Check out this piece from Laphams Quarterly, written by Elizabeth Della Zazzera, a historian of modern Europe and a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, in which she outlines the processes individuals took to figure out Odysseus whereabouts throughout his 10-year journey home from war: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/geography-odyssey



Core students interested in reading The Odyssey can come to the Core Office to borrow a copy, or contact us at core@bu.edu.

Core Curriculum’s First In-Person Lecture since 2020

We're back! After over a year of online classes, staying home, and biweekly covid tests, Boston University's Core Curriculum has had its first in-person lecture for its Ancient Worlds course, otherwise known as CC101. As tradition would have it, the students were welcomed into the lecture to the glorious sound of Bruce Springsteen's "Land of Hope and Dreams".


101 lecture 9-7-21 (3)

101 lecture 9-7-21 (2)

101 lecture 9-7-21 (1)


To quote the man himself,

"Leave behind your sorrows, let this day be the last, well, tomorrow there'll be sunshine, and all this darkness past."

After the past year and a half we've had, here's to hoping for a healthy, productive, and exciting semester! Good luck, and we wish you all the very best from here in the Core Office.

Editor’s Introduction to The Journal, Issue 30

core-journal-cover-2021The online edition of the thirtieth issue of The Journal of the Core Curriculum has just been published. To help place the issue in a context of editorial goals and of the community involvement that went into its production, we hereby present the Editor's Note from the front matter, written by the editor-in-chief:

I am alone and they are everyone. In this quotation, Dostoyevsky aptly summarizes the state that the Underground Man finds himself in, a feeling of being intensely alone. It is a state we perhaps each found ourselves in at some point over the course of the past year. Tasked to compile--entirely through screens--an anthology of commentary, criticism, art, and meritorious research, I feared that the alienating effects of remote learning might seep into our editorial work. This concern deepened my sense of responsibility as chief editor to provide encouragement and a semblance of community though we were physically separated. Cultivating a compassionate (virtual) space for cooperative group work and nurturing ties of friendship among the members of the editorial team became as important as the practical matters of proofreading and deadlines. Perhaps this wasnt a change in focus as much as a foregrounding of what should ideally always be a goal of publishing: the responsible use of resources to lift as many people as possible, empowering as many voices as we can.

This issue of The Journal is noteworthy for many reasons; let me share a few:

  • We saw the greatest number of submissions in program history, with nearly triple the submissions count from last year.
  • We expanded our contributor pool to be more inclusive, inviting submissions from the entire CAS community. Our contributors now include departmental majors, cross-registered students, and alumni from any class year.
  • We made a commitment to showcase the prize-winning essays of the Devlin Award competition for first-year writing.
  • We launched a new content category relating to the topics of sustainability and environmental justice.
  • We formalized award categories for sustainability, essay-writing, and creativity.
  • And finally, we went multimodal. Our table of contents will now list exclusive and multimedia pieces selected and developed by the editors. Visit us online to find an original musical, a timely video response addressing anti-Asian hate, and an extended interview with a Core alumnus turned popular YouTube creator.

We'd like to recognize and celebrate the students, alumni, faculty, and staff who collaborated during extraordinary circumstances to bring our print and online issues to fruition. Individuals from numerous disciplines and departments came together to offer suggestions on marketing, editing, and design, and to supply our contributors with careful, constructive feedback.

We wish to express particular thanks to Zachary Bos, for his meticulous mentorship and congeniality through each stage of the production process. To Prof. Hamill and the CAS leadership, we thank you for your guidance and trust. We are especially grateful to David Weinstein and the team at Write the World for providing our staff with immensely helpful editorial training and unprecedented financial support. And thank you to all who supported CAS, Core, and The Journal on Giving Day.

For this 2021 issue, we felt it important to collect and highlight responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and to preserve accounts of how the transition online impacted members of our learning community. In reply to our call for submissions, we received many dozens of essays, photos, and personal accounts. Some responses were academic in nature, offering intelligible answers grounded in perspicuous reasons that unbiased individuals can appreciate and possibly accept; others were more expressive, using artistic methods to transcend limits, which so often bear upon collegiate writing.

When reading these pages, it is our hope that you may be stimulated to ponder and to attempt to answer for yourself some of the great questions of human concern. The work of grappling with such questions, unavoidable and ultimate, is an important part of our profound enterprise of being in the world.

Transmitting peace and love on behalf of the entire editorial team,

Vanessa Hanger

Read and enjoy the issue online here. To request a print copy, please email the editors.