This spring, in honor of America’s 250th anniversary, Hertog alumni are invited to revisit a Great American Novel: Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918). Set on the Nebraska frontier, Cather’s work explores the formation of American identity through the intertwined themes of immigration, memory, and the building of community in a new land—an enduring effort to make one people out of many. In this semiquincentennial year, particular attention will be given to the novel’s elegiac epigraph, drawn from Virgil—“the best days are the first to flee”—and to Cather’s deeper ambition: to capture what she calls “the precious, the incommunicable past.”

Image: Winslow Homer, On the Hill (1878)

Faculty

Jeffrey E. Schulman

Jeffrey E. Schulman is Program Manager for Academic Affairs at ACTA. He manages the What Will They Learn?® program and helps communicate ACTA’s mission of higher education reform through op-eds, blogs and articles. He earned a Ph.D. in ancient history from the University of Groningen with a dissertation on political culture in the late Roman empire for which he received the OIKOS PhD award.

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