Commonwealth School teachers bring an infectious intellectual energy to their classrooms, fueled, in part, by their own innate curiosity. What happens when that curiosity is unleashed? The Hughes/Wharton Fund for Teachers aims to do just that, ensuring faculty can pursue their academic passions, access fulfilling professional development opportunities, and have the latitude to create new courses and reinvigorate existing ones. 

When you teach history (and City of Boston), all travel is professional development. That’s certainly what Ms. Haber has found on her many cross-country sojourns, including the six thousand miles she drove over the summer of 2024, fueled by her Hughes/Wharton grant. Many treasures from that month-long road trip have since made their way into her history courses, from pieces of Native American art to bits of trivia from the Civil War’s most storied battlegrounds to meaty debates about the role of private funds used for public benefit. Keep reading to join her for the ride. 
 
Four years ago, my husband Ezra Haber Glenn ’87 and I attempted to see all fifty states in our fiftieth year of life. It being 2020, the venture was a bust, but it gave us a taste of what it means to take a Random Walk down Main Street—to find what we did not expect to find by wandering around in these United States of America. Our Random Walks have been inspired by the happy experience of going to seemingly random places and letting ourselves find what’s interesting there. So far, it’s proved to be a great way to travel, as we found in our 2021 trip to western New York or in 2022 when we had a delightful trip to Indiana. And so, for the summer of 2024, and with great anticipation, we planned a month-long road trip centered around Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska (one of the four states we’ve never visited). We didn’t plan much, which was probably good, since it was so hot we probably would have bailed on plans that involved long, carefully selected hikes. But over the six thousand miles we drove, we were continuously excited and intrigued by everything we saw.

There were a lot of little details that made it into my U.S. History courses, picked up at Gettysburg, Harper’s Ferry, Antietam, Fort McHenry, or Henry Clay’s Ashland, where I learned Clay was the one who defended Aaron Burr at his treason trial. We learned a lot at six presidential libraries and nine presidential gravesites (we’re up to twenty-two now…). Every one of the excellent art museums we visited offered a little something, from the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Art that I’ve added to the 1930s assignments to an introduction to the possibility of using paintings and other Native American artifacts as sources that are sorely missing in my courses. And I learned more details about events (I thought) I knew well at the Jewish Museum of Tulsa, the World War I Museum of Kansas City, and Greenwood Rising, learning about the Tulsa Race Massacre and its aftermath. The museum, inspired by Bryan Stevenson’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, provides an unstinting look at the horror of June 1921, where so many lives were lost and so much wealth destroyed—and it also leans into other uncomfortable truths. I had learned on our 2020 trip that the Cherokee had many Black slaves and last summer learned that ten percent of those on the Trail of Tears were enslaved, but it had not occurred to me that those people and their descendents made up much of the wealthy Black population or that they had received land under the Dawes Act…or that that land might have oil. Another piece of the story I had missed: Greenwood came back. By 1942, the survivors had regained all the wealth lost in 1921 (though not, of course, what that wealth would have grown to). What wiped it out was the economic changes of the 1950s.

And then, beyond the factoids, were the big themes to chew on. Here are a few.

Maybe the country is less divided on the ground than it is online. Not only were we surprised to see what we should have known—that cities in Oklahoma and Kansas and Nebraska feel like cities in Massachusetts—but there seemed to be a lot less interest in division and confrontation (and a lot fewer angry signs) than we saw in 2020. One thing that does divide us is what it means to celebrate America. What does it mean to be decked out in red, white, and blue? And how do we move forward when the American flag itself has become a divisive symbol? Other major divides on other major issues remain, but I believe there’s material for building a bridge. 

Urban renewal was much on our mind throughout the trip, especially the role of public and private money. Many of the cities we visited are scarred by the urban removal projects of the 1950s and are today focusing on the way public space can pull the community together. Louisville, Tulsa, Wichita, and Omaha are all pouring money into their waterfronts (with some of the best playgrounds I’ve ever seen—Boston, take note!). Journalist Tony Horwitz once wrote that parks, as a neutral space, pull classes and races and religions together. We certainly saw that—especially in Wichita, where night barrels of fire in the Arkansas River pull scores of people of all backgrounds together at the monumental “Keeper of the Plains” statue—but we were most impressed by Tulsa’s Gathering Place, which was simply astounding. The details, the way the park brings you to vistas (almost using the Chinese “cup garden” techniques), the playful fountains with their leaping water, the stunning playgrounds: they all felt, in the best possible way, like Disneyland—a Disneyland that’s free and where no one is trying to sell you anything. 

That brings us to private funding for public benefit. All of these places were made with some public funds, but much of it was done with private money. Alice Walton, for example, contracted with Somerville’s Moshe Safti to make the exquisite Crystal Bridges museum, which is free in perpetuity, and she pays the transportation costs to bring school groups to see the collection (and it’s worth seeing!). And the Kaiser Foundation not only underwrote most of the Gathering Place and its acres upon acres of exquisite grounds that all rival (or maybe even surpass?) Central Park but also so much of the development of downtown, including the new Greenwood Rising museum. In Detroit, the art museum and the oh-so-fun Henry Ford museum (with its insane Americana, including the chair where Lincoln was shot and the limo where Kennedy died) were all funded with Ford money. But as Harry Truman said about the Carnegie libraries: they were made out of the blood of Andrew Carnegie’s workers. (Diego Rivera agreed: in the mural Ford funded, Rivera depicted the industrialist as a war hawk.) Carnegie argued that his concentrated wealth would do far more than what the workers could accomplish together with higher wages. I suppose I can be glad that Alice Walton uses her money as she has—and decry a company that helps its workers get onto public assistance because it doesn’t give a living wage. And yet, and yet, and yet. Hey! It was summer vacation. I didn’t need to come to any final conclusions, right?

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