Spring General Meeting
Caroline Humphrey

The 2008 recipient of the American Philosophical Society’s Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities is Caroline Humphrey for her paper “Alternative Freedoms.” It was presented at the Society’s Spring General Meeting in April 2005 and published in the March 2007 issue of the Society's Proceedings.

In the paper Dr. Humphrey uses her experience in Russia to analyze the ideas of freedom held by ordinary Russians and to question the belief of Western leaders that their conceptions of freedom are applicable worldwide. She analyzes the ideas of freedom held by ordinary Russians and identifies three different concepts of freedom that, although derived from the past, were still present under the Soviet regime: svoboda, the individual freedom that came with the acquisition of privileged social status; mir, the freedom enjoyed through membership in one’s community; and volya, the emotional drive for self fulfillment. of these is identical to the Western belief in individual political freedom, though svoboda is the closest. Since the end of the Soviet regime, political and cultural developments have introduced the population to Western ideas of freedom, but ordinary Russians have come to perceive this imported version of svoboda as a cover for new forms of privilege. As they struggle for meaning in their everyday lives, they often turn to the self respect of their volya, their free will. From this analysis Professor Humphrey concludes that our sermons on freedom will ring hollow in regions of the world that differ from us culturally.

Caroline Humphrey is University Professor of Asian Anthropology at Cambridge University, where she has headed the Department of Social Anthropology since 2001. She developed an interest in Russia as an exchange student in anthropology at Moscow State University, studying there in 1966-67 and again in 1974-75. In those years she managed to get permission to study a collective farm in Siberia and became one of a handful of scholars allowed to do research in Russia at that time. This led to her first book Karl Marx Collective: Economy and Society in a Siberian Collective Farm.

Since then Dr. Humphrey has conducted research throughout Asia, including studies of pastoralism and trade in northeastern Nepal; the religion and rituals of the Jains of Rajasthan in western India; and the shamanism of the Daurs in Inner Mongolia. A remarkable social anthropologist with an impressive command of languages, she has achieved an intimate association with and understanding of Russian and central Asian societies.

The co-founder and former director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, Dr. Humphrey also helped organize "Environmental and Cultural Conservation in Inner Asia", a broad comparative study of the management of pastoral economies in Russia, Mongolia and China. Her many honors include the Staley Prize in Anthropology, the Royal Anthropological Institute's Rivers Memorial Medal and the Heldt Prize. Dr. Humphrey’s most recent book is The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism (2002). Her current projects include a book on Mongolian historical consciousness and a collaborative project on post-socialist urban development in Asia. She was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 2004.

The Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities is awarded annually to the author of a paper in the humanities or jurisprudence read at a meeting of the Society. It was established in 1982 by a gift from the widow of Henry Allen Moe to honor the longtime head of the Guggenheim Foundation and president of the American Philosophical Society from 1959 to 1970. It pays particular tribute to his firm commitment to the humanities and those who pursue them.

The selection committee consisted of chairman Richard Herr, professor of history emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley; Christopher Jones, George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics and History at Harvard University; and Elfriede R. Knauer, consulting scholar for the Mediterranean Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Autumn General Meeting
Barbara Mittler

The 2009 recipient of the American Philosophical Society’s Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities is Barbara Mittler for her paper “Popular Propaganda? Art and Culture in Revolutionary China.”  It was presented at the Society’s Spring General Meeting in April 2007 and published in the December 2008 issue of the Society's Proceedings.

In her paper, Barbara Mittler addresses the question why the items of propaganda of Mao’s time, a tragic period of suffering, are now popular in China, and the figure of Mao himself, once a monster, has become a mythical figure.  This, she argues, goes against the general response to propaganda that it is to be scorned and mistrusted.  From her experience in China especially interviewing artists and musicians, she proposes various reasons.  The use of art and music in Maoist propaganda did not reject Chinese tradition but brought it to the countryside (people read Confucius or heard Chinese opera who would never have done so).  People found pleasure in this learning experience, many of them able to look beyond the Maoist criticism to the value of the works.  Some of her interviewees credited participation in activities during the Great Leap Forward with starting them on careers in music and painting that would never have been open to them otherwise.

The other main point she makes applies to the broader Chinese society as a whole.  The glorifying of the Maoist period is a response to the new society that has emerged as China introduces its form of capitalism, with the scene of extravagant wealth falling into a few hands.  The new world makes Mao’s dedication to the common man seem a heroic age.  This is useful knowledge, a valuable perception of the gut feeling of ordinary people in China to the current regime.

Barbara Mittler, since receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg (Germany) in 1994, has been a member of the Institute of Chinese Studies at the same institution.  She was first employed through a project sponsored by the German Research Foundation, later (since 1996) as an Assistant Professor, yet later again (since 1999) as an Associate Professor. Starting in October 2002, she was on research leave, originally for three years, on a Heisenberg Scholarship by the German Research Foundation. During this time, she was affiliated with the Institute of Chinese Studies and the Center for Gender Studies at Marburg University, as well as the Centre d'Etudes de la Chine moderne et contemporaine in Paris. She resumed teaching as a Full Professor at the University of Heidelberg in 2004.  Her former desires to become a practicing musician led her to explore Chinese avant-garde music and fueled her passion for Chinese culture.  She is a member of the Selection Committee for German Scholarships by the Rhodes Trust, a member of the Senate committee for International Affairs, and a Principal Investigator and Member of the Steering Committee in Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe, Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows.”

Endowed by Edith N. Moe in 1982, the prize honors Henry Allen Moe, paying particular tribute to his firm commitment to the humanities and those who pursue them. Early in his career, Dr. Moe became president of the Guggenheim Foundation, and for the next forty years shaped and ran the organization to become one of the nation’s chief benefactors of creative scholars, scientists, and artists.  Dr. Moe served as president of the American Philosophical Society from 1959 to 1970.

The selection committee consisted of Richard Herr (chair), Professor of History Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley; Kezia Knauer, Consulting Scholar, Mediterranean Section, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; and Christopher Jones, George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics and History, Harvard University.

Spring General Meeting
Clyde Barker

The American Philosophical Society’s 2010 Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities is awarded to Clyde Barker in recognition of his Jayne Lecture delivered to the members of the Society on November 9, 2007, and published in the Society's Proceedings, March 2009, entitled "Thomas Eakins and His Medical Clinics."

The central theme of Barker’s paper is a great American painting, Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic (1875). Barker shows that the characteristics ascribed to Eakins by his contemporaries – boorish, eccentric, outrageous – had a secure basis in fact. Moreover, he exploits contemporary accounts in order to understand the background both of this painting and of another of Eakins’ masterpieces, The Agnew Clinic (1889). He shows how both portraits reflect their subjects – the flamboyant Gross, the "Emperor of American Surgery," and the aloof, patrician Agnew. Between the painting of the two pictures occurred the revolution brought about by the acceptance of antiseptic surgery, largely through the efforts of the Scotsman Joseph Lister. Gross was contemptuous of this innovation, whereas Agnew embraced it wholeheartedly. Another change was the growing use of electric rather than natural light in operating rooms. The pictures reflect these changes as much as the character and style of the subjects. Gross, dressed in ordinary clothes, dominates the frame as he gestures rhetorically in a dark operating room; Agnew, dressed in a white surgical smock, stands to the left of the frame under a strong electric light. Barker has much to say on other aspects of Eakins: the sexual scandals, his exploration of photography, and the effect of his personality on those closest to him. While Barker claims "no expertise as an art critic or art historian," this wonderful study will surely enter the literature on Eakins and on the history of American painting.

Clyde F. Barker was appointed to the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1966.  Since then he has been Chief of Transplantation Surgery, Chief of the Division of Vascular Surgery, John Rhea Barton Professor, chairman of the Department of Surgery, and Director of the Harrison Department of Surgical Research.  Dr. Barker’s research interests have been primarily in transplantation, especially transplantation of the kidney and pancreas and of isolated pancreatic islets.  He has authored more than 400 scientific papers.  He is recognized as one of the leading investigators in the transplant field in the United States. He initiated the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania’s transplant program in 1966 and is credited with building it into the largest and most successful program in the area.  Dr. Barker was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1997 and has served as its Vice President since 2005.

Endowed by Edith N. Moe in 1982, the prize honors Henry Allen Moe, paying particular tribute to his firm commitment to the humanities and those who pursue them. Early in his career, Dr. Moe became President of the Guggenheim Foundation, and for the next forty years shaped and ran the organization to become one of the nation’s chief benefactors of creative scholars, scientists, and artists.  Dr. Moe served as President of the American Philosophical Society from 1959 to 1970.

The Moe Prize Selection Committee consists of chair Christopher Jones, George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics and History at Harvard University; Louis Begley, novelist and former partner at Debevoise & Plimpton; and Elfriede R. Knauer, Consulting Scholar of the Mediterranean Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Spring General Meeting
William Chester Jordan

The 2012 recipient of the Henry Allen Moe Prize is William Chester Jordan for his paper entitled "Count Robert's 'Pet' Wolf," read at the Society's meeting April 23, 2010, and published in the Society's Proceedings, December 2011.

William Chester Jordan's paper on Count Robert of Artois touches on both an unusual moment in history and the overarching themes of both physical and psychological subjugation practiced by the medieval rich and powerful.  Count Robert, a nephew of Saint Louis of France, implicitly rejected his uncle's teachings (put forth in works known as the Instructions and Teachings of Saint Louis) by indulging in the more traditional aspects of courtly life such as hunting and keeping a fool.  Among his unusual indulgences was a 'pet' wolf which the keeper often allowed to roam about the countryside, terrorizing the populace both physically (killing more than twenty of the peasants' livestock in the spring of 1302 alone) and psychologically (in an ironic twist of Aesop's famous fable of mice belling the cat).  This paper gives us a brief glimpse into the lives of both subject and subjugator in medieval Europe and the role wolves played in reality and as symbol.

Christopher Jones, Chair of the Moe Prize Selection Committee, stated while presenting the prize that: "this is a splendid and original paper on Saint Louis of France's eccentric nephew, Count Robert of Artois. Count Robert kept an unusual pet, a wolf, and amused himself by letting it terrorize his peasants.  Though he 'belled' the wolf, he did so not to warn the unwary (as the mice hoped to do in Aesop's famous fable), but to increase the beast's power to cause terror.  This elegant and concise essay considers how wolves were generally regarded in the High Middle Ages, the particular dangers created by 'lone wolves,' and (since lone wolves were sometimes rabid) the horrifying effects of rabies in a world where there was no known remedy other than cauterization.  The paper is vivid, erudite, and at the same time a timely lesson about the ways by which the medieval rich and powerful could keep the poor in psychological subjection."

William Chester Jordan received a Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1973 and has remained at Princeton throughout his career.  Professor of History since 1986 and current Chair of the Department of History, he also served as Director of the Davis Center for Historical Studies from 1994-99.  Dr. Jordan is a master medievalist. Beginning as a historian of the state, he has consistently made the development of the central political and social institutions of the great feudal monarchies the core of his work.  Thorough investigations in the French national and provincial archives have enabled him to shed new light on classic subjects as diverse as the military organization of the Crusades and the dissolution of serfdom.  At the same time, however, he has never lost sight of the many thousands of medieval people who had to forge communities and ways of living outside the central institutions of the great states, and sometimes in sharp opposition to them.  His work on the lives of serfs, Jews and women in the Middle Ages applies to new sources, new problems, and unstudied social groups the same expert craftsmanship exhibited in his work on the state.  His book on the famine of the fourteenth century is a still broader account of the social and human consequences of catastrophe.  Jordan’s wide historical sympathies, remarkable linguistic gifts, and eloquence in speech and writing have won him an international reputation, and his rigorous undergraduate and graduate teaching has led brilliant younger scholars to devote themselves to careers in the field.  Dr. Jordan was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2000.

Endowed by Edith N. Moe in 1982, the prize honors Henry Allen Moe, paying particular tribute to his firm commitment to the humanities and those who pursue them. Early in his career, Dr. Moe became president of the Guggenheim Foundation, and for the next forty years shaped and ran the organization to become one of the nation’s chief benefactors of creative scholars, scientists, and artists.  Dr. Moe served as president of the American Philosophical Society from 1959 to 1970.

The selection committee consisted of Christopher Jones (chair), George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics and History, Harvard University; Louis Begley, Novelist, Retired Partner, Debevoise & Plimpton; and Elizabeth Cropper, Dean, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art.

Spring General Meeting
John W. O'Malley

Professor O’Malley’s paper discusses the depiction of the Last Judgment that forms the centerpiece of Michelangelo’s frescoes for the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City. The fresco has undergone various alterations in the direction of supposed decency, and it has often been claimed that these were mandated specifically by the Council of Trent, convened by three successive Popes between 1545 and 1563 to provide a Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation. O’Malley has just published a ground-breaking history of the Council in which he shows that the question of the “lasciviousness” of sacred images came up for discussion at Trent only at the last minute, and at the instance of the French delegation, which faced the furies of domestic iconoclasm. In this concise and elegant paper O’Malley concentrates our attention on the fact that Michelangelo’s fresco was not mentioned at the Council of Trent at all. Only after its closing session, in January 1564, did Pope Pius IV, acting as Bishop of Rome, propose that any indecencies or falsities in the Sistine Chapel and other churches in Rome should be covered up. This is an important and original contribution, based on a careful and informed reading of the documents. It challenges what O’Malley calls “established verities” that have become part of both scholarly and popular discourse.

John O’Malley is University Professor at Georgetown University and is a specialist in the religious culture of early modern Europe, especially Italy. He received his doctorate from Harvard University. Among his publications are Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome (1979), which received the Marraro Prize from the American Historical Association, and Trent and All That (2000), which received the Roland Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. His best-known book is The First Jesuits (1993), which received both the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society and the Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society for Church History. It has been translated into ten languages. A recent monograph, What Happened at Vatican II (2008), has been translated into Italian, French, and Polish. He has edited or co-edited a number of volumes, including three in the Collected Works of Erasmus series. His latest works on the Jesuits are The Jesuits and the Arts (2005), co-edited with Gauvin Alexander Bailey, and Constructing a Saint through Images (2008), an annotated facsimile of the 1609 illustrated life of Ignatius of Loyola attributed in part to Rubens. His most recent monograph, Trent: What Happened at the Council, was published in 2012.

John O’Malley has lectured widely in North America and Europe to both professional and popular audiences. He is the past President of the American Catholic Historical Association and the Renaissance Society of America. He has been elected to the Accademia di san Carlo, Ambrosian Library, Milan, and was awarded the Johannes Quasten Medal by the Catholic University of America for distinguished scholarship in religious studies. He received the lifetime achievement award from the Society for Italian Historical Studies in 2002 and the corresponding awards from both the Renaissance Society of America in 2005 and the American Catholic Historical Association in 2012. He is a Roman Catholic priest and a member of the Society of Jesus. Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1997, O’Malley has served as its Vice President since 2010.

The prize was established in 1982 by a gift from the widow of Henry Allen Moe, to honor the longtime head of the Guggenheim Foundation and president of the American Philosophical Society from 1959 to 1970. It pays particular tribute to his firm commitment to the humanities and those who pursue them. The prize is awarded annually to the author of a paper in the humanities or jurisprudence read at a meeting of the Society.

Autumn General Meeting
Bruce Kuklick

The American Philosophical Society is pleased to award the 2015 Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities to Bruce Kuklick for his paper "Killing Lumumba" presented at the Society’s April Meeting in 2012, and published in the June 2014 Proceedings.

In this paper Professor Kuklick discusses the events that led to the murder in January, 1961, of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minster of the newly-created Republic of the Congo. The full details of this terrible episode only came to light after several documentary sources had been opened, notably a report commissioned by the Belgian parliament in 2001. One of the experts on the commission, Professor Emmanuel Girard, collaborated with Professor Kuklick to write a book on the subject, which has now been published by the Harvard University Press under the title Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba (2015). Bruce Kuklick’s paper concentrates on the American perspective, especially the role of President Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower had close links with Belgium, the last colonial power in the Congo; at the same time, he feared the spread of Soviet influence in Africa, and saw NATO as a useful instrument for containing Lumumba’s aspirations. Realizing that he was being treated as a threat rather than as a national leader, Lumumba made an unfortunate visit to New York and Washington in July, 1960, and this visit, by souring the Belgian authorities and appearing to threaten the stability of NATO, started a chain of events that led to his murder in January, 1961. Professor Kuklick tells this sorry tale objectively, and yet with full compassion for Lumumba as a person and for Africa as a theater of Cold War rivalries.

Bruce Kuklick is Nichols Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. His historical interests are broadly in the political, diplomatic, and intellectual history of the United States, and in the philosophy of history. He has written a dozen books, including his three-volume history of American thought, Churchmen and Philosophers: Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (1985), The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (1976), and Philosophy in America, 1720-2000 (2001). His most recent books are Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (2006); a biography of African American philosopher William Fontaine, Black Philosopher; White Academy (2008); and a political history of America, One Nation Under God (2009). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2004.

The prize was established in 1982 by a gift from the widow of Henry Allen Moe, to honor the longtime head of the Guggenheim Foundation and president of the American Philosophical Society from 1959 to 1970. It pays particular tribute to his firm commitment to the humanities and those who pursue them. The prize is awarded annually to the author of a paper in the humanities or jurisprudence read at a meeting of the Society.

The selection committee consists of Christopher P. Jones, chair, George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics and History Emeritus at Harvard University; Louis Begley, Novelist and retired Partner at Debevoise & Plimpton; and Elizabeth Cropper, Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art.

Spring General Meeting
Kathleen Hall Jamieson

The recipient of the American Philosophical Society's 2016 Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities is Kathleen Hall Jamieson for her paper "Implications of the Demise of 'Fact' in Political Discourse" presented to the Society at its April 2013 Meeting and published in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, volume 159, no. 1, March 2015.

In her timely essay on the dangers to the republic of the strategies of what she calls "reality creating communities," Kathleen Hall Jamieson traces ways in which the manipulation of fact can thwart the public will. Following the traditional view of skepticism that well-founded belief must at some point rest on trusted premises, Jamieson underlines the importance of institutions that serve as custodians of knowledge. These institutions can, however, easily be undermined through misinformation, and mimicked through deliberate and deceptive manipulation. Her warning that the traditional institutional producers of knowledge are no longer protected by the halo of public credibility is substantiated through a succinct series of examples drawn from debates on prison furloughs, health care, welfare reform, and gun control.

Jamieson shows how the custodians of knowledge are undermined, whether through advertising or by new controllers of media dedicated to conflict. Pseudo-knowledge comes to take knowledge's place in a new reality not governed by credible fact. Deep-pocketed deceivers, conjurors of this new reality, threaten the public good. Citing James Madison on the need for the people to be armed with the power that knowledge gives, given that "knowledge will forever govern ignorance," Kathleen Hall Jamieson draws our attention to the importance of trust in fundamental, useful knowledge today. Her dedication to unmasking the rhetoric of deceit speaks to urgent questions in the study of the humanities today.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, and the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author or co-author of 15 books including: Presidents Creating the Presidency (2008), Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (2008) and unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation (2007). Jamieson has won university-wide teaching awards at each of the three universities at which she has taught, and political science or communication awards for four of her books. Her book, co-authored with Kate Kenski and Bruce Hardy, The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Messages Shaped the 2008 Election, received the 2010 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in the area of government and politics. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science and the International Communication Association. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1997.

The prize was established in 1982 by a gift from the widow of Henry Allen Moe, to honor the longtime head of the Guggenheim Foundation and president of the American Philosophical Society from 1959 to 1970. It pays particular tribute to his firm commitment to the humanities and those who pursue them. The prize is awarded annually to the author of a paper in the humanities or jurisprudence read at a meeting of the Society.

Spring General Meeting
Margaret J. Geller

The American Philosophical Society’s 2008 Magellanic Premium medal is awarded to Dr. Margaret J. Geller, Senior Scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, in recognition of her pioneering observations of the universe.

Dr. Geller is a brilliant astrophysicist who studies the distribution of galaxies and matter in the universe and the processes that produce their clusterings. Almost thirty years ago she interested her colleague, Dr. John Huchra, in joining her to observe redshifts, determine distances, and produce a three dimensional map of over 10,000 galaxies. Their pioneering work, “A Slice of the Universe”, showed that the “distribution of galaxies looks like a slice through the suds in the kitchen sink.” Geller and Huchra had discovered that the universe is filled with huge, extended, relatively thin structures composed of galaxies and clusters of galaxies surrounding huge volumes devoid of galaxies. Since that paper, numerous teams have extended the observational database by orders of magnitude, and theorists have reexamined earlier ideas of the universe, but the structures discovered by Geller and colleagues remain among the largest known structures in the universe.

Dr. Geller’s visualization techniques produced striking images and captured the public’s attention. The “stick-man” image from “A Slice of the Universe” was featured prominently in The New York Times. With her MacArthur Fellowship funds, Geller studied advanced filmmaking techniques and produced six movies, some showing simulated flights through the observed galaxy distributions. Her movie, Where the Galaxies Are, produced for the Air and Space Museum, won medals in international competitions, and set a high standard for future astronomical simulations.

Dr. Margaret Geller’s work is beautifully conceived, meticulously carried out, and discussed in terms that inspire scientists and captivate the public. The medal is engraved, “Margaret J. Geller, for discoveries about the remarkable nature of galaxy distribution in the universe.”

In 1786, two years after his election to the American Philosophical Society, John Hyacinth de Magellan of London, made a gift to the American Philosophical Society of 200 guineas for a medal to be awarded “to the author of the best discovery or most useful invention relating to navigation, astronomy, or natural philosophy (mere natural history only excepted).” The medal, named the Magellanic Premium, was first awarded in 1790. It is the oldest medal recognizing scientific achievements given by a North American institution.

The selection committee consisted of chairman Charles P. Slichter, Research Professor of Physics and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Physics and Chemistry Emeritus at the University of Illinois; Nicolaas Bloembergen, Gerhard Gade University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University; Leo P. Kadanoff, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Physics and Mathematics Emeritus at the University of Chicago; and Vera C. Rubin, Staff Astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington.