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There is an old adage that history repeats itself. Mistakes and triumphs cycle again and again on an endless reel.

Documentarians Ken Burns, Geoffrey C. Ward and Dayton Duncan have worked to bring these stories out of the tattered folds of history through film.

The trio will hold a conversation about the work they’ve done in their collaborative careers at 10:45 a.m. Mon., Aug. 20, in the Amphitheater as part of the Week Nine theme, “Documentary Film as Facilitator: Storytelling, Influence and Civil Discourse.”

Burns said he looks for projects that reflect us back to ourselves, saying he considers both the simple two-letter pronoun, “us,” and its capitalization, “U.S.,” as in the United States.

“Each film, maybe at a distance, may look the same,” Burns said. “They have a certain style to them. But they all represent up close, or minutely, sometimes hugely different calibrations of all the elements of our effort trying to wake up the past, our kind of trying to shake the dead, saying, ‘Tell us your stories again.’ ”

For more than 40 years, Burns has produced some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries of all time, garnering numerous awards and nominations.

Burns said he has always looked at what a particular subject tells viewers about not only who Americans were or are now, but what the country might be in the future.

“More often than not, I feel like the subjects choose me,” Burns said. “They’re quintessentially American things that I hope will be helpful to us in complicated times — which is, of course, all times.”

Burns’ style involves an integration of different mediums, dense research and storytelling.

“The grist of our mill is inevitably these old photographs, the diaries, the journals, the film footage, the paintings, the sketches, the newspaper headlines,” he said. “It just became a way for me to to work out a way to tell these dramatic stories without getting into the dramatic filmmaking and the fictionalization and the licenses that (feature film style) takes.”

Burns said he learned from photographer Jerome Liebling at an early age that there is more drama in the world than the human imagination could ever come up with.

Burns said he loves giving a new dimension to eras that have been visited in so many of his films. The effort became to reveal the film and research crews’ own process of discovery through complex stories, rather than to introduce audiences to things they didn’t already know, or things the teams wished them to know. Burns said it becomes a different form of storytelling entirely.

“No hero is perfect,” Burns said. “No villain is absolutely bad. Nothing is ever only one thing. Wynton Marsalis told us during ‘Jazz’ that sometimes a thing and the opposite thing are true at the same time.”

Although Burns might be the household name known for those films, he said he can’t imagine where he might be in his career if it weren’t for his professional collaborations with Duncan and Ward.

“I seem to have found what I’m supposed to be doing in this short tenure that we have,” Burns said. “I work, most importantly, with extraordinary people, particularly extraordinary writers that have helped me finish the films that I’ve made.”

Geoffrey Ward, author and scriptwriter, has worked with Burns for 36 years, writing companion novels for eight of the series the pair has collaborated on, including A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Of Ward’s writing on the team’s upcoming project centered around author Ernest Hemingway, Burns said he stopped numerous times to ask who was the superior writer, the subject or the scriptwriter. Burns said Ward, as a writer, stepped his work up beyond an already high level when working on this script.

“It was just a pleasure and a joy,” Burns said. “That has a huge effect on how we film, how we edit and how we do it.”

Ward said he has enjoyed every film he’s been able to work on with Burns, saying the pair seem to agree on how to tell a story.

“It’s a wonderful team,” Ward said. “Ken is terrific. He likes words, which is a huge advantage as a writer. And he’s not scared of complexity.”

Filmmaker and author Duncan said he has the best job in the world, working alongside one of his best friends. He said being able to work on a project and learn everything about a topic he’s already passionate about or profoundly curious about is a “joy that thrills the reporter inside him.”

“We do this — and I think it’s true of Geoff and Ken as well — we do it because we love doing it,” Duncan said. “It’s part of our DNA, our interest in American history and people, known and unknown, that tapestry of American history. That’s what we live for. The audiences we attract, that’s just an extra bonus.”

Duncan said he’s always humbled by the audiences the films reach. As a storyteller, he said he always wants to share these topics with as many people as possible.

Having spoken at the Institution before, Burns described Chautauqua as the “pursuit of happiness” personified and embodied.

“We’ve spent a lot of time, 240 years, trying to figure out the inscrutability of that last phrase of Thomas Jefferson’s second sentence of the Declaration of Independence,” Burns said. “A lot of people mistakenly think it’s the pursuit of material objects, a marketplace of things, when in fact, happiness with a capital ‘H’ is about lifelong learning and the improvement of the brain, the heart, the body and the soul throughout one’s lifetime. And there is no place on Earth that embodies that rigor and that joy more than Chautauqua Institution.”

At 8:15 p.m. Mon., Aug. 20, the Avett Brothers will take the Amphitheater stage for a sold-out performance in their second appearance at Chautauqua.

The Avett Brothers are known for their authenticity, in both their soul-baring lyrics and pared-down acoustic sound. Look no further than the February article in The New Yorker, “Listening to the Avett Brothers and Thinking About Extreme Musical Honesty,” for evidence.

Or consider this scene — it’s 2003, and the band has just released its second studio album on a small label when an executive from RCA Records asked the members to come play for her. It was an audition, of sorts.

“Like, a full on corporate boardroom,” Seth Avett said, describing the scene in the band’s documentary, which was shown Sunday in the Amp. “Big gigantic wooden table, probably like a dry erase board. Like, a sterile, carpeted boardroom.”

The ill-matched atmosphere foreshadowed the record deal negotiation: RCA suggested that the Avett Brothers would need to record music written by other people — either through covers or external songwriters — if they wanted to get a song on the radio. The band declined.

To this day, the Avett Brothers — despite widespread acclaim and sold-out shows — have still never had a major radio hit. But the band doesn’t seem too worried.

“We’ve never had a record that was massive, marketing-wise, and we’ve continued to grow,” Scott Avett said in the documentary. “We’ve never shrunk; we’ve always grown.”

Their lack of a hit could be due to a number of reasons. Perhaps it’s because of their refusal to play other people’s music. But legendary producer Rick Rubin, who began working with The Avett Brothers in 2008, said they’ve never been after the charts.

“I can’t imagine them ever making any choices creatively with the idea of gaining more of an audience,” Rubin said in the film. “It’s never been about that. It’s always been about pure expression of who they are.”

The Avett Brothers released their most recent album, True Sadness, in June 2016. Rolling Stone called it “their most heart-baring LP, staring down loss and fingering scars amid the good-time jams.”

The Avetts are from Concord, North Carolina, a small city just outside Charlotte. The brothers grew up playing on the porch with their father, Jim Avett, who exposed the boys to different instruments and musical styles at a young age.

When Scott Avett was in college and Seth Avett was still in high school, they formed the band Nemo, performing high-energy rock songs inspired by the likes of Kurt Cobain. After Nemo broke up, the brothers continued performing together as The Avett Brothers, and eventually arrived at their well-known folk-rock sound.

Despite their success in the music industry, their father still appreciates his sons for the small things.

“I’m most proud of the boys when they help me with the cows,” he said in a 2016 interview with GoUpstate.com. “If they had never made music, it would be the same. They’re good kids, and they’ll leave (the world) better than they found it.”

In the eighth edition of the Interfaith Friday Series, the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, vice president of religion, moderated a number of questions with interfaith advocate Joel Hunter, who represented evangelical Christianity.

Hunter served as a spiritual adviser to President Barack Obama from 2008 to 2017. He served on the boards of the National Association of Evangelicals from 2004 to 2017 and the World Evangelical Alliance from 2006 to 2017. He participated in the Global Christian Forum in Bangkok, Thailand; the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia; the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar; and the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations in Madrid, Spain. Hunter was senior pastor of Northland Church in Longwood, Florida, for 32 years.

Now, Hunter serves as the chairman of the Community Resource Network, a nonprofit organization he founded that focuses on helping marginalized and homeless families.

What follows is an abridged version of Hunter’s conversation Friday in the Hall of Philosophy. Hunter and Robinson’s remarks have been condensed for clarity.

From where you sit in your tradition, why should we be moving in an interfaith direction either here at Chautauqua or in the world?

Just from a utilitarian perspective, we have problems in this world that are way too big — not only to solve with any one group, but even to move the needle with any one group. So if you are serious about any world problem — poverty, climate change, the marginalization of people, the persecution (of people) and so forth — we have to do that together. When I say together, I am not just talking about interfaith; I am talking about people of good faith and good will, people who have a basic humanitarian inclination that says, “I want everyone to be treated with respect, to be treated fairly.”

The second answer I would give to that is that the universe has been created in a complementary fashion. We see this in Scripture when God said, “It is not good for you to be alone.” We see this in the very nature and in the very ontology of God. But then he said, “I will make you a helper suitable.” In Hebrew, the word helper is “one who answers back.” Now, why did God do that? Not only because we are made in his image and were made for relationships, but there is a sense in which we only best operate in the midst of differences that can complement our deficiencies.

We see that all the way from quantum mechanics to the principle of entanglement. When two photons become somehow linked in a spooky universe, if you affect one, the other one eight miles away shows a reaction. So there is a principle built into our very creation of us being entangled together. In our faith tradition, there is a sense in which the church is made up of differences that fit together. We need each other, and that same principle is true in the world. Personally, we will not grow without befriending and advocating for people who are different than we are.

There is something that happens when you know someone who is different and you now have a friendship. When people talk to me about Muslims, they are not talking about Muslims in general, they are talking about my friend, Muhammad Muslih. Whatever they are saying better come out pretty well in that shape because this guy is my friend. There is something about this connection of differences that is really beneficial and we need personally.

When you come to the metaphorical interfaith table, what gifts do you bring as an evangelical Christian to that table? 

Just Jesus. Jesus or God. I was walking with a monsignor and I said, “I will tell you, evangelicals are so thankful for the 200 years of Catholic social, theological development. We are leaning heavily into what you guys have already studied, we are with you, thank you.” He said, “I will tell you what, we could use your passion. We need your passion because we tend to live in our heads and in our rituals. We need to be fired up, and that’s what evangelicals can bring us.” So maybe we can bring some fire.

What gifts do other religions bring to the table that you might benefit from? 

This is so fun for me because I go down my list of friends and I just see what they add to my life. So, Judaism is our mother religion, and you’re always nice to your mama. There is a sense of identity. There are observant Jews and non-observant Jews, there are believer Jews and non-believing Jews, but there is a sense of cultural belonging that they have, and there is a sense in which there is a kinship there. That is such a healthy thing. There are always a dozen (religions) that point out that the world is the enemy, but there is a resilience there that all of us would benefit from knowing, because a lot of us tend to get panicked when we just get poked a couple of times.

With the Muslims, there is an obedience there, a simple obedience and observance that is quite admirable.

With the Hindus, I love the inclusiveness of the Hindus. Hindus have never met a belief they couldn’t go, “Alright, I kind of like this.” There is this warmth and this friendship. If you hear an evangelical say, “Tell me what you believe,” it’s like we are already on alert, but a Hindu goes, “No, really, tell me about what you believe. I would be interested and maybe I could believe some of that, too.”

For Buddhists, there is this sense of, “Don’t throw all of your eggs in the basket of this world. Don’t think that just because something has happened in this world, it is the end of the world or the end of your life.” When Buddhists practice right, there is this healthy detachment. There are a lot of great qualities that all of us can learn from.

Do you have any sacred texts or holy teachings that are telling you that yours is the one true religion? 

Yes. In John 14:6 (Jesus said), “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Don’t get all offended, or be offended, I don’t care. Yes, Jesus is the center of our universe. He is the creator of the universe. In the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was God, nothing was made if not made through him, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. So he is the organizing principle of the universe.

There are two ways to interpret that Scripture. One is exclusively. If you’re not an active, believing, follower of Jesus Christ and have given your whole life to him, then you are going to hell. That is the exclusive way. If you can’t get to the Father, give it up, you’re going to hell.

There is another (interpretation), though. There are several Scriptures I could point you to that would be more inclusive in its interpretation and it gives room for “I haven’t had the opportunity to hear who Jesus is,” or they have lived in a world where that option was not a viable option for them. That is not to say that his death on the cross hasn’t also paid for those. Because remember what he said on the cross? “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” Ignorance is a line of defense, and he was dying for those who were ignorant and pleading for their forgiveness at the same time.

So, yes. On one hand, I believe that all that is goes through Jesus Christ, but that does not necessarily mean that I think that everybody who doesn’t carry around the label of Jesus Christ is doomed.

Do you have extremist practitioners of evangelical Christianity? 

I used to, and still do, defend my Islamic brothers and sisters when people accused Islam as a religion of terrorism. That can’t be any more possible than Christianity as a religion of KKK people. There is a great propensity for all of us to try to justify what we do through the use of Scripture and to somehow contort the natural meaning of Scripture into something that is not at all like Jesus. So we do have lots of folks now who are claiming to have Biblical backing, but remember, the devil knew Scripture. Those of you who are Christian, remember the desert temptation — it talked about the devil coming and quoting Scripture to Jesus in order to tempt him. Well, he still does. Those who are anti-God still use Scripture to justify what they are doing to make it seem like that is what God would want.

There’s no time like the present to come forward and take a stand for a world in which power and possibility for females — regardless of class, race, sexual identity, age or any other factor — are equal to that for males.

So say Marie C. Wilson and Teresa C. Younger, honorary founding mother and president emerita, and current president and CEO, respectively, of the oldest women’s foundation in the United States, the Ms. Foundation for Women.

At 2 p.m. Saturday in the Hall of Philosophy, Wilson and Younger share the podium. They will talk about “Stepping Up and Speaking Out: Women in Politics and Society in America,” as part of the Chautauqua Women’s Club’s Contemporary Issues Forum series, spearheaded by the late Mary Ann Jenkins McCabe.

According to Younger, Wilson will be giving the first quarter of their presentation, tying in the history of Chautauqua to the women’s movement. Younger said she will be speaking more broadly about political diversity, the “richness of women of color” and Ms. Foundation’s new strategic plan.

The Ms. Foundation for Women was established in 1973 to provide funding and strategic resources to organizations across the United States through which women and girls are leading the transformation toward the vision of an equal and just nation.

Wilson, an entrepreneurial and award-winning women’s advocate, political organizer, book author and Huffington Post contributor, is known to many Chautauquans. Not only has she returned previously as both a CIF and a Chautauqua Professional Women’s Network speaker due to popular demand, but she and her family have become Chautauquans themselves.

As the director of women’s programs at Drake University in Des Moines from 1978 to 1981, Wilson developed and administered educational programs and services for women entering and re-entering the workforce, and started practical career-related programs for women in the community, including minority women. Over this three-year period, her university-based women’s program became the largest in the United States, serving 3,000 women annually.

In 1981, the 650-member Iowa Bankers Association hired Wilson as director of education and human resources and promoted her to vice president. In 1983, she was elected as the first woman to serve on the Des Moines City Council as a member-at-large. The following year, before Wilson completed her term as council member, the Ms. Foundation for Women recruited her to be its first president. She served in this capacity for 20 years, from 1984 to 2004.

While leading the Ms. Foundation, Wilson established the Collaborative Fund for Women’s Economic Development, which pioneered and supported collaborative funding circles and micro-enterprise programs for low-income women. She created the foundation’s first endowment ($17 million) and launched a five-year, $50 million endowment campaign.

One of America’s most successful and enduring national public education campaigns owes its existence to Wilson. In 1992, she conceived the Take Our Daughters to Work Day. It became such a hit that it is observed annually on the fourth Thursday in April, and was broadened to Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. It is also celebrated around the world in more than 200 countries.

To honor her accomplishments, the Ms. Foundation included Wilson with its group of four “Founding Mothers” — Patricia Carbine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Gloria Steinem and Marlo Thomas — and established The Marie C. Wilson Leadership Fund.

Wilson founded The White House Project in 1998 “in order to build a richly diverse, genuinely representative democracy,” according to her HuffPost bio. She served as its president until 2011. The mission of this nonprofit organization was to train women candidates and activists in order to advance women’s leadership in all spheres, including cultural, economic, social and political, all the way up to the presidency of the United States.

According to Wilson, the “ultimate goal is to transform American culture so that the number of women leaders in all sectors achieves a critical mass.”

As part of this work, The White House Project conducted research — “Benchmarking Women’s Leadership” — in multiple sectors. It was completed in 2009 and updated in 2013 by the Colorado Women’s College at University of Denver, its research partner.

Although The White House Project closed in 2013 because of fundraising challenges, two of its major initiatives are going strong. Its outgoing president started another organization — VoteRunLead — to continue the project’s political leadership training. Wilson serves on its advisory board.

The White House Project also launched SheSource.org, a database of women experts with media experience, which has since become part of the Women’s Media Center, co-founded by Steinem. WMC connects these experts to journalists, bookers and producers.

“Marie is the longest serving president and CEO of the Ms. Foundation,” Younger said. “She has a strong understanding of politics. My background is in organizing; most recently in state organizing.”

For her organizing, activism and advocacy, particularly concerning women’s health, safety and economic justice, Younger has received notable honors and awards, including being named by Inside Philanthropy as one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Philanthropy.”

Younger serves on numerous boards and committees, including Black Funders for Social Justice, the ERA Coalition, the Women’s Campaign School at Yale, and the NYS Council on Women and Girls. She said she was on the board of the Girl Scouts of Connecticut for one year before being elected its chair and serving for four more years.

“I am a lifetime Girl Scout and a Girl Scout award recipient,” Younger said. “Girl Scouts is very much a part of who I am and my values.”

When she was 11, her father, who in the Air Force, was stationed in North Dakota.

“I knew more about farming than feminism,” she said. “ ‘GS’ stood for Girl Scouts rather than Gloria Steinem.”

Growing up, Younger thought she’d work for the United Nations. She participated in the North Dakota Girls State summer leadership and citizenship program for high school juniors and was elected governor.

As a first-generation college student at the University of North Dakota, Younger said the expectation was that she pay for school herself and that she take on leadership roles. Starting out with a focus on peace studies, she was politically active. In addition to serving as vice president of the student body during her junior year, she worked on two statewide campaigns, one of which was to establish Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Needing a break after her third year, Younger worked as a nanny for two years in Stamford, Connecticut.

“I learned an amazing way of influencing children and setting them up to change the world,” she said.

Thinking strategically about her college major, Younger said she switched to recreation, which included finance and business-related courses. Her first job after earning her bachelor’s degree was as the executive assistant to the executive director of the American Camp Association. There she worked with the children’s residential camp directors all over the New England states.

Younger said she left the ACA to run Morry’s Camp, a free residential summer camp for inner-city children that addresses the academic challenge of summer learning loss. Project Morry was established in 1995 in memory of “camping world hero” Maurice Stein by his friends, colleagues and family.

Her experience as the executive director of Morry’s changed Younger’s career focus from recreation to juvenile justice and reproductive rights policies. Initially, she joined Changing Our World, a fundraising consultancy committed to impassioned advocacy and social impact, as its senior director of the corporate philanthropy division.

When offered the position of executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut arose, she accepted. Younger said she was able to get involved in organizing, including reaching out to Southeast Asian women about the problem of domestic violence. As the ACLU’s membership grew, she said she realized the importance of women in gaining the acceptance of men and of communities.

In 2005, Younger became the director of affiliate organizational development for the ACLU’s national organization. She said she spent two years ensuring that the executive director in each state was qualified to do the work needed, and she helped the ACLU build the boards of its affiliated offices all over the United States.

Drawn to grassroots work, Younger next served for nearly eight years as the executive director of the Connecticut Permanent Commission on the Status of Women. There, she concentrated on policy, including the state’s minimum wage, collective bargaining, the number of women on boards, domestic violence, permits to carry guns, breastfeeding in the workplace and child care subsidies.

“It was an amazing opportunity to educate and empower women in the state of Connecticut and legislators who were like-minded to work on policies that make lives better,” Younger said.

Younger has been serving as the CEO and president of Ms. Foundation for Women since June 2014. As part of the process for developing the foundation’s 2018-2022 strategic plan, she said she traveled 56,000 miles across the United States from 2014 to 2015 on a “listening tour” to learn about people’s concerns about feminism and their objections and concerns regarding gender equity.

“It’s probably the greatest gift I was ever given — to meet people that way,” Younger said. “I trust the grassroots, as does the Ms. Foundation.”

Under her guidance, the Foundation initiated a multimedia campaign — #MyFeminismIs — prompting a national conversation about feminism.

It has also funded a major report on the sexual abuse to prison pipeline, joined the “Prosperity Together” $100 million funding commitment by leading women’s foundations to create pathways to economic opportunity for low-income girls and women, and led a campaign to hold the NFL accountable for violence against women.

Led by Younger, the Ms. Foundation for Women has indeed been stepping up and speaking out.

More than 30 years ago, guitarist Sharon Isbin and composer John Corigliano found themselves in the same line at the post office. Isbin asked if Corigliano would write a guitar concerto for her, and Corigliano said no — the in-demand composer was too busy at the time.

But Isbin persisted. She checked back with Corigliano every year for eight years, and eventually, Corigliano agreed to write her concerto.

In 1993, Isbin finally premiered Corigliano’s “Troubadours (Variations for Guitar and Orchestra).” Their collaboration would reach many ears. Just two years after the premiere, astronaut Chris Hadfield brought Isbin’s recording of the piece to space, where he presented it to Russian cosmonauts.

At 8:15 p.m. Saturday in the Amphitheater, Isbin will join the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra and Rossen Milanov for a performance of Corigliano’s “Troubadours,” and the orchestra will perform Gioachino Rossini’s Overture to William Tell and Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A major, op. 90, “Italian.”

According to Isbin, Corigliano finally capitulated to her request because Isbin suggested the theme of the troubadours, lyric poets of the Middle Ages. That idea, she said, came to her in a dream after Corigliano’s publisher suggested she come to Corigliano with a “historical and dramatic” theme for the proposed concerto.

The troubadours existed in Southern France and surrounding areas from the late 11th century to the late 13th century, and are credited with major advances in European poetry. Their poems were often set as songs, with some 300 troubadour melodies surviving into the modern era.

Corigliano selected a melody from trobairitz (female troubadour) Comtessa de Dia to form the basis for the concerto’s main theme. The comtessa was a fitting pick for a concerto written for Isbin — just as it was unusual for women to be troubadours in the Middle Ages, it was unusual for women to play the classical guitar when Isbin was beginning her career.

“In the past, the role models have been men,” Isbin said. “It takes time to really create the vision for younger people to know that they can follow their passion and their heart even if it’s an instrument or profession not commonly associated with their gender.”

Isbin has certainly done that — she’s won two Grammy Awards (the only female classical guitarist to ever do so), performed around the world as a soloist both in recitals and in front of orchestras, and she founded the guitar program at The Juilliard School in New York.

Isbin has also been a major force in bringing the guitar into the contemporary concert hall. She’s had 10 guitar concertos written for her by some of the most well-known contemporary composers, from Christopher Rouse to Joseph Schwantner and Corigliano.

“Like most artists, I think there’s something to be said for being part of our time, especially when there are some amazing composers like John Corigliano,” Isbin said. “He’s one of the true greats. Fortuitously, meeting him was almost like fate, and while it did take some effort and arm twisting to bring him to an instrument that he wasn’t familiar with, he grew to love it.”

Chautauqua’s second annual Food Festival will expand to include another F-word: film.

The Food & Film Festival will take place all of Week Nine to coincide with the week’s theme, “Documentary Film as Facilitator: Storytelling, Influence and Civil Discourse.”

The Film Festival will act as an extension of the morning and interfaith lectures as documentary filmmakers will have their movies screened at the Chautauqua Cinema.

During the off-season, a group of Chautauqua administrators went to the 42nd Cleveland International Film Festival to promote Week Nine programming and recruit potential guests. Chautauqua Institution was a sponsor of the film festival, which gave leaders a chance to talk about the Institution.

“It was really a great presence for Chautauqua because (CIFF) is doing a lot of what we’re doing,” said Vanessa Weinert, director of marketing and analytics.

Director Lisa Klein’s “The S Word” was one of the films screened at CIFF this year. The documentary discusses the stigmas surrounding suicide, and the film will be shown at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, with a talkback with Klein to follow.

Similar to that of the Film Festival, Weinert said administrators built relationships over the last year with local food vendors, wineries and other craft beverage businesses to bring them to Chautauqua. The Food Festival began last season in conjunction with a week titled “At the Table: Our Changing Relationship with Food.”

Bestor Plaza will be filled with the aromas from food of many vendors. Demonstrations will be held in Bestor Plaza every day, ranging in topic like “Kombucha Making” with Buffalo-based Barrel + Brine on Monday, “Cocktails in Movies” with Nick O’Brien on Tuesday and “Grilling with Cheese” on Thursday.

Niagara-based winery Liten Buffel will talk about the future of natural wine and what makes a wine “natural” on Monday.

Weinert said she loves the demonstrations because “it’s not just how to make food in certain ways,” and it continues Chautauqua’s focus on education.

“It’s really just a nice spectrum of different things,” Weinert said.

Placing the festival during Week Nine allows Chautauqua to “bring some energy” in the final week of the season after all of the in-house art companies have departed, said Matt Ewalt, Institution chief of staff.

“One of the reasons we looked at the idea of turning Bestor Plaza into a lively programming space and to have a lot of these festival elements (was) that it was also identifying the opportunities that we have in Week Nine that we don’t have the rest of the year,” Ewalt said.

Food and film will be combined with a Tuesday showing of the Oscar-nominated “Knife Skills,” which tells the story of a Cleveland restaurant that employs men and women who were released from prison.

Lifelong Chautauquan Bestor Cram will have two of his historical documentaries shown at the cinema. Cram said the week of the festival further represents the Week Eight theme, “The Forgotten: History and Memory in the 21st Century,” because documentary storytelling acts as an extension of history.

Cram has had several of his films shown at Chautauqua Cinema, and said it is a worthwhile experience to have discussions with people about his films.

“One feels energized by being able to have conversations with Chautauquans about shared experiences,” Cram said. “You feel like you’re participating in what Chautauqua is about.”

Common ground is not racially bound, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said in a discussion of his life, legacy and the work of his friend and fellow civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. at Friday’s 10:45 a.m. morning lecture in the Amphitheater on Aug. 17.

He was joined in conversation by the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, in a crossover of Week Eight’s theme, “The Forgotten: History and Memory in the 21st Century,” and the week’s interfaith theme, “Not to Be Forgotten: A Remembrance on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

“We move along in just trying to remember — I think, which is a very important thing — the role that King played in the life of all of us, of all of the things that Jesse and I and others have gone through,” Campbell said. “We take a look now at what’s before us today and what we learned from yesterday and how we will behave in a country much in need of what it is that these people of the past have given to us.”

Campbell is an ordained Christian Church and American Baptist Church minister. She presided as the first female associate executive director of the Greater Cleveland Council of Churches; the first female executive director of the U.S. office of the World Council of Churches; the first ordained female general secretary of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA; and the first female director of religion at Chautauqua Institution from 2000 to 2013.

The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, vice president of religion and Chautauqua’s senior pastor, moderated the conversation. He opened by offering condolences to Jackson for the death of soulful, musical icon Aretha Franklin, who passed Thursday. Jackson and Franklin were longtime friends.

Franklin, the daughter of Baptist minister and civil rights activist C. L. Franklin, was around Jackson and the civil rights movement often, campaigning and fundraising for Jackson and his cause. Jackson visited her on her deathbed, to which he said: “I had the chance to feel the warmth of her hand one more time and to kiss her forehead. It was hard to let go.”

Robinson asked, in a week honoring civil rights activists, specifically King, is his work ever romanticized? He turned to Jackson, who worked closely with King directing Operation Breadbasket.

“Sometimes we become sentimental, and we over-conceptualized him,” Jackson said. “Next year will be the 400th year since African-Americans came here enslaved. We didn’t come as immigrants looking for a better life; we did not come as refugees in desperation. … Segregation was more violent than slavery. … Dr. King emerges out of that context.”

Campbell recalled King’s time in Cleveland, where he met with various congregations across the city campaigning against poverty and discrimination, while fighting to elect the first African-American mayor. At a meeting, King said he visited every black congregation in the area, but had yet to visit a white congregation. Campbell, being “young and naive,” invited King to her church.

Her decision was met with passive resistance; members went as far as to propose renovating the chapel during King’s scheduled visit.

“But the church had in it many more people who wanted him there than people who were fearful to have him there,” Campbell said. “They were the courageous ones. … The troublemakers became more so — more noise — but the people determined to have him also increased.”

By the time of King’s sermon, thousands of people surrounded the church — that church was never the same again, she said.

“One of the concerns Dr. King had was that we have been taught to learn the lesson well of how to survive apart — never been taught how to live together, which is our challenge,” Jackson added. “Racism, after all, is unscientific. It is well-taught. It’s a social order. Someone has to unteach a lesson learned well. The question is, will the church be a teacher or an extension of the bad lesson?”

Robinson went on to ask how King and Jackson always found the strength to preach hope, despite the seemingly hopeless circumstances.

Jackson described a wall; on one side, ignorance, fear, hatred and violence. On the other side, the people. It is not those who are evil who control the people, he said, but rather those in power over the wall. King’s philosophy: to pull the wall down takes strength, Jackson said.

He marked the immense growth in dismantling the wall, from African-American chief executive officers to redefined football rivalries, while also acknowledging politicians’ efforts to reverse this growth.

“There is a trend now to turn that back,” Jackson said. “Trump can turn the clock back, but he cannot turn time back. We ain’t going back.”

Robinson looked to current movements, like Black Lives Matter, asking how they relate to previous movements.

“Black Lives Matter is a hashtag of the old movements that matter,” Jackson said. “The abolitionists were saying ‘black lives matter’ and the anti-segregationist was saying ‘black lives matter.’ Those who were saying ‘make lynching a federal crime — by the way, lynching is not yet a federal crime, lynching is not yet a federal crime, lynching is not yet a federal crime’ — said ‘black lives matter.’ … Black Lives Matter is a hashtag; it’s the same matter of equal protection under the law.”

Robinson interjected; why is “all lives matter” a bad response, he asked.

“It’s insufficient,” Campbell said.

For Jackson, it’s agreed that “all lives matter,” but the reality is that discrimination against people of color is real and institutionalized — that “blacks were being killed without consequences.”

He related this to football; “Whenever the playing in field is even … and the rules are public and the goals are clear, the referees are fair and the score is transparent, we can accept the outcome.” But in reality, one team — white people — has the upper hand, running half as much for the same first down as a systematically disadvantaged team.

“Something about true and transparency has power, … fairness matters” Jackson said. “Hillary beat Trump by 3 million (votes), and she’s not the winner? It ain’t transparent. It ain’t fair. A ‘one person, one vote’ democracy and you win by 3 million and lose?”

Relating to institutionalized racism, Robinson gestured to the mostly-white audience and asked how people can be “white allies.”

Jackson said to “move from racial battleground to common ground” on affordable, universal health care and to equalize public education because “schools cost less than jails.”

“If the ballplayers can figure it out, surely we can figure it out,” he said. “When the young African-American male put children in the classroom, the president puts them in cages, and those in the church are silent where the cages are — that breaks the rhythm of transparency and fairness. Lebron (James) put children in classrooms, Trump put them in cages and the silence of the church is betrayal.”

Campbell looked out to the audience.

“My friends, we have power,” she told them. “We can make a difference. It is not just a matter of what could be done, what should be done, who else can do it — the fact of the matter is, I look out across all of this space, I know within these rooms and within the people sitting here, there is the possibility, maybe even the probability … that perhaps today we can take one another’s hands and say, ‘Our best selves call us today to something that will guide us into a nation that is more fair, that is more clear about who we are and where we want to be.’ ”

Jackson interjected by reiterating the Golden Rule: “Treat others the way you want to be treated.”

“The difference between us is not scientific, it is social,” he said.

Robinson closed the lecture by asking if Jackson were to write a letter to the clergy, similar to King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” what would it say?

Jackson said King’s 1963 letter denouncing the church’s intolerance toward injustice planted a seed, which culminated in Alabama’s 2017 special election, where white and black people alike voted a Democrat into office.

“You can’t plant the seed today and say ‘grow,’ ” Jackson said. “Seeds have to germinate, so the people of Alabama are learning to live together.”

Robinson turned to the audience for questions; one attendee asked what King would have thought of Barack Obama’s presidency. From the Affordable Care Act, the Paris climate agreement and bringing the country out of the recession, Jackson said King would have been impressed.

To close, an audience member asked if multiculturalism prevents a common familial culture.

Before answering, Jackson listed off the handles, numbers and contact information for himself and his organization Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a multiracial, multi-issue, progress organization fighting for social change.

“We need not be of one color to have common values,” he said. “I would argue (that) we must move from racial battlegrounds to economic common ground to moral higher ground. If we make that transition, then we’ll make transitions based not upon race, (but) based upon reason. Do we want children in cages or not? Do we want to feed the hungry or not? Do you want to educate children or not? Affordable health care or not? … We must be bond by common values.”

After a standing ovation and roaring applause, Amp attendees rushed to the floor in front of the stage as Jackson shook hands and led attendees, Campbell and Robinson in prayer:

“Let us bow our heads in prayer and join hands. Join our hands and bow our heads in prayer. We pray especially today for the sick; if Aretha had had no insurance, she would have been dead 10 years ago. We pray to God for the health care of all of his children. We pray to learn to live together as brothers and sisters and not die apart as fools. For grieving families everywhere, we pray. For those who died in our cities, we pray for them. Those in the coal mines of Appalachia, we pray for them. We pray for each one of us to have a more perfect union, a better nation and a more fit nation. So touch our hearts. We fall down sometimes. We make mistakes. We get up again, same as the sinners get back up again. We fall down and get back up again because the ground is no place for a champion, and nothing is too hard for you, and so see us through. In late years I’ve been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and yet I thank God for saving my life and for sustaining my will to work. One thing I’m sure about is once I was young, but now I’m old. I have never seen you foresake the righteous. Bless us, bless Chautauqua — let this little place be the center of the universe. Let the joy from this place flow to the streets of our nation. Amen.”

A half-century ago, a bullet robbed Martin Luther King Jr. of his life and a nation of his leadership. According to Drew Dellinger, Americans are still facing many of the same challenges King’s civil rights movement stared down, challenges that represent a failure to understand the world’s  interconnectedness.

At 2 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 16, in the Hall of Philosophy, Dellinger, a poet and founder of Planetize the Movement, a progressive movement dedicated to encouraging the intersection of justice, ecology, cosmology and art, gave his lecture, “All Life is Interrelated: The Interconnected Vision of Martin Luther King Jr.,” to conclude Week Eight’s interfaith theme, “Not to be Forgotten: A Rememberance on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

“Even as he focused on racism, war and poverty, King’s understanding of existence as interconnected was central to his vision and his work for peace and for racial and economic justice.”

-Drew Dellinger, Founder, Planetize the Movement

The inability to understand King’s view of interconnectedness stems from modern Americans misremembering him, Dellinger said.

“We misremember him in education, in the media and in popular culture by failing to engage with the deeper dimensions of his work and the radical nature of his vision,” he said.

Dellinger called King the “omnipresent figure” in global culture. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab conducted a survey that placed King first on its list of “globally known people” born in the United States. In 2006, The Atlantic ranked King eighth on its list of the 100 most influential figures in American history.

Even though he believes the global recognition of King is justified, Dellinger still doesn’t believe it is for the right reasons, as people fail to understand the entirety of his vision.

“Despite the annual holiday in his honor with its obligatory clips from his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, we have allowed our focus on the surface of King’s image to obscure the deeper dimensions of his thought,” he said.

In addition to King’s representation in the media, Dellinger said his vision is misremembered in educational settings as well.

“His most radical critiques have often been obscured in the effort to present a crowd-pleasing, noncontroversial (King) in classrooms,” he said. “These abridged editions of his mission have succeeded in softening our memory of King’s prophetic fire, blending his legacy into a cardboard cut-out.”

Scholar Derrick P. Alridge demonstrated with his survey of textbooks, curricula, and teaching on King in high school classrooms, that the history taught to youth tends “to gloss over King’s critiques of American racism, poverty and the war in Vietnam,” and presents “narrow, sanitized views.”

“Our children need the real Dr. King; they don’t need narrow, sanitized views,” Dellinger said.

Dellinger said misremembering King has led to a “superficial” version of him. According to Dellinger, King’s colleague, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, captured society’s perception of King “perfectly.”

Dellinger quoted Jackson: “We think of Dr. King like he was a big civil rights teddy bear, but this guy was radical.”

Dellinger was first introduced to the concept of a “superficial King” when he read Vincent Harding’s Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero — more specifically, an essay in the book called “Beyond Amnesia.”

“He says we basically have amnesia in regards to the fullness of Dr. King’s teachings because we freeze him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 giving the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and we almost completely ignore the last five years of his life,” Dellinger said.

Dellinger said Harding’s interpretation inspired him to learn more about King’s work in the last years of his life. However, Dellinger noted King was radical his entire life.

“He was critiquing capitalism in the 1950s, so I don’t think there was a dramatic shift, but I do think that as the ’60s were carrying on and as the rhetoric was becoming more radicalized, King was also making these connections between racism, war and poverty,” he said.

Dellinger refers to the last two years and two months of King’s life as the “mountaintop period,” the most radical and forgotten years.

The “mountaintop period” started when King moved to Chicago.

“To me, that is the beginning of this period in which King is linking the issues and making connections,” he said.

As an example, on Jan. 14, 1968, King made a radical statement when he stopped to speak to anti-Vietnam War protesters.

“He told them, ‘I see these two struggles as one struggle,’ ” Dellinger said. “So King was making these links from racism and white supremacy to the war in the Vietnam, he was linking the international and the domestic, he was linking the civil rights movement to issues of poverty and economic inequality.”

While King was making connections between various world issues, Dellinger said he was always focused on the significance of systemic racism and challenging white supremacy in America.

“In his last years, he made some of his most searing indictments of systemic racism and the philosophy and practice of white supremacy,” Dellinger said. “In just the last few weeks of his life, he said, ‘The first thing that must be on the agenda of our nation is to get rid of racism.’ ”

More specifically, King said later on in Mississippi that the thing “wrong with America is white racism.”

“I love that quote because it is so simple and uncompromising,” Dellinger said.

Dellinger said in order to reclaim the radical King in present day, people need to recognize the depth of his critiques on white  supremacy.

“He has been softened as kind of a paragon of racial reconciliation, and that’s why we quote from the latter part of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech of little black boys and little black girls holding hands with little white boys and little white girls,” he said. “We less often hear the earlier parts where he says, ‘There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.’ ”

Beyond reclaiming King’s radical aspects, there are also ecological and cosmological dimensions of King’s thought, Dellinger said.

Dellinger quoted an example of King’s ecological standpoints from a television interview in July 1967: “It would be foolhardy for me to work for integrated schools or integrated lunch counters and not be concerned about the survival of the world in which to be integrated. … Our cities are gasping in polluted air and enduring contaminated water.”

“We now would recognize that as an early environmental justice statement,” Dellinger said.

King was also involved in the “atomic” or “nuclear” issue.

“He said, ‘We played havoc with the destiny of the world,’ ” Dellinger said. “ ‘Somewhere we must make it clear that we are concerned about the survival of the world.’ Elsewhere he wrote, ‘It is very nice to drink milk at an un-segregated lunch counter, but not when there’s Strontium 90 in it.’ ”

As part of the ecological King, there is also a cosmological King, Dellinger said.

“From the beginning of his leadership, King used language that was not only theological, but consistently cosmological,” he said. “King said that in the summer of 1956, ‘We have the strange feeling down in Montgomery that in our struggle for justice, we have cosmic companionship.’ ”

Dellinger then quoted King three months later, addressing a meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church.

“These 11 months have not at all been easy,” King said. “ … Our feet have often been tired and our automobiles worn, but we have kept going with the faith that in our struggle we have cosmic companionship, and that, at bottom, the universe is on the side of justice.”

King was also interested in the physical cosmos, Dellinger said.

He quoted King from a sermon he delivered called “Our God is Able.”

“He revels in what he calls ‘the vast scope of the cosmic order,’ and King said, ‘Since I started talking to you about five minutes ago, you and our earth have hurtled through space more than 5,500 miles,’ ” Dellinger said. “King pointed out that the earth is circling the sun so fast that even the fastest jet would be left 66,000 miles (behind) in the first hour of the race.”

King continued to learn about the cosmos from his favorite television show, “Star Trek.” One day, he met with African-American actress Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura. King did not know at the time, but Nichols was planning on leaving the show to pursue a career on Broadway.

“When he found out he said ‘You can’t leave. Do you understand?’ ” Dellinger said. “ ‘It has been heavenly ordained, this is God’s gift and onus for you. You have changed the face of television forever because this is not a black role, this is not a female role. Anyone could fill that role. This is a unique role, at a unique point in time that breathes the life of what we are marching for: equality.’ ”

That meeting drove Nichols to stay on the show after he convinced her of the importance of her role, the power of television, the significance of science fiction and of her presence in the show’s portrayal of the 23rd century.

Whether it was through his sermons or an episode of “Star Trek,” Dellinger said King also had an understanding of unity and connectedness that was linked to action.

“Dr. King predicted the ‘inevitable decay of any system based on principles that are not in harmony with the moral laws of the universe,’ ” Dellinger said. “King’s cosmology told him that somehow the universe is on the side of all that is moving toward justice, dignity, goodwill and respect.”

Dellinger believes King’s interconnected worldview, a vision that “centers justice and peace and bold action” for social change, is the vision present-day America needs in order to survive.

“King’s interrelated vision bridging ecology and social justice is more relevant than ever in our time of climate crisis, ecological devastation, economic injustice, the #MeToo movement and the movement for black lives,” Dellinger said. “It is precisely the kind of vision we need today if humanity is to have a viable future.”

Historian and author Abby Smith Rumsey discussed stewardship of the past, present and future at Thursday’s 10:45 a.m. morning lecture on Aug. 16, titled “Will Digital Memory Erase Our Past.” Her Amphitheater lecture, part of Week Eight’s theme, “The Forgotten: History and Memory in the 21st Century,” was accompanied by various alarms — car, carbon monoxide, truck and phone among the bunch.

“The questions we have been contemplating this week — how and what should we remember — are fundamentally moral questions about our obligations to other generations, as well as to ourselves,” Rumsey said. “And the real question that I have for us today is ‘What will people know about us in 100 years? How will they come to understand our actions, the things that we have done and the things that we failed to do that will stun them in historical perspective?’ ”

As a historian, Rumsey’s work focuses on the creation, preservation and cultural recording in the media, which are prominent topics in her book, When We are No More: How Digital Memory Will Shape Our Future. She served as director of the Scholarly Communication Institute at the University of Virginia, and she worked with the Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) for more than a decade.

Her work with the NDIIPP involved strategizing how to identify, collect and preserve digital content of value.

“There is a very real threat, people tell me, that digital memory will erase our past because it is so easy to erase digital memory,” she said.

Digital memory is fragile, Rumsey said. Despite hardware’s ability to store exabytes of data — one exabytes being 1 billion gigabytes — it is impossible to retrieve digital information without a computer; an MP3 can’t be “picked up” and listened to without a compatible device. Moreover, data has been privatized and commoditized by Amazon, Google and Apple, she said.

And while digital has its dilemmas, physical records can also be cumbersome. Rumsey referenced a picture of the Library of Congress in 1897, featuring overflowing piles of records. Eventually, the piles were catalogued, indexed and shelved, but within 10 years, the collection had once again outgrown its space.

As for humans, Rumsey said collecting and documenting memories is not considered important until it is too late.

“People don’t always agree with what memory is,” she said, “and they seem to neglect the fact that it is a natural endowment given to all living beings and has a fundamental biological function, no matter how culturally important it is.”

Humans have various types of memory, Rumsey said, including genetic memory and learning.

Genetic memory is uniform coding in DNA that informs aardvark cells to become a fertilized aardvark egg and eventually an aardvark, rather than an elephant or a human.

“If you take this as a metaphor for our cultural and collective memory, I’d say the cultural memory operates very much like the genetic memory DNA,” Rumsey said. “It operates the same way because cultural memory is something that tells a Japanese girl what language she is going to learn when she grows up, what kind of food she is going to eat, what kind of music she is going to like, how she’s suppose to behave around men.”

Learning is the modification of an individual by an experience or environment, she said. For example, When sea slugs feel pain or pleasure, there is a biological response; the same applies for humans, which advertisers have caught onto, she said, with the use of attracting — and distracting — colors.

Memory is a survival mechanism, Rumsey said; the brain’s perception of the world is based on previous observations, and the conscious mind is only alerted to unexpected occurrences, which saves memory space and keeps the most relevant information fresh.

Rumsey stressed that although the brain ages and information is lost, forgetting a name or date is part of the brain’s survival technique: pushing the less pressing information to the back of the mind.

Primitive archival efforts to extend the life of the human memory came from the Sumerians’ early cuneiform tablets used to track goods and services  — ”you’ll be glad to know that the people who invented civilization were actually accountants,” Rumsey said. Their tablets embraced propaganda, poetry and proficiency, she said, which are also embraced by modern technology.

“The Sumerians invented the single most durable form of cordon technology,” she said. “This tablet is 2,300 years old. It survives fires, among all other forms. It’s made of clay, so it gets stronger once fired. You do not want to drop it, and it is not very portable, and it does not have a lot information on it. All technology since then have become more fragile, have held more information and have been harder to actually preserve.”

But are these technologies advantageous, Rumsey asked, quoting technology-curmudgeon Plato, who questioned the morality of memory through the guise of Socrates:

“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”

Rumsey said Socrates — the ironist who knew Plato was writing down everything he said — was wrong in his assumption, as societies that adopted writing flourished. However, she agrees technologies have no morality and that without humans, technology would have no power.

Modern technology’s power is gross, with too much information trapped in digital technology. But this “data deluge” did not amass from the onset of the computer, but rather with the ability to record sounds and images — technology that produced more fragile material to be preserved, she said.

But who decides what is worthy of preservation? Rumsey said it’s the collectors, avid collectors like Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson preserved literature and scientific works that reflected “who Americans are.” His books eventually joined the national collection after the burning of the Capitol Building by British soldiers, when he sold his books to the Library of Congress.

“What this library represents is a commitment across generations of citizens who every other year vote in representatives and senators to fund the Library of Congress and make this access publicly available,” she said. “… So stewardship is a multigenerational commitment. We have to do our part when we are alive and take faith that people coming after us will take care of our legacy.”

Stewardship is also a commitment to preserving an uncorrupted collective memory because it shapes the future.

Rumsey referenced her graduate experience researching 17th-century Russia in 1980s Soviet Union. While in Russia, she was unable to retrieve documents or records from the 1600s, as they “did not exist.” When she discussed this with her friends, they said: “The future is certain; it’s the past that is always changing.”

An example of the Soviet Union’s erasure and doctoring of the past comes in two photos Rumsey displayed on the screen. On the left, a photo of Joseph Stalin with Soviet secret policeman Nikolai Yezhov, who presided over the Great Purge. On the right, the same photo without Nikolai Yezhov, who was virtually erased from Russian history after he fell out of favor, succumbing to the Great Purge himself.

“When you are actually telling a story where you want everyone to know what the outcome is, you actually have to rearrange the past to get the outcomes that you want,” Rumsey said. “Some nations are very good at this, and we like to think in America that we are not this kind of people, but I will tell you we all know that it is in fact possible to … get into the historical record and manipulate it.”

She referenced the 2016 presidential election and the manipulation of facts, sensationalized “fake news” and the current climate surrounding Confederate monuments and symbols in the South. Rumsey called for resilience.

“First, we have to get over ourselves,” she said. “There is something about this country; we have this secular culture that believes time is always moving forward. … The current culture in the U.S. is that the future is coming at us so fast the past couldn’t possibly matter anymore, so who cares? Why does it matter to anybody? But the notion (that) the future, let alone the present, could ever supersede the past is biologically impossible. … The past is more important than ever. The faster we move forward, the more important it is that we have a strong, open access to the past.”

Resilience involves taking responsibility for data, “backing it up” — on the cloud or elsewhere — to pass onto the next generation. Rumsey quoted poet Czesław Miłosz:

“I imagine the earth when I am no more. Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant. Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.”

She closed with a charge for the audience.

“I hope you take away this idea that, in the digital realm, we can also do something to take away our own radiance and heights through this new technology if we apply ourselves and our moral sense to how to use this technology, which is much more powerful than we anticipated when it was first invented,” Rumsey said. “It is up to us all.”

After the conclusion of Rumsey’s lecture, Institution Chief of Staff Matt Ewalt opened the Q-and-A by asking if there are dangers to revisiting nostalgia and reliving the past digitally.

“I think nostalgia is an emotional problem,” Rumsey said. “… I think the questions of being trapped inside of nostalgia is not a technological question; it has to do with what a person wants.”

She did acknowledge that being “trapped” in a digital world is dangerous, as it can be addicting.

Ewalt then turned to the audience for the final question; one attendee asked if the distinction between past, present and future was an illusion.

“If we think about what people are going to know about us — what’s going to be important in a hundred years — we have to say with humility, ‘We have no idea,’ ” Rumsey said. “The only thing we can do is record what matters to us.”

Thus far, the Week Eight morning lecture platform and the Interfaith Lecture Series have explored different issues: “The Forgotten” and a remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr., respectively. Fri. Aug. 17, they converge.

At 10:45 a.m. in the Amphitheater, the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Joan Brown Campbell will join the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Chautauqua’s vice president of religion, to close both morning and afternoon themes for Week Eight.

Matt Ewalt, Institution chief of staff, said Jackson and Campbell’s conversation is an “opportunity to bring both the morning and afternoon platforms together in a powerful way.”

“Through the work of Department of Religion leadership — both past and present — we close with the reflections of the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Joan Brown Campbell on King’s legacy and the legacy of the civil rights movement,” Ewalt said.

Both Jackson and Campbell are longtime proponents of social justice and civil rights.

As a student in the 1960s, Jackson rose to prominence as one of the foremost leaders of the civil rights movement, working closely with King on various initiatives. He is the founder and president of Rainbow PUSH Coalition and the recipient of several awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Campbell is a former director of religion at Chautauqua. During her tenure, she established key programs within the Department of Religion, including the Abrahamic Program for Young Adults and designating the 2 p.m. religion lectures as the Interfaith Lecture Series. She was the first woman in that position, as well as the first woman to be associate executive director of the Greater Cleveland Council of Churches; executive director of the U.S. office of the World Council of Churches; and the first ordained woman to assume the position of general secretary of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States. Her many awards include the Walter Cronkite Faith and Freedom Award from the Interfaith Alliance.

Robinson, who will moderate today’s discussion, said Jackson and Campbell each bring a  different perspective of King’s legacy and can speak to the differing impacts of his work.

“One of the ways we honor Dr. King in this 50th anniversary of his assassination is to connect as personally as we can with both his experience, but also the experience of those around him,” Robinson said.

Robinson said he’s interested in hearing Jackson’s thoughts on not only the legacy of the civil rights movement, but also how modern movements like Black Lives Matter compare to the work King did.

“So where does the movement stand now, and how is it different now?” Robinson said. “We can point to some gains, in terms of an emerging black middle class and African-Americans being named to all kinds of rather grand positions, but going back to our theme — what should we have learned that we didn’t? What did we learn momentarily that we actually forgot?”

Robinson said Campbell will speak to the impact King had on her own life, as well as the “indirect impact” King had on various communities he visited. As pastor of the first white Cleveland church King visited, Campbell witnessed the “enormous effect on that community,” Robinson said.

“Just his presence, just the announcement that he was coming, sent people into a flurry of activity,” Robinson said.

Robinson said an important part of today’s conversation will be a point that has echoed throughout the Week Eight interfaith lectures — King was more than his “I Have a Dream” speech or his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” To honor the legacy of the man is to “dwell not merely on how Dr. King died, but also on how he lived,” as Jackson wrote in an April opinion piece for The New York Times.

“We owe it to Dr. King — and to our children and grandchildren — to commemorate the man in full,” Jackson wrote in the Times, “a radical, ecumenical, antiwar, pro-immigrant and scholarly champion of the poor who spent much more time marching and going to jail for liberation and justice than he ever spent dreaming about it.”

Emma Francois & Cat Hofacker

Friday night and the lights are low.

For those Chautauquans looking for a place to go, look no further. ABBA: The Concert is taking the stage at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater.

“ABBA: The Concert is a ridiculously fun show at Chautauqua, and it functions as a gigantic sing-along for so many,” said Deborah Sunya Moore, vice president of performing and visual arts.

Founded in 1996, ABBA: The Concert “brings one of the greatest pop phenomena back to life,” according to its website. The tribute group has been performing Swedish pop band ABBA’s hits for over two decades to audiences of all ages — not just those “young and sweet.”

“Whether you like it or not, everyone has heard ‘Dancing Queen’ at least once,” Christian Fast, lead guitarist and founding member of ABBA: The Concert, told MetroWeekly.

The original ABBA group released more than eight albums during its 10-year career, and the band’s influence continues to live on.

“It’s pop evergreen,” Fast said to MetroWeekly.

More than 30 years after the group split in 1982, ABBA tributes are alive — and not just in acts like ABBA: The Concert. From the official ABBA fan club, formed in 1986, to the 1991 musical, Mamma Mia!, and its 2008 and 2018 movie adaptations, audiences continue to keep the iconic songs like “SOS” and “Waterloo” alive.

In fact, the 2018 film “Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again,” which features a star-studded cast that includes Meryl Streep and Cher, is one of the reasons Moore wanted to have this “top” ABBA tribute band on the Amp stage this summer.

“The movie has driven a lot of increased excitement about the songs,” Moore said, “and I think we are in for a joyful evening of dance and song.”

Tonight, ABBA: The Concert, which has performed in over 30 countries, will sing hit favorites including “Money, Money, Money,” “The Winner Takes All” and “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme.”

Chautauqua last enjoyed ABBA’s hits in 2014, when tribute group Sweden on Arrival opened the season in an “upbeat and uplifting way,” according to a previous Daily article.

Fast told MetroWeekly the band has “fun on stage,” and that the energy and vibe is the “closest thing” audiences will get to the original ABBA.

He also said his favorite song to perform is “When All Is Said and Done.”

“I really love that song,” he said to MetroWeekly. “It’s a nice moment in our concerts.”

Kent State University is a “wounded healer,” said President Beverly J. Warren.

Warren discussed the remembering, reflecting and redefining of the May 4, 1970, shootings at her 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Wed., Aug. 15, in the Amphitheater, marking the first time a Kent State president has publicly addressed the tragedy outside of Kent’s campus.

Kent State University is located in Kent, Ohio, in the northeastern corner of the state. With more than 39,000 enrolled students across its main and seven satellite locations, Kent State is highly ranked in the Best National Universities by U.S. News & World Report. Warren has served as president since 2014.

Her lecture, titled, “Kent State Beyond the Shootings: Journey of the Wounded Healer” continued Week Eight’s theme, “The Forgotten: History and Memory in the 21st Century.”

“Like the students we lost, Kent State suffered a terrible, indelible wound,” Warren said. “Since 1970, we have seen every emotion on the spectrum, from rage and despair to, perhaps unaccountably, serenity. Frankly, we have not always honored all those honest reactions. We have seen the impulse to erase history, to move along. We have seen the high price of remaining chained forever to one terrible minute.”

Warren recounted the events of May 4, 1970, through the experience of then-freshman Dean Kahler, whose curiosity about the anti-Vietnam War rallies led to a life of consequence.

National attention turned to college campuses across the country on May 1, 1970, when protests erupted in reaction to the United State’s sudden invasion of Cambodia. Kent State at first experienced mild, peaceful protests, Warren said, but May 1 ended in vandalism, and by May 2, the ROTC building was set ablaze. By then, Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes mobilized 850 members of the Ohio National Guard, vowing to restore law and order to Kent State’s campus by “any means necessary.” By the morning of May 4, the protesters numbered in the hundreds, Warren said.

“There was tension,” she said. “Rocks were thrown; tear gas canisters were fired, picked up by protesters and thrown back. There was angry shouting. And around noon, it was time for the change of classes, and many more students came out (to) the Commons — perhaps 1,500 more. Some were curious to just see what was happening on their campus, many were merely passing by or heading for lunch. Dean Kahler would remember thinking, ‘I expected a bigger protest.’ ”

At 12:24 p.m., 67 gunshots pierced the Commons, killing four students: Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, William Schroeder and Sandra Lee Scheuer. Kahler was 300 feet from the National Guard, Warren said. He was among nine wounded, shot in the lower back. Now paralyzed from the waist down, his steps toward the Commons that day would be his last.

The year 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, and while Warren’s institution is working to remember, it is also looking to move forward — “(stewarding) the story of May 4, 1970, for a new century as a moment in time and a call to action,” beginning with examining individuals’ relationship to the event.

This starts with the question, “Where were you?” she said. Although Warren remembers hearing about the Kent State shooting as a senior at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the majority of its current student body wasn’t born during Vietnam, and it is likely their parents might not remember the 1970s. By 2045 — the 75th anniversary of the shootings — most of the baby boomers will have died, along with their memories of the late 20th century.

“As the date recedes into history and the events grow less vivid in our communal memory, we have to do more than ask ‘Where were you?’ ” Warren said. “If we don’t do more, we risk allowing May 4 to become one more dusty, abstract date in history. We are determined to avoid that. We have to keep it relevant, make it mean more, put our wound to work.”

However, Warren’s mission to “remember and renew” the lessons of May 4 was not the charge of her predecessors; following the massacre, the Kent community grappled with emotional, physical and financial pain. In 1975, President Glenn Olds motioned to end official commemorations but, Warren said, no one forgot the “the drumming, four dead in Ohio,” — a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young refrain, which cut through America that summer.

This was the genesis of the “May 4th Task Force,” a group that took over the job of remembering; their efforts continue to this day with an annual candlelight vigil at the site of the shootings after walking the demonstrators’ path. The university also created the May 4 Visitors Center devoted to the history and impact of the shootings, as well as commemorating the site of the protest as a historic landmark.

Such efforts pay off in two “insights,” Warren said.

The first: information surrounding the Kent State shootings is incomplete, despite fierce or conscientious remembrance; Warren acknowledged the narrative is messy, with dozens of conflicting accounts, gray areas and no conclusion of who ordered the gunfire.

The second: the wound is not yet healed — an open wound for victims, families, the community and the campus, in part because of the messy narrative and lack of closure. Kent State’s reflection and pain is relevant in the current political climate, Warren said.

“One way to view the shootings is as a terrible product of missed signals and failed communication,” she said. “That doubles as a fair description of the environment we find ourselves in today, where our leaders talk past one another, … outrage is the norm, insults and mockery blow away civility and respect. As we learn to live with the wound of May 4, 1970, we at Kent State strive for different values.”

Examples of Kent State’s values, Warren said, include its School of Peace and Conflict Studies; a recent Second Amendment protest where students brought guns on campus and engaged in peaceful discussions with students, faculty and the community; and its Wick Poetry Center, whose Traveling Stanzas exhibit is in residence at Chautauqua Institution.

Warren encouraged the audience to reflect on the Kent State shooting through the Poetry Makerspace located in the Colonnade.

But after reflection, how does Kent State move forward to “renewal”?

Warren hopes May 4, 2020, will be a day of renewal for the campus and the country through Kent State’s plan to distribute interactive mobile museum installations, as well as middle and high school teaching materials that “honor the past and renew the future.”

Kahler is a man renewed, she said. After being shot in the back and losing the ability to walk, Kahler was grateful to be alive. He finished his degree, pursued a life in politics and was elected to public office, where he lobbied for wheelchair accessibility. His — and the energy of survivors who found strength in the atrocity — is the energy Warren wants to grow from May 4, 1970, and continue through generations of students.

Quoting Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” she said: “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

“We choose to remember, reflect and renew,” Warren said. “We will remember vividly, but not live in the past. We will honor all emotions and perspectives that forever will resound around us, but be consumed no more by grief or anger. And we will raise our voices using lessons of May 4, 50 years ago, to convene people, heal conflict and create a more inclusive and more peaceful future. If we do that, we and Kent State will be transformed. So that then is our plan for using our history and making it forever meaningful and making the most out of our wild and precious lives.”

After the conclusion of Warren’s lecture, Emily Morris, vice president of marketing and communications and chief brand officer, opened the Q-and-A by asking how the relationship between Kent State and the City of Kent has evolved since May 4, 1970.

“It was very hard for the community members of Kent,” Warren said. “Many were resentful at the time, and perhaps rightfully so, but what has happened over time is we have tried to bring down fences and the differences that divide us, and we’ve really worked to develop a partnership that shows that we are better together than we would be as separate and isolated institutions.”

Morris then asked how the National Guard’s voices are represented in Kent’s history, specifically the May 4 Visitors Center.

“I think what we’ve tried to do with the May 4 Visitors Center and with our language and our actions, we’ve tried to have all voices heard,” Warren said. “As I said, guardsmen cannot be painted in the same stroke any more than the Kent State students and protesters can be painted with a general stroke. And so it’s a complex matter of dealing with both sides and perspectives and trying to honor them.”

When Abby Smith Rumsey started working at the Library of Congress, she was worried about the amount of information being produced digitally.

“I was very aware that inside the library, people who knew about the technology and librarians and archivists understood that there was this avalanche coming of digital data that no one knew how to preserve and, in fact, this occurred very quickly,” said Rumsey, who worked with the Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. “ … Over time, I became more reassured that more people were aware of this — that more technology could solve some of the problems of preserving.”

Wanting to document that worry and ways to deal with it in the future led Rumsey to write When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future. Rumsey will give the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Thurs., Aug. 16, in the Amphitheater as part of Week Eight’s theme, “The Forgotten: History and Memory in the 21st Century.”

During her lecture, Rumsey will touch both on the fundamentals of memory and the artificial memory humans have created.

“As far as we know, no other species records and accumulates information and knowledge the way we do,” Rumsey said. “It’s actually one of the keys to our success as a species. Why we are spread across the planet is because we actually can accumulate knowledge and share it with other generations — and now with digital, across time and space.”

Now with social media and the 24-hour news cycle, people have been exposed to an information overload, but Rumsey said the world experienced a similar flood of information in the 1800s. When people created the technology to record sound, they couldn’t just hold up an LP and be able to hear what was on the disc; they needed a machine. The same goes for digital memory, Rumsey said.

The concept behind digital archiving is that there is an endless realm in which people can save information, but it’s difficult to know long-term value in the digital era, she said.

Now, Rumsey said, there is one question that is repeatedly asked: What should we save?

“There is very, very little surprises and hard lessons in the digital realm that humans have not experienced before,” Rumsey said. “We’ve always been able to solve the problems of how to manage too much information, how to organize it in such a way that we can find it and that, like today and the past, sometimes we invent technologies to solve one problem, then create an entirely new set of problems that we hadn’t anticipated.”

Rumsey spent time in Soviet-era Russia researching the country during the 17th century. She encountered some documents that had been made inaccessible by the Soviet government, and said it hadn’t occurred to her that the political happenings of tsarist Russia could warrant censorship during the Soviet era.

Rumsey knew it was routine for people in charge of totalitarian regimes, like that in Soviet Russia, to erase people in photographs or censor documents. That’s how leaders controlled the population. Even when people tamper with documents, that gives insight into society of the time, Rumsey said.

With digital memory, she said it’s harder to discern what has been manipulated, but that’s only because the technology to figure it out hasn’t been developed yet.

“It’s not as if this hasn’t happened before. People have solved these problems before,” Rumsey said. “People used to forge papers all the time until it became just a matter of vital importance to the state and other people that forgeries be detected. It will be the case with digital.”

Rumsey said there is no right answer to what people should forget or remember in the digital age because memories change.

“How we choose to remember people is fluid. It will change with time, and we are in charge of it. It’s we who remember,” Rumsey said. “We think our machines remember for us, but we are the ones who remember things. Machines don’t erase the past; humans erase the past, and they do it all the time.”

On May 4, 1970, Thomas Grace was attending classes at Kent State University. Anti-war protests were scheduled to continue on the campus for the fourth day in response to the United States’ invasion of Cambodia.

Grace was asked not to attend by his then-girlfriend, whose brother had died in Vietnam. Grace wasn’t going to go to the protests that afternoon until someone in his class stood up and encouraged everyone to attend. Grace had been active in the anti-war movement up to this point, so why should he back off now?

The walk to the Commons, the usual gathering place for protests on campus, was only five minutes. Within minutes of Grace’s arrival, the National Guard announced that everyone needed to disperse. Grace found his roommates, and stood his ground. That’s when the tear gas was
released.

The National Guard herded the activists up and down one of the hills to the practice football field. Students started shouting and throwing rocks at the National Guardsmen. Grace was about 200 feet away when he heard it.

“You could hear an M-1 rifle being shot,” Grace said.

Grace was knocked off his feet. He had been shot in his left heel. He tried to sit up to assess the injuries, but his roommate, who was about 20 feet away from him, told him to stay down as bullets rained over them.

Four people died that day, nine more were injured, and Grace has dedicated his life to telling the history related to the incident.

Grace was a key historian and screenwriter for the documentary film “Fire in the Heartland: Kent State, May 4, and Student Protest in America,” which will be shown at 2:45 p.m. Wed., Aug. 15, at the Chautauqua Cinema. After the screening, there will be a panel discussion in which Grace will speak.

At 10:45 a.m. Wed., Aug. 15, Kent State President Beverly Warren will present the morning lecture, incorporating the Week Eight theme, “The Forgotten: History and Memory in the 21st Century.” Warren’s address will be the most important speech given by a Kent State president since the rallies in 1970, Grace said.

“For the first 20 years, (Kent State administrators) did everything to bury (the memory of the shootings),” Grace said, “and now they have moved toward embracing it.”

“Fire in the Heartland” acts a “companion film” to Grace’s book, Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties. Instead of setting the film on the day of the Kent State shooting, the movie and the book go back to the origins of protesting at the university, leading up to the events of May 4, 1970.

In the film, Grace provides personal testimony, as well as the history behind student activism at the university.

Grace didn’t want to write a memoir about the Kent State shooting, so he decided to talk about the political repercussions of the events and provide background on the history of protesting. Grace will speak about his book at 1 p.m. Wed. Aug. 15, in Smith Memorial Library.

The movie includes more than 20 voices of people who lived through that era and participated in the social and political movements of the ’60s and ’70s.

Grace and director Daniel Miller have screened “Fire in the Heartland” in many locations. Journalist Carl Francis Penders was doing a story about Kent State when he met Grace. Penders and Grace are both from Buffalo, and Penders helped screen the film at Burchfield Penney Art Center.

Penders said “Fire in the Heartland” is a film that fits with Chautauqua, which is why he and Grace decided to screen the movie here.

“It fits the theme of the week,” Penders said, “and it feels like the kind of thing that fits Chautauqua.”