Posting Peace: Peace Corps Posters 1961–2022
This exhibition by ArtReach Gallery and the Museum of the Peace Corps Experience does more than trace marketing materials for the agency. In images and words — including works by renowned artists Peter Max and Shepard Fairey — it explores how we think about and talk about the idea of peace itself. And how we make it. Introduction by W. Sheldon Hurst Curator, ArtReach Gallery To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Peace Corps in 2011, Shepard Fairey created a poster that was widely distributed across the United States. The focus of the two figures is on the fruit of the...
Mapping a Life
A Life Unimagined: The Rewards of Mission-Driven Service in the Peace Corps and Beyond By Aaron S. Williams International Division, University of Wisconsin-Madison Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum Aaron S. Williams grew up in a segregated neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side in the 1950s. When he began studying geography at Chicago Teachers College, it was because the subject would offer him good career opportunities in the public schools. But, as he notes early in the memoir A Life Unimagined, “studying the geography of distant places around the world…the seeds once planted by my father of distant travels began to take root.” That’s not to...
Peace Corps Posters: In Portland, Oregon, ArtReach Gallery and the Museum of the Peace Corps Experience Host an Exhibit Spanning Six Decades
Posting Peace in Portland Peace Corps Posters 1961–2022 If you’re near Portland, Oregon, before October 16, be sure to visit ArtReach Gallery for the exhibit Posting Peace. Co-hosted by the Museum of the Peace Corps Experience, it features six decades of Peace Corps posters and maps. The exhibit and an accompanying book are curated by gallery director Sheldon Hurst. Collectors in Oregon, California, Illinois, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere contributed. The exhibit is also made possible thanks to First Congregational UCC, Portland Peace Corps Association, and NPCA. Special events connected to the exhibit take place in September and October. On September 18, former Peace...
He helped inspire the Peace Corps, then became a Volunteer: Douglas Kelley
In Memoriam: Douglas Kelley (1929–2022) By Catherine Gardner Photo courtesy the family of Douglas Kelley. Douglas Kelley holds a special place among those who helped inspire the Peace Corps. As a student at Berea College in Kentucky, he was committed to international cooperation and civil rights. In his senior year in college, in 1951, he began laying the groundwork for the International Development Placement Association, a program to promote humanitarian service by placing people internationally in jobs with indigenous organizations and governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Within three years the program had sent 18 young Americans abroad and had...
Juliane Heyman Escaped the Holocaust in Europe. In the U.S., She Became the First Woman to Serve as a Peace Corps Training Officer.
In Memoriam: Juliane Heyman (1925–2022) By Catherine Gardner Photo of Juliane Heyman courtesy Alana DeJoseph Born in the Free City of Danzig, now Gdansk, Poland, Julie Heyman was 12 years old when she fled her home due to increasing Nazi persecution. After months of being disconnected from her parents, she and her family were reunited in Brussels. They fled again when the Nazis invaded Belgium. In 1941, Heyman arrived in New York by freighter. She graduated from Barnard College before earning master’s degrees in international relations and library science from U.C. Berkeley. In what she calls one of her “most...
GALLERY: The Face of Iran Before …
A selection from Dennis Briskin’s photos from Iran in the late 1960s. His book was recognized with the Rowland Scherman Award for Best Photography Book by Peace Corps Writers. By NPCA Staff Dennis Briskin has published a collection of 60 photographs from the city of Arak and central Iran, where he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer 1967–69. Briskin writes that he calls the collection The Face of Iran Before… because these photographs were taken before “the Islamic Revolution took the country back to oppressive intolerance and brutality. Before oil wealth brought engines and electric motors to replace mule, camel and horsepower, sometimes even human power,...
Peace Corps Introduces an Ethical Storytelling Toolkit
A video and workbook to help Volunteers — and those who served years ago — think about storytelling. That includes intercultural dialogue and awareness of whose voices are at the center of a story. By NPCA Staff Image courtesy Peace Corps video Shortly before the first Volunteers began returning to service overseas in March 2022, the Peace Corps agency published an Ethical Storytelling Toolkit. How we tell our stories — and the voices at the center of these stories — have informed discussions inside and outside the Peace Corps in recent years. A focus on ethical storytelling was also an important...
He Started Out Selling Soap. And Went On to Found the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
Good Business The Talk, Fight, Win Way to Change the World By Bill Novelli Johns Hopkins University Press Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum Bill Novelli’s career includes serving as CEO of AARP, founding the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, leading the humanitarian organization CARE, and establishing global PR agency Porter Novelli. He teaches in the MBA program at McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. In Good Business, he offers lessons on life and leadership. He got his start in the corporate world with Unilever, selling soap. Next stop: a New York ad agency, where he sensed a kind of...
On the Plain of Snakes
In the mountains near Oaxaca, tales of El Norte: among weavers and migrant workers who left family and home for work across the border — and returned. Conversations from a time before COVID. By Paul Theroux On a sojourn in pursuit of understanding, writer Paul Theroux set out five years ago to travel the length of the U.S.–Mexico border. Then he drove his old Buick south, visiting villages along the back roads of Chiapas and, here, a mountain town near Oaxaca. An excerpt from On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey. In the small Zapotec-speaking town of San...
As a Child, She Fled Nazi Germany with Her Family. Two Decades After the War, She Was a Chemist Teaching at a University in Lagos with the Peace Corps.
My Years in the Early Peace Corps Nigeria, 1964–1965 (Volume 1) Ethiopia, 1965–1966 (Volume 2) By Sonja Krause Goodwin Hamilton Books Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum Sonja Krause Goodwin had already traveled far from home, earned a doctorate in chemistry, and worked for six years as a physical chemist when she joined the Peace Corps. Born in St. Gall, Switzerland, in August 1933, she had fled Nazi Germany with her family and resettled in Manhattan, where her parents opened a German bookstore. Sonja entered elementary school without speaking a word of English. Science is where she found her calling....