A Blog on McConnell Center Life

 By Sydney Finley   “We Should All be Feminists” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:   https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_we_should_all_be_feminists?language= en   “Culture does not make people. People make culture .”  For as long as I can remember, my being has been predetermined by my “culture.” The assumptions and predispositions that the world has placed upon me continue to change the way in which strangers and acquaintances alike perceive my character and personality. Words such as “sassy” and “spunky” have been used to describe me, when in actuality, I am simply just willing to speak what comes across my mind if I have something I want to say.  In We Should All be Feminists , award-winning author and storyteller Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks about the microaggressions that she has experienced as a woman who grew up in N igeria. In a culture that refused to accept or view women as equal to men, Adichie recounts several instances in h...

By Noah Tillery   An over-the-top yet non-satirical short story of what it has been to meet new people in Louisville, Kentucky, being from Central Appalachia.  “Hello!” the Young Man said to the Young Girl sitting on his couch. He had yet to meet her but had heard from a mutual friend that she was quite the company to have. “What’s your name?” The Young Girl smiled politely as one does when meeting a stranger. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Kadence.” “It’s a pleasure,” the Young Man said, and he held his hand out to shake. He put it down, just as naturally, when Kadence looked uncomfortable. “So where’re you from, Kadence? I overheard you said you weren’t from Louisville, a while ago.” Kadence made a face. She was offended. “I’m sorry, what did you call me?” “Kadence?” The Young Man answered. The mutual friend had come and sat on the couch between the two. “That’s what you said, right?” “Oh, yes. Sorry, I couldn’t understand you.” “It’s the country-boy accent,” the mutual friend said, s...

 By Thomas Hulse   On the first day of class, a professor asks her students: “Who is here to get a degree so  that they can get a good job?” Invariably, 95% of the class raises their hand, hopeful eyes towards their well-paying future. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. All elders hope that the next generation can live more comfortably than themselves by adopting better jobs. In this sense, college acts as a place of certification. Regardless of whether one wants to become a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, an engineer, or a teacher, the proper qualifications must all be obtained from a college education. At the end of the undergraduate experience is a red stamp certifying that student to higher education or the job market. Doubtless, there is great utility in this. Professional careers absolutely need those qualifications, and many might reasonably be suspicious of people without such a degree.  But notice the difference between this modern education and the goals of...

 By Tanner Morrow   I am willing to guarantee you have spent at least half an hour of life doing the activity that I have commanded you to undertake in the title of this post. The opportunity has invariably presented itself to almost everyone who has received any type of education, whether at a local museum, writing a paper, or through a book in your local library. However, I am also willing to guarantee that unless you are a distinguished historian of Kentucky history like McConnell Center Fellow John Kleber, author of the Kentucky Encyclopedia, you have not spent enough time doing so. Spurred by a project for a class on Urban Studies this semester, I was recently thrust into the complexities of the surprisingly dramatic backstories of the sleepy land that I was raised in. Yet, even after combing through hours of websites, and even purchasing a few books at a local drugstore, I have hardly broken the surface of the stories of my native county. Regardless, in hopes of inspirin...

By Claire Harmon   On the wall of my bedroom, I have dozens of postcards from across the world. Most of my postcards are thrifted, found in antique stores or between the pages of library books. I love getting a glimpse into someone else’s life, seeing where they went and who they deemed important enough to write to. Some of my postcards are sent from exotic locations, while others are from familiar places. They all hold a tiny piece of history, a microscopic look at the life of someone I’ll never know who visited places I’ve never seen.  I suppose I live vicariously through some of my postcards, but I also love the mundane ones featuring weekend trips to small towns or pictures of dingy motel rooms and descriptions of bad weather or car troubles. I just love seeing the more intimate sides of people’s lives, especially those before my time.  Over the years, though, I’ve found that I love more than just postcards. Most of the items in my room are thrifted from estate sales,...

 By Abigail Cheek   I started my company when I was seventeen years old. It began the summer after my  junior year of high school when I attended the Kentucky Governor’s School for Entrepreneurs  (GSE.) GSE is a residential summer program where high school students aim to create a solution to a problem, then take their idea and create a product with a business model. While these business models don’t typically move forward after the three-week program my team’s idea has a rather unique success story.   The problem we chose to solve was accidental overdose, tens of thousands of kids visit  ER’s across the nation every year after accidentally ingesting medications. After discovering that most of these occur when loose pills get lost around people's homes for children to find,  we created our solution, DoseDEFENSE. DoseDEFENSE is a pill bottle insert that limits pill output to just one at a time, allowing better control over the dispensing of me...

By Jakob Sherrard   The American political experience has been chaotic over the past year. With a failed insurrection on the U.S. Capitol Building, wide distrust in basic American political institutions, and dangerous extremism on both sides of the aisle, the politically salient citizen has a plethora of issues that they should be concerned with. One of the most important conversations that I believe has gone largely unnoticed during the past year has been the conversation that we’ve been having about our country’s history. The Trump Administration’s 1776 Commission painted a vastly different picture of American history than the New York Times’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1619 Project. While I take particular issues with both portrayals of America’s history, the fact that we, as a people, have decided to confront and reflect on our history has made it clear just how fundamentally different our views have become.  If we are unable to agree on something as fundamental as a starting ...

 By Allison Boarman   I’ve always been so sure of what I wanted to do with my life. As soon as I graduated high school, I would go on to graduate college, and then to graduate law school and get a career in that field. Then a pandemic hit and made me question a lot of things. Especially my future plans. Since I’ve been social distancing for almost a year now, a lot has changed, both in my personal life and all over the world. I lost family members during that time, and by the end of 2020, I was looking at my own life so much more carefully. I started looking into more and more ways that I could grow as a person, and I am still growing every day. While I was in this period of rethinking my plans, the movie Soul came out. It’s not every day that a Disney movie makes me think that hard about such a deep topic, but the movie has stuck with me ever since. In the movie, the main character dies immediately after getting his absolute dream job. While trying to get back to Earth to get...

 By Julia Blackburn   Last weekend I had the opportunity to go to Frankfort, my hometown, to visit my family. However, as it turned out, on Saturday both of my parents and younger sister were busy and none of my childhood friends were visiting home from college. Immediately, I made the deadset decision on who I would spend my day with- my grandma. Despite our daily texts to one another, it had been several weeks since I had seen her and she had recently sent me a message suggesting we make a craft incorporating old family heirlooms, specifically antique jewelry, whenever the chance came up. I figured what better to do than this craft she had so excitedly mentioned weeks before. It sounded interesting and there certainly wasn’t much else to do amid the pandemic and biting cold weather. When I arrived at her house, she had already pulled several cardboard boxes from her attic. I sat in the floor, beginning to open the boxes, while she continued to poke around in every closet and...

By Emma Lawson (Class of 2021)  During the 2019 Session of the Kentucky General Assembly, I was fortunate to be a part of the University of Louisville Frankfort Legislative Internship Program sponsored by the department of political science. This program provided me with a unique opportunity to be connected with Kentucky politics and our governmental processes through on-site connections (two days a week in Frankfort) and an academic experience that brings what I am learning in the classroom as a student of political science to life. While I particularly enjoyed networking with our legislators and LRC staff, I appreciated the in-depth and candid review of our Commonwealth’s government. I have always had a passion for education policy being a graduate of the Kentucky public education system myself.  During my time at the Capitol, I focused primarily on education and agriculture policy, but one particular bill I followed was Senate Bill 175. I found that this particular bi...

 By Will Randolph   2020 was the year I distanced myself from politics. This was not a dramatic change (I had been drifting away, so to speak, for a few years), but it was an important one, for me at least. I finally stopped checking Twitter, and I only got on Facebook once every few days. Throughout the entire year, politics and the news (which is almost entirely politics these days) were distant, blurry images to me, clouded out by more prescient and distinct visions of quality time with family, with the outdoors, and with good books.  That’s not to say that I removed myself from the political going-ons of the world entirely. I still read ‘the news,’ but instead of receiving instant notification from the simmering cesspit of hot-takes that is the social network, I turned to older, more moderated mediums of media-consumption, such as daily newsletters and monthly magazines and journals. If you ever want to know what’s going on in the world without feeling irrationally an...

FOR YOUR BOOKSHELF | William Shakespeare’s   The  Tragedy of Julius Caesar (Focus, 2018) We know that Shakespeare (1564-1616) was a superb storyteller. What might surprise you, however, is that he was a keen student of history and an astute political thinker. Indeed, of Shakespeare’s thirty-eight plays, fifteen were historically situated in either Greece, Rome or England. Further, the main protagonists of those plays were historical figures and primarily leaders of their respective realms, such as Pericles or Richard II. But perhaps no play better demonstrates Shakespeare’s careful study of history and politics than  The Tragedy of Julius Caesar . The Tragedy of Julius Caesar  was first performed in 1599. It is one of Shakespeare’s four Roman plays that depict Rome and its leadership. Along with  Coriolanus  and  Antony and Cleopatra , these three plays encapsulate the transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire.  Julius Caesar  depicts t...