Braswell Memorial Library is proud to present “Let’s Talk About It” — a library discussion series sponsored by the North Carolina Humanities Council and the North Carolina Center for the Book. This Fall’s series is Picturing America: Making Tracks. The program starts August 27, 2019 and continues every-other Tuesday evening through October 22, 2019.
As the art and literature of the past 150 years reveal, the railway has had a profound impact on Americans sense of mobility and range of opportunities and on their thinking about time and distance. Picturing America: Making Tracks includes two nonfiction books, a selection of poems, a documentary film, and a novel.
The series opens with an historical account of the construction of the transcontinental railroad (Nothing Like It in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad), followed by a cluster of poems by nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets that offer views of trains and from trains. Rising from the Rails presents the stories of the black men – and ultimately women – whose work as Pullman porters not only shaped the quality of train travel in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century but also shaped the black middle class. The fourth work, Riding the Rails, is an award-winning film that tells the little-known story of the adolescents who became transients during the Great Depression. In the novel that closes the series (Housekeeping), the railroad exerts a powerful influence on the lives of the principal characters, who grow up near the tracks.
Picturing America: Making Tracks series dates are:
- August 27, 2019
- September 10, 2019
- September 24, 2019
- October 8, 2019
- October 22, 2019
The time for each date is 5:30-7:30pm.
Braswell Memorial Library is located at 727 N Grace Street, Rocky Mount, NC. The Library is online at Braswell-Library.org.
This project is made possible by funding from the North Carolina Humanities Council, a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. For further information, call the library at 252.442.1951 x.243.
Source: Brenda F. Thibodeau, Braswell Memorial Library
