Beacon Salon Speaker Series: Recent Episodes
Beacon Salon Speaker Series
The Beacon Salon Speaker Series at Beacon College in Leesburg, Fla. is the school’s flagship community education outreach program. The Speaker Series brings in speakers, educators, authors, and entertainers from Florida and around the country to educate, edify, and entertain by exploring Florida history, waxing poetic, delving into popular culture, and clenching the political third rail. It borrows its name and channels its ethos from the Parisian salons of the Enlightenment. Its goal: uplift the community, spark engagement and sow seeds of conversation. Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/beaconsalonspeakerseries/support
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King examines injustice, racial bigotry, and corrupting power through the lens of two monstrous cases in Lake County in the late 1940s and 1950s connected only by a central figure, infamous Lake County Sheriff Willis V. McCall, in his presentation “Bedeviling Confluence: Injustice and Willis McCall through the Prism of ‘Devil in the Grove’ and ‘Beneath a Ruthless Sun.’”
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“Protecting the Home Front: Women in Civil Defense During the 1950s”
From senior roles in the federal government to positions at the state level, to local volunteers, Michael Scheibach chronicles how women of all ages and backgrounds played an essential role in civil defense during the 1950s and early 1960s — an era in which many believed in the probability of an atomic attack by the Soviet Union.
About Michael Scheibach:
Michael Scheibach, Ph.D., is an independent scholar specializing in the history of the early Cold War from 1945 through the 1960s. He is the author of four books, including “Atomic Narratives and American Youth: Coming of Age with the Atom, 1945-1955,” “Atomics in the Classroom: Teaching the Bomb in the Early Postwar Era,” “Protecting the Home Front: Women in Civil Defense in the Early Cold War,” and “Atomic Alert! The Atomic Bomb and ‘The Show That May Save Your Life’.” He is also the editor of “In Case Atom Bombs Fall”: An Anthology of Governmental Explanations, Instructions and Warnings from the 1940s to the 1960s.” Scheibach received his doctorate in American studies from the University of Kansas. He has more than 20 years’ experience as an adjunct professor and currently teaches at the University of Miami’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. He has made numerous presentations on the early cold war and atomic age at conferences and other venues. He lives in Miami, Florida.
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Dr. Caren Neile mines her book, “Only in Florida: Why the Manatee Crossed the Road,” a compilation of stories collected throughout Florida with the goal of connecting neighbors to neighbors and to the areas in which they live, to deliver a performance/lecture that includes readings and retellings from the book, as well as an introduction to her philosophy of community storytelling and invaluable how-tos to bring storytelling into listeners’ own lives.
Caren S. Neile, Ph.D., has taught storytelling studies for the School of Communication & Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University since 2001. A performance storyteller, she hosts The Public Storyteller on public radio WLRN, as well as storytelling events throughout the state. Neile’s publications include the book “Florida Lore” (History Press) and a chapter in the “Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies,” and she helped found the academic journal Storytelling, Self, Society (Wayne State). Her latest book is “Only in Florida” (History Press). A speaker for Florida Humanities, she chaired the National Storytelling Network and was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Vienna and Jerusalem and Peace Corps volunteer.
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Ben Beard explores the history of the Deep South on screen, beginning with silent cinema and ending in the streaming era, from President Wilson to President Trump, from musical to comedy to horror to crime to melodrama. His idiosyncratic presentation — part cultural history, part film criticism, part memoir — journeys through genres and eras, issues and regions, smash blockbusters, and micro-budget indies to explore America’s past and troubled present, seen through Hollywood’s distorting lens.
Ben Beard is a writer and librarian. He is the co-author of “This Day in Civil Rights History,” the author of “Muhammad Ali: The Greatest” and “King Midas in Reverse,” and the author of a forthcoming biography of filmmaker Joseph H. Lewis, “I Told You I Was No Good.” In the 2000s, Beard reviewed movies and wrote features for INsite magazine, King Kudzu, and Filmmonthly.com, where he also worked as an editor. Beard, a native of Georgia who spent his formative years in the Florida Panhandle and Alabama, currently lives in Chicago.
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How do intelligent people come to believe odd things? How do they maintain beliefs when facts show they aren’t true? Taking a lesson from history, Lyn Millner will tell the story of the Koreshans, a group of utopians who believed that Earth is hollow and we live inside. Their story is from a time in America when people held fast to beliefs that didn’t conform —not unlike today. Through this story, and with modern-day lessons of news literacy, you’ll understand what keeps people in filter bubbles and echo chambers — and how to get free.
About Lyn Millner:
Lyn Millner is the author of “The Allure of Immortality: An American Cult, a Florida Swamp, and a Renegade Prophet,” selected by the Wall Street Journal as one of its top five books on cults. Her radio stories and essays have been broadcast on National Public Radio, and her print work has appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, Oxford American, the Hollywood Reporter, and Boca Raton magazine. Millner is a professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, where she founded the BA in Journalism. She is an expert in news literacy, writing and cults.
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Dirty Work tells the story of pilot Richard Vaux whose employer, Trans World Airlines wants him and a crew to sneak into Beirut, Lebanon, at the height of a civil war, to reclaim an airplane hijacked by Palestinian terrorists. About Brad Kuhn Brad Kuhn is the author of 10 books including four of his own and six as a ghostwriter. A former newspaper reporter, Kuhn’s first novel Mr. Bones, won a Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association. He is a founding director of The Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence Project of Orlando and currently resides in Jacksonville, with his wife, the writer Darlyn Finch Kuhn. Together they run the Jax by Jax Literary Arts Festival, an annual celebration of writers and writing in Duval County.
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“Recollections of an Editorial Cartoonist” This talk examines what goes into editorial cartooning and the challenges by reviewing Stein’s published work.
About Glenn “Marty” Stein
Glenn “Marty” Stein served as an editorial cartoonist/ illustrator at the Orlando Business Journal, The Apopka Chief, and the Spanish-language newspaper La Prensa, where he also wrote and drew his original comic strip “El Oasis.”
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In celebrating the centennial of the Negro Baseball Leagues, this talk is based on Byron Motley's father’s co-authored memoir, “Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants & Stars: True Tales of Breaking Barriers, Umpiring Baseball Legends, and Wild Adventures in the Negro Leagues.”
This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/beaconsalonspeakerseries/support