In Spring / Summer 2012, The New York Botanical Garden will present a Garden-wide, multi-element exhibit, entitled "Medicinal Plants: Ancient Culture to Modern Medicine," which will demonstrate how plants have shaped the trajectory of medicine from a historical, humanities-based, and cross-cultural perspective. The exhibition, sited throughout the Garden’s 250-acre historic landscape, including the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, the Everett Children's Adventure Garden, and the permanent collection, will examine the relationship between medicine, people, and culture. Public programs and interpretative materials will help visitors make the connection between plants and nature, and the impact, via medicine, that plants have in their lives.
This is a request to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funds to support the production of Panama Canal, a two-hour special presentation of American Experience, for national broadcast on PBS. Focusing primarily on the decade-long American construction effort, it places the American Canal against the backdrop of the calamitous French effort that preceded and haunted it. It traces the roots of the American commitment to a trans-Isthmian canal in Theodore Roosevelt’s expansionist vision of American power, and shows how advances in public health, technology and engineering made it possible for the Americans to succeed where the French had failed. It examines how the leadership of the canal dealt with the challenges of recruiting and managing an immense and diverse work force, and explores the risks borne by workers building one of the planet's most remarkable structures in one of the most hostile environments on earth.