Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Course of the Appalachian Trail,” on the fascinating past and uncertain future of a beloved wilderness trail and national park, with Mills Kelly, emeritus professor of history at George Mason University and author of A Hiker’s History of the Appalachian Trail.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-appalachian-trail]

For more than 100 years the Appalachian Trail has provided opportunities to spend anywhere from a few hours to six months traversing the Appalachian Mountains. Stretching more than 2,000 miles across 14 states, from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, it ranks among the most iconic long-distance hiking trails in the world. It and its associated national park are annually visited by nearly 17 million.

Gear up to perhaps spend some time on the trail yourself by spending an evening with Mills Kelly, an expert on all things Appalachian Trail and the author of two books and numerous articles on the trail’s history.

We’ll start our scholarly journey by looking at the trail’s origins. First proposed by Benton MacKaye, a forester, in 1921 as a place for urban workers to get some fresh air and sunshine, the trail took 16 years to scout, map, and carve out of the mountains. The first version was woven together mostly from abandoned mountain roads, Indigenous people's paths, and highways.

Drawing on research in archives up and down the length of the trail, Professor Kelly will show us archival photographs and video clips spread across the decades of the trail’s history, and he'll let the voices of hikers themselves describe how the experience of hiking has changed over the decades. You’ll learn what hikers ate before the advent of freeze-dried backpacker meals and when and why thru-hiking became a thing. More profoundly, we’ll examine how innovations in gear changed the experiences of women on the trail, and how changing attitudes about race transformed the hiking community.

Professor Kelly will describe how the trail is maintained entirely by 33 volunteer clubs. Looking ahead, he’ll discuss how the trail’s long-term health as a recreational resource is being affected by declining federal support, overuse in some sections, and climate change. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: A 1928 photo of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club taking a break from its work (National Park Service / Public Domain).

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Power of Cults,” on how cults operate, recruit members, and get people to stay, with Mariah Wilkerson, adjunct professor of psychology at George Mason University.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-power-of-cults ]

Most people believe that they’d never join a cult, yet cults have existed for thousands of years and continue to pop up all over the world.
What makes people join cults and why is it so hard to leave them? Hear these and other questions about cults tackled by Mariah Wilkerson, a social psychologist with a deep interest in them.

Dr. Wilkerson will take you inside the psychology of cults, both demystifying them and busting common myths about them.

She’ll describe how cults grab people's attention by co-opting religious doctrine or messaging around current social issues. Once people are drawn in, cults use simple, yet powerful, social psychological techniques to keep them from leaving, to take money or other resources away from them, and to even pressure them to commit horrendous crimes.

We’ll look at how cults recruit through positive reinforcement, love bombing, and charismatic leadership, and then control through cognitive dissonance and through deindividuation—the shedding of self-awareness and personal identity.

You’ll learn how cults cause people to undergo dramatic psychological changes that alter how they make sense of the world and interact with others. Dr. Wilkerson will shed light on why leaving a cult can be so difficult as well as what happens to someone psychologically once that person is out. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Members of the Rajneesh movement at a 1981 festival. (Photo by Marcel Antonisse / Dutch National Archives / Creative Commons.)

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Green Knight and Medieval Yule,” a look at the Arthurian holiday legend and pre-Christian belief in “green men,” with Larissa “Kat” Tracy, with Larissa “Kat” Tracy, professor of medieval literature and author of several books on the Middle Ages.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-green-knight-yule ]

The fourteenth-century Arthurian tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight captures the festive spirit of the Christmas season in a distinctly dramatic way, with the arrival at the court of King Arthur of a striking green visitor with holly branch in one hand and an ax in the other. Told in verse form, it’s a story full of references to holiday festivities, hunts, and romantic intrigue, and it’s rooted both in Christianity and pre-Christian ideas of green men with plant features.

Bring some added magic to your holiday season by coming to Baltimore's Guilford Hall for a talk that will immerse you in the strange tale of the Green Knight and the beliefs and symbols it draws upon.

Dr. Larissa Tracy, a medievalist who has extensively researched Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, will discuss how the poem set at Yuletide traces the pre-Christian calendar as Gawain waits a year and a day to face his Otherworldly opponent at the mysterious Green Chapel.

To provide broader cultural context, she’ll discuss how the image of the Green Knight has its roots in the Green Man, a pre-Christian figure that co-existed with Christianity—as seen in the dozens of examples carved into the stonework of Rosslyn Chapel, outside of Edinburgh, Scotland. Scholars have wondered at the seemingly contradictory presence of these images in a Christian site, but the Green Man is not at odds with medieval Christianity. It often figures as a facet of it—an embodiment of similar religious sentiments that intertwined over the centuries.

Whether you are a fan of Arthurian legends, enjoyed The Green Knight film released in 2020, or simply have an interest in how pagan nature beliefs live on in our culture, you’ll be glad you planted yourself down in the audience for this talk. Christmas trees and wreaths will wish they could be there. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: A Green Man in the woodwork of England’s Lincoln Cathedral. Photo by Richard Croft / Creative Commons. (Green tint added.)