UPCOMING SERIES

SELECT YOUR COURSES AND REGISTER

Dates: Thursdays, Sept 10, 17, 24 and Oct 1
Time: 10:30 - Noon ET
What exactly is SOCIALISM in the 21st century? America is currently seeing a resurgence in interest in democratic socialism. How is it different from communism? This set of four lectures explores the historic evolution of two distinct but related forms of socialism: democratic socialism and socialism’s radical variant, communism. We will focus largely on how socialist theory was turned into practice in the 20th century, primarily in Europe—but we will also reference other cases in China, Cuba, and elsewhere. Indeed, one of the key aspects we will explore is how democratic socialism emerged in part as a reaction against communism in England, France, Scandinavia, and elsewhere in the mid-20th century. We will study the strengths and weaknesses of the systems they created and look clearly at their unsteady status here in the 21st century. We will examine the rise and fall of communist-oriented states such as the USSR, Yugoslavia, and Albania, look at the roots of their failures, and consider their legacies in those states. Finally, we will study how Europeans today view their political and economic systems, the challenges they face, and current trends in voting, youth employment, immigration, and general public pessimism that have shaped European politics today.

Dates: Fridays, September 4, 11, 18, and 25
Time: 10:30 - Noon ET
This set of four lectures explores the historical fundamentals of European imperialism from the 16th through the early 19th centuries. From a European history point of view, we will examine the legacies of Spanish and Portuguese colonization and the rise of the Dutch, British, and French empires, whose merchants, navies, settlers, and chartered companies challenged Iberian dominance. Particular attention will be given to the East India Companies, the struggle for India, the colonization of North America and the Caribbean, and the imperial wars of the 17th and 18th centuries. We will also explore the economic machinery of empire: mercantilism, plantation agriculture, global trade, chartered corporations, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Sugar, tobacco, silver, spices, textiles, and enslaved labor created an increasingly interconnected global economy, generating enormous wealth while imposing devastating human costs. Finally, we will examine how Indigenous Americans, Africans, Indians, and Asians resisted, accommodated, and adapted to European expansion. We will explore how slavery, disease, warfare, migration, religious conversion, and cultural exchange transformed Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America—and how this first age of empire helped create the economic, political, and cultural foundations of the modern world. Part Two on 19th century European imperialism will be in October.

Dates: Mondays, September 8, 14, 21 and 28
Time: 1:00 - 2:30PM ET
Hollywood entered the 1950s with a well-established idea of what a movie star should be. Leading men such as Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, and James Stewart represented an older tradition of screen acting—controlled, confident, polished, and unmistakably larger than life. But during the 1950s, that tradition was challenged by a remarkable new generation of actors. Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Shelley Winters, Paul Newman and others brought a new emotional intensity and psychological vulnerability to the screen. Influenced by Method acting and the Actors Studio, they mumbled, hesitated, exploded in anger, exposed their insecurities, and transformed American ideas about masculinity and screen performance. But the revolution extended far beyond acting technique. As the old studio system weakened, stars increasingly escaped long-term contracts, chose their own projects, demanded profit participation, and even formed their own production companies. Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn Monroe helped transform the actor from a studio employee into an independent creative and economic force. This lecture explores how the 1950s revolutionized both what movie stars looked like on the screen and how much power they possessed behind it—creating a new model of acting, stardom, and celebrity that would shape Hollywood for generations.

Dates: Mondays, September 8, 14, 21 and 28
Time: 10:30 - Noon ET
This four-part lecture series explores the turbulent struggle over race, citizenship, and national reunion that followed the U.S. Civil War. We begin with the disastrous presidency of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, whose approach to the defeated South threatened to create a system of “slavery light,” and whose battles with Congress produced the nation’s first impeachment of a sitting president. We will examine the remarkable achievements—and profound failures—of Reconstruction, as well as the extraordinary efforts of four million freedpeople to build families, schools, churches, businesses, and political power in the postwar South. We will then turn to the complex and often contradictory racial policies of the Grant administration, examining its treatment of both Black Americans and Native peoples. Finally, we will explore the revolutionary constitutional transformation embodied in the 14th Amendment—and the tragic counterrevolution that followed, as white supremacy was rebuilt through violence, disfranchisement, Jim Crow, and segregation, culminating in the Supreme Court’s endorsement of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Dates: Thursdays, Sept 3, 10, 17 and 24
Time: 1:00 - 2:30pm ET
For nearly two centuries, from 1095 to 1291, the lands of the eastern Mediterranean became the battleground for one of history’s most dramatic encounters between the Christian and Muslim worlds. This four-part lecture series explores the Crusading Era from both sides of that great divide, examining the ambitions, fears, faith, politics, and personalities that drove Europeans and Muslims into repeated conflict. We will follow the extraordinary story from Pope Urban II’s call for the First Crusade and the bloody capture of Jerusalem through the rise of the Crusader States, the Muslim resurgence under leaders such as Zengi, Nur al-Din, and Saladin, and the great later crusades of Richard the Lionheart and Louis IX. But this was more than a story of battles and religious fanaticism. We will explore two complex civilizations confronting—and often misunderstanding—one another, while also trading, negotiating, borrowing, and sometimes living side by side. Finally, we will examine the collapse of the Crusader presence in the Holy Land, culminating in the fall of Acre in 1291, and ask what two centuries of crusading meant for both Christian Europe and the Islamic world—and what legacy this remarkable encounter left behind.