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The Talkies Revolution: How Sound Changed the Movies
Blood, Virtue and Ambition: The French Revolution as Seen Through Individual Lives Who Lived It
Blood, Virtue and Ambition: The French Revolution as Seen Through Individual Lives Who Lived It
- Dates: Mondays, January 5, 12, 19 & 26
- Time: 1pm - 2:00 pm ET
- In this 4-lecture series, we will examine the new cinematic possibilities that opened up with the arrival of “The Jazz Singer” and talkies beginning in 1927. Sound placed revolutionary demands on directors, writers and actors and, indeed, on whole studios. Mega-stars such as John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Ramon Navarro and Buster Keaton each faced unique challenges. Sound not only transformed existing genres such as comedies and dramas but opened up new cinematic possibilities for animated film and horror, and led to new forms such as the musical and the screwball comedy. We will explore some of the key figures of the 1930s who were uniquely able to take advantage of the new medium including Mae West, Will Rogers, Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich, Edward G. Robinson, Frank Capra and many others.
Blood, Virtue and Ambition: The French Revolution as Seen Through Individual Lives Who Lived It
Blood, Virtue and Ambition: The French Revolution as Seen Through Individual Lives Who Lived It
Blood, Virtue and Ambition: The French Revolution as Seen Through Individual Lives Who Lived It
- Dates: Fridays, January 9, 16, 23 & 30
- Time: 10:30 - Noon ET
- This set of four lectures will examine the French Revolution through the lives of a broad range of its most prominent and/or revealing figures. These include Queen Marie Antoinette, Baron Turgot, high profile revolutionaries such as the Abbé Sieyès, Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, the Marquis de Lafayette, Charlotte Corday, Olympe de Gouges, and Maximillian Robespierre, and many lesser known people whose lives showcase the revolution in all of its complexity, reforming zeal, brutality, and world-altering dynamism.
Building Dixie: Race, Class, and Culture in the Antebellum South, 1789-1850
Borders, Cartels, and Conflict: The New American Imperatives in Latin America
Borders, Cartels, and Conflict: The New American Imperatives in Latin America
- Dates: Mondays, January 5, 12, 19 & 26
- Time: 10:30 - Noon ET
- This set of four lectures examines the complex lives and relationships that defined the plantation economy of the American south. A world filled with slaves and free Blacks, plantation owners and mistresses, poor white men and women, a world that starkly defied later images of quiet contentment, mint juleps and magnolias. Instead, what emerges is a fraught social landscape marked by racial and class tension and resistance as well as accommodation and adaptation in service to survival. From Charleston to Mobile to New Orleans, white southerners created a “frontier” civilization that selectively embraced American social and political traditions – even as they formed conventions uniquely tailored for the region and its economy.
Borders, Cartels, and Conflict: The New American Imperatives in Latin America
Borders, Cartels, and Conflict: The New American Imperatives in Latin America
Borders, Cartels, and Conflict: The New American Imperatives in Latin America
- Dates: Thursdays, January 8, 15, 22 & 29
- Time: 10:30 - Noon ET
- In this time where the US has threatened Venezuela with war, this set of 4 lectures will examine America’s complex relationship with Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Mexico, Honduras and Columbia among others. We will explore the US’s ever-changing “War on Drugs,” growing concerns about fentanyl, and how drug trafficking has transformed national and regional economies and communities. We will also examine America’s other interests in the region and how they have shaped the US’s policy decisions concerning oil, war, interdiction, arrests of heads of state and pardons for traffickers in recent years.