We will travel back in time to the dawn of film in Japan and travel to the present while exploring the cultural, historical, technical, and sociological factors behind the intriguing, dynamic, and changing world of Japanese cinema – both live action and “anime,” or animation. We will also survey the topic in terms of cinema being one of the most well-known of Japan's cultural exports and a major part of that country's rise as a cultural world power - especially within the last fifty years.

Located between the Alps and the Mediterranean Sea, there are eight provinces in Northern Italy, Valle d'Aosta, Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Trentino-Alto Adige and Fruili Venezia - Giulia For centuries they have been strategically positioned along the major trade routes that link the Mediterranean Sea with Northern Europe. Trade remained of vital importance to the cities of Northern Italy, not only for the large communities, Milan, Venice, Bologna and Genoa but also numerous smaller towns and villages. The accumulation of wealth in this region resulted in a phenomenal flowering of the arts. Europe’s best painters, sculptors, architects, writers and poets circulated among the Northern Italian courts, leaving behind their masterpieces. Explore their creations, but also take time to marvel at the scenery, a region of towering snowcapped mountains, alpine forests and crystal-clear lakes and rivers. Venture off the tourist paths and discover the secrets of Northern Italy.

When many of us in the West think of Japan, we often visualize such disparate mental images as the urban tech jungle of the Akihabara District of Tokyo side by side with more tradition-bound images of castle-towns and Shinto festivals relating to the past. This course will set these images into proper historical context and tell the epic 150-year story of warriors, artists, philosophers, generals, peasant-soldiers, business men, and regular men and women, who created the modern Japanese nation of today. The ideas and political, cultural, and geo-political predicaments that such people faced and the outcome of the controversies, upheavals, and transformations of which they were also a part provide the backdrop for a look at the ways in which their lives fashioned a new nation and a different, non-Western, version of what it means to be "modern." Through lecture and discussion and through examination of documentary and audio-visual sources we will discover how both change and continuity have catapulted Japan, within the last century and a half, from a comparatively peripheral player in Asian or world geopolitics to one of the world's largest economies and a nation with a surprisingly influential and increasingly exportable "soft-culture" in the bargain.

Our timeline will border the two great Queens - the Elizabethan Age to the crowning of Queen Victoria. Examine the civil wars between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, the Jacobites, and their end at Culloden. Delight in the deep cultural background woven through the class, including Shakespeare, Dafoe and Swift. Explore the Restoration and the Enlightenment. Probe into the conquest of the New World and how discoveries will rock the foundations of English corporate greed. Learn about the origins of the Puritans and the Industrial Age.

The First World War was not merely a story of trenches, blimps, and poison gas, but also one of far-flung struggles in remote colonial out-posts, crisis and change in non-European empires that traced their roots back over a thousand or more years, and espionage and technological change that encircled the globe. We will discuss some of the lesser-explored campaigns, technologies, personalities, combatants, of the "Great War" while coming to a better understanding as to why we remember that war - and all history - as we do.

What has the Pandemic done to our Mental Health? What are so-called Mental Illnesses? And why are there so many stigmas behind these conditions? As seniors, many of us have become more isolated. We humans are social creatures. The isolation and social distancing called for under the Pandemic is resulting in depression and other conditions. Yet, because of the stigmas connected to mental problems, we do not talk about it. We need to talk about it and what measures can be taken to help us.