History & Current Events   

Our invaluable national parks have been called "America's best idea: because they preserve scenic wonders, protect endangered species, and interpret the history and diverse cultures of the nation. In 1916 Congress created the National Park Service (NPS) to protect these important resources. Mistakes have been made over the years, but the NPS has mostly done admirable work. This will be the emphasis of this course, but we also need to talk about the crisis the parks face in the current political climate. To save our parks, we need to educate ourselves.

This continuation of personal experiences from the instructor's participation in military, agricultural, and aerial firefighting aviation will include stories from the early days of flight to modern adventures of the 21st Century. You'll learn about airplanes and the characters who flew them, from Orville Wright to Burt Rutan (1903-2025).

The University Farm is a "living laboratory" for agricultural education, literacy, and research in Northern California. Join us for a guided tour showcasing our fields, labs, and hands-on learning spaces, including the new Agricultural Education Center and Jay Gilbert Farm Store. This state-of-the-art facility features modern classrooms, collaboration areas, and a student-run retail space with farm-produced goods. Explore how the farm supports experiential learning, community engagement, and the next generation of leaders in sustainable agriculture.

The University Farm is a "living laboratory" for agricultural education, literacy, and research in Northern California. Join us for a guided tour showcasing our fields, labs, and hands-on learning spaces, including the new Agricultural Education Center and Jay Gilbert Farm Store. This state-of-the-art facility features modern classrooms, collaboration areas, and a student-run retail space with farm-produced goods. Explore how the farm supports experiential learning, community engagement, and the next generation of leaders in sustainable agriculture.

This class includes short presentations (talks, slides, videos) followed by discussions on all sorts of current US and world topics involving history, government, policy, science, technology, literature, education, culture, and many more. Participants are welcome to make presentations, suggest topics, discuss, or just listen. Special guests are also welcome to present.

The Founding Fathers wrote a new, second Constitution for the new United States in 1787. Today its contents and meaning are only partially understood. Why did they propose the creation of a much stronger federal government? How did they compromise while writing it? What are its fundamental provisions? In this learning through conversation seminar, we will examine the events and essential documents surrounding the Constitutional Convention.

In this class, we will look at old tales, their tellers and illustrators, and transitions from spoken to written literature. Fairy tales, a.k.a. magic tales, are very old and both stable and shapeshifting. People have enjoyed them in cartoons, Victorian nurseries, peasant huts, and even courts like Versailles. The original, oral forms of magic tales are violent, coarse, and sexually explicit. Sometimes governments, priests, or schoolmarms compelled changes. Sometimes, writers. There will be nine tellers with at least nine tales sent to class members.

"Great Decisions" is the Foreign Policy Association's public education program about US foreign policy and global affairs. Currently, relations with other nations are undergoing great change; there are new winners and new losers. Old rules don't apply and the world is struggling to make new ones. However, the geographical map of natural resources, manufacturing, trade routes, and population centers has not changed. Join us for a thoughtful examination of the major issues and new directions in foreign policy.

This learning through conversation seminar will discuss Never Let Me Go, a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro. We meet an unusual group of children in an English boarding school, and follow them into young adulthood. Ishiguro slowly reveals to us how unusual these children are. In the process we visit several fundamental issues about what it means to be human, especially in the context of contemporary medical ethics.

This learning through conversation seminar will discuss Never Let Me Go, a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro. We meet an unusual group of children in an English boarding school, and follow them into young adulthood. Ishiguro slowly reveals to us how unusual these children are. In the process we visit several fundamental issues about what it means to be human, especially in the context of contemporary medical ethics.

Recent changes in US health insurance and health care policy, including vaccinations, implore us to learn all we can about health issues so we can be our own best advocate. This class will offer information concerning how pandemics and epidemics are declared at the local, state, national, and international level. We will examine diseases including bird flu, swine flu, monkeypox, West Nile virus, and COVID-19. We will discuss masking, social distancing, the Strategic National Stockpile of medicine and medical devices, biocontainment lab operations, and disease disinformation.

Located at the corner of Fifth and Salem Streets, the Stansbury Home was built by Dr. Oscar Stansbury, a local physician, in 1883. Owned by the City of Chico since 1976, it is operated by the Stansbury Home Preservation Association as a historic house museum. This tour will include Dr. Stansbury's office, with its display of the tools used in his practice, as well as rooms used by the Stansbury family with original interiors and furnishings intact.

We'll look at the accomplishments of several women artists associated with surrealism, including Méret Oppenheim, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, Maya Deren, Dorothea Tanning, and others.

Sports and politics have always been connected, even when athletes and fans try to claim they're separate. From the original Olympics to Jesse Owens competing in Nazi Germany in 1936, to Muhammad Ali's resistance to the Vietnam War draft, the two have been intertwined – whether we like it or not. This class explores the historical relationship between sports and political movements, as well as how politics has shaped the world of sports. We'll examine how teams, leagues, and athletes have navigated race, gender, laws, and nationalism in a seminar setting that encourages discussion and participation.

Towering above the desert sands for over 4,000 years, Egypt's pyramids remain some of the most iconic and enduring symbols of human ingenuity. In this class, we'll explore the story behind these massive monuments from the earliest experiments in stone architecture to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Whether you're fascinated by ancient engineering, intrigued by pharaohs and the afterlife, or just want to better understand one of the world's greatest architectural traditions, this class offers a window into a civilization that quite literally moved mountains.

The Weimar Republic (1918-1933) was an experiment in democracy between the Second and Third Reichs. It was conceived at the end of World War I, plagued by an abortive German revolution, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, and the growing cloud of Nazism. It was a social (see Broadway's Cabaret), artistic (the Bauhaus, German Expressionism [Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and more in cinema; Max Beckman, George Grosz and more in painting], and more) and political (socialists, communists, and Nazis being the major players) era of experimentation. We'll look at all of that, including its dreadful end with the Enabling Act of 1933. Draw parallels at your own risk.

There are more than two billion Muslims in the world and about 50 countries where Islam is the majority religion. We will cover the history of Islam from its birth through the present day as one of the largest world religions. We will discover Islam as both a way of life and a religion, be introduced to its major texts, and explore the influence of geography and cultural diversity in how these texts are applied.

This class will tour three museums. The Tehama County Museum in the town of Tehama has many artifacts from different time periods. The old jail and original Masonic Lodge are part of the museum. The Heritage Trail on the Glenn County Fairgrounds in Orland has many old buildings moved in from different parts of Glenn County. The Sacramento Valley Museum in Williams is housed in the original high school with a one-room schoolhouse adjacent.