History, Classics, & Philosophy   

Revisit the Nationality Rooms to learn of their history, explanations of their appearance, and how they tie together thematically. Along the way, you will be exposed to architecture, art history and studio arts knowledge, languages, and world events that have shaped the region and the world. Your guide each week will be the tour coordinator and advisor to the student tour guides, Michael Walter. Mr. Walter has been with the Nationality Room program for 16 years and has taught this course before. Members are encouraged to be inquisitive as we unpack the many layered appeal of the Nationality Rooms.

In school we often learned myths about our founders who seemed to be beyond our ability to emulate. Today's trend is to "cancel" them because their faults err on the other extreme. The founders were humans with complex admirable accomplishments and reprehensible failings. Understanding these historic figures' contributions to the founding of the republic and their acknowledged inability to end slavery and native displacement provide a realistic analysis of our history. Learn from the founders to understand the evolution and current situation of our government.

The Korean War has long been called the forgotten war, but recent events have rekindled interest in learning something about the first war that America did not win. The course will look at the political and diplomatic events that led to the conflict, the geography of the war, and some of the key personalities involved and how they influenced the progress of the war. It also will look at the key campaigns and the eventual outcome.

This course is designed to give lifelong learners a better understanding of the forces that saw Pittsburgh’s transformation from a resource-rich wilderness into an industrial powerhouse whose people and innovations helped build America. This course will present Pittsburgh’s history to the start of World War II as more than two-dimensional, grayscale ideas about rivers, coal, and steel. Rather, the city’s history is presented in a vibrant way that not only tells the stories of the names we know—Braddock, Forbes, Carnegie, Rooney—but digs deeper to pull from the margins the voices whose stories we haven’t yet heard.