Political, Social Sciences & Society   

Poverty is a serious problem for all racial groups in America. In this course, each week will feature a different recent book on poverty conditions, causes, and solutions. The books are White Poverty (Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove), Poverty, By America (Matthew Desmond), Injustice of Place (Kathryn Edin et al.), Poverty in the Pandemic (Zachary Parolin), and Broke in America (Goldblum and Shaddox). The class will be asked to read each week’s book or at least a book review and participate in the discussion.

NOTE: This course will be hybrid, meeting in the Community Engagement Center in Homewood and on Zoom.

The course will be a lecture series on the challenges to making foreign policy today and will consist of five talks followed by discussion. The topics may change since they depend, in part, on current events, but they could include: why foreign policy is harder to make today; where ambassadors come from, where they go, and why they still matter; intelligence and foreign policy; the evolution of conflict and the impossibility of effective peacekeeping; the Iran nuclear deal and what it says about how foreign policy is made; and why it is hard to have a treaty with anyone anymore.

The decade of the 1960s was one of the most turbulent eras in American history, marked by massive social, cultural, and political changes. Fittingly, the decade also saw three of the most politically skilled and highly accomplished, but tragically-concluded presidential administrations America has ever experienced. In this course, we will look closely at these three leaders, examining both how they set changes in motion and how they responded to changes they often could not control. We also will explore the three very different tragedies that brought each administration to a shocking end.