Thursday Session 2   

This course will explore Abraham Lincoln’s life and how his experience of melancholy (a name for depression in the 19th century) influenced his leadership and legacy. We will explore societal attitudes toward mental health in the 19th century and today. Finally, we will consider the impact of Lincoln’s melancholy on several of his leadership traits (e.g., empathy, resilience, and visionary thinking). A key text will be Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness.

In this course, students will learn, examine, and practice a special few of the over 60 types of poems. Students will practice tools essential to poetry, understanding that these techniques improve all writing. Specific forms to be covered include clerihew, couplet, triplet, quatrain, limerick, rap, rondeaux, and sonnet.

NOTE: This in-person course will take place at the Community Engagement Center in Homewood.

What do we mean by the American Dream? Has the concept changed from its historical ideas to 21st century ones, and what does that imply about our contemporary lives? In Arthur Miller's All My Sons and Thornton Wilder's Our Town, we explore conflicting views about what that iconic phrase means to us now. We will read, analyze, and discuss the motifs in the plays, the dramatists' perspectives, and how they may or may not resonate with our own reactions.

This course will analyze the intersection between politics and economics and how they affect both elections and markets alike. How do our political choices affect our economic reality, and vice versa? What roles can public institutions like Congress or the Federal Reserve play in maintaining and growing our economy? What roles should free market companies have in shaping the political arena? We will analyze both history and current events in the lead-up to the 2024 elections and try to understand how these critical choices can alter our lives and our nation.

These lectures will deal with theft, including the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, the theft of three paintings from the Gardner Museum in Boston, and the theft of a Caravaggio in Palermo in 1969. The course will document two large-scale looting sprees, that of the Napoleonic armies from around 1795 to 1815, and that of the Nazis, including the heroic saga of the Monuments Men (the American soldiers deployed to find and recover Nazi loot). The ongoing debate about repatriating works of art that were wrongfully seized by colonial powers will also be discussed.

In this course, we will analyze the color strategies of one or more master artists each week. We will then apply what we learn to our own artwork. A range of art periods, styles, subject matter, and media will be explored, including still life and landscape, watercolor and acrylic. This course builds on the instructor’s prior Color Deep Dive class, but it will be equally valuable for those who did not attend that course.

This course will explore how and why the music of the 1970s evolved from the psychedelic era to a unique art form and a social force and how it expanded to radically new vistas. An era evolved to the new American attitude, away from communitarianism and toward individualism, and toward a society comprised of self-interested and largely self-sufficient individuals—the “Me Generation.” The subject matter will be explored through lectures, PowerPoint presentations, selected YouTube videos and discussion.

 

We will read and discuss a variety of narrative poems past and recent. Some will be longer, most will be brief, but many come with their own story attached. We will look at a range of ballads and some longer poems by Chaucer, Keats, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Subjects range from the shield of Achilles to actress Hattie McDaniel. Sorry — no ravens, aged mariners, or dead duchesses.

Do the current presidential election and primary campaigns seem to be particularly nasty, negative, and even scary? How do they compare with campaigns of the past? This course examines presidential campaigns from the beginning of the Republic to the present, including the process of picking presidential candidates.

Starting even before 1939, World War II can be considered the first truly multi-media war. A major element of that were movies made not only to entertain but to send messages overly and subtly to the opposing sides’ populations of how to understand and react to the conflict. We will explore the propagandistic work from both the Allies and the Axis, the use of “shorts” from cartoons to documentaries, and full-length films which created ideals of heroes, motivations to fight, and expectations of facing loss.

 

This course introduces members to world geography, with special emphasis on issues in the news. Have you ever read about a refugee crisis in a foreign country, and been unsure where that country is? This course will help you fill in the blanks on your own mental map of the world and learn something interesting about every country on the planet. Follow along as we move from region to continent to identify countries and to discuss their history, language, culture, and contemporary political issues.