I’m grateful to Chicago’s Newberry Library, Oakton Community College and the North Shore Senior Center for the opportunity to lead adult seminars and courses on topics in history and political thought. I am equally grateful to the thoughtful, engaging participants in those programs, whose observations and insights have so enriched the content.
Here are topics I have been selected to present at OCC and the NSSC since 2017:
- The Making of Modern North America:
Canada, Mexico, and the US, 1857-1867 - Creating Our Constitution and Bill of Rights
- The Civil War and Our Constitution
- Our Constitution in an Age of Global Commitments
- Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
- Nations and Nationalism
- Church and State from the Reformation to Today
- America in the World, 1920-2020
- Race in America: The Origins and Evolution of
Our National Dilemma - North American Visions: The Mexican Muralists,
American Regionalists, and Canada’s Group of 7 - The Imperial Powers and Colonial Peoples, 1870-1920
Here are categories and topics for seminars I have led at The Newberry since 2008:
16th-18th CENTURY RELIGION, POLITICS, AND ECONOMICS
- The Political Thought of the Reformation Era
- Three Writers and Revolution: Thomas Paine,
Mary Wollstonecraft, and Edmund Burke - The Moral Breakthrough to Capitalism
- Political Economy: Adam Smith and his Contemporaries
- America’s Beacon: The Declaration of Independence
- Debating the Constitution: The Federalist Papers and anti-Federalist Essays
- The Origins and Adoption of the Bill of Rights
THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
- The Irrepressible Conflict: The Debate Over Slavery, 1830-60
- Secession and War: The Crisis of the Union, 1860-61
- Lincoln’s Road to Emancipation, 1861-63
- Conscription, Race, and Citizenship, 1861-64
- The Diplomacy of the Civil War
- The Moral History of the Civil War
- Myth, Memory, and the Meaning of Reconstruction
19th CENTURY TOPICS
- The Catholic Church and the British Empire, 1763-1963
- Tumult and Transition: Canada, Mexico, and the United States, 1857-67
- The Challenges of the Habsburgs
- European Colonial Expansion and Rivalries
- Mandate for Mobilization: The Franco-Russian Alliance and World War I
- War, Peace, and Social Democracy
20th and 21st CENTURY TOPICS
- Folly and Fury: The Diplomacy of the Mexican Revolution
- World War I and the Western Hemisphere
- War Without End: Failed Attempts to End World War I
- US-Russian Relations, 1918-2018 (presented independently to previous Newberry participants)
- Supreme Commands: Major Decisions of World War II
- Obama’s Favorite Philosopher: Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism
- George Kennan and the American Century
- Peace in Our Time: How Violence Has Actually Declined