by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
“Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life,” quipped George Bernard Shaw. To be sure there is truth in this observation, but it’s hardly the whole story. For millennia, human beings have been fermenting and distilling spirits and putting...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
In this course, the class will examine how the image of the Roman emperor was and is constructed. We will be investigating questions of source material reliability, genre, and the use and power of rhetoric in history. Through an examination of Rome’s rulers, from...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Attend In Person OR Online Why is French the most-commonly taught language in the United States after Spanish? Why are Americans so interested in things French? This course suggests that answers may be found in the long and fascinating saga of the French in North...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Attend In Person OR Online! See Below for full details about our new Hybrid courses This course explores the people, processes and places that fostered the technological and artistic creativity of potters, sculptors, and temple builders in ancient Greece. Our topics...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Attend In Person OR Online! See Below for full details about our new Hybrid courses This course centers on the recent, brilliant film 1917 as a touchstone for discussing the literature, film, music, and painting of World War I. Sam Mendez’s movie was nominated for ten...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Attend In Person OR Online! See Below for full details about our new Hybrid courses This course will cover the history of the oldest field of science, from prehistory and the ancient Greeks to research on the earliest instants of our 14-billion-year-old universe. We...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Attend In Person OR Online! See Below for full details about our new Hybrid courses The Christian religion is inextricably bound up with contemporary culture in America and around the globe. Yet, even after centuries of scholarly inquiry, numerous questions regarding...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Attend In Person OR Online Haydn’s Creation is considered one of his greatest achievements and is undoubtedly a masterwork of the choral/orchestral oratorio tradition. The original English libretto is shrouded in mystery and Haydn needed it translated into German for...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Attend In Person OR Online In this course, we will cover the causes of WWI and the role of the United States in the conflict. The course will begin with the primary focus on the war itself. We will explore what was occurring on the U.S. home front. Next, we will spend...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Attend In Person OR Online The decade of the 1970s represented a turning point in US politics, which shifted in a rightward direction toward free market economics at the domestic level, combined with more militaristic and interventionist policies overseas. The course...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Attend In Person OR Online The course investigates the ecology of war in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century to determine its impact on post-war perception, avant-garde art and architecture, and conceptions of place and memory. The primary focus will be...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This course will survey the fundamentals of ancient Egyptian religion, from the Predynastic period (ca. 4000 BC) to the end of the New Kingdom (ca. 1000 BC). Material will be covered both diachronically and synchronically. This course offers an examination of...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was both a beloved and rejected painter of the Baroque era. His paintings, which often included realistic figures, theatrical lighting, and dark, obscure settings activated a deep sense of spiritual contemplation for many....
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
We will look back over the half-century since the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam to consider its impact on three groups: the veterans who fought there, the Vietnamese people who fled to the U.S., and those who were radicalized by the war on the left and right. The...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Over the past 1,400 years, numerous Muslims have contributed to the rich intellectual traditions of Islam. These thinkers explored theology, philosophy, mysticism, and science. Yet few of them are known today by educated Americans. This seminar aims to introduce a...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This seminar will critically examine what we know about Rapa Nui’s spectacular archaeological history. Over the past two decades, intensive multi-disciplinary research led by the instructor has dramatically transformed our understanding of this remarkable and...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This seminar is a critical examination of the many areas which lie near science but which are not (for the most part) science, often called “marginal science” or “pseudoscience.” We will begin by examining scientific method and discovery science, falsifiability, and...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872) – according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1970 – “are crawling across the whole world in front of our very eyes, infesting countries where they could not have been dreamed of” and “announcing their determination to shake and destroy...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This course will focus on the scientific field of dendrochronology (from dendron=tree and chronos=time), or tree-ring science, and what it can tell us about the past, present and future. We will explore the fascinating history of how the science was developed by a...
by bartmann | Apr 4, 2024
This course focuses on Cleopatra VII (69-30 BCE), the far-famed last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt and a key powerbroker during a period of important political change. Her legacy in the western world emphasizes her actions as a “romantic” agent, a deployer of...
