Spend an afternoon with professional decorator and author Coleen Christian Burke as she covers the traditions of White House holiday decorating. She brings you behind the scenes as the seasonal transformation takes place, and shares how modern first ladies from Jacqueline Kennedy to Melania Trump have lent their distinctive styles and creativity to guiding the annual themes.
Paige Williams, a staff writer at the New Yorker, delves into the sometimes-perilous world of the illicit international fossil trade as she tells the story of an American dealer’s dangerous obsession with a rare dinosaur skeleton.
Every election cycle, American evangelicals play a significant demographic role, but who exactly makes up this complex group that spans multiple denominations, regions, and ethnicities? Historian Joseph Slaughter, covers 400 years of history to highlight key doctrines, figures, and events that shaped and transformed what it has meant to be an evangelical in America.
By 1972, support for the conflict in Vietnam was rapidly waning among Americans, and many of the troops fighting that war had begun to question the meaning of their own service. Author Stephen Talty examines why the dramatic and dangerous mission to rescue an Air Force navigator behind enemy lines provided a galvanizing moment for both the public and the military.
Brandon Terry of Harvard University examines the ethical and political thought of arguably the greatest public intellectual and activist that the United States ever produced. He contends that King’s body of philosophy offers indispensable resources for addressing many of our current political crises.
The long fight against American slavery produced some of the most powerful autobiographies and works of fiction in American history. Read and discuss four 19th-century classics by men and women, both black and white, who were central figures in the struggle to destroy the institution.
Art historian Renée Ater draws focus to several monuments to the slave past recently added to the landscape in Virginia, Maryland, and the District as she considers the ways that visualizing, remembering, and engaging with the past may help transform the future. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)
How did the name of a Continental Army general become a synonym for treason? Historian Richard Bell reconstructs the life and times of Benedict Arnold, the reasons he turned on his country, and the larger problems of betrayal and desertion that dogged George Washington’s army.
The city of smokestacks and steel has been miraculously reborn as a cultural capital. Join arts journalist Richard Selden for a visit that surveys its art scene (highlighted by the 57th Carnegie International exhibition) as well as the rich ethnic and industrial history of “the ’Burgh.”
