CIVIL WAR & CIVIL WAR TIMES
THE HISTORY OF THE AUTOMOBILE
WORLD WAR II
VIETNAM
POLITICAL HISTORY
CARIBBEAN HISTORY
The conference fee is $1,425 and includes all 20 90-minute seminars below. (There will be no concurrent classes so everyone will be able to attend every class.) Classes only take place when we’re at sea, between the hours of 8:30am and 7:30pm.
Speaker: Michael Burlingame, Ph.D.
This seminar focuses on Abraham Lincoln’s personal life, with a special emphasis on his relations with his parents, children, and wife. It will also examine how Lincoln grew from a rather narrow political partisan in his early career to become a true statesman.
Speaker: Michael Burlingame, Ph.D.
Lincoln’s humor, compassion, mercy, and tenderheartedness are well known. Less understood are his grasp of military strategy and his steely determination to defeat the Confederacy and thereby not only free the slaves and preserve the Union, but also to vindicate democracy.
Speaker: Michael Burlingame, Ph.D.
This class discusses the causes of the war and the ways in which Lincoln and his party contributed to the outbreak of the war. Special attention will be paid to Lincoln himself and race and racism.
Speaker: Michael Burlingame, Ph.D.
Lincoln’s historical role as a successful wartime president commands respect, but what else makes him so compelling a figure in the imagination of so many people? Emphasis will be placed in this seminar on his personal triumph over adversity and his remarkable psychological wholeness.
Speaker: George Rable, Ph.D.
This seminar focuses on how the significance of this battle extended far beyond the battlefield. This terribly bloody engagement was a Confederate victory but a Union story. After a looking at some key strategic and tactical issues, the emphasis shifts to the consequences of the battle including the treatment of the wounded, coming to grips with carnage on such a large scale, and how the news of the battle was conveyed. The demoralization of the Army of the Potomac and the resilience of the soldiers adds a final chapter to a surprising story.
Speaker: George Rable, Ph.D.
Even the most casual student of the Civil War has some sense of Stonewall Jackson as a deeply religious military leader. This lecture will look at the wider significance of Jackson’s faith for himself, his soldiers, and for the Confederacy. Stonewall Jackson religious views evolved in some surprising ways. His reputation as a Christian soldiers was remarkably well established not only in the Confederacy but in the northern states. The talk will examine religious interpretations of Jackson’s death and conclude with a brief consideration of how Jackson’s example ironically prepared the way for acceptance of Confederate defeat.
Speaker: George Rable, Ph.D.
The focus of this lecture is religious interpretations of American Civil War in its causes, course, and consequences. This is a topic largely missing from the war’s grand narrative and certainly one until recent years badly neglected by historians. During the Civil War themes of providence, sin, and judgment helped explain contemporary events including battles, emancipation, and the even the death of Abraham Lincoln. This was true not only for ministers and churches but for countless soldiers and civilians.
Speaker: George Rable, Ph.D.
From southern belles to steel magnolias, the image of the southern women at war has been a powerful one in American culture. This lecture will focus on how a variety of flesh-and-blood women struggled with new and challenging roles, dealt with staggering losses and hardships, and both served and undermined the Confederate cause.
Speaker: John Heitmann, Ph.D.
It has been said that the automobile is the perfect technological symbol of American culture, a tangible expression of our quest to level space, time and class, and a reflection of our restless mobility, social and otherwise. In this introductory lecture we will explore together the place of the automobile in American life and how it transformed business; life on the farm and in the city; and, the nature and organization of work, leisure time, and the arts. This was a complex transition that transformed everyday life and the environment in which we operate. It influenced the foods we eat, music we listen to, risks we take, places we visit, errands we run, emotions we feel, movies we watch, stress we endure, and, the air we breathe.
Speaker: John Heitmann, Ph.D.
The 1950s proved to be a golden era for the automobile in America. Particularly after 1955, it was a time characterized by cars featuring tailfins and chrome, high horsepower V-8 engines, and numerous accessories. The car influenced culture as no other technology had to date. This complex interaction between human beings and this machine was reflected in contemporary literature, music, and film. We will examine the genesis of rock music, listening to “Rocket 88,” “Maybelline,” “No Particular Place to Go,” “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” and “Deadman’s Curve;” watch film clips from “Rebel Without a Cause,” “Hot Rod Girl,” “Thunder Road,” and “Bullitt;” and read excerpts from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and John Keats Insolent Chariots. We will also discuss the iconic cars of the era — Corvettes, Cadillacs, Thunderbirds, Mustangs, and muscle cars. Was this period really a golden age, or an era so complex that it defies any simple characterization? While these cultural manifestations of automobility — or at least the ones scholars tend to focus on — often dealt with troubling matters like alienation and rebellion, the average family preferred to drive on without much thought concerning the larger issues raised by concerned observers, the Beats, and critics of the new lascivious rock and roll music. Despite the uncertainty and anxiety of the period, for many it was an era of smooth rides and good times. Or so our faded memories want us to believe ...
Speaker: John Heitmann, Ph.D.
The history of automobile racing in America has been examined by numerous “buff” historians, but scant attention from scholars. It began as a way to test and improve an emerging technology and as a pastime for the sporting elite. Yet by the end of the first decade of the 20th century it became a promoter-organized spectacle and to a degree, a blood sport dominated by professional drivers. With great tracks built in Indianapolis, Southern California, and across the U.S., by the 1920s it was regarded as a reflection of national technological prowess and pride, and defended as a great outdoor laboratory for new material designs and technologies that would eventually be introduced into passenger cars. After World War II auto racing became big business, not only at Indianapolis and in the NASCAR circuit, but also at more local levels where everyday folks would flock on Friday and Saturday nights to dirt tracks like Eldora in western Ohio and hard-surfaced ovals such as Winchester in Indiana. At all of these locales, heroes were recognized and celebrated. Some of the questions we will address include: how did national rivalries shape the nature of racing; what technologies were developed as a result of the racing game; how did auto racing become a sport on the level of professional baseball and boxing; what motivates everyday people to become race fans; in what ways did auto racing enter American culture, particularly in film; and finally, how did NASCAR become a way of life for many Americans in more recent times?
Speaker: John Heitmann, Ph.D.
In 1955, at the height of America’s love affair with the automobile, few if any commentators would have predicted that a little more than a half century into the future the auto industry would be a shell of its former self. More specifically, was it even conceivable in 1955 to think that Americans would, in the near future, buy cars that were made by our former enemies, the Germans and Japanese? How and why did this happen? In this lecture we will explore the various forces and events that contributed to the automobile’s industry decline, including: the recession of 1958 and the first wave of imports coming to the U.S.; pattern bargaining and lucrative union contracts; managerial hubris; peak oil, the rise of power in the Middle East, and shifts in energy supplies and costs; made in Japan — new standards of product quality and worker engagement; an obsession with bigness, including trucks and SUVs; and finally, Asian and European competition coming from American soil. Ultimately, what does this decline mean in terms of the American economy and society in the years ahead?
Speaker: Richard Stewart, Ph.D.
History is not an inexorable path to one specific result or end. The choices made by the leaders of the Axis and the Allies led to specific actions that led to further choices, none of them inevitable. Why did such decisions have to be made? What other paths were available and why were they not taken? Why was a specific choice made and what were the results? To understand decision points is to understand the leaders and events of the time and to understand why World War II turned out the way it did. Some of the critical dicisions of the war include: Why Munich? The Road to Moscow: Why Operation Barbarrosa? Why Pearl Harbor? Why Normandy on the 6th of June? and why the Atomic Bomb? To understand these decisions is to understand how history often rests on a knife’s edge.
Speaker: Allan Lichtman, Ph.D.
Few topics in American history are more controversial than the response by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Hitler’s persecution and then systematic extermination of the Jews of Europe. Among scholars, Roosevelt has his passionate critics and his equally ardent defenders. Neither side in this spirited debate, however, has accurately and completely told the story of the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Jews during this tragic period in world history. Dr. Lichtman will present a new and comprehensive interpretation of Roosevelt, the Jews, and the Holocaust, based upon his forthcoming book on the topic to be published by Harvard University Press.
Speaker: Allan Lichtman, Ph.D.
Few events in modern history have changed America and the world as profoundly as the lengthy War in Vietnam, which resulted in nearly fifty thousand American deaths and several million Asian deaths. Drawing on unpublished sources, Dr. Lichtman will explain how and why President Lyndon Johnson, at the height of his power and accomplishment, launched and continued the war. He will explain the source of Johnson’s “credibility gap” and show how the war divided the Democratic Party, drove Johnson from the presidency, and led to the election of Republican Richard Nixon in 1968.
Speaker: Richard Stewart, Ph.D.
The Vietnam War cannot be understood without understanding America’s participation in Vietnam prior to the engagement of major military operations. The United States had already been involved in Vietnamese affairs for twenty years, aiding the French in thier attempts to save South Vietnam from communism as well as attempting to build a new Vietnamese state without military action — so how and why did the United States go from peaceful relations to full blown war?
Speaker: Allan Lichtman, Ph.D.
This lecture will forecast results of America’s 2012 presidential election using Dr. Lichtman’s unique historically-based prediction system, the Keys to the White House. This system retrospectively accounts for the popular-vote winners of every American presidential election from 1860 to 1980 and prospectively has forecast well ahead of time the winners of every presidential election from 1984 through 2008. Long before the polls or any other forecasting system can provide accurate predictions, the Keys will have produced a relatively secure forecast for the winner of the next presidential election. Together with participation by the audience, Dr. Lichtman will present this prediction during his lecture.
Speaker: Allan Lichtman, Ph.D.
The surge of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century conservative movement in the United States can only be understood only as part of a larger pattern of conservative politics. Conservatism assumed its distinctively modern form, not in recent years, but in the decade after World War I. In this lecture, based on his book, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Dr. Lichtman traces the history of conservatism from Warren Harding to the Tea Party Movement and assesses the future of the movement. He shows that modern conservatism has a life, history, and logic of its own. It emerged not simply in opposition to the liberal state, but as an equally robust response to social and economic changes of the urban, industrial order.
Speaker: Richard Stewart, Ph.D.
Despite the sincere efforts of a newly elected President McKinley, the United States went to war with the empire of Spain in 1898 shortly after the mysterious explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor. After a series of naval engagements and the confused but successful landing of U.S. Army troops in Cuba, the United States found itself with an empire. How did this happen? Why did the U.S. go to war? How did it win and why did Spain lose so quickly? The entry of the United States onto the world stage was noisy and triumphant yet with serious long term consequences.
Speaker: Richard Stewart, Ph.D.
Ranging all over the Caribbean and even around the world, Sir Francis Drake, the archetypal freebooter, fought for booty, for England, but mostly for Sir Francis Drake. He and the other Sea Dogs fought against the the most powerful empire on earth in an illegal war that led most of the world to condemn their actions as piracy. Those actions, and the political maneuverings of Elizabeth of England, led to a decades long war and a series of naval armadas and counter-armadas that changed the face of European politics forever.
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