This course invites American and international students to explore two hundred and fifty years of American political thinking and the culture that has developed alongside it. We’ll cover everything from the founding documents to President Trump’s Inaugural Addresses, interrogating the key philosophical ideas that have informed and inspired American revolutionaries, abolitionists, suffragists, progressives, conservatives, civil rights advocates, libertarians, populists, fundamentalists, and more. Along the way, we’ll put this rich intellectual tradition into conversation with various American cultural contributions, from the great American novel and classics of American poetry to some of the distinct contributions America has made to film (westerns, film noir, musicals, gangsters, and superheroes), music (blues, jazz, bluegrass, gospel, country, rock and roll, and hip hop) and sports (baseball, American football, basketball, volleyball, and skateboarding).
Our focus in all of this will be to make sense of the current American crisis, a crisis that the vast majority of people both domestically and internationally acknowledge as transpiring, but their agreement ends there as to what it is and what its remedies might be. Different political orientations will characterize it differently. A central thesis of this course is this: anyone wishing to exercise effective public leadership in addressing the current American crisis, from within or without the country, will greatly benefit from better understanding the intellectual and cultural sources of that crisis. Students taking this course will therefore come away from it with that better understanding. And in the spirit of American political thinking, which has never been “academic,” but instead, has always been action-oriented, students can expect to be better positioned to take productive steps in addressing the crisis at hand.