American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850

Alan Taylor is a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian who has authored, among other works, the core books for three very well-received PLATO SDGs: American Colonies, The Settling of North America, American Revolutions, A Continental History, 1750-1804; and The Civil War of 1812. His broad view of American history, his excellent writing, and his unique insights were praised by past SDG members in these courses. His most recent work, American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, is the winner of The New York Historical Society’s 2022 Book Prize in American History. Like his other works, it has been described as “…sweeping, beautifully written, prodigiously researched and myth-busting.”

American Republics is the third in the series of Taylor's works that began with the colonial period (American Colonies) and ended in 1804 (American Revolutions) . It tells the story of the fragile American Republic during the  period from the end of America’s war of independence until the Compromise of 1850.

As he has in his earlier works, Taylor challenges the myths that we learned in school, painting a picture of a fragmented America beset by conflict, white supremacy, and violent aggression towards Indians and Blacks. The period of this new work is one of territorial expansion through war, violence and land grabs, and of bitter conflicts among its own people and states. As he has in his earlier works, Taylor studies this period through different perspectives, including those of its native peoples, both enslaved and free Blacks, and of the peoples and rulers of  Canada, the West Indies,  Mexico, and  Europe. He (and our SDG ) will also study the competing Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian visions of America, the bitter divisions over slavery that threatened the survival of the Republic, the American economy, the War with Mexico, the Donner Party, Shakerism, and much more.  American Republics also portrays many memorable characters, including Sojourner Truth, Andrew Jackson, Adams, Clay, Calhoun and Webster and writers like Cooper, Irving, Poe and Emerson, and many more. This will be an SDG that PLATO members interested in American history will love.

This SDG will be coordinated jointly by Sam Pryor and Paul Markowitz. 

Weimar on the Pacific

In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals―including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg―who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism. Weimar Germany and its culture, with its meld of eighteenth-century German classicism and twentieth-century modernism, served as a touchstone for this group of diverse talents and opinions.

Brecht's Theater

Bertolt Brecht, original name Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, (born February 10, 1898, Augsburg, Germany—died August 14, 1956, East Berlin), German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theater departed from the conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for leftist causes.

Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theater (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theater") 

Until 1924 Brecht lived in Bavaria, where he was born, studied medicine (Munich, 1917–21), and served in an army hospital (1918). He left for Berlin in 1924, where with the composer Kurt Weill he wrote the satirical, successful ballad opera The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

During the Nazi Germany period, Bertolt Brecht fled his home country in 1933, first to Scandinavia (1933-41), and during World War II to the United States (1941-47).  He lived in Santa Monica and did some film work in Hollywood. In Germany his books were burned, and his citizenship was withdrawn. He was cut off from the German theater; but between 1937 and 1941 he wrote most of his great plays, his major theoretical essays and dialogues, and many of the poems. While in US, he was surveilled by the FBI. After the war he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Many of his best known plays were written in his exile years (1933-1947)

Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theater company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collaborator, actress Helene Weigel.

Brecht's theater has influenced many playwrights such as David Hare, Caryl Churchill, Arthur Miller and Tony Kushner, and film makers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Jean-Luc Godard.

In this SDG, we will read, view, if possible, ten of his most notable plays and discuss the content, as well as the structure and impact of each play and they differ from classical theater. 

Watergate

This SDG will  explore the Watergate scandal through the core book Watergate: A New History from Garrett​ Graff. The book examines the scandal through the politicians, investigators, journalists, and informants who made it the most influential political event of the modern era. On the fiftieth anniversary  of the break-in the book provides the first comprehensive, single-volume account in decades, using newly public documents, transcripts, and revelations. Graff recounts every twist with remarkable detail and page-turning drama, bringing readers into the backrooms of Washington, chaotic daily newsrooms, crowded Senate hearings, and  the Oval Office itself during one of the darkest chapters in American history. Grippingly told and meticulously researched, Watergate is the defining account of the moment that has haunted our nation’s past—and still holds the power to shape its present and future. Explore why the plumbers were created, what were the Watergate burglars after, who authorized it, what did Nixon know and when did he know it, why didn't Nixon destroy the tapes, what ultimately brought Nixon down and what are the long term consequences of it all?