In a single year (1599) William Shakespeare presented four of his most famous plays: Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet. Careful historical research by James Shapiro examines the contemporary events and personalities reflected in Shakespeare’s popular plays: In Henry V, Shakespeare portrays patriotic military campaigns on foreign soil while, at the time the play is being written, the Earl of Essex is conscripting Englishmen to fight in bloody battles overseas. To understand this political history, we will also consider Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2. While Julius Caesar is being staged at the Globe Theater, assassination conspiracies against the English monarch are the talk of Shakespeare’s audiences as well as the Tudor court. As You Like It affords escape from Elizabethans’ difficult daily lives featuring the best stage comics of the day. Hamlet deals with the ever-present fear that Queen Elizabeth might be assassinated. We will then consider Anthony and Cleopatra and The Tempest, in order to explore further Shakespeare’s treatment of love and revenge. In addition to these eight plays, we will read and discuss excerpts from James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, HarperCollins (2006
Empire of Ants: Are we really superior to Ants?
The SDG is based on a new, highly readable book, the Empire of Ants. It is accessible and describes the incredible research of the author and of many of her fellow Myrmecologists (Ant researcher). These researchers point out that ant societies are highly organized, successful and highly evolved forms of social organization. Some look to find solutions to human problems by studying ant societies and their organization and functioning. This book raises a variety of questions about how ant societies adapt to differing conditions. We will explore how ant societies develop tailored solutions to real world problems and compare their solutions to those of humans. It should be an intriguing and enjoyable exploration that inevitably raises a number of questions about a much older animal and one that may last much longer than humans.
The Code Breaker
Using Walter Isaacson's new book, The Code Breaker, as the core book, this SDG will explore the world of the gene, DNA, RNA, mutations, and the gene-editing technology, CRISPR. Jennifer Doudna, the co-creator of CRISPR technology, for which she and her collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, are the only sixth and seventh women to be so honored. These remarkable scientists asked "how do bacteria protect themselves from viruses (bacteriophage)" and discovered the molecular mechanism for identifying how viruses attach to the bacterial outer cell wall, and how bacteria destroy these viruses - - - a remarkable example of an immune-like system in microbes and the birth of CRISPR technology from microbes to Plato members!
Travels with Somerset Maugham
Somerset Maugham was a British secret agent, a London physician, and the highest paid author in the world in the thirties, writing countless stories and creating plays so successful that he opened four different shows on the London stage at the same time. Ian Fleming’s spy novels were inspired by Maugham’s sophisticated secret agent stories (Maugham’s spy stories, based upon his own experiences working for British intelligence while posing as an author/playwright visiting foreign locales, also inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s 1937 film “Secret Agent”). Maugham was the modern author who most influenced George Orwell, and he was universally praised by other authors from Graham Greene to John le Carre (“Maugham…is a genius.” Theodore Dreiser).
Among Maugham’s novels, short stories and stage comedies, his travel stories have become the most enduring, as they manage to capture remote locations and times that Maugham personally experienced, and depicted characters and cultures now vanished.
Like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Maugham volunteered with an army ambulance corps during the Great War; he thereafter was recruited by British intelligence to serve as a secret agent.
During his British Intelligence years, and in constant search for interesting literary material, Maugham travelled to revolutionary Russia (ordered by the head of the British secret service—known only as “R”—to “stop the Bolshevik revolution;” Maugham reported that he had arrived too late to do so, but observed that, if he’d had gotten there a few months earlier he believed he might have been able to do so!)
Following the War, Maugham traveled extensively through British India, Malaysia, and sailed throughout the South Seas. Maugham owned a villa in the South of France where he composed his stories. His villa was seized by the Nazis during the Second World War and Maugham thereupon escaped Europe for Los Angeles, where he enjoyed yet another profitable career as a Hollywood screenwriter.
This SDG will take a tour of Maugham’s travel writing and examine the life and times of Maugham’s autobiographical characters, from pre-1914 Europe and the embryonic USSR to British India, Pago Pago, France, Spain and diverse foreign locales, featuring Maugham’s assortment of memorable characters, including the author’s suave prototype for James Bond.
How the Word is Passed, a Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
"In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history", our core book, "How the Word Is Passed" "illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view - ... in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods — like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted". We will follow our author, Clint Smith, a poet with a PhD from Harvard, through his lyrical accounts of his visits to Monticello, Whitney Plantation, Angola Prison, Blandford Cemetery, Gorée Island (Senegal) and more. Clint Smith is a fellow New Orleanian; his descriptions of the city of my childhood echo deeply in my memory.
Additionally, we will review the history of Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era, the rise of White Supremacy, new ways to "Pass the Word", and Reparations.
Grant
Ulysses Grant is one of the most misunderstood figures in U.S. history. He was much more than the inept businessman and flawed President of history or the brutal but successful general of the Civil War. Ron Chernow in his masterful biography gives us a true understanding of a complex and complicated man. Much like he did with his stunning biography of Hamilton, we get to see a full picture of a flawed yet complicated man.
Despite a problem with drink, a poor businessman, yet an excellent soldier, he would ultimately prove himself during the Civil War rising to become head of the Union forces and Lincoln's closest military advisor. This of course would ultimately lead to a two term presidency which would ultimately be marred by corruption in his cabinet and staff. Yet during his presidency he would earn the admiration by black Americans for attempting to crush the Ku Klux Klan.
The Habsburgs
One of the many important consequences of the First World War was the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the last remnant of the once great Habsburg Empire. We cannot truly understand the history of Europe, indeed of much of the world, from the 15th until the 20th centuries without understanding this remarkable dynastic family.
In a concise, and highly readable history of the Habsburgs, Professor Martyn Rady traces their rise from the late 10th century, when they possessed a few villages in the Upper Rhine, to their becoming the dominant political family of much of western and central Europe, the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, and in the 16th and 17thcenturies, the rulers of the world’s first truly global empire. At its peak, the Austrian Habsburg lands included, not only Austria, but Hungary, Bohemia, Serbia, Bosnia, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, Milan, Naples, Lombardy-Venetia, Sicily, and Dalmatia (Croatia). And the Spanish Habsburgs ruled Spain, Portugal, the East Indies, territories in Africa, Asia, and Southeast Asia, Malta, Oran and much of South and North America (including Los Angeles, California).
Through our study of the Habsburgs, we will meet a fascinating cast of characters, and we will delve into many events that changed the course of history, such as the rise and fall of the Holy Roman Empire, the Thirty Years War, the Renaissance, the division of the empire between the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs, Europe’s struggle against the Ottoman Turks, the exploration of the Americas and Asia by explorers such as Magellan, Pizarro and Cortes, and even World War One.
Although the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 began the slow decline of Habsburg power, the Hapsburgs remained powerful through alliances, marriages, and reforms of governmental institutions within the empire. Our discussions will also include the Habsburg promotion of culture, science, and architecture. From the late-18th century, for example, Vienna, the heart of the Austrian Habsburg empire, was the capital of western music, the home of composers such as Mozart and Beethoven to Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, Richard Strauss and, of course, Johann Strauss. We will even read about reports of vampirism within the empire, Habsburg in-breeding, and the infamous Habsburg jaw. Our journey through the extensive breadth and depth of this European dynasty promises to be both exciting and illuminating.
Stalin: The Peasant Who Became Dictator
Joseph Stalin was a ruthless despot who could be utterly charming. He was a pragmatic Marxist- Leninist ideologue, and an intuitive geostrategic thinker who nonetheless made some egregious and inexplicable strategic blunders. He inspired his people as a “father figure” while evincing utter disdain for the lives of individual Russians.
In Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, the first of a three-volume work, Stephen Kotkin tells “the story of Russia’s power in the world and Stalin’s power in Russia.” Kotkin argues that Stalin was that rare individual whose decisions radically changed history. "More than any other historical figure, even Gandhi or Churchill, a biography of Stalin, as we shall see, comes to approximate a history of the world."
Kotkin places Stalin in a Russian global context, as Russia’s geopolitical position was shaken by the rise of Germany on one side and Japan on the other. This work is not the usual biography; in fact, in the first 300 pages of the book, Stalin only appears periodically as Kotkin describes the structural forces that made Stalin possible.
As Stalin emerges into leadership in the 1920s, Kotkin portrays him as his contemporaries saw him then: not just as a vindictive man seeking power for its own sake but as an “indomitable communist and leader of inner strength, utterly dedicated to Lenin’s ideas, able to carry the entire apparatus, the country, and the cause of the world revolution on his back.” The crux of Kotkin’s interpretation is found in Stalin’s decision to go for all-out collectivization of peasant agriculture, not compelled by necessity but as a wild gamble on Stalin’s part driven by his ideological conviction that socialism in Russia demanded an end to small-scale peasant farming.
In this SDG, will use Kotkin's first volume to cover the momentous events from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the end of the first quarter of the twentieth. This is an amazing story and encompasses, as Kotkin suggests, "the history of the world.”
While the core book may appear daunting, it contains nearly 250 pages of notes and an extensive bibliography. Our average weekly reading will be roughly 60 pages a week. Kotkin tells a gripping story in a book that is hard to put down once you start reading it.
Critical Race Theory
“Critical Race Theory” has become a fixture in the debate over how to teach children about the country’s history and race relations. Since President Trump's 2020 Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, the term CRT has become a political hot button, even though the original theory had nothing to do with the K-12 education.
CRT was developed in the 1970s and 80s mostly at Harvard Law School in response to continuing racial discrimination following the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The original scholar of the movement was Derrick Bell. Bell himself won several civil rights cases but observed that even landmark civil rights cases were of limited practical impact to most Blacks.
Developed as the practice of exploring the role of race and racism (originally against Blacks) in law and society, the original theory's core concept is that race is a social construct and that racism is not merely the product of individual prejudice, but is something embedded in the legal system, social system, and our assumptions. Over the years, this core concept has been expanded to include other minorities.
The objective of this SDG is neither to promote nor attack Critical Race Theory but to understand its relevance and current concerns about inequality in the United States.
