The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. The long practice of ignoring indigenous history is changing because a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this synthesis he shows that European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success; that Native nations helped shape England's crisis of empire; the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior; California indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War; the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West; twentieth century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. Blackhawk's retelling of of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency and survival of indigenous peoples, thus giving us a truer account of the United States. Blackhawk's book was the winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction this past year.
Memoir Reading and Writing: Our Stories and a Few by Others
This is an SDG in which we will both write our stories and read those of others. The SDG is 12 weeks and will be limited to 12 Regular members, each acting as Discussion Leader for one of the 12 weeks. There will be no auditors. (We also want to give any associates who join us an opportunity to share their personal writing. We are still figuring out how to do this.)
Discussion Guides will be due 2 weeks prior to the Session being led. This deadline is important as there is prospectively a lot for people to do. The Guides will have 3 sections:
1. Every week the 2 Coordinators will assign a writing prompt, such as a memorable grandparent or job. Those who wish to do so, will be invited to write on this topic – roughly 2 double-spaced pages (5 or less minutes when read aloud) based on the prompt.
2. The Discussion Leader will select an accessible memoir, provide background material including a chapter or a few pages that can stand alone, in a machine-readable format, to the group, and state why the book was selected.
Reading more than the pages provided will be optional, except for, obviously the Discussion Leader.
3. The Discussion Leader will provide personal memoir material they wish to share and discuss with the group. (Anyone who does not wish to do this, should not be in this SDG.)
Each week, the Discussion Leader will cover these same 3 sections. The time allocated to each is at the discretion of the Discussion Leader, with the exception that all who wish to read what they wrote based on the writing prompt, may do so.
1. Have all members who wish to read what they wrote, do so. Discuss as you see fit.
2. Introduce and discuss your selected memoir.
3. Introduce and discuss your personal material.
There are no restrictions on the memoir you chose. It must be written in the first person and, a true, or purportedly true, story by the author. It may be about anything you like. Of you chose a shorter, easier to read book, odds are more will read it. But it is not required. A list of memoirs will be provided but you are not limited to the books on this list.
Your personal material may also cover any ground in your life that you wish. @gaon, no restrictions, no rules. However, consider the willingness of your fellow members to read anything too lengthy.
One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy from the CIA, FBI and the Mafia
This is the story of Sen. Frank Church, who exposed the dirty laundry of the CIA and the FBI nearly 50 years ago, and inspired congressional oversight of intelligence agencies. The Last Honest Man also doubles as a guide to high-stakes politics. In this book, James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, examines Senator Frank Church, the man at the center of numerous investigations into abuses of power within the American government.
We live in a world today where it is understood that The United States has a powerful array of intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency and others. And while much of what they do is classified, it's also understood that they're ultimately accountable to Congress and the American people for what they spend and what they do. But this was not always the case in Senator Church’s time and some politicians contend it is not the case now.
After helping conduct the Watergate inquiries, he formed a Senate committee that exposed the nefarious activities of the intelligence community, including the CIA’s alliance with the Mafia in an effort to assassinate Fidel Castro.
For 16 months, Church and his committee scrutinized the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency and their many abuses. Church also examined presidents’ use of emergency powers to advance their agendas.
As a result of the discoveries of his committee, Church arrived at a difficult question: was the disgraced Richard Nixon really that different from his predecessors in the White House? We can ask: Was Trump really that different from his predecessors in the White House (with regard to intelligence agencies)?
In the author's view assassinations and coups carry a bipartisan legacy. It wasn't just Eisenhower and Nixon, Iran and Chile. It was also Kennedy, Cuba and Vietnam. Then we had Iran, Afghanistan, et al.
Iran and its aftermath still reverberate. But for that debacle, would Trumpism have attained the purchase it still possesses? Would our national divide be as deep - or intractable? We will bring the recent past to bear on the present in our discussions about U.S. intelligence agencies in this SDG.
Hollywood in the 1940’s
“In 1939, …, the leading moviemakers of Hollywood could … regard themselves as conquering heroes. The assorted film studios, …, had by now become the nation’s eleventh-largest industry. They created some four hundred new films every year, attracted more than fifty million Americans to the theater every week, and grossed nearly $700 million annually. Just a decade later, Hollywood was in shambles, its biggest studios losing money, its celebrities embroiled in charges of Communist influence, its audiences turning to television.” Our core book, CITY OF NETS/A PORTRAIT OF HOLLYWOOD IN THE 1940’S (1986), looks at whether it was always “Golden” in Hollywood’s Golden Era and behind the Silver Screen in an effort to answer the question: What happened to cause this change of fortune? Its author, Otto Friedrich, was not a “Hollywood Insider.” He was the Managing Editor of the Saturday Evening Post, a senior editor at Time Magazine and a well regarded national journalist and cultural historian who took a distanced view of Hollywood. Together we will explore the era, Hollywood’s movers and shakers, Hays Office Code censorship, famed directors, movie stars, labor troubles, publicity scandals, antitrust problems, “black list” problems. And, oh yes, back stories to some beloved movies - such as GONE WITH THE WIND, CITIZEN KANE, THE MALTESE FALCON, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, ALL ABOUT EVE, CASABLANCA, SUNSET BOULEVARD and others.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is the world's richest man and one of the most powerful. He led the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, artificial intelligence, and took over Twitter (now X). He has Aspergers, had an abusive father, and fathered ten children with four women. For two years, journalist, professor and bestselling biographer Walter Isaacson followed the billionaire entrepreneur through his SpaceX and Tesla factories and board meetings, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers and adversaries. Isaacson concluded, “He’s the most interesting person on the planet right now doing the most interesting things and driving people crazy in the process.” Find out how he thinks, how he became who he is, and what he is likely to do in the future.
Poverty In America
This SDG will examine the issue of poverty in America, what it is, what the extent of it is, contributing factors to it and the solutions that have been proposed to cure it. It will make use of two core books including that of Princeton Professor Matthew Desmond's best seller Poverty by America which argues that poverty in the US is the product not only of larger economic shifts, but of choices and actions by more fortunate Americans. It also will use Professors Mark Robert Rank, Lawrence M. Eppard and Heather E. Bullock's book, Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty.The SDG will then look at numerous other sources to learn how many other factors may have an impact including race, deindustrialization, housing, health care, the decline in unionization, social programs, and the ascendance of neoliberalism. Finally the class will look at the many proposals for reducing poverty not only from the two core books but from conservative, to liberal to socialist thinkers.
The Coming Wave; an exploration of artificial intelligence
The core book, “The Coming Wave“ by Mustafa Sulleyman was published in September, 2023. It addresses a wave of change that is driven by AI and genetic engineering. Our SDG will explore the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence, and to a lesser extent biogenetics. We will review the history of AI from its early origins, to its current state, and also the potentials for AI in the future. We will address the ethical and social implications of AI and the opportunities and risks associated with it. The author discusses why this wave of technology change will occur more rapidly than past waves, such as electricity and automobiles. He emphasizes that we may have to find a way to “contain“ AI to avoid the worst risks, and he discusses how that might be done.
Mustafa Sulleyman is a serial entrepreneur and AI pioneer. He is best known for co-founding Deep Mind (now part of Google) and Inflection AI. “The Coming Wave“ has already received widespread praise and review by among others: Bill Gates; Yuval Harari; Eric Schmidt, a former CEO of Google; Elon Musk; Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple; and Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.
Our SDG will also feature hands-on exploration of many of the new AI applications, including: chatbots, such as Chat GTP, Bing Chat, Google’s Bard, Anthropic‘s Claude 2, and Inflection’s PI; image generators, such as DALLE from Open AI, and Midjourney; digital assistants like Siri and Alexa; facial recognition technology; and translation apps. Members will choose not only a chapter from the core book to lead a discussion on, but also will choose an AI application to report on and where possible, will have the group try out before discussing at our session.
Elections 2024
Every four years our nation goes through a political paroxysm of (pick one or all): furious activity, anxiety, fear, or loathing. The Presidential election -- this year may be the worst ever. The nation has gone through a grueling time since the 2020 election. Now, not only must we choose our president & vice-president, 1/3 of all Senators, all members of the House of Representatives, countless governors and state legislators – we are faced with two very different philosophies of governance.
This SDG proposes to study Election 2024 in each of the three terms in 2024. While we will focus on the Presidential race, we’ll also discuss important local and national trends & issues as they emerge.
How the South Won the Civil War - The Fight for the Soul of America
The Nation's founders - the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality - owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior. America was founded with contradicting ideals, with the ideas of liberty, equality, and opportunity on one hand, and slavery and hierarchy on the other. This is the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and white male domination that were woven into the nation’s fabric from the beginning. United States victory in the American Civil War should have settled that tension forever, but at the same time that the Civil War was fought, Americans also started moving into the West. In the West, Americans found, and expanded upon, deep racial hierarchies. Those traditions—a rejection of democracy, an embrace of entrenched wealth, the marginalization of women and people of color—have found a home in modern conservative politics.
We will supplement our core book, How the South Won the Civil War with writings from Jubal Early, a southern war general and key figure in the creation of the Lost Cause myth; with the highly influential Conscience of a Conservative, ghost-written by L. Brent Bozell; with an oft-cited 2016 essay from a prominent conservative intellectual arguing the critical importance of a Trump win over Hillary Clinton; and finally with selected readings from recent Richardson publications.
Our core book author Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and professor of history at Boston College. She publishes Letters from an American, a nightly online newsletter that chronicles current events in the larger context of American history, with over one million subscribers.
