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History Lessons NYC

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Discover a world of history classes in NYC that will transport you back in time and deepen your understanding of the past. From ancient civilizations to modern events, explore fascinating topics and gain valuable insights to enrich your knowledge and perspective.

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The History of American Protest

92nd Street Y

This program is taking place remotely. If you have signed up, you will receive an email with details of how to access the program ___________ Join renowned civil rights activist, scholar and writer Mary Frances Berry for a fascinating look at America’s rich and complex history of protest and resistance. Drawing from her own experiences from six decades of activism and in five presidential administrations, Berry contends that resistance movements...

(1061) All levels 18 and older
No upcoming schedules

Dr. Janetta Rebold Benton: Escape to Sicily

92nd Street Y

Sicily’s art and architecture mirror its history as a kaleidoscope of cultures, ranging from stark Greek temples, through dazzling Roman and Arab-Norman mosaics, to Baroque opulence, and charming Romantic revivals. Travel vicariously with art historian Janetta Rebold Benton, PhD to see the highlights of aesthetic eclecticism and cultural combinations on this island of sun and stone! Fri, Oct 9: Eternal Crossroads of the Mediterranean Pt. I ...

(1061) All levels 18 and older
No upcoming schedules

Notorious Westchester County: True Crime Through the Lens of Archival Documents

Bronxville Adult School @ 177 Pondfield Rd, Bronxville, NY

Blackmail, assault, grand larceny and murder! True crime stories have made headlines for decades and become TV series, movies, and bestselling books and novels. But what of those that time forgot? Utilizing the collections of the Westchester County Archives, we will open a window to the past, exploring the darker elements of a period of extensive economic development and social upheaval in Westchester County during the first quarter of the 20th...

(20) All levels 18 and older
No upcoming schedules
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Cracking Cold Cases: DNA Detectives

Bronxville Adult School @ 177 Pondfield Rd, Bronxville, NY

Did you know that The Golden State Killer was captured by the work of a renowned genealogist, Barbara Rae Venter? The Golden State Killer committed more than 50 rapes and 14 killings over 14 years before he was captured. Repeated attempts to track him down were foiled even though hundreds of law enforcement officers were assigned to the case. Today thousands of cold cases, some more than decades old, are being cracked because of genealogy, genetics,...

(20) All levels 18 and older
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European Avant-Gardes: Art, Theory, Practice

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

In the movement from pre-World War I to post-World War I avant-gardes, the problem of how to make and respond to art beyond the limits of beauty preoccupied the architects of European movements from Dada to Surrealism to German Expressionism to Russian Constructivism to Italian Futurism. With reference to the rich material cultures produced by these artistic factions, this course asks two related questions: “What is an avant-garde?” and “What...

(29) All levels 21 and older
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Another Country: James Baldwin’s New York

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

New York is a city immortalized many times over in word, image, and sound; it wears many faces, each as alluring as the last. This course focuses on Another Country, James Baldwin’s most vivid portrait of his hometown. The book was notoriously difficult for Baldwin to finish, occupying his imagination from the late 1940s until 1961, even as he traveled from France to Switzerland and Turkey, producing acclaimed essays, plays and other novels...

(29) All levels 21 and older
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The Case of Kafka, Brod, and Benjamin

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

The Writer, the Executor, and the Critic: The Case of Kafka, Brod, and Benjamin Are artists saints? Franz Kafka famously asked his friend Max Brod—a popular critic in his own day—to burn all of his papers after his death. This included the vast majority of Kafka’s work, as he had published only a handful of stories in his own lifetime. Brod did not oblige. Instead, he began the publication of Kafka’s writings and later composed a popular...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

American Modernism and the Radical Thirties

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

This course seeks to understand what were the possibilities (and limits) of radical political and cultural transformation in the United States between 1929 and 1941.  Most of the readings will focus on New York City, but imagining a national culture and international solidarity will also be important themes. The readings for the course, which include fiction, poetry, memoir, reportage, history, and film, are oriented around the concept...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

The Long Shadow of the Great War

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

In May 1916, as the senseless slaughter of Verdun entered its fourth month and the Allied powers prepared for the Battle of the Somme, François Georges-Picot and Sir Mark Sykes concluded a secret agreement to divide the Ottoman Empire into British and French territories. That the spoils of war would be imperial acquisitions was self-evident to the two countries, which had long competed for influence in the Eastern Mediterranean. What was less obvious...

(29) All levels 21 and older
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Walter Benjamin: the Collector

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Walter Benjamin—as he became better acquainted with Marxism and began to self-identity as a convinced if somewhat idiosyncratic Communist—became one of the Western world’s preeminent philosophers of stuff. From toys to decorative design to clothes, materials, buildings, popular art and knick-knacks, Benjamin was persuaded that “detritus” was in fact the key to understanding history and the always pregnant, revolutionary possibilities...

(29) All levels 21 and older
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George Eliot’s Middlemarch: Awakening Consciousness

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Virginia Woolf called George Eliot’s Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Henry James described it as “at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels… a treasure-house of details [and] an indifferent whole.” In our own time, Middlemarch is widely considered the finest Victorian novel, and is the subject of popular books as well as endless scholarly conversation. Who was George...

(29) All levels 21 and older
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Carl Schmitt: Political Theology

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

In recent decades, there has been a surprising resurgence of interest in the work of the Nazi jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt. From neoconservative doctrines of the “unitary executive” to many strands of non-Marxist leftist thought, Schmitt’s ideas have found new purchase in our contemporary political landscape. Schmitt was a towering figure in the Weimar period. Next to Martin Heidegger, he stands as perhaps the most important and...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Discipline, Punish, Revolt

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

What would it mean to abolish the penal system as we have come to know it? To address this question, this class will focus on Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking theoretical and activist work on discipline, punishment, and prisons, and how this work might speak to contemporary struggles against mass incarceration and the rise of what has come to be called the prison abolition movement. We will begin with selections from Foucault’s classic book Discipline...

(29) All levels 21 and older
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The Politics of Infrastructure

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

What does it take to build an infrastructural system? What kind of norms do infrastructures enforce, and what kinds of people do they allow to thrive? What happens when infrastructure starts to break down, or prove inadequate in the face of disaster? What do infrastructures teach us? And what kind of world do they make possible? This four-week seminar pulls back the curtain to reveal the people, processes, and values that shape the infrastructures...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Partitions: the Politics of Separation

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

From the population exchange that forged modern Greece and Turkey to the post-WWII division of South Asia and Palestine to the more recent dissolution of Yugoslavia, the 20th century was a time of partition and the compulsory movement of peoples. Often narrated as the inevitable result of different national and ethnic groups inhabiting the same territory–the outcome of “age old” prejudices and mutual hatred–partitions are in fact a thoroughly...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Resting on the fault line between art and politics, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man makes the powerful claim that black modernism and the African-American experience are central to the American narrative. For Ellison, the plight of his narrator, “both black and American,” was emblematic of major and  persisting paradoxes in American society. Yet the questions it raises about race and the constraints it places on American class...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Thucydides: War and Civilization

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the disastrous, 27-year war between Athens and Sparta. The Peloponnesian War brought to an end both democracy in Athens and the traditional Spartan aristocracy. Also destroyed was the classical idea of the city-state itself, with its attendant conceptions of citizenship and civic life.  Through its mix of speeches, narrative, and analysis, Thucydides’ History presents...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Modern Palestine: a Historical Introduction

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Perpetually in the news and commanding a tremendous amount of scholarly attention, Palestine remains a flashpoint in a number of contemporary debates: about war, colonization, and violence, religious and ethnic identity, nationalism and self-determination, modes of resistance, the role of international institutions, diasporic politics, academic freedom, and American foreign policy, among others. This course offers students an opportunity step back...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Euripides: the Varieties of Tragedy

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

To Aristotle, Euripides was “the most tragic of poets.” To his contemporary Aristophanes, he was a “morality-destroying quibbler and quarreler.” To Nietzsche, Euripides was, along with Socrates, the co-destroyer of tragedy. Behind these critical evaluations stands an extraordinarily variegated body of work: tragedies of intense psychological focus, of political engagement and despair, of romantic intrigue and...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Psychedelic Renaissance: Past, Present and Future

New York Open Center

This program can be taken as a series (at a special discounted price) or as individual sessions. This unique series of evening presentations addresses the history of psychedelics from classical antiquity and among Amazonian shamans through current research investigating the therapeutic value of psilocybin, MDMA and other compounds for clinical applications including PTSD, addiction, existential distress in palliative care and clinical depression....

(299) All levels 18 and older
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