What I’m Reading: Voices from Earlier Generations

As I prepare my upcoming lecture series, The Anatomy of Fascism, I’ve spent the past few months reading widely. Much of that work has focused on contemporary political philosophy and analyses of authoritarianism, fascism, and Nazism. But I’ve also returned to several older works that feel especially worth revisiting in the current political climate.

Some of these works connect obviously to authoritarianism and fascism.

• George Orwell: 1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945) are layered critiques of authoritarianism, each approaching the subject from a different angle: dystopian prophecy in one case, political allegory in the other. Together, they offer Orwell’s most forceful warning about how oppressive systems rise, consolidate power, and destroy truth

• Sinclair Lewis: It Can’t Happen Here (1935) remains one of the sharpest American literary warnings about fascism—not as a foreign import, but as something that could grow from U.S. traditions, anxieties, and political habits. Lewis suggests that American fascism would arise from populism, nationalism, economic fear, and the appeal of a “strong man” promising order.

Other works I’ve returned to are less obviously tied to The Anatomy of Fascism, but they still speak powerfully to the topic and to current political moments.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925) is an elegant critique of the American Dream. Jay Gatsby embodies that dream in motion, but Fitzgerald shows how the American’s Dream promise—that anyone can succeed through hard work—collapses under wealth, class, illusion, and human frailty. The novel portrays a nation where aspiration curdles into disillusionment, a theme I will connect to fascism’s roots in The Anatomy of Fascism.

• Ernest Hemingway: In A Movable Feast (1964) and The Sun Also Rises (1926), Hemingway traces two stages of disillusionment—one reflective and elegiac, the other raw and immediate. Both works show the “Lost Generation” struggling to rebuild meaning after World War I. Disillusionment is one of fascism’s emotional engines: not because disillusioned people seek tyranny, but because widespread loss of faith—political, economic, cultural, and moral—creates a vacuum that fascist movements can fill with certainty, identity, and rage.

• Christopher Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin (1939) offers a vivid eyewitness account of fascism’s rise in everyday life—not through grand speeches, but through the gradual normalization of hatred, poverty, and political violence.  Isherwood shows fascism emerging slowly, through social decay, economic desperation, moral collapse, and the willingness of ordinary people to look away.  The 1966 musical play and 1972 film Cabaret are based on the 1951 play I Am a Camera, itself adapted from Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin.

To understand what we are experiencing today, we sometimes need to listen to the voices of earlier generations.

Read on!

 

 

The Anatomy of Fascism

Registration for The Anatomy of Fascism requires membership in the California State University East Bay Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Click here for more information.

The 20th century left us a warning written in ash and bone: when fascism rises, entire societies can be dragged into catastrophe. World War II did not simply erupt—it was engineered by movements that fed on rage, myth, and the seductive promise of national rebirth. In the end seventy‑five to eighty million lives had were claimed. With destruction on that scale, understanding fascism becomes more than a historical exercise

Fascism today is often reduced to a casual insult, a rhetorical weapon tossed at any politician or policy we dislike. That flattening strips the term of its historical weight.  [What We Lose When “Fascism” Becomes an All‑Purpose Insult]  Even in more serious discussions, however, we tend to imagine fascism as a tidy ideology—a fixed set of doctrines that can be summarized like a party platform. But as historian Robert O. Paxton reminds us in his book The Anatomy of Fascism, “fascist movements varied so conspicuously from one national setting to another… that some even doubt that the term fascism has any meaning other than as a smear word."

The truth is that fascism was never primarily about doctrine. It was about behavior. Fascist movements revealed themselves through what they did: their mobilization of crowds, their glorification of violence, their manipulation of myth and emotion, their relentless pursuit of power. Their ideas were often contradictory or deliberately vague because coherence mattered far less than momentum. Fascists were not theorists; they were activists, agitators, and opportunists who believed that action itself—dramatic, theatrical, often brutal—was the engine of political transformation.

A past that cost tens of millions of lives is not something we can afford to misunderstand. The question is not whether history repeats itself exactly, but whether we are paying attention when its shadows begin to lengthen again. 

This is why my lecture series The Anatomy of Fascism approaches the subject not as a static belief system but as a dynamic political movement. To understand fascism, we must watch how it behaves, how it grows, how it exploits crisis, and how it transforms ordinary citizens into participants in extraordinary violence. Only by studying its patterns of action can we recognize how similar forces might re-emerge in different times and places, wearing new symbols but pursuing familiar ends.

Two Lectures in Early 2026

What a great time I had with my last lecture series Pilgrims and Puritans: A Theocracy in Colonial New England.  And it seems the participants really liked the experience.  As one of them emailed me:

Thank you for another WONDER-FULL presentation. Of course, YOU would go above and beyond what the title implied. Pilgrims and Puritans ain't all turkey when Dincher is the one talkin'!

I am doing something a little different in early 2026.  I'll be delivering two single-session presentations through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Cal State East Bay.

Beyond Economics: Healthcare Justice

Tuesday, March 3, 2026
9:30 AM to 11:30 AM

Register here

Medicine’s classical duty to “do no harm” has collided with a modern, market-driven healthcare system.  In today’s America, health care is no longer a simple exchange between doctor and patient. It’s a sprawling, high-stakes system involving providers, hospitals, clinics, labs, pharmaceuticals, cutting-edge technologies—and the ever-present insurance industry. The cost of accessing this system was the central flashpoint in the 43-day U.S. government shutdown of 2025.  But beyond economics lies a deeper concern: justice. When access to life-saving care depends on a person’s ability to pay, the problem becomes not only economic but ethical—a question of justice about who counts, who pays, and how a just society cares for the sick. Beyond Economics:  Healthcare Justice explores how values in medicine have evolved from Hippocrates’ timeless call to “do no harm” to today’s urgent debate over fairness and equity—and the intersections with theories of justice.

Erasing History—or Caring for our National Soul?

Tuesday, April 21, 2025
9:30 AM to 11:30 AM

Register here

Confederate statues topple from their pedestals. Military bases shed names that once honored rebellion. Government websites are scrubbed clean, museum exhibits closed, and school curricula rewritten.  Across the political divide, accusations fly—each side charging the other with “erasing history.” Yet beneath the noise lies a deeper question: when does such action distort the past, and when does it nurture the spirit of our nation? Erasing History—or Caring for the National Soul offers one perspective on the difference. 

My "Pilgrims and Puritans" Lecture Series has been Scheduled

Update:  Registration is now open for Pilgrims and Puritans.   Click here to go to the OLLI registration page. 

For those of you who have expressed interest in my next online lecture series in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at California State University - East Bay, Pilgrims and Puritans in Colonial America, that series has now been calendared.  

The Schedule

9:30 AM to 11:30 AM (Pacific Time)

Tuesday, October 14, 2025

Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Tuesday, November 4, 2025

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Tuesday, December 2, 2025

[Note:  No classes on 10/28, 11/11, 11/25 due to other commitments and holidays]

Click here for a brief introduction to the series.  Those who have participated in my lectures before are accustomed to hearing me say, "Everything's related" and know that I enjoy pulling connecting threads to see where they lead.  This series will be no different.  

I'll let you know when registration is open.  Hope to see you in October!

Click here to check out CSU's OLLI and its current course offerings!

    

   

Pilgrims and Puritans

Pilgrims and Puritans:  A Theocracy in Colonial New England

In 1797, U.S. President John Adams signed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary.  Better known as the Treaty of Tripoli the agreement between the United States and Tripoli (now Libya) was intended to secure commercial shipping rights and to protect American ships in the Mediterranean Sea from Barbary pirates.  But today the treaty is remembered for its Article 11:  The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion...

The supposed purpose of Article 11 was to assure North African Muslims that the United States was a secular state and that its intentions were not the same as that of earlier Christian nations that took part in the Crusades.  But Article 11 quickly raised dissenting voices.  For instance, Adams's Secretary of War, James McHenry, wrote to the Secretary of the Treasury, Oliver Wolcott, Jr. (1800): 

The Senate … ought never to have ratified the treaty alluded to, with the declaration that “the government of the United States, is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” What else is it founded on? This act always appeared to me like trampling upon the cross.

This contemporary-sounding argument over the founding nature of the United States began with the ink barely dry on the U.S. Constitution’s amendment prohibiting Congress from passing any legislation “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

The notions of secular government and freedom of religion were novel in the 18^th century—and not generally accepted by either the European nations or the British colonies in North America.  National identity, patriotic loyalty, and unity were thought to be achieved and maintained only through conformity of thought and behavior as defined by the ruler.  The idea that individuals have a right to their own thoughts and beliefs was subversive, treasonous, and a threat to national security.  

Consequently, each of the British colonies in North America attempted to enforce strict religious observance through both colonial governments and local town rules.  Most of the colonies had established churches with the salaries of ministers of those established churches paid through taxation.  The colonies also had some sort of religious test requirement for officeholders.  Strict limits were place on members of other churches, including prohibitions on their public religious services and at times even prohibiting them from even entering the colony.  Virginia, for instance, banned the public celebration of the Catholic Mass until Catholic soldiers from France arrived to fight in the American Revolution.  Nowhere in the colonies were state and church more enmeshed than in New England, the land of the Pilgrims and the Puritans—and their spiritual heirs, the Congregationalists—who envisioned building a Protestant Christian theocracy in the New World. 

As usual, my plan for this series is to take the long view on the history of the relationship between government and religion.  Starting with some ancient history, we will work our way up to the questions of who were the Pilgrims and Puritans, what was the basis for their vision of a North American Protestant Christian theocracy, and what did they do about it when they got to New England?  And then we grapple with the novel thinking some of America’s founders like of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that turned a rebellion into a revolution—and thwarted the Pilgrim and Puritan ambitions for a Calvinist theocracy. 

Fairy Tale Damsels in Distress

[Registration for Enchantments is now available at California State University - East Bay's Osher Lifelong Learning website.  Click HERE.]

In my last post (Enchantments and Villains) about my upcoming online lecture series on fairy tales (Planning Ahead: "Now for Something Completely Different"), I wrote that one of the concerns that people have about reading fairy tales to children is that the stories are often too scary and gruesome for young children.  

The struggle between the hero/heroine and the villain—between good and evil—is often at the center of the fairy tale. The hero/heroine and the villain are at odds with each other. They each want a different outcome, producing conflict and competition which drives the action in the story.  What would fairy tales be without their villains? 

According to some psychological theories, the telling and hearing of stories can support emotional health and have therapeutic benefits - and perhaps engaging the dark side of fairy tales is actually good for children—and for adults.

Another issue of concern is the recurring theme of the damsel in distress within fairy tales. The term 'damsel' refers to a young woman of high social standing who is often depicted as beautiful and popular. These damsels find themselves in various forms of danger, such as being kidnapped, imprisoned, cursed, or otherwise oppressed, and require the aid of one or more male heroes to save them. The portrayal of these women as weak, helpless, and passive victims awaiting a male rescuer has been a staple in Western storytelling, with the nature of their adversaries evolving over time to reflect societal fears and tastes, ranging from witches to aliens. Iconic characters like the unconscious Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, who depend on a prince's love to free them from a witch's curse, continue to promote outdated and condescending views of women. Similarly, even the diligent Cinderella is depicted as needing a prince to liberate her from her abusive household.

Food for Thought

Princess Belle-Etoile rescuing Prince Cheri
by English artist and book illustrator
Walter Crane (1845-1915) 

There are fairy tales that tell a different story.  In "Hansel and Gretel," Gretel slays the witch and rescues Hansel. In "Beauty and the Beast," Belle frees the prince from his curse. In the lesser-known "Princess Belle-Etoile," the princess dons her armor and saves the prince. Rapunzel herself concocts the escape plan from the tower, actively participating in her liberation. Although her role involves the stereotypical woman's activity of knitting, she proactively avoids waiting for the prince to devise a plan. Moreover, in the often-overlooked conclusion of the tale, Rapunzel, as a single mother fending for herself and her child in the wilderness, rescues the prince.

More Food for Thought

There are other ways of relating to fairy tales than a literal reading.  Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung considered fairy tales to be symbolic communications from - and to - the unconscious mind akin to dreams.  They held that the telling and hearing of fairy tales is an active experience, involving a powerful dynamic.  The narration of and reflection on the stories promote the resolution of internal, unconscious, and often self-defeating conflicts.

Freud and Jung had contrasting views on the symbolic significance of characters in dreams and fairy tales. Freud posited that while a character in our dreams or fairy tales does represent the self, other characters symbolize other people—typically mothers, fathers, siblings—who are the source of our internal and unconscious conflicts. Jung, conversely, believed that every character embodies different facets of the self. Both the feeble, defenseless victim and the potent, ingenious savior are representations of "me," irrespective of the character's gender.  Of course, then so is the villain.

[My related post:  Enchantments and Villains]

Enchantments and Villains

[Registration for Enchantments is now available at California State University - East Bay's Osher Lifelong Learning website.  Click HERE.]

With my lecture series on fairy tales and psychology coming up soon, I had a bit of a chuckle yesterday when an article popped up in my newsfeed about Disney’s plans for massive renovations and expansions to its theme park.  The Magic Kingdom is about to get a bit darker as villains will soon have their own home in the Magic Kingdom!   The expansion of Walt Disney World in Florida includes creating Villain Land.  Watch out, Sleeping Beauty and other fairy tale damsels in distress! 

Fairy tales do have their dark side. In fact, there has long been concern that fairy tales are generally too scary and gruesome for young children.  [Of course, they didn’t originate as children’s stories; they were stories told by adults to other adults.  But that changed by the mid-1800s after the Brothers Grimm realized that promoting their academic work on folktales as stories for children could ease their financial worries.]  In 1900, L. Frank Baum wrote in the introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:

          … the old time fairy tale, having served for generation, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale.

          … Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to please children of today.  It aspires to being a modern fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.

The villains eliminated together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents?  Nightmares left out?  Baum appears not to have thought that it might be a bit nightmarish to tell a story about a young girl being hunted down by a wicked witch who sends an army of flying monkeys after the girl and her friends—that is, after attacking them three previous times with an army of wolves, an army of crows and an army of killer bees—and then enslaves her. 

The struggle between the hero/heroine and the villain—between good and evil—is often at the center of the fairy tale. The hero/heroine and the villain are at odds with each other. They each want a different outcome, producing conflict and competition which drives the action in the story.  What would fairy tales be without their villains? 

[My related post:  Fairy Tale Damsels in Distress]

Planning Ahead: "Now for Something Completely Different"

Yes, Iceland was just as cold as it looks!

I am just back home this week from a wonderful 10-day adventure in Iceland - and am ready to give some attention to a new lecture series.  

If you have been attending any of my classes over the years, then you are accustomed to my focusing on history with contemporary social, political and even religious implications.  Those series can get to be a bit heavy–like my recent Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire on America’s history of White supremacy, racism and the Ku Klux Klan. That series was a great event.  Lots of information.  But it certainly was intense.  So, I am taking a break from "heavy" and planning to do something a little more fun.

I have proposed an online lecture series in the SCU-East Bay OLLI program for the fall that takes me back to my academic roots in psychology and my interest in literature and culture. 

Enchantments:  The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

Little Red Riding Hood by Jessie Willcox Smith
(1911) from the book A Child's Book of Stories

Contemporary Americans have simultaneously watered down fairy tales with Disney cuteness and eschewed them as stories too frightening for young children. But fairy tales did not originate as stories for children. They were stories told by adults for adults, the chief form of wintertime entertainment in pre-literate agricultural communities.

Those who study myths, dreams and the symbolic nature of human psychology believe that the telling—and hearing— of stories like fairy tales is not a passive experience, that there is a powerful dynamic that takes place in the telling and listening to stories. Some cultures even trained their physicians in the art of storytelling so that they could use stories as tools for psychic and emotional healing and to help a patient become a more integrated person. (Scheherazade's storytelling in One Thousand and One Nights is not simply a ploy to save her life; her storytelling is therapeutic.)

My Plans for the Series

I presented this series several years ago and am now updating it.  My plan is to look at the nature and history of fairy tales and the theories of psychological interpretation—with a presentation on the basics of Freudian and Jungian. psychology.  We will explore both some well-known and lesser-known fairy tales to see what they can tell us about ourselves and our journey towards integration, wholeness, and healthy human development.  

Hope to see you in the fall!  I'll keep you posted on scheduling.  In the meanwhile, check out the great selection of OLLI lectures available during the Spring/Summer 2024 Term!

[My related posts:  Fairy Tale Damsels in Distress and Enchantments and Villains]

Counting Down to The Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire

My lecture series on slavery, White supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan - The Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire - starts in just about a month.  Looking forward to seeing you there!  [If you haven't signed up yet, you can register on the California State University - East Bay OLLI website by clicking here.]  

In the meanwhile - 

This past Saturday, I attended a performance by one of my favorite jazz singers, Tierney Sutton.  She opened her show with a music video of the song "Good People" - confronting racism with a musical and visual survey of events in American history (as well as some present-day realities). 

 

Tierney then began her live performance without an introduction or comment by singing "The Way We Were".

Mem'ries may be beautiful and yet

What's too painful to remember

We simply choose to forget

So it's the laughter we will remember

Whenever we remember the way we were

Having spent a great deal of time over the past few months reading, researching and thinking about racism in America in preparation for The Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire, this was a surprise coincidence - and a surprisingly moving moment.   

On another note -

One of the topics that I will touch on briefly in the series is modern-day slavery and human trafficking.  Statistics vary quite a bit, but there are somewhere around 50 million people in the world today living in slavery.  Most coverage of human trafficking focuses on people being forced into sex work, but there are other areas of forced labor - one of the fastest growing being cyber slavery.  Hundreds of thousands are forced to work in industrial scale online scamming compounds. in southeast Asia.   You might find CNN's Ivan Watson's report on the intersection between human trafficking and the proliferation of online scamming:  Myanmar-based gangs force trafficking victims to scam Americans online. 

Some more food for thought - 

CNN's Fareed Zachariah closed out 2023 with a special report on immigration:  A Fareed Zakaria GPS Special: Immigration Breakdown.   Fareed provides a wide-ranging look at immigration, exploring not only the situation at the US southern border but immigration's history of racism.  You might also find the PBS American Experience page Reconstruction: The Second Civil War worth checking out.

Everything's Related!

Registration is Open: The Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire

Registration is now open for my next online lecture series in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at California State University-East Bay:  The Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire.  

You can register on the OLLI website by clicking here.   Hope to see you there!  In the meanwhile, check out a few of my recommended readings in a previous post.   [Of course, I'll have created a lengthy bibliography by the time the series starts as usual.]  

You might also find the PBS American Experience page Reconstruction: The Second Civil War worth checking out.

On a misty April evening in 1865, a jubilant crowd packed the White House lawn to hear President Abraham Lincoln first speech since the end of the Civil War. They expected a stirring celebration of the Union victory — but instead got harsh reality. Even with the South defeated, Lincoln warned, the future would be "fraught with great difficulty." He called the task ahead reconstruction — a word that returned to American headlines nearly a century and a half later, in the aftermath of the war in Iraq.

Even as Lincoln spoke, opposing forces were gathering. Some Americans saw Reconstruction as a chance to build a new nation out of the ashes of war and slavery. Others vowed to wage a new war to protect their way of life, and a racial order they believed ordained by God. Lincoln saw the problem with agonizing clarity. Bitter enemies, North and South, had to be reconciled. And four million former slaves had to be brought into the life of a nation that had ignored them for centuries. In some ways, it was harder than winning the war.

Three days after delivering his warning, Lincoln was shot dead. Reconstruction would have to go forward without him.

Spanning the momentous years from 1863 to 1877, Reconstruction tracks the extraordinary stories of ordinary Americans — Southern and Northern, white and black — as they struggle to shape new lives for themselves in a world turned upside down.

Reconstruction:  The Second Civil War

American Experience 

Aired January 12, 2004

The Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire: Some Recommended Reading

If you are planning on participating in my next online lecture series, The Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire, you can mark your calendar.  We have it scheduled - and registration is now open.  You can register on the OLLI at CSU-East Bay website by clicking here.

In the meanwhile, I want to recommend some related books that are worth reading whether you are planning on joining me for the series or not.

America's Original Sin:  White Supremacy, John Wilkes Booth, and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (John Rhodehamel)

John Rhodehamel weaves together the rise of Lincoln and the evolution of his thinking on slavery from containment to emancipation to racial equality and John Wilkes Booth's rise to fame as an actor, his growing anger and hatred of Lincoln, and the evolution of his plot from kidnapping to assassination.  This is the first book to explicitly name white supremacy as the motivation for Abraham Lincoln's assassination.  (America's Original Sin on Amazon)

Unpunished Murder:  Massacre at Colfax and the Quest for Justice (Lawrence Goldstone) 

On Easter Sunday, 1873, a band of white supremacists attacked the residents of Grant Parish, Louisiana and massacred over 100 African Americans in what is one of the most horrific episodes of mass murder in the United States.  Although those who sought justice for the victims took the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, no one was ever convicted - and the resulting Cout ruling (US v Cruickshank) helped create a society in which black Americans could be legally oppressed and denied basic human rights, paving the way for Jim Crow laws and institutionalized racism in the American justice system. (Unpunished Murder on Amazon)

Built from the Fire:  The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street (Victor Lukerson)   

Popularly known as America's "Wall Street", Greenwood is a historic district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, During the early 20th century, the district grew into one of the most prominent and prosperous concentrations of African American businesses in the United States.  It was burned to the ground in the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 in which a white mob gathered and attacked the area.  Estimates of deaths range from 75 to 300 with hundreds injured and 5000 left homeless.  Victor Lukerson tells the story of the people who built the Greenwood community and struggled for equal opportunity, the destruction of the community and massacre of its population, and the surviving residents who rebuilt their community.  (Built from the Fire on Amazon)

You can check out the current course offerings at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at CSU-East Bay here.  You don't need to be a member to enroll in a course - and many courses are offered online.  

  

Planning Ahead: The Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire

The Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire is the working title of my next online lecture series for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at California State University-East Bay.  With the current challenging conversations among Americans about race, I thought it would be a good idea to look at some of the America's racial history and have proposed a lecture series on slavery and the Ku Klux Klan which has often been referred to as the Invisible Empire.  We are still working out a schedule, but the series will take place in early 2024.  I will let you know when we finalize the schedule. 

Update:  Registration is now open on the OLLI at CSU-East Bay website.  Register by clicking here.

The Ku Klux Klan is an American white supremacist, terrorist, and hate group which has existed as three separate Klan organizations in three non-overlapping time periods in American history. 

• First Klan (1865-1872):  After the American Civil War, the first Klan terrorized formerly enslaved Black Americans and their White allies in in South until it was crushed by Ulysses S. Grant in 1872.

• Second Klan (1915-1944):  Inspired by D. W. Griffith’s 1915 incendiary film “The Birth of a Nation”, the second Klan (often referred to as the Invisible Empire) grew to include as many as 6 million Americans by the mid 1920s—primarily in the North and Midwest rather than in the South—targeting not only Black Americans but Jews, Catholics. and immigrants in general as well.  The second Klan tapped into American passion for fraternal organization at the time and partnered with Evangelical clergy, temperance groups and suffragists.  The Klan infiltrated local and state governments, Congress, the judiciary—and had its sights set on the presidency before its scandal-driven decline in the second half of the 1920s.  Membership dropped to about 30,000 by 1930, and it finally faded away in the 1940s.  

• Third Klan (1950-present):  The third and current manifestation of the KKK with between 5000 and 8000 members emerged after 1950 in opposition to the civil rights movement.  Contemporary Klan groups have consistently declined due to a variety of factors including the American public's general distaste of the group, prosecution by law enforcement, civil lawsuits, and the growth of alternative radical right-wing hate and militia groups such as neo-Nazis and neo-Fascists.

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For some recommended reading, click here.  

Planning Ahead - The Great Awakenings

America's Great Awakenings were periods of widespread religious rivals led by evangelical Protestant ministers.  The Awakenings occurred just prior to moments of upheaval in American history – the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and the two World Wars.  The Awakenings were characterized by:

• Revival meetings, intense religious fervor, and a profound sense of conviction and redemption on the part of those affected;
• A sharp increase in interest in religion and an increase in evangelical church membership; and
• The formation of new religious movements and denominations

Each of the Great Awakenings lasted only about a generation.  Nevertheless, they each had a profound impact on American development.  The Great Awakenings shaped the discussions and debates over independence, abolition, suffrage and women’s rights. and social welfare. 

[This lecture series takes its title from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, a 1740 sermon by American revivalist preacher, philosopher and Congregationalist theologian, Jonathan Edwards (1703 - 1758.  Edwards' sermon was immensely influential during the 1st Great Awakening and considered a classic of early American literature.]

Registration for "In the Hands of an Angry God" is now available.

Click here to go to the CSU-East Bay OLLI website to register and view other courses.  

Planning Ahead - Politics of Grievance

The term populism originated in the USA in the late 19th century.  Populist-like movements, however, have existed in many eras in many places, and today populist movements with their politics of grievance exist in almost every democracy in the world.   

Because it ends with “-ism,” [populism] is often mistaken for an ideology, a counterpart to socialism and liberalism in competition for a coherent governing philosophy. It is no such thing. Instead, populism is best understood as a strategy for gaining and wielding power.” …[P]opulists portray a political reality neatly cleft into two:  corrupt, greedy elite versus the noble and pure—but betrayed and aggrieved—Volk, the people. All the people’s problems stem from the decisions—often conspiratorial, always corrupt—of a venal elite. …Populist leaders portray themselves as embodying the will of the people and championing their cause against the corrupt elite.  (The Revenge of Power by Moisés Naím)

Populist movements don’t fit easily into the left-wing/right-wing model—some movements are clearly left-wing, some right-wing, and some have elements of both—because populist movements are essentially reactive to the perceived political reality and grievance of “the People.”  

Politics of Grievance takes a thought-provoking journey to populism in the USA through the complexity of power dynamics and grievances in Western religious, intellectual and political development.  

Addicted to "Truth" - Early Christians wrestled with one another over what constituted true belief, and over time the winners of those contests defined Christian orthodoxy—and over time gained the religious-political power to enforce orthodoxy and control Europe’s political and intellectual life. 

Recommended Reading:  Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Bart D. Ehrman)

16th Century Grievances:  Protestant Reformers - The grievances of Martin Luther, John Calvin and others ended the religious, political and intellectual monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church

 Recommended Reading:  Luther’s Fortress:  Martin Luther and His Reformation Under Siege (James Reston, Jr.) 

Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650)

17th Century Grievances:  The Enlightenment - The Protestant Reformers were not advocates of religious freedom, equal rights or separation of church and state, but their break with Rome opened the door for intellectual freedom that led to the Age of Enlightenment, the philosophical movement based upon evidence of the senses, science and reason rather than faith and revelation.  Their grievances dominated and reshaped Western thought and politics in the 17th and 18th century.

Recommended Reading:  Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason (Russell Shorto)

18th Century Grievances: The Enlightenment and America's Founders - Enlightenment philosophy fueled America's founders' grievances with British rule and shaped their thinking on government, democracy, human equality, rights and self-determination.

Recommended Reading:  Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Woody Holton)

19th Century Grievances:  Populism in the United States - Americans of the Jacksonian Era demanded that government be taken out of the exclusive hands of "the Elite" and greater power given to "the People."  In the early 1830s, however, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed his concern that the populism he observed in his travels through America during Andrew Jackson's presidency would erode American's foundational ideals of equality and human rights, creating a new form of tyranny and despotism.

Recommended Reading:  The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century (Moisés Naím)

Registration at www.scholarolli.com is available beginning December 12, 2022.

Planning Ahead - Fighting Faiths: The Crusades

In 1095 the Byzantine Emperor appealed to the Pope for mercenaries to support his fight with the Muslim Turks who had reduced the once expansive empire to just Greece and coastal Asia Mino--and not threatened the capital of Constantinople.  Pope Urban II responded by delivering a sermon that called Europeans to a "military pilgrimage."  

Tens of thousands of nobles, knights, and soldiers, as well as untrained peasants—men, women and children—responded, initiating a crusading era that lasted nearly two centuries. 

In modern times, it is generally thought that the Crusades were not a good idea.

But the facts of the Crusades are generally less well-known than the myths and legends.  And some contemporary historians see the Crusades as a crucial (if less than successful) defensive effort in “response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world.  At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam” (Thomas Madden, The Real History of the Crusades).

 

Topics to be Covered

The Holy Land of relics and shrines

Medieval Chaos in the Christian West

The Split between Western and Eastern Christianity

The Growth of the Islamic Empires

Highlights of the Major Crusades

The Legacy of the Crusades

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute

Cal State East Bay Concord Campus

4700 Ignacio Valley Road

Concord, CA  84521

Phone:  925-602-6776

Email:  OLLI@csueastbay.edu

Website:  www.scholarolli.com

Planning Ahead - No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Most of us remember the series of comedic sketches in Monty Python's Flying Circus satirizing the real-life Spanish Inquisition., "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"   

Monty Python's inquisitors applying the
comfy chair torture

But the Inquisition has been serious business in one form or another for nearly 800 years targeting Jews, Moors, witches, the Knights Templar, scientists (like Galileo), theologians and philosopher. 

This attempt by the Catholic Church to deal with its enemies, inside and outside, pioneered tools that had not existed before:  surveillance, censorship, and “scientific” interrogation.  These tools spread far beyond the Church to become the tools of secular persecution, tools that have only improved and are part of our lives today.

We like to think that the Inquisition is something safely confined to the distant past, something "medieval" that in an enlightened age we’ve moved far beyond.  But the Inquisition is really one of the first modern institutions, and its mindset and methods are with us today. 

Topics Covered 

• The Inquisition Mindset and “Inquisitions” in the Modern Age
• The Birth of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages and the Dominicans (Order of Preachers)
• The Spanish Inquisition
• The Roman Inquisition:  Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition
• Banning Books:  Index Librorum Prohiborum

Food for Thought

The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe

• An 1842 short story about terror induced by the Inquisition (and a 1961 film starring Vincent Price, my 9^th cousin 1x removed)

A prisoner undergoing torture at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition
with monks in the background waiting to write down his confession.  

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

• Set in 1327 against the Medieval Inquisition’s prosecution of the Fraticelli.  The Fraticelli ("Little Brethren") were extreme proponents of the rule of Saint Francis of Assisi, especially with regard to poverty, and regarded the wealth of the Church as scandalous, and that of individual churchmen as invalidating their status. They thus claimed that everyone else in the Church was damned and deprived of powers.  The Fraticelli were declared heretical in 1296 by Boniface VIII.

Against the Inquisition (La Gesta del Marrano) by Marcos Aguinis

• An historical novel set in Latin America during the Spanish Inquisition and based on the true
  story of Francisco Maldonado da Silva, an Argentine marrano physicial who was held in the secret prisons of the Inquisition for six years before being burned at the stake in Lima, Peru.

Captain from Castille by Samuel Shellabarger

• A best seller published in 1945, tells the story (with lots of swashbuckling) of a 19-year-old Pedro de Vargas, whose family is denounced to the Inquisition on trumped-up charges.  Pedro flees to Cuba where he enlists in Cortes' campaign to conquer Mexico.  Basis of the 1947 film of the same name starring Tyrone Powers and Jean Peters in her feature film debut - along with Jay Silverheels who later portrayed Tonto on the television series The Lone Ranger.