As we head into the fall election, Denver Brunsman of George Washington University will discuss the history of the Electoral College. Agreed to in the last days of the Constitutional Convention, the Electoral College persists to this day as a relic of 18th-century political thought and compromise. Why did the framers of the Constitution create such a complicated system for electing the President? Professor Brunsman will explore this and other questions about what might be America’s most unloved political institution.

The United States is facing the most serious set of foreign policy challenges since the end of the Cold War more than 30 years ago. At the same time, we are heading into a presidential election that will have major impact on the direction of our foreign policy. The choices that must be made will likely affect our country for the next several decades at least.

Voters weigh a president’s economic stewardship every four years--usually rewarding incumbents and their party during good economic times and punishing them during bad times. Yet, presidents have less influence on the economic cycle while in office than the public realizes. They often are beneficiaries or victims of the marketplace, Federal Reserve interest rate changes and predecessors’ policies that later boost the economy or blow it up. We'll examine this pattern from Lyndon Johnson to Joe Biden.

The classical Greeks defined human beings as rational animals, but are we really? It turns out that our brains are actually wired in many circumstances to believe irrational ideas, to draw unsupported conclusions and believe them. We will examine a number of these cognitive biases and logical fallacies and consider ways to avoid them.

When Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense, died in June 1809 only a dozen people came to his funeral. This program examines Paine’s meteoric rise to celebrity status during the American Revolution and his equally dramatic fall from grace in the decades afterwards. Once lionized as our most relatable and revolutionary founding father, Tom Paine died a pariah, too radical and uncompromising for the cautious new country he had called into being.

In August 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette, a Frenchman and the last surviving major general of the American Revolution, triumphantly returned to the country he loved. Over the next year, Lafayette covered over 6000 miles by carriage, stagecoach, canal barge, and steamboat, traveling to all 24 exiting states and “Washington City.” This presentation will cover the details of Lafayette’s Farewell Tour of America, and how it will be celebrated in 2024 – 2025.

The movies and dancing are a partnership born in heaven. From its very beginnings, the new medium of motion pictures turned toward dance as one of the best ways to showcase its unique ability to make movement come alive. And through the decades, it’s been dancing on the big screen that has provided some of the most ecstatic moments in film history—whether it’s Fred Astaire gliding on the ceiling in Royal Wedding, the Nicholas Brothers leaping down a staircase in Stormy Weather, Moira Shearer pirouetting through the dreamscape of The Red Shoes, or John Travolta burning up the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever. Illustrated with more than 75 video clips, this talk will survey 130 years of thrilling movie dance performances and demonstrate the extraordinary ways cinema brought dance to life.

Machines can think...or can they? We know computers can calculate, and we know that for us to calculate we must think, but surely it does not then follow that computers must have thoughts. But could they? What would it mean for a machine to think? How would we know if a machine was actually thinking or just making it look as if it was?