This extensive course will encourage you to engage in critical thinking as we consider the inventions, events, and people that have shaped and influenced American journalism from colonial times to the internet. The impact of technical, economic, political, and cultural developments will be considered as we examine what “freedom of the press” and “the truth” have meant in American society from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of President Trump.

The Constitution is one of the great creations of civilized society, but there are many misconceptions and much ambiguity. We hear about the Constitution every day, but much of what we hear are partisan arguments based on court opinions rather than the actual words in the document. This session will focus on the words in the Constitution, with some attention to its structure and court interpretations. We won’t make any new discoveries, but we will find some things that are often overlooked, and we will gain a better understanding of how politicians and lawyers often say inconsistent things about our Constitution.

This will be an entertaining and compelling collection of stories by four established masters and two living writers: Leo Tolstoy’s “After the Ball”; Anton Chekhov’s “A Trifle From Real Life”; William Faulkner’s “Pantaloon in Black”; Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers”; Ron Rash’s “Back of Beyond”; and Lionel Shriver’s “Exchange Rates.”

This extensive course will encourage you to engage in critical thinking as we consider the inventions, events, and people that have shaped and influenced American journalism from colonial times to the internet. The impact of technical, economic, political, and cultural developments will be considered as we examine what “freedom of the press” and “the truth” have meant in American society from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of President Trump.

This course is based on Dr. Stefany’s doctoral dissertation in history at the University of Kansas. It is the first English language study of the December 1986 Alma-Ata (“Zheltoksan”) protests, which were in response to Mikhail Gorbachev’s replacement of long-serving First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan Dinmukhamed Kunaev with the Russian Gennadi Kolbin – and which many view as a harbinger of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The instructor will discuss the history and Russian colonization of the Kazakhs, Soviet “nationalities problem” dating from Lenin on, Stalinism, and the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods – during which Kunaev rose to power and began putting Kazahs in positions of authority in the Kazakh Societ Socialist Republic (KSSR).