StocktonAfterClass

Send us Fan Mail Reflections on Obama’s Election.  The Day After For someone of my generation, it was hard to believe that we would ever have a Black President.  And then we had one.  I realized that this was a historic event and decided I should put my thoughts down in writing.  These are reflections written the day after that amazing election.  They are very personal, especially about my engagem...

Send us Fan Mail Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie Salman Rushdie is one of the great English language literary figures.  He has won the Brooker Prize for the best Novel in English and was a finalist twice.  The focus of this talk is on the Rushdie novel, the Islamic traditions around the most controversial passages, comparisons with Christian traditions, and the reaction of Ayatollah Khomeini.  Bu...

Send us Fan Mail Six Months of Stocktonafterclass, and Counting. August 6, 2021 is the six month anniversary of the beginning of this podcast series.  This is a short description of how this podcast got started, the philosophy and approach of the series,  some of the themes followed, and some data on the downloads, including where they are occurring.   There is also a discussion of feedback, inclu...

Send us Fan Mail My favorite novel is Gilead by Marilynn Robinson.  It is up there in my pantheon with Les Miserables and Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.  Spoon River Anthology is a dialogue from the grave, short one-page, free-verse statements from the deceased about their lives.  After a while you realize they are interacting with each other, in death as they did in life.  It is one...

Send us Fan Mail Black Political Leaders                       There are two talks on Black leadership, one on Political Leaders, one on Intellectual Leaders.  This is the talk on Political Leaders.   The focus is upon nine key leaders.  There are others who are worthy of inclusion. I thought of Rosa Parks, far more significant than the demeaning image as a simple woman with tired feet who sat dow...

Send us Fan Mail When our 50th anniversary rolled around, I decided to write up a reflection on how we came to become a couple.  That occurred back in the 1960s when dating practices were a bit different from today, to say the least.  I wrote this with an idea of entertaining my family members.  I also shared it with friends and colleagues and even with some students.  Most people thought it was w...

Send us Fan Mail Osama issued two declarations of war on the United States, one in 1996 and one in 1998.  The one in 1996 was more lengthy and more filled with passion.  The one in 1998 was in the name of a collection of leaders, some of whom were religious leaders.  Both were called "fatwa," a term much misunderstood to most Americans.  A fatwa is a an advisory opinion by a religious le...

Send us Fan Mail The Holocaust was an effort by the Nazi government to exterminate the total Jewish population of Europe.  It is a form of genocide but perhaps the most extreme form of genocide.  There is a separate talk on that topic which you can listen to if you wish.   This talk will walk you through the Holocaust in eight steps.  There is nothing in this talk that is meant to be argumentative...

Send us Fan Mail Background to Catholicism.  Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask. This is an introduction to the Catholic Church.  We start at 1868 when Italy became a country and the pope was stripped of his “temporal” power, i.e., he stopped being the ruler of a state.  He got very irritated and renounced the very existence of Italy and Germany.  Not good.  The Church shifted to...

Send us Fan Mail Black Intellectual leaders .    Because I think race is the single most critical and most divisive issue in American politics, I always included a unit on Black politics in my course on American government.  And in my course on Revolution.   And in my Honors course.  The approaches in these three courses were very different but they all followed a theme:  resistance to injustice. ...

Send us Fan Mail Ian Lustick is a prominent political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.  He is known for his analysis of intractable conflicts:  South Africa, Algeria, Northern Ireland, and Israel-Palestine. I discussed some of his ideas in the podcast on The Black Swan.    In his book Paradigm Lost Lustick discusses why the option of a two-state solution is no longer possible.  He says...

Send us Fan Mail This is part one of a two part lecture on Osama bin Laden. Part Two  will focus on his Declaration of War on the United States (1996).  Osama issued two Declarations of War, in 1996 and in 1998.  The second was called a “fatwa.” Both are available on the internet.  I suggest that you download the 1996 declaration so you can follow along as we discuss it.     My goal is to show bin...

Send us Fan Mail Pete Seeger was one of the great social justice protest singers.  His songs ("If I had a hammer" for example) were legendary.  Pete believed that music could change societies.  He never gave up, even during the long period of time when he was blacklisted.  Then in 1968 he appeared on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and introduced a new anti-Vietnam war song.  It was &q...

Send us Fan Mail The Book of Daniel was written about the same time as Maccabees II.  It would be best to listen to the Maccabees podcast before this one.  Remember that Maccabees II was a response to the Maccabees uprising, described in Maccabees I.  Daniel was placed in a much earlier time to conceal its contents as not being contemporary, even though it was.  This was a time when the literary s...

Send us Fan Mail The Maccabees Uprising . 167-160 B. C.  In my class on Religion and Politics I had students study two uprisings rooted in religious communities.  One was the Maccabeean uprising against the Seleucid Empire and the other was Osama bin Laden.  This podcast is on the Maccabees.  There will soon be a podcast on Osama bin Laden. Thinking of these two uprisings in comparative and analyt...

Send us Fan Mail Somehow I went from being an 18-year-old writing instructor’s nightmare to a being a good writer.  There were a lot of steps along the way to that achievement, not all of them easy.   In this podcast, I am going to share some of my struggles, and my secrets, with you.  I always told my students that writing was a skill that one could learn.   I have seen students go from C to B in...

Send us Fan Mail In September, 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon,  the Israeli army took control  of West Beirut and the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatillah.  Bashir Gemayel, the leader of the Phalangist movement (Kataeb in Arabic), had just been assassinated.  He had supported the Israelis in their invasion, hoping to free his land of the PLO and of Syrian domination.  The...

Send us Fan Mail Abraham Lincoln delivered two speeches that are considered among the greatest ever delivered.  One was the Gettysburg Address and one was the Second Inaugural.  Most Americans consider the Gettysburg Address to be his greatest, but Lincoln believed his Second Inaugural was his best. I agree.  It changed the way Americans thought about their country.   This is a talk I delivered to...

Send us Fan Mail In 1986 General Westmoreland visited the University of Michigan-Dearborn.  He had three events during the day.  One was a meeting with faculty and guests, which I chaired.  Another was a panel discussion and a third was a meeting with the public.   These are my observations and comments, written up just after the day's events.  

Send us Fan Mail There are extremist group in Israel, even in the Knesset,  that trace their origins to Rabbi Meir Kahane.  Kahane was born in Brooklyn but moved to Israel and was elected to the Knesset.  He was later assassinated.  At the time, his views were considered shockingly extreme.  He was widely renounced by American Jews and by Israelis.   I heard Kahane speak twice in the Detroit area...

Send us Fan Mail The word Intifada (sometimes Intifadah) means uprising.  More specifically it means “shaking off,” but uprising is close enough.  There were two Intifadas, one in 1987-1993, just called the Intifada.  The other is called the Al Aqsa Intifada from 2000 to 2005.  These were very different from each other.  I have two podcasts on these.  One on the Intifada, one on the Al Aqsa Intifa...

Send us Fan Mail Al Aqsa Intifada.  The Logic of Violence, the Impact of Violence.   There were two Intifadas. The first began in December, 1987. The second is called the Al Aqsa Intifada and began in September, 2000.  The first involved non-lethal violence on the part of the Palestinians, throwing stones, burning tires. The second was extremely violent.  In both cases, from a Palestinian point of...

Send us Fan Mail One morning we woke up and Soviet Union was gone.  None of us saw this coming.  When I started teaching in the 1970s, I told students there were three conflicts that would go on forever:  Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Israel-Palestine.     But two of those are resolved: Northern Ireland and South Africa. Is it possible that the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict could be resolved...

Send us Fan Mail What happened after the armistice in January of 1949?   Of course, the major consequence was the Palestinian refugees.  Thinking only of what we consider the internationally recognized boundaries of Israel, probably 80% or more of all the Palestinians inside of that area  on January 1, 1948 were gone by December 31, 1948.  This is the real “catastrophe,” or nakhba,  as the Palesti...

Send us Fan Mail On April 24, 2021 President Biden used the word “genocide” to describe what happened to the Armenians of Turkey.  Whether to use this word had been a matter of debate since the 1970s.  In 1915 the Ottoman government, fearing that the Armenians in eastern Turkey would align with the Russians, decided to evacuate the whole Armenian population of Eastern Turkey by marching them acros...