One Day University: Rethinking America (NYC) WAIT LIST ONLY

The rise and fall of ancient Rome is one of the greatest stories in the history of the world. From a group of settlements huddled along the Tiber in Italy, Rome rose to conquer much of the Mediterranean world and Europe. At the height of the Roman Empire, one in every five people in the world lived within its territory.

For Americans, Rome’s unlikely ascent, spectacular ambitions, and gruesome decline have provided endless fuel for our national self-examination. Is the United States an empire? Are empires good or bad? What makes great civilizations decline and fall—and how can America avoid that fate? This talk will explore the great American question—”Are We Rome?”—and show why this ancient empire continues to fascinate our very modern nation.

Caroline Winterer / Stanford University
Caroline Winterer is Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. Her latest book, “American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason,” is being published by Yale University Press in October 2016. She is a recipient of an American Ingenuity Award from the Smithsonian Institution for mapping the social network of Benjamin Franklin, and is also a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

There’s a story we like to tell about what makes us Americans. Centuries ago, great men enshrined noble principles of liberty and equality in the Declaration of Independence. They wrote the Constitution to carry those principles into execution. And for over two hundred years, that Constitution has served us well. It is the bedrock of our American society, it establishes our core values, it tells us who we are.

It’s a nice story, but what if it’s wrong? In this lecture, Professor Kermit Roosevelt will explain how the principles of the Declaration are not what we think they are, how the original Constitution fell to pieces, how the story of America is actually one of repeated crisis, struggle, and even failure—and how despite that, the Constitution remains a vehicle for the advancement and articulation of American ideals.

Kermit Roosevelt III / University of Pennsylvania
Kermit Roosevelt is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Born in Washington, DC, he attended Harvard University and Yale Law School. Before joining the Penn faculty, he clerked for DC Circuit Judge Stephen F. Williams and Supreme Court Justice David Souter, and practiced law in Chicago. His experiences clerking and practicing law informed his first novel, “In the Shadow of the Law,” which was a national bestseller and winner of the Athenaeum Literary Award. Professor Roosevelt is the great-great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and the fifth cousin four-times removed of President FDR.

Think back to the 1970s: the end of the Vietnam War, inflation, America’s rust-belt factories going bust, disco, a stagnant Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, intense global poverty in populous places like Communist China. Now look around today, 40 years later: the Soviet Union is long gone and Russia has a large middle class,led by strongman Vladimir Putin, a villain straight out of Hollywood central casting. And now China is the world’s great economic dynamo.

What happened? How should we understand these changes? How might things look another 40 years hence? Does this portend a decline in American power and influence? Is America’s place in the world, in fact, changing? Should it change? Or, is this just a temporary phenomenon, overhyped, a marketing slogan? Might China instead crash? Is Russia set for further reversals, too? What are the real strengths and weaknesses of China, Russia and our own United States? More broadly, what lessons can we draw from these cases about global geopolitics and the world in which our children and grandchildren will inherit?

Stephen Kotkin / Princeton University
Stephen Kotkin is the John P. Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton. Professor Kotkin established the department’s Global History workshop. He serves on the core editorial committee of the journal, World Politics. He founded and edits a book series on Northeast Asia. From 2003 until 2007, he was a member and then chair of the editorial board at Princeton University Press, and is a regular book reviewer for the New York Times Sunday Business section.

New York Hilton
1335 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10019