Democracy and Duty: Activating Service

FAIN: AV-279608-21

Clemente Course in the Humanities, Inc. (New York, NY 10065-8014)
Lela Hilton (Project Director: October 2020 to April 2024)
Aaron Rosen (Project Director: April 2024 to present)

A preparatory training program hosted by Oregon Humanities and three discussion sessions for 15-20 participants, to be held in Dorchester, MA; Blacksburg, VA; and one remote session utilizing the SAKAI learning management system.

Our goal for these Dialogues is to explore the call to military service and offer opportunities for reconciling and repurposing that call into service in civilian life. These three Dialogues will engage 15-20 students (mostly veterans plus invited civilians) with primary sources drawn from moral philosophy, US history, literature, and images. Through letters, speeches, essays, poems, fiction, music, painting, photography, film, and architecture, we will explore Homeric epics, the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and WWI, to ask questions that challenge our assumptions about service, duty, and equality. In keeping with NEH’s goals for A More Perfect Union, studying these wars through the lens of service, allows us to better understand how US history informs and guides our service to our democracy, both as soldiers and citizens. The Dialogues will be team-taught over a series of 14 weeks and culminate in a service-learning project. (Dialogues faculty Jack Cheng and Jim Dubinsky are