What did Great-Grandpa do for a living? How big was his family? Were they rich or poor? What was their religion? Did their physical characteristics match the characteristics of the majority of the local population? Can you discover genealogy’s “Holy Grail”: Great-Grandma’s hometown somewhere in the world? Constructing a timeline for your ancestors will connect you with the geography, history, and culture in which they lived, bringing together your own family stories with the powerful search engines of the internet.

We will sample the most popular genealogical websites as well as some unusual ones. This seminar is open to all, from beginners to professionals, and encourages an interactive exploration of your ancestors as well as their lives and times.    

Participants are encouraged to use personal laptops in class, working on their own projects while learning from conversation with others in the group. 

The Charlotte region (Mecklenburg and surrounding counties) is one of the fastest growing areas in the United States. Using the instructor’s personal experience from working directly with regional city, town, and county governments – along with information from the archives of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute – we’ll explore the history of the region. We will examine Charlotte’s explosive growth and the issues stemming from that growth: jobs, housing, crime, education, and transportation. We’ll also look at historical patterns in the surrounding counties and the way outlying areas connect to Charlotte. As tourism plays a major role in the region’s economy, we’ll discuss what there is to see and do in the metropolis.

This course will be primarily lecture, but it will include some group participation.

From 1947 to 2017, the US helped construct an international trading system that encouraged trade among nations. President Trump believes this undermined the US economy, costing many American jobs. His solution has been tariffs on other countries and products. A February 2026 Supreme Court decision invalidated a major portion of his program. His administration is working on “workarounds” to be implemented over the summer and fall of 2026. This course will examine what has happened and why, and what might come next.  

This course updates the instructor’s Fall 2025 course in light of more recent events and information. Students do not need to have attended the previous version of this course to enjoy this course.

Explore the life and work of August Wilson, one of the most important playwrights of the 20th Century. His American Century Cycle is a series of ten plays set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where he grew up. We will investigate Wilson’s themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, generational conflict, personal responsibility, gender stereotypes, and racial discrimination. We will consider Wilson’s importance in the contexts of other playwrights such as Lorraine Hansberry, Henrik Ibsen, and Arthur Miller, in addition to African-American artists, including Romare Bearden, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ryan Coogler. This course addresses the question: Why does August Wilson matter now?

This course, which will be primarily lecture but will include some class discussion, will involve a significant amount of required reading and viewing, roughly 3-5 hours per week.

Poetry at work. Poems have structures as do other art forms. Formal poems, and those that reflect the forms but do not adhere strictly to them, offer writers great examples for their own work. Looking at formal poetry offers solutions for revision as well—to see what our poems need to become their best selves. In each of four classes we will read examples of a particular poetic form and discuss how the writer achieved a meaning and an experience for the reader. The first class will be an introduction to four forms with some exercises in class. The remaining classes will include an introduction to a form, then close readings of the students’ own works.

Behavioral ecologists often focus on the reproductive behavior of animals because reproduction is so intimately tied to the fitness of individuals.  In this course, we will examine the evolution of sexual reproduction and sex roles, male-male competition, female choice, sexual conflict, and mating systems.      

This course will be primarily lecture.

This course examines American slavery not as a social practice that gradually hardened into custom, but as a deliberately engineered economic and legal system.  Drawing on the disciplines of legal history, economic history, and primary source literature, we ask the questions a forensic accountant might bring to a fraud case: What was the structure? Who designed it? What did it produce? Who benefited? And what does the ledger show today?

The US defense budget is likely to top one trillion dollars (that’s $1,000,000,000,000) this year. This course will give an overview of what we as taxpayers are buying and how the defense budget is built. We will explore the current budget relative to historical spending and relative to spending by other countries. We will break spending down into three major categories: (1) People: military personnel, civilians, and their compensation, (2) Places: bases, housing, repair depots, hospitals, and more, and (3) Things: the development and acquisition of ships, aircraft, weapons systems, etc. The final class will consider options for reducing spending – past ideas and future possibilities.

This course is primarily lecture.

Socioecology is a field of biology that examines the social behavior of animals as evolutionary adaptations to their environment. Dr. Case will review concepts of socioecology using an archive of her photographs of some of Africa’s most charismatic mammals. She has been taking Davidson College students to Africa since 2000 and has a rich portfolio of photographs illustrating a variety of species and their social behavior. Using  her perspective as both scientist and photographer, Dr. Case will convey her love for animals and what they can teach us about our own behavior.

In late June of 1863, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia began its second invasion of the North. This invasion culminated in the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, the most famous battle of the war due to the amount of human carnage, the Gettysburg Address, and the central role it played in the Myth of the Lost Cause. This course will cover the myths of the battle; the three days of fighting; and post-war events, including the establishment of the Gettysburg National Military Park.

Literature can bring history to life by capturing the passionate, partisan views of its combatants and the broader political currents that shaped their experiences. Such is the case of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Spain in Our Hearts makes superb use of letters and diaries to highlight the tragic participation of Americans of the International Lincoln Brigade. Similarly, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia details his participation on the Aragon Front in 1937 and his disillusionment with the infighting among communists and anarchists, allies against General Franco’s insurrectionists. A recent novel by Julian Zabalbeascoa further explores the conflict’s complexities through the limited perspective of the people of Basque, where mountainous terrain impeded isolated, uneducated villagers from understanding the strategies and goals of the war. The course will introduce other works in Spanish, Catalan, and English to further explore these themes, as well as concise histories of the Spanish Civil War. The instructor will provide students with links to news clips and videos covering different aspects of the war. Through literature, the course will provide new interpretations of this war, its historic significance, and its long-term consequences.

This course will be primarily lecture but will include some group participation.

Why do people migrate? What is the impact of immigration on the residents of the host country? What is the impact of emigration on the residents of the home country? How does migration affect the migrants themselves? Using basic economic theory and data, we will study these questions and look at how migration can affect incomes, growth, and inequality within and across countries.

This course will be primarily lecture, but it will include some group participation.

In this course we will discuss the Federal Reserve policies towards interest rates, the tools at its disposal, and how the Fed balances inflation and unemployment in the US economy. Interest rate changes are one of the risks in bond investing, and they will be analyzed along with credit and structure considerations.

Can reading and discussing fictional and historical narratives help us answer the question posed by Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here (itself partly inspired by the destruction of democracy in Germany’s democratic Weimar Republic)?

We will read and consider one work of history and four novels by German and American authors to probe the question(s) evoked in the course title. These texts narrate the time from the beginning of World War I to the rise of fascism. Through discussion and occasional mini-lectures, we will explore how to apply what we learn from the texts to examine our current authoritarian threat: descriptively, analytically, and hopefully motivationally. To allow sufficient time for reading, we will meet every other week.

The staff of the Davidson College Archives, Special Collections & Community Department will lead two sessions. In the first, students will learn how to explore and access the department’s notable and unique resources about town and college history, including oral histories, local publications, scrapbooks, and photographs. In the second, workshop-style session, students will learn how to use archival supplies to preserve a selection of their own family records. At the end of the course, students will be able to conduct their own research on local history topics and contribute to a larger understanding of Davidson’s past, present, and future. In addition, they will understand how to protect their own records so that they can share their stories with their families.

In order to participate fully in the second session, students should bring a small selection of their own records. This material could be photographs, scrapbooks, ephemera, materials from volunteer work or other organizations, or other family records deemed valuable to the participant. Instructors will provide archival storage materials and guiding literature, including Beginner’s Guide to Family Archives.

Ever realize that you have a priceless slice of the past to donate to the future? You do – it’s called the story of your life. In this course, we will tap our memories to chronicle the vivid lessons and life experiences that molded us into who we are. Funny, poignant, heroic, or embarrassing, our lives are a bundle of stories that deserve to be recorded either as a private exercise or a gift to future family generations. This dynamic workshop will release the not-to-be forgotten tales of your life on earth.

November is Men’s Heath month, aka Movember or "no shave November.” The Movember Foundation seeks to change the “face of men’s health” by encouraging men to know more about common health conditions, screening, treatment, and prevention of male-specific cancers, mental health disorders, and suicide. This two-hour course will touch on the Foundation's goals, as well as contributing factors to male identity, dysfunction, and andropause (male menopause). Most of our discussion will focus on prostate enlargement (BPH) and prostate cancer, issues that most men will face over their lifetimes.  The instructor – a physician, educator, researcher, and patient facilitator – will share his experiences and the latest medical advances. Participants will be encouraged to think and act holistically when confronted with such issues, to be their own best advocate, and to learn what to do when they need help. The course is open to all, regardless of gender.  

The American musical evolves as American culture changes. We will look at musicals that were revolutionary in their day: South Pacific (1949), West Side Story (1957), Cabaret (1966), A Chorus Line (1975), Phantom of the Opera (1986), Rent (1996), The Lion King (1997), Jersey Boys (2004), and Hamilton (2015), covering two decades per class.

Too often, women are slighted when discussing war. Yet before, during, and after the American Civil War, women in both the North and the South played pivotal roles. This course will examine their actions and how they influenced the war’s outbreak in 1861, the important roles they played throughout the four-year conflict, and the impact both Black and White women had in the years following the war’s conclusion.

This course will be primarily lecture but will include class participation.

Students will explore the musical genre of Traditional Music through instructor lectures, discussions with performing artists, and attendance at two Traditional Music concerts at Davidson College. The first class, one week before the first concert, will introduce the genre and provide background on all the artists. A day or two before each concert, there will be a preparatory session in which students will learn more about the artists and their place within the genre. On the day of the concert, the class will meet for 45 minutes with the artists, who will give examples of what to expect in the upcoming performance. 

Part II of this course, which will be offered in the spring, will feature two additional concerts. That course will open for registration December 7, 2026.     

Course Introduction

Monday, August 31, 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM

Concert 1 Background Lecture: Don Flemons

Friday, September 4, 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM

Concert 1: Dom Flemons

Saturday, September 5, 4:00 PM – 4:45 PM meet-the-artists session and 7:30 PM concert

Dom Flemons was among our earliest performers in the Traditional series, and we are delighted to welcome him back a decade later. A founding member of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, Flemons is one of today’s leading interpreters of American roots music, with a special focus on Black American string band traditions and folk history.

https://youtu.be/OCS7VG_hiF0?si=Dk-MJ3HZcxuhrVeI

https://youtu.be/3srTYL4LqD8?si=AnVKl2BXhztO7w6C 

Concert 2 Background Lecture: Sheila Kay Adams

Thursday, November 19, 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM

Concert 2: Sheila Kay Adams

Friday, November 20, 4:00 PM – 4:45 PM meet-the-artist session and 7:30 PM concert

The incomparable Sheila Kay Adams returns to share stories and songs of her life through ballad singing, banjo playing, and memorable stories about growing up in the remote community of Sodom. Bill Lawing will join her to talk about the unfolding of her remarkable life. It will be an evening of pure delight!

https://youtu.be/LE6Df2F4EZM?si=PuyhxKHl5IVlmckI

In the Federalist Papers, America’s Founders imagined a democratic republic with safeguards against the rise of demagogues who might stir up the “prejudices,” “intemperate passions,” and “fluctuations” of the popular will. By the late 19th century, however, new media and new strains of popular discourse began to undermine those safeguards, as various political movements and even the government itself resorted to deceptive and manipulative forms of persuasion.

In this course, we will explore the ethical and practical distinctions between persuasion – an essential tool of democratic governance – and propaganda in a series of historical case studies, beginning with the “Calamity Howlers” of the late 1890s and concluding with 9/11 and the War on Terror. Along the way, we’ll encounter figures such as Teddy Roosevelt, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and others. In the process, we’ll learn to recognize, analyze, and critique unethical, deceitful, and/or manipulative forms of communication with a view toward becoming more critical consumers in the “marketplace of ideas.”

This course will be primarily lecture, but it will include some group participation.

Do you remember The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the movie for which Maggie Smith won the Academy Award for best actress (1969)? If you do, you not only date yourself (I’m right there with you!), but you may also think the movie reflects Dame Muriel Spark’s novel, which is the basis of the movie, to a T. In fact, however, the movie trims off and sands down the book’s difficulties and dimensions, rendering it a simplified and sanitized version of the complex novel (1961). In this course, we’ll start by reading the novel, then view two filmed versions of it: the movie and a later TV series with Geraldine McEwan as Miss Brodie (1978). Spark herself favored the latter. What can we learn about this elusive writer’s challenging novel by studying its adaptations?

When you watch a movie, what is happening beyond intriguing narrative and social commentary? Psychological science has studied how we view the actor’s movement and, separately, how camera angles and editing impact our interpretation of scenes. How is our attention captured and directed? How do we remember aspects of a scene and story in a movie; how does this differ from social conversation? How do we know something is scary? Does the soundtrack (music in particular) inform our interpretation of scenes? This is not a traditional film studies class, but instead it uses scenes from Hollywood movies as starting points to explore the science of cognitive psychology, including historical approaches to these topics.

For each topic, the instructor will present specific cognitive experiments in detail, but each class will include some group participation.

Note: this course stands quite separately from Munger’s other course, Visual Arts and the Mind; there is no overlap. 

Does globalization help world trade by making it cheaper, faster, better, safer? What is the historical context for globalization and world trade, including its benefits and costs? How have the pandemic, geopolitics, demographics, economics, tariffs, protectionism, and supply chain issues disrupted and changed globalization? What is the future of globalization – is it the end of the world as we know it or has a new era begun? What are the geopolitics of China vs. the West (and the US)? We will explore these issues through lectures and some group discussion.

What is the future of capitalism? You need to look no further than current headlines to realize that the world’s dominant economic system faces increased scrutiny. Conservative economist R. Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University once stated that even business school students are questioning the future of capitalism. This course begins with a critical examination of the origins, workings, and limitations of capitalism as a system for organizing economic activity and concludes with recommendations for reform. The first two meetings cover the functioning of markets and market failure. The next two meetings address the failings of capitalism in the areas of the social and natural environments. The final session focuses on whether capitalism should be saved and considers various proposals to do so. While many of the concepts presented in this course are widely applicable for most developed economies, the majority of the course content is focused on the United States.

The course format will be a combination of lecture and class discussion. 

Off North Carolina’s turbulent coast lies a vast repository of sunken vessels, thousands in all, doomed by powerful currents, capricious storms, reckless seamanship, and more than a few diabolical buccaneers. In this rich pool of sea tales, we will 

• learn how nature itself conspires against ships at the point of Cape Hatteras,

• understand why German U-boats chose the Carolina coast to feast on Allied shipping, 

• meet the stars of the underwater fleet (including a US battleship and the Hollywood replica of HMS Bounty), 

• profile the great Carolina pirate Blackbeard (sorry, turns out he wasn’t much of a terror after all), and 

• delve into the mystery of the Carroll Deering, the ghost ship of the Outer Banks.

Explore five diverse, groundbreaking American engineering wonders of the first half of the 20th century. In the little-known history of developing these marvels and the innovative genius behind them, there seemed no challenge that could not be overcome by sheer imagination and brute strength. We will look at the construction of the Hoover Dam, the Overseas Railroad to Key West, the Pentagon, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and the B-52 bomber. These mammoth creations defied conventions of their time and endure to this day. 

How do we define identity? How does identity change and not change as we age? Who are we as a character? What role do others play in shaping our identities? This course addresses those questions by drawing on fiction and nonfiction to deepen our understanding of how identities develop; are experienced; and are transformed, especially as we age. We will view identity as an evolving life story people construct about themselves. 

This course invites personal reflection and some disclosure. You're always welcome to limit your participation to the level that feels right for you.

The costs of health care in the United States are rising exponentially for patients and their families, businesses, and the government. We spend more on health care than any other nation (nearly 20% of GDP), and while we lead much of the world in innovation, health outcomes are less than desirable. The value of what we get for what we spend is declining and care is increasingly less affordable and less accessible to every segment of society. Is it fair that only the uninsured are asked to pay full price? This course will explore why today’s health care costs so much, what the impact of these costs is across society, and what remedies might exist.

This course will focus mainly on the ground and air wars in North Africa, Italy, and Central Europe. We will discuss the major battles that led, eventually, to victory; the major lessons learned in the war; and the relevance of those WWII lessons for today’s national security policies.

WWII in Europe and North Africa complements the instructor’s previously-taught course that covered the naval battles of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. All students are welcome to enroll in this course, whether or not they took the first course.

This course is primarily lecture but will include some class discussion.