History and Culture   

Join me in exploring Ann Arbor’s SmartTours, created to celebrate the city’s bicentennial and showcase its rich history. Featuring numerous walking tours and historic sites, SmartTours highlights the people, places, and events that shaped Ann Arbor. We will experience three of these tours together, with stories and historical context shared along the way rather than reading from smartphones. Participants should be comfortable walking at least two miles while discovering the city’s landmarks and hidden historical treasures.

Will Hawk retired from the information technology industry after 35 years. He is currently a dedicated volunteer with OLLI and enjoys using his tech expertise to help seniors with everyday tasks. A lifelong learner, Will has a wide range of interests, including hiking and yoga.

City of Sedition (Strausbaugh, 2016) explores New York City’s conflicted role in the Civil War. No city contributed more men, money, and materiel to the Union cause, yet none resisted the war more fiercely through antiwar protest, draft riots, and political sedition. The city produced patriots, war heroes, and abolitionists while also fostering strong opposition to Abraham Lincoln and his policies.

Barb Cherem, Ph.D. spent five decades teaching in P-12 and higher education. A passionate history enthusiast, she has facilitated many OLLI book studies and other topics of interest to older adults.

Constantinople/Istanbul is the San Francisco of Eurasia. In this study group we will examine the history of the site, the cosmopolitan culture, the artistic and architectural legacies, and the fascinating social history of this storied city.

Rudi Lindner has taught Byzantine and Turkish history for fifty years at the university level.

Welcome to Depot Town, one of Ypsilanti’s three historic commercial districts. Emerging in the mid-nineteenth century, the neighborhood became a hub of industry and transportation after the Michigan Central Railroad reached Ypsilanti in 1838. A depot built near the Huron River spurred commercial growth between the railroad and nearby mills. Today, Depot Town preserves its historic character while celebrating the city’s rich railroad heritage and the role transportation played in shaping Ypsilanti’s development.

Will Hawk retired from the information technology industry after 35 years. He is currently a dedicated volunteer with OLLI and enjoys using his tech expertise to help seniors with everyday tasks. A lifelong learner, Will has a wide range of interests, including hiking and yoga.

Join curator Juli McLoone for coffee, conversation, and an exhibit tour of “Cans, Cars, and Kitchenettes: Changing American Foodways in the 1920s.” This exhibit explores technological and social changes in the 1920s through cookbooks, periodicals, and advertising ephemera from the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, a world class collection documenting the history of food and drink in America.

Juli McLoone is a Curator in the University of Michigan Library’s Special Collections Research Center, where she builds collections and provides instruction & outreach for 18th to 20th century materials, including the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive. Previously, she was the Rare Books Librarian at UT San Antonio, where she curated their Mexican Cookbook Collection. She holds an MA in Library and Information Science and an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Iowa.

Fundamentalist and sectarian nationalist ideologies are flourishing in the world today among Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus. Is this a positive development or a threat? The bases and implications of this phenomenon will be examined using as a guide Malise Ruthven's book, Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction. Students are asked to purchase this book (New $13) and will be invited to participate in jointly exploring these trends with their own research and insights.

Jon Swanson, MSW, Ph.D. is a retired anthropologist, social worker, community organizer and union activist who lived and worked in the Middle East, Southeast Dearborn, and Detroit for many years.

Join us for a fun and informative class where you'll learn to prepare delicious and nutritious Chinese meals! You’ll get to enjoy a tasty lunch and take home vibrant recipes, including a flavorful tofu dip, a savory tofu casserole, and a cashew chicken with veggies. These recipes, provided by the Confucius Institute at UM, emphasize fresh ingredients and balanced nutrition. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to enhance your cooking skills and enjoy healthy, flavorful Chinese dishes!

Angela Yang retired from a career in medical research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan.

Come join us for an engaging class where you'll discover how to prepare healthy Chinese meals! Participants will enjoy a delicious lunch and take home colorful recipes, including fried rice noodles with chicken and veggies, ma-Pa tofu, and sesame chicken with veggies. These recipes focus on fresh, nutritious ingredients for a balanced and flavorful meal.

Angela Yang retired from medical research from Howard Hughes medical Institute and Life Science Institute, UM. She enjoys water color painting.

Sessions cover events in the 1920's leading up to The Great Depression, including ominous parallels between the 1920's and the 2020's. We will discuss political and economic conditions during the 1920’s, 1930's and the early years of WW II with detailed examination of the lives of a diverse group of Americans who lived during this tumultuous period of American life. There will be a discussion of lessons learned with questions and comments solicited.

Ed Linz, a 1965 graduate of the Naval Academy, and former Commanding Officer of a nuclear submarine, is the author of nine books, including a novel, works on the Great Depression and the Vietnam War, and most recently, four children’s books. He holds advanced degrees from Oxford University and George Mason University and lives in Maine and Virginia.

Please join me in exploring the Michigan Firehouse Museum. Encompassing over 26,000 square feet, the Museum is an educational treasure trove that includes an original 1898 firehouse and modern, multilevel exhibit display area. Walking through the restored firehouse, visitors can see fire engine steamers replete with horses ready to go on their way to a fire. The large, modern addition offers 25 changing exhibits of antique fire trucks and early fire rigs, multiple displays of historic artifacts including tools, equipment, memorabilia, and the largest collection of fire truck bells in the country!

Will Hawk has been a member of OLLI for seven years and is always looking for new adventures. Will has volunteered for many OLLI committees and currently serves as Study Group Co-Chair.

A map of Michigan is easy to describe for most people, whether it's on their cell phone or by holding up their left hand. It wasn't always that simple as the shape of the state took centuries to be fully realized on a map. Join Sierra Laddusaw, Curator of Maps & Graphics, and Mary Pedley, Assistant Curator of Maps, from the William L. Clements Library to learn more about the mapping of "the Mitten."

Join me in exploring Ann Arbor’s SmartTours, created to celebrate the city’s bicentennial and showcase its rich history. Featuring numerous walking tours and historic sites, SmartTours highlights the people, places, and events that shaped Ann Arbor. We will experience three of these tours together, with stories and historical context shared along the way rather than reading from smartphones. Participants should be comfortable walking at least two miles while discovering the city’s landmarks and hidden historical treasures.

Will Hawk retired from the information technology industry after 35 years. He is currently a dedicated volunteer with OLLI and enjoys using his tech expertise to help seniors with everyday tasks. A lifelong learner, Will has a wide range of interests, including hiking and yoga.

One means to better understand the recent increase of ethnic/racial hate crimes is to examine the WWII genocides of the Roma and Jews. However, with the passage of time, many aspects of the holocaust have become less accessible, less understood, or forgotten. We will reexamine factual aspects of the holocaust, using contemporary communication science and personality/social psychology to explain acceptance and rejection of the kinds of racial hatred that existed then and persist today.

Terrance Albrecht is Professor Emerita, Wayne State University. Her Ph.D. is in Communication Science and has studied the holocaust from the perspective of communication science. She has taught a groundbreaking, nationally recognized holocaust course, that drew heavily on the social and behavioral research literature. Louis Penner is Professor Emeritus, Wayne State University. His Ph.D. is in Personality/Social Psychology. He has conducted extensive research on social psychological variables underling acceptance and rejection of authoritarian ideologies.

Islamic culture is central to large parts of our world. In this group we will examine aspects of the origins and nature of that culture: the arts, the Qur'an, law, the Eurasian contributions, and Shi'ism in Iran and Iraq. We will also examine traditions of governance and science.

Rudi Lindner has taught Islamic history for fifty years at the university level.

Clark library recently acquired a first edition of the first modern atlas: Abraham Ortelius’s "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum", published in Antwerp in 1570. Come learn how this volume changed the way that the western world encountered knowledge about distant places; how U-M’s Conservation Lab is bringing our copy back to life; and how atlases have continued to shape and be shaped by history up to the present.

Tim Utter is the Director of Social Sciences and the Clark Library, where he works with a collection of over 440,000 maps and atlases. Trina Parks-Matthews is the Assistant Book and Paper Conservator at U-M Library. Anna Rohl is Map Curator at Clark Library.

University archives often spotlight famous alumni, but what about infamous ones? Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” was once a mathematical prodigy and academic rising star before living off the grid and carrying out a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people, leading to his 1996 arrest and conviction. This workshop traces how his papers entered the University of Michigan Library, how researchers use them, what’s included and even allows participants to review and discuss some of the actual documents.

Julie Herrada is the curator of the Joseph A. Labadie Collection which is part of the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Michigan. The Center collects holdings related to social protest movements, curates exhibits and assists researchers from all over the world. She holds a MLS degree with a Certificate in Archival Administration from Wayne State University.

The Interstellar Foundation, a nonprofit, collects information (e.g. images, music, languages, literature), digitizes them, puts them into data artifacts and then helps land them on the lunar surface where they will last millions of years. This program explores how we decide what should be placed on the Moon and what aspects of you and your family's life experiences you would choose to record. Participants will write a message which will be landed on the Moon in 2027.

Walter Di Mantova is the Executive Director of the Interstellar Foundation. He is an educational and technology entrepreneur, an anticipatory anthropologist advising on future technologies, a pioneer in workforce development for over 30 years, and the University’s Consultant on the History of Quantum Physics.