Back for its 55th year, Living Room Learning was started by Sweet Briar College alumnae. The series offers university-level lectures for lifelong learners who seek to expand their knowledge without having to take a final exam. Join us for this 7-week daytime lecture course held each Wednesday, January 17th– February 28th.
Over the past several years, the series has gradually been working its way through 20th century history and has now arrived at the 1980s. We hope you’ll join us for this year’s course, Marching Through the 20th Century: The 1980s, which begins on January 17, 2024. The series will focus not only on the milestone cultural and historical developments in the United States, but takes a global perspective with lectures on the former Soviet Union, Europe, and Latin America.
All lectures will take place in McElreath Hall. Doors open at 1:30pm and lectures begin promptly at 2pm with a brief intermission. Parking is free.
To purchase tickets, please download and mail in this order form with a check by December 15, 2023 or purchase your tickets online. Advanced ticket purchase is strongly encouraged.
Weekly Lectures. 2024 Schedule.
The American Population in the 1980s
Lecturer: Patrick Allitt
- The American population grew by ten percent in the 1980s, from 226 million to 249 million. It was extremely diverse because the immigration reform act of 1965 permitted people from every part of the world to apply. Some observers feared the population was too big; others wanted it to be even bigger. This lecture will describe the unique characteristics of the American people in the 1980s and the arguments about their future prospects.
- Recommended reading: Ben Wattenberg, The Birth Dearth (1987); Herbert Klein, A Population History of the United States.
- Patrick Allitt is Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University, where he teaches courses on American intellectual, environmental, and religious history, on Victorian Britain, and on the Great Books.
Ronald Reagan and the Conservative Revolution
Lecturer: Joseph Crespino
- Ronald Reagan, alongside Franklin Roosevelt, was one of the two most transformational presidents of the twentieth century. This lecture explains why, focusing primarily on Reagan’s unlikely rise and the impact of his domestic agenda.
- Recommended Reading: Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime; Garry Wills, Reagan’s America; Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980; Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics
- Joseph Crespino is the Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University. He is an expert in the political and cultural history of the twentieth century United States, and of the history of the American South since Reconstruction.
Catastroika? The Soviet 1980s: From Stagnation to Reform to Dissolution
Lecturer: Matthew Payne
- The 1980s was the most consequential decade for Eurasia since the war as the superpower that dominated it tottered and then fell. This collapse was remarkably speedy as the Soviet Union went from occupying Afghanistan at the start of the decade to the brink of implosion at the end of it. The Soviet Union fell not because it was weak, indeed the Soviet Empire might have carried on for another generation without reform. Rather, the collapse was the result efforts by a reformer at the top, Mikhail Gorbachev. How this would-be reformer became the USSR’s gravedigger is our topic.
- Recommended Reading: Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000
“Lost Decade” or Democratic Revival? Latin America in the 1980s
Lecturer: Thomas D. Rogers
- Through the 1980s, a consensus emerged that Latin America had “lost” the decade. While stagnation and foreign debt did bedevil the region, its countries’ experiences cannot be reduced to a series of economic struggles. Many nations simultaneously emerged from repressive dictatorships to embrace democratic institutions, in some cases ratifying new multicultural constitutions. Central America plunged into civil war in one of the last, bloody spasms of the Cold War. For this huge, diverse region, the decade was more than a period of oblivion between the populist and authoritarian past and the neoliberal future.
- Recommended Reading: Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South
- Thomas D. Rogers, the Arthur Blank/NEH Chair and Professor of History at Emory University, is a specialist in labor and environmental history and the author of two books about 20th-century Brazil.
The Crisis of “Really Existing:” East German Socialism and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Lecturer: Joe Perry
- Why did East German Communism collapse? While ramped up Cold War pressure from NATO and the West challenged communist leaders, this talk suggests that internal weaknesses led to the ultimate breakdown of the East German state. The failure of communism to provide ordinary people goods and opportunities, and the relative success of western capitalism, undermined the legitimacy of the state to the point of implosion. To illustrate the peculiarities of East German ideology, the talk includes an exploration of the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial site, East Germany’s premier monument to the horrors of WWII and National Socialism.
- Recommended Reading: Robert Darnton, Berlin Journal 1989-1990 (Norton, 1991).
- Joe Perry is Associate Professor (Emeritus) of modern German/European history at Georgia State University and the author of Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History.
The War on Drugs—Its Origins, Impact, and Consequences
Lecturer: Joseph Crespino
- Drug addiction, crime, policing, and federal and state drug policy became a large and divisive topic in American life in the 1980s. Its implications can still be felt to this day. This lecture examines how and why that happened.
- Books: Matthew Lassiter, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs; Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness; Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
- Joseph Crespino is the Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University. He is an expert in the political and cultural history of the twentieth century United States, and of the history of the American South since Reconstruction.
Computers and the Internet in the 1980s
Lecturer: Patrick Allitt
- In 1980 less than one percent of the American population owned a computer. By 1990, 20 percent had personal computers in their homes. The mass production of user-friendly computers was one of the vast changes that reshaped America in the 1980s, making typewriters, slide rules, and pocket calculators obsolete. The internet, born in 1983 and available to ordinary citizens from 1989, grew out of Cold War military projects but soon joined with the computer revolution to transform our access to information.
- Recommended reading: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (2011)
- Patrick Allitt is Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University, where he teaches courses on American intellectual, environmental, and religious history, on Victorian Britain, and on the Great Books.