Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina presents One Day University in Raleigh

The doors will open at 8:30. We welcome you to arrive any time between 8:30am and 9:30am to get some coffee and light refreshments and meet your fellow students!

The American Revolution is this country’s founding moment. It marks the birth of a nation committed to the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s a staple of school and college curriculums and as a result, most people know something about the American Revolution and about the Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence and led their thirteen colonies into a bold new future as the United States.

But the full story of the American Revolution requires us to look beyond the lives of Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson. This talk focuses on all the things you might not have learned in high school or college about this great struggle for independence. It probes unexpected corners of this sprawling, eight-year war and expands its cast of characters substantially to include the typhoid-ridden immigrant corset-maker who wrote the pamphlet that gave colonists the confidence to believe they could beat Britain; the Massachusetts woman who disguised herself as a man so that she could serve in Washington’s Army; the enslaved stable hand at Mount Vernon who ran off to join the war and who ended up on the other side of the world; and the widow who became the most important Native American leader during the war. Studying their lives and exploits will reveal the breadth and depth of the sacrifices that the colonists made as they worked to turn a small-scale protest over the price of goods like tea into a fight for freedom.

Music permeates our lives. Thanks to technology, it is always with us… via the radio, our smart phones, TV commercials, film music, even the streamed music at our local malls and favorite restaurants. Technology has made it easy for us to put music in the background. The goal of this lecture is to bring it front and center again.  As Professor Celenza will demonstrate, music does not simply reflect culture…it changes it. To demonstrate just how such changes come about, she will highlight four musical masterpieces that changed America. These include: a bawdy 18th-century drinking tune that eventually defined American patriotism, a 1940s ballet that fueled the Cold War, a 1980s pop album that changed American foreign policy, and a hit Broadway musical that redefined the way many of us think about the founding of America and its earliest years as an independent country.

As the 2024 Paris Summer Olympic Games approach, this talk will explore the complex relationship between the Olympic Movement and global politics. By focusing on a handful of the more significant Olympiads, we will consider the paradox of an event that was created to celebrate human commonality, but one that requires athletes to compete as representatives of different nations. We will look to the past and point to the future–exploring how the United States and other nations have used the Games for nationalist propaganda, and how individual athletes and spectators have used the Games as a global theater for political protest. We also will consider the vexing question facing Olympic officials in the summer of 2024–namely, should athletes from Russia be allowed to compete?