One Day University live event in Raleigh: Free tickets

Schedule

Registration and Continental Breakfast

8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.

The doors will open at 8:30. Arrive any time between 8:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. to get some coffee and light refreshments and meet your fellow students.

The American Revolution: Remarkable Stories You’ve Never Heard Before

9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.

Richard Bell / University of Maryland

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.

Dr. Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and has won more than a dozen teaching awards, including the University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress and is the recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award. Professor Bell is author of the new book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home, which was shortlisted for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize.

Four Musical Masterpieces That Changed America

10:45 a.m. to 11:45 p.m.

Anna Celenza / Johns Hopkins University

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.

Anna Celenza is a professor of music and creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of several books, including Jazz Italian Style: From Its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra, The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin and Music and Human Flourishing. Her next book, Music that Changed America, will be published next year. In addition to her scholarly work, she has served as a writer/commentator for NPR’s “Performance Today.”

War Without the Shooting: The Olympics Past and Future

12 p.m. to 1 p.m.

Matthew Andrews / University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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?

Matthew Andrews teaches American History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His courses use the history of American sports to explore race relations, gender ideals, political protest, and American identity. Professor Andrews was asked by the UNC student body to give the honorific “Last Lecture” to the graduating class of 2015. His students voted him their university’s “Best Professor” in 2016.