Check out Norman Finkelstein at the Brooklyn Central Library for his lecture series, “Bracing for the Revolution: Landmark Documents and Speeches in American History”:
Bracing for the Revolution is a free ten-week class offered as part of BPL’s Library School series taught by Norman Finkelstein.
The US is at a crossroads. The status quo cannot endure much longer. Too many people are hurting and desperate. They don’t want to repair the system. They want to radically alter it. We, the People, are about to embark on a journey into uncharted territory. But it’s still unclear which path will be chosen: the one on the left or on the right. The upcoming elections in November 2018 will present a tantalizing hint. To prepare for the journey ahead, we must learn from the past, so as to preserve in the future what’s best from the past and so as not to repeat in the future the errors of the past.
This class will critically analyze the most influential and insightful documents and speeches in American history, with an eye to learning practical-political lessons from them. Among the documents we will look at are: Declaration of Independence, US Constitution, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Martin Luther King’s “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam,” Malcolm X’s speech at Oxford, Noam Chomsky’s “Responsibility of the Intellectual.” The last 30 minutes of each class will be devoted to a discussion of current events.
Norman Finkelstein received his doctorate in political theory in 1988 from the Princeton University Politics Department. He taught for two decades in the CUNY system, NYU and DePaul University (in Chicago). He has lectured on a broad range of subjects, and has written ten books that have been translated into more than 50 foreign editions. Finkelstein’s main fields of research and teaching are political theory, international law, and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
