Apologies to Sam Cooke, but can our world be truly wonderful if we don’t know much about history or, for that matter, biology, or even French! Most of us believe that history is not bunk, but basic to our well-being. Whether it is George Santayana (Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it), William Faulkner (The past is never dead. It’s not even past), or even F. Scott Fitzgerald (So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past), we assume we cannot master our present without first making sense of our past.

But how, exactly, do we do this? Santayana, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald—none of whom were historians—do not offer much in the way of answers. In this session, we will spend two hours exploring a few of the possible answers to this urgent question. Along with reading a couple of very short texts, all that students need to do is bring are their inquisitive minds and incisive thoughts.

This session will be the first in what we hope will be a series of monthly gatherings led by Robert Zaretsky, a professor of history at the Honors College, University of Houston. The idea for this experiment is inspired by the café philo (or philosophy café) movement in France, where dozens of cafés in Paris and the provinces host gatherings of non-academics who are eager to discuss ideas new and old. While a professional historian or philosopher will introduce a philosophical topic or historical event, their role is largely to serve as the traffic coordinator and timekeeper. (This includes calling the timeout for coffee and croissants.)

In Person