On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the ways that Homer depicts women in The Odyssey before introducing a lecture from Dr. Benedict Whalen.

Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, uses her own cunning to deceive the suitors while she awaits her husband’s return. Telemachus, their son, journeys to Sparta seeking news of his father.

The Odyssey tells the tale of the cunning and crafty hero of the Trojan War on his journey home. After ten years of war, Odysseus faces another ten years of fantastic temptations, deadly monsters, treacherous seas, and impious men. Meanwhile, Ithaca is threatened by suitors who plague his wife and plunder his wealth. When Odysseus reaches home, he must slay the suitors, test the loyalty of his friends and family, and restore order to his marriage and his kingdom.

Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I’m Jeremiah Regan.

And I’m Juan Davalos. We’re back with the Odyssey lecture number two today. Rumors of Odysseus.

So in lecture two, Professor Whalen covers books two through four of the Odyssey. And you’ll notice, just like in book one, we’re not really following the story of Odysseus directly yet. We’re seeing what is going on at home. And while Odysseus himself is a man of twists and turns, a man of cunning and great virtue, uh, he’s he’s well paired to his wife, Penelope, who hasn’t seen him at this point for 19 years, but who mirrors many of his traits. Penelope is accosted by suitors. They wish to marry her. She’s a beautiful woman. She has an estate, uh, really? A kingdom that would be inherited by her new husband. Odysseus is presumed to be dead, of course, but Odysseus. But excuse me, but Penelope is faithful, and she is not quite ready to declare her husband dead and, uh, and marry a new man. So she comes up with ingenious ways to put off the suitors, to delay them without enraging them. And we learn some of that. Also at home is Odysseus 19 year old son, Telemachus, who was merely an infant when Odysseus left. He has not been raised by his father, hasn’t had that benefit. But he loves his father and yearns for him. And he hears stories about who Odysseus is. Uh, as he’s coming of age and getting to the point where he should be thinking about inheriting his father’s kingdom, he’s actually awaiting for his father to return and reclaim it.

I really enjoyed the deep dive into Telemachus and Penelope and Penelope that the lecture starts with, um, at the time of, of recording the the movie is launching by the famous movie by Christopher Nolan and one of the actresses for the movie was recently interviewed, saying how Homer didn’t understand women, and they were not prominent figures in his writings. And it’s awesome that the book actually begins with going into Into Penelope and how cunning and smart she is, and how Odysseus, uh, really is attracted to her because of her cunning and her intellect.

Not absolutely. And what’s great about Homer is he doesn’t have women in here so that there can be women in here. Homer is a master of understanding the human condition, and he. That includes being able to speak eloquently about the excellencies of women and the excellencies of men. Penelope is a key character in this story. She’s not only one of the things Odysseus longs to return to. She’s a fully formed character in her own right. The. The poem also features, uh, Calypso, Circe, Athena. These are are fleshed out female characters that are playing particular roles with excellence. And so there’s no there’s no dye in the Odyssey. There’s genuine human experience laid out in a great work of art.

Uh, if you’re following along the course, uh, on the podcast, I encourage you to go to hillsdale.edu/course and download the study guides. Uh, that’s at hillsdale.edu/course. Um, there’s study guides, uh, follow the lecture. There’s timestamps for all the different parts of the lecture with outlines. And, uh, this study guide for this course actually include now some illustrations, some maps, some key passages. Um, it really is something that will help you dive a little deeper into the lecture and get a better understanding of what you’re learning. So I encourage you to go to hillsdale.edu/course and download the study guide so you can follow along. Yeah.

Those illustrations are done by a young artist named Aidan Kennedy. His artwork is featured in the lectures themselves as well, along with many other beautiful paintings and drawings, and as a lot of color and life to the course. Now let’s join Professor Whalen for lecture two of The Odyssey. Rumors of Odysseus.

In our last lecture, we got our first glimpse of the situation on Ithaca and the difficult positions of Telemachus, Odysseus son and Penelope, Odysseus wife. In this lecture, we’ll follow how the situation unfolds on Ithaca, including Penelope’s situation there with the suitors and Telemachus journey to mainland Greece. In books two through four of the Odyssey. Now, at the outset, it’s interesting to note that books one through four of the Odyssey all focus on Telemachus and Ithaca and Penelope, rather than on Odysseus, our epic hero. This function something like the opening lines of the Odyssey as a whole, where we hear about the man of twists and turns but don’t learn his name until 24 lines in. So in the narrative as a whole, we delay meeting Odysseus until book five. This raises anticipation and suspense. Who is this man of twists and turns who. We have to work through four books of poetry before we meet. But it also stresses the position of Telemachus, his son Telemachus. We see as a young man trying to assert himself in a difficult situation, despite the mockery and laughter of these suitors who are courting his mother. So we should see the Odyssey as a story of Odysseus, the great epic hero’s return home. But we should also see the story as a coming of age story for Telemachus and as a coming of age story. We should watch for ways in which Telemachus grows and grows in what he understands, grows in virtue, and grows in confidence as he asserts himself. Coming of age stories are particularly important in seeing how the young man or woman is educated, and what we do see as Telemachus makes his travels in books two through four is a sort of education of the young Prince of Ithaca. This focus on Telemachus in books one through four leads some readers to call this part of the epic the Telemachus. That is the story about Telemachus. Now the last thing that the focus on Telemachus and on Ithaca does in these opening books is that it stresses for us, the reader, how dire, how terrible the situation on Ithaca is for Odysseus. Odysseus is coming home not to a happily ordered and peaceful land, a disordered domestic and political situation. Even if Odysseus makes it home, he’s going to have a lot of difficulty in cleaning things up. Now. Book two opens with Telemachus convening the council that Athena had advised him to do. At the close of book one, the council ends up being a complete disaster for Telemachus. The suitors laugh at him and mock him, and when he tries to assert himself and is derided, he ends up breaking down in tears and falling to the ground, weeping as the elders and the parents of the suitors refused to restrain their sons. Nevertheless, in the midst of this council, we do learn a very interesting detail that sets up for us one of the most famous scenes or images from the Odyssey. One of the leaders of the suitors, Antinous, complains back at Telemachus about the behavior of Penelope, saying that she’s been leading them on. This is what Antinous says. So high and mighty, Telemachus, such unbridled rage. Well, now, fling your accusations at us. Think to pin the blame on us. You think again. It’s not the suitors here who deserve the blame. It’s your own dear mother, the matchless queen of cunning. Look here. For three years now, going on to four. She’s played it fast and loose. With all our hearts. Building each man’s hopes. Dangling promises dropping hints to each. But all the while with something else in mind. This was her latest masterpiece of guile. She set up a great loom in her royal halls, and she began to weave. And the weaving finespun the yarns endless. And she would lead us on young men, my suitors now that King Odysseus is no more. Go slowly, keen as you are to marry me until I can finish off this web so my weaving won’t all fray and come to nothing. This is a shroud for old Laertes, for that day when the deadly fate that lays us out at last will take him down. I dread the shame my countrywomen would heap upon me. Yes, if a man of such wealth should lie in state without a shroud for. Cover her very words. And despite our pride and passion, we believed her. So by day she’d weave at her great and growing web. By night, by the light of torches set beside her, she would unravel all she’d done. Three whole years. She deceived us blind, seduced us with this scheme. Then, when the Wheeling seasons brought the fourth year on, one of her women in on the Queen’s secret told the truth and we caught her in the act unweaving her gorgeous web, so she finished it off against her will. We forced her. Now this is a famous scene. It shows the suitors arrogance and also their threatening nature. That last line against her will. We forced her. Should alarm us as readers. Penelope is in a vulnerable situation here. These. These suitors can force her to do things. This scene, though, is also sort of funny. It shows us the suitors aren’t that bright. She was able to pull this scheme off for three whole years before they noticed. So we learned something about the suitors. If Penelope is the queen of matchless cunning, these suitors might be a little bit slow on the uptake. There’s also a nice emphasis here on Penelope’s cunning. She’s respected in her cunning, even by the suitors, and we can already anticipate the way in which this display of her cunning, uh, shows her to be an appropriate a good wife for the man of twists and turns, Penelope herself has twists and turns. But these lines also remind us of the question we raised in our last lecture, which is what is Penelope’s intention here? Telemachus had said, she neither refuses a marriage she despises, nor does she accept one of them. Here we see the suitors saying that she’s been playing it fast and loose with their hearts, that she’s been dangling promises, dropping hints to each. And Antinous even uses the language that she seduced us. So what is Penelope’s aim? Now, here I like to push my students and ask, and I present them with this as a sort of provocation. Perhaps Penelope’s keeping the suitors around because she likes their attention. I mean, if we think about it, after all, Odysseus has been gone for 19, 20 years. How old is Penelope? If she was 18 when Odysseus left and left her with a young child, she’s been left alone for 20 years. She’s maybe in her mid to late 30s. Perhaps Penelope likes the attention of a bunch of young, handsome suitors coming to pay her court. This usually provokes a reaction from my students who don’t like that view, and they start to theorize. What is Penelope doing by keeping the suitors around and even dangling hopes or making promises? Perhaps it’s a way for Penelope to maintain control on the island of Ithaca in the absence of her husband. After all, as long as Penelope doesn’t reject the suitors but also doesn’t accept one of them, then she has the attentions of all of them. It’s a way for her to maintain power, a way for her to maintain authority in this situation. Maybe also, she’s waiting for Telemachus to be old enough to take the power himself. Perhaps she’s an attentive mother trying to maintain control of things until her son finally is old enough to act the man in the house. And perhaps she has some other plan in mind. We will continue to ask this question as we go. So despite the fact that Telemachus says she neither rejects a marriage she despises, nor does she accept a suitor. We are not really sure why she’s behaving the way she does or what her end is. We also have the sense that while she is besieged by the suitors, she’s not entirely helpless. She has twists and turns of her own. She has her own cunning as her defense. Now this cunning and her own resourcefulness is further emphasized over the course of books two through four. For instance, when the suitors realize in book four that Telemachus has gone to the mainland to find news of his father, they decide to set an ambush for him and plan to kill Telemachus. But as soon as they make those plans, Homer writes. But not for long was Penelope unaware of the grim plots her suitors planned in secret. The Herald maiden told her he’d overheard their schemes. Listening in Outside the court, while they wove on within. He rushed the news through the halls to the Queen. Now we see here. Penelope, in fact, has spies among the suitors, and she learns their plans. So even when she is up in her chamber and not around the suitors, she does keep tabs on them. She understands and figures out what they are doing. Then, at the close of book four, Penelope, yearning for her husband, falls asleep and Athena appears to her in a dream and gives her encouragement, telling her Odysseus is alive. Odysseus is on his way back. Just hold on a little bit longer. It’s very interesting there. Penelope, in fact, is wary and reserved, and she expresses doubts even to this dream figure. We see here another quality in Penelope’s mind. She is. She’s reserved. She’s wary. She’s cautious. She has circumspection. She has intelligence and depth of thought. That is part of the way she will defend herself against these suitors. She’s not going to be easy to fool or to take advantage of. So all of this representation of Penelope in books one through four adds up to make her more formidable than might appear at first glance. Yes, Penelope is besieged, and more than 100 suitors are in her halls seeking her hand. Yes, she’s terribly outnumbered. Yes, her son is not mature enough to defend the house or to take control of things. Yes. She has no definite knowledge of Odysseus condition where he is. Is he even alive? But the woman Homer presents to us is not a damsel in distress. She’s a cunning, thoughtful, tricky woman who is wary, watchful and competent. She’s a complex, perhaps even somewhat inscrutable figure, and we are left wondering why she neither accepts nor dismisses the suitors. She does have some plan in mind and will watch to see what that is. Now let’s turn to Telemachus travels. He first sails to Pylos, where Nestor rules and Nestor greets him, welcomes him in, tells him a couple of stories about his father, and then sends him overland by chariot to Sparta, where Menelaus rules. Menelaus is living there with his recaptured wife, Helen, who they recovered after the fall of Troy. On this journey we watch Telemachus growing up and learning several different things. Some of them are very easy to recount and are quite obvious. Telemachus is learning diplomacy. He’s polite. He is able to act in a courtly way with the different royal households he encounters. We also see him exercising courage and leadership. He takes a whole ship, a whole crew on a ship across the ocean to the mainland of Greece. We see him actively cultivating these virtues, and Athena, the goddess, is disguised as this herald this guide along with Telemachus, and she encourages him in these virtues as well. Telemachus is also learning about the greatness of his father, the different stories that he hears from Nestor, and then from Helen and Menelaus all give him a model of greatness, a model of virtue and excellence and cunning in his father. That is a bar that he should strive to live up to. But we also hear the story of the death of Agamemnon when he returned home, and of Orestes having to avenge his father’s death. And this is established for Telemachus as a potential model for what Telemachus himself might have to do, the way that Telemachus might have to be, Nestor tells him. But Atreus son Agamemnon, you yourselves, even in far off Ithaca, must have heard how he returned, how Aegisthus hatched the king’s horrendous death. But what a price he paid in blood, in suffering! Ah, how fine it is when a man is brought down to leave a son behind. Orestes took revenge. He killed that cunning, murderous Aegisthus who’d killed his famous father. And you, my friend. How tall and handsome. I see you now. Be brave. You too. So men will come to sing your praises down the years. We see here Nestor invoking the story of Orestes avenging his father’s murder during his father’s homecoming, which is held up as a potential model for what Telemachus might have to do. After all, Odysseus is coming back. His house is full of suitors. Will Odysseus be able to triumph, and will Telemachus have to take the role of Orestes and avenge his father’s death? Now from Nestor, Telemachus is not just learning how great his father was, and then also the model of Orestes avenging Agamemnon’s death. But at the end of a certain conversation with Nestor, Athena, having told Telemachus what to do, flies off as an eagle, and Nestor, seeing this, turns to Telemachus and advises him that he has been guided and has been in the presence of a God. And so we see another aspect of the education. This coming of age story for Telemachus is how to comport himself around the divine, how to deal with the gods. Nestor says, dear boy, never fear, you’ll be a coward or defenseless. Not if at your young age, the gods will guard you. So. Of all who dwell on Olympus, this was none but she. Zeus’s daughter, the glorious one, his third born, who prized your gallant father among the Argives. Now, O Queen, be gracious. Give us high renown myself, my children, my loyal wife and queen, and I will make you a sacrifice. A young heifer, broad in the brow, unbroken, never yoked by men. I’ll offer it up to you. I’ll sheathe its horns in gold. So he prayed, and Pallas Athena heard his prayer. So Telemachus is now being guided by Athena again and again. And on his journey he’s learning from the older veterans, the older, wise men like Nestor how to deal with these divinities who from time to time interrupt with and interfere with human life. Now, in book four, when Telemachus does finally come to Sparta, Menelaus says that he did indeed hear that Odysseus was alive but held captive on an island by a nymph. And so Telemachus has the first definite concrete news that his father is alive and still striving to come home. This is heartening for Telemachus, and gives him hope and direction in his activities. But I’d like to close this lecture by looking at another aspect of what we see in book four. It’s actually quite exciting for us as Telemachus makes his way to Sparta. For any reader of the Iliad to wonder, how is the marriage of Menelaus and Helen going. After all, the entire Trojan War was fought for the sake of this marriage. Now Menelaus has recaptured his unfaithful wife. How are they doing? It’s a natural question, and it leads to anticipation and excitement as Telemachus comes to them. Homer tells us that Helen and Menelaus both recognize the looks of Odysseus and Telemachus, and they all grieve for the lost Odysseus. And then Helen does this. Then Zeus’s daughter Helen thought of something else into the mixing bowl from which they drank their wine. She slipped a drug. Heart’s ease dissolving anger. Magic. To make us all forget our pains. No one who drank it deeply. Mold in wine could let a tear roll down his cheeks that day. Not even if his mother should die. His father die. Not even if right before his eyes. Some enemy brought down a brother or darling son with a sharp bronze blade. So how is the marriage of Helen and Menelaus doing? Well, this is not a good sign. Helen is slipping drugs into the wine, and the drugs might sound nice at First heart’s ease dissolving anger. But the effect of this drug is actually alarming. You wouldn’t even lament if your son or brother was cut down in front of you. So it seems already troubling that Helen is drugging the wine, especially with such a drug. But then Helen goes on to tell a story to Telemachus and Menelaus about one time when she encountered Odysseus in Troy. And this story is very interesting for how Helen represents herself. She says, my royal king Menelaus. Welcome guests here. Sons of the great as well. Zeus can present us times of joy and times of grief. In turn, all lies within his power. So come, let’s sit back in the palace now. Dine and warm our hearts with the old stories. I will tell something perfect for the occasion. Surely I can’t describe or list them all the exploits crowding fearless Odysseus record. But what a feat that hero dared and carried off in the land of Troy, where you Achaeans suffered, scarring his own body with mortifying strokes, throwing filthy rags on his back like any slave, he slipped into the enemy’s city, roamed its streets, all disguised. A totally different man, a beggar hardly the figure he cut among Achaea’s ships. That’s how Odysseus infiltrated Troy, and no one knew him at all. I alone, I spotted him for the man he was kept questioning him. The crafty one kept dodging. But after I bathed him, rubbed him down with oil, given him clothes to wear, and sworn a binding oath not to reveal him as Odysseus to the Trojans. Not till he was back at his swift ships and shelters. Then at last he revealed to me, step by step the whole Achaean strategy. And once he’d cut a troop of Trojans down with his long bronze sword back, he went to his comrades filled with information. The rest of the Trojan women shrilled their grief. Not I. My heart leapt up. My heart had changed by now. I yearned to sail back home again. I grieved too late for the madness Aphrodite sent me. Luring me there, far from my dear land. Forsaking my own child, my bridal bed, my husband. To a man who lacked for neither brains nor beauty. Now, this story is very interesting because Helen is purportedly sharing what she saw of Odysseus during the Trojan War. It’s a story that is purportedly in praise of Odysseus, and indeed we hear of Odysseus cunning, his ability to infiltrate the city and disguise himself. He’s a man of twists and turns who won’t be recognized by any of the Trojans. But on a deeper level, Helen’s story clearly is meant to show her loyalty to Menelaus. After all, she’s saying she recognized Odysseus and didn’t turn him into the Trojans, that her heart had changed, that she did yearn to be back with Menelaus. And so her story is praising Odysseus, but at the same time, it is trying to establish her as, in fact a loving and loyal wife, a wife of a husband who she gives naked flattery to. Here at the end of her speech, she calls him, and he’s sitting right there, a man who lacked for neither brains nor beauty. This is an obvious attempt to flatter her husband and to present herself as a loyal wife. Now, what’s very interesting is the way Menelaus hears her story and then responds. And the red haired Menelaus answered, Helen. There was a tale, my lady, so well told. Now I have to read those lines as as as almost. It sounds sarcastic on Menelaus part. She’s represented herself as the faithful, loving wife. He says, yeah, that’s a good tale. Now then, I have studied in my time the plans and minds of great ones by the score, and I have traveled over a good part of the world. But never once have I laid eyes on a man like him. What a heart that fearless Odysseus had inside him! What a piece of work the hero dared and carried off in the wooden horse. Where all our best encamped, our champions armed with bloody death for Troy, when along you came. Helen roused, no doubt, by a dark power bent on giving Troy some glory. The dashing Prince Deiphobus squired your. Every step. Three times you sauntered round our hollow ambush feeling, stroking its flanks, challenging all our fighters, calling each by name. Yours was the voice of all our long lost wives, and Diomedes and I crouched tight in the midst with great Odysseus, hearing you singing out, were both keen to spring up and sally forth, or give you a sudden answer from inside. But Odysseus damped our ardor, reined us back. Then all the rest of the troops kept stock still all but antyllus. He was hot to salute you now. But Odysseus clamped his great hands on the man’s mouth and shut it brutally. Yes, he saved us all, holding on grim set till Pallas Athena lured you off at last. It’s a very interesting response from Menelaus. Menelaus, like Helen, is telling a story of Odysseus greatness. This Odysseus cunning. The story of the Trojan horse, and also Odysseus self-control, his composure within it, keeping the men quiet when they think they hear their wives voices outside. But of course, at the same time, Menelaus is responding on a deeper level to Helen’s story. Helen had represented herself as the loyal and loving wife Life and Menelaus here, even at the moment of the fall of Troy, is telling a story showing how she in fact was not faithful. She was tempting the Achaeans to come out to their destruction. It’s interesting to see how Helen and Menelaus are using stories to give different representations of themselves and each other. Helen wants to show a certain aspect of herself through her narrative. Menelaus wants to do the same. As we proceed in the Odyssey, we’ll see that in the middle of the work, Odysseus will tell a great story about himself as well. Stories are ways of conveying meaning and understanding and in fact, of making arguments. Helen is making one here. Menelaus is making one, and Odysseus will as well. So in answer to our question, how is that marriage between Menelaus and Helen doing? It seems not great. We have drugs in the wine, and we have arguments being made through competing stories about the nature of Helen’s loyalty or disloyalty. Now, the final point I want to make is that it’s interesting to see how Telemachus navigates this awkward, unpleasant marriage situation between Helen and Menelaus. After Menelaus finishes his story, we hear. But clear sighted Telemachus ventured, son of Atreus, King Menelaus, captain of armies, so much the worse, for not one bit of that saved him from grisly death. Not even a heart of iron could have helped him. But come, send us off to bed. It’s time to rest, time to enjoy the sweet relief of sleep, and Helen gives the servants orders to make the beds. So Telemachus, here, caught in an awkward situation, is polite and tactful and turns to bed. Now book four of the Odyssey closes with something of a cliffhanger. Telemachus has learned that his father is still alive, but he’s in Sparta. He needs to make his way back to Ithaca. The suitors, having learned that Telemachus is at Sparta, have set up an ambush for Telemachus and are waiting to kill him with that sort of cliffhanger. Homer then finally turns and we meet Odysseus in the flesh in book five. It’s that we’ll look at in our next lecture.

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Once per week, Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss Great Books, Great Men, and Great Ideas.

Dr. Larry P. Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, joins Hugh Hewitt on the Hillsdale Dialogues to continue a series on The Second World War, Churchill’s sprawling memoir and history of World War II in six volumes.

Release date: 24 July 2026

Read more about Sir Winston Churchill including the official biography of Churchill by Martin Gilbert at the Hillsdale Official Store.

Every week. Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss great books, great men, and great ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you find your audio.00:30S2

Morning. Glory. Evening Grace. America. That music means it’s the last broadcast hour of the week. That means it’s time for the Hillsdale Dialogue. Doctor Ron and I are done celebrating the semi sesquicentennial, and we’re back into Churchill’s World War Two memoirs, volume two. Their finest hour. Last week, Doctor Arnn, you were talking about, um, Churchill’s comment to the French that those nations that die fighting rise again. And you’re also talking about how the French collapse may have been, in part linked to the exhaustion of the French Republic after World War One. I am curious, as it occurred to me when we were talking, I wanted to ask you about it this week. When Reagan arrived after Vietnam and after Carter, he had to start again to rebuild sort of American fighting will. And he did it with Grenada. And then George H.W. Bush did it with Panama and then George W Bush. We went to war for 20 years and were exhausted again. And we got out ignobly from Afghanistan in 2021 and a haphazard, disastrous and deeply humiliating retreat. What do you make of the idea that Donald Trump is rebuilding the American capacity for force with this battle with Iran in a way that is necessary, limited, precise, and deadly when it’s unleashed?01:57S3

Yeah. That’s it limited Um, uh, we we fell into a period, uh, unique in American history when we were the only superpower. And so we thought we could do anything. And you mix that up with the principles of liberal imperialism, which include statements like, we can’t be safe until the world is free. Uh, my favorite is Colin Powell saying, when we invaded Iraq the first time, after they had attacked a neighbor and the neighbor appealed to us for help, it means we can do that if we want to. But he said, if you break it, you own it. And, uh, that means that we have to fix it, right? Well, Trump hasn’t said anything like that. What he said is we’re going to stop them threatening us and our neighbors, and we’re going to do what it takes to do that. And, uh, that means that it’s up to us how far we go. So that’s limited, Right? Because you can’t study Churchill carefully without understanding his constant reluctance about and fear about war. Uh, he you know, you don’t you don’t do it for a demonstration. You do it because you have to. And you’ll be less likely to have to if you’re ready to do it. So that’s the old wisdom, right? And I think.03:27S2

It’s interesting that you bring up and that’s not in our notes or our outline. Uh, General Powell, who of course became secretary of State Powell, but he was a general. He was a military man because Churchill has a not a jaundiced eye, but a skeptical eye about generals making policy. And it comes up in this chapter, chapter ten. General Weygand, who is their their boss of bosses, their number one general, he decides, he decides. The general decides that it’s time to quit. And Churchill says he used his supreme political position far beyond the limits which his professional responsibility, as great as they were, were justified or required. He asserted. The right of a soldier to dominate the duly constituted government of the Republic, as did Marshal Patton. And I sense in Churchill a. I don’t sense, I read in Churchill a great skepticism of generals stepping into the role of statesmen. AM I right about that? Oh, yes.04:25S3

Well, if they get elected right, they have to become statesmen. Right. But the idea that they get to decide. Remember, that’s a that’s a thing in human affairs. In every human organization, people have a job and they think because of that job, they can control more than that job. And they try to control things for which they don’t have responsibility. Nobody gave general responsibility for the future and being of France, but he effectively exercised that authority for a time. And that was just wrong. And what Churchill thought was, you know, Churchill is a follower of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. And what do they say? The purpose of a government is to defend the rights of its people, and it gets its authority from their consent. Well, nobody consented to Vigan making those decisions. He just happened to have supposedly at least control of the military. And so there was nobody I mean, I mentioned last week that Victor Hanson writes about the amazing effectiveness of Britain in the Second World War, how much they got out of themselves. Right. And they mortgaged their future to do it. And Churchill didn’t want to do that and always called it the unnecessary war. But now you’re in the gang war, and somebody’s got to command all the efforts of the nation toward victory. That’s what he did. Well, there wasn’t anybody at the top ready to do that? Uh, Churchill meets the son of Clemenceau from the First World War. The tiger, they called it. And at the end of the First World War, Clemenceau took power. And he did do that. And Churchill marveled at that and admired that very much, and did that himself later. Well, the son of Clemenceau Churchill Records, in these chapters that we’re reading, he had the spirit of his daddy in him, and Churchill thought that was missing at the top.06:29S2

Well, he said Renault was not up to it. And this is a quote, uh, France would have needed a Cromwell, a Clemenceau, a Stalin or a Hitler. It’s a and that’s a silent reflection on himself. Capacity married to Will, married to, um, a country that’s got the ability to rise to the occasion. As Victor Davis Hanson noted, he’s not complimenting Stalin or Hitler’s moral character. He is recognized. And I’m sure he’s not a big fan of Cromwell, but is recognizing, uh, data, uh, there too. Um, what what Machiavelli. Well, put down as the essential ingredient. Sure.07:09S3

Uh, there’s that charge against Donald Trump, the old one about the Playboy interview where he congratulates the Chinese on their strength. Well, he also says in that same interview that they’re horrible. Their policies are horrible. But. And see, here’s what I think is the distinction. Strength is urgently necessary. But Churchill was fond of saying, kindness is better than strength. But you actually need some strength in order to be kind. And so, you know, when you take a responsibility like that, if Hillsdale College fails, it’ll be my fault, right? And that’s why that’s where I get my authority from the mission of the college, from its well-being, and from the people I work with. And I have to use it only for that. And it means that while I have the job, I’m stuck. Something goes wrong. It’s my fault. Well, if you take that attitude, then you might be capable of command in an urgent situation. I’ve never been in a situation as urgent as the ones we’re describing here, but all of us face in life urgent situations, and we have to discharge our responsibilities. That’s what our authority, whatever it is we have, is for.08:31S2

That’s so yeah, that’s well put. Let’s talk now about the the French fleet because it’s a little known aspect of the war. But Churchill had spotted it not long after he became prime minister after Chamberlain stepped down. He begins to lobby Darlan, who’s the the chief of naval operations. He’s in command of the French fleet. But he’s he’s an admiral. He’s not a minister. And he says to Darlan, we got to have the French fleet. We got to have the French fleet. And Darlan says to him, of course you’ll get the French fleet. Well, France is collapsing and Churchill sends out his IOU for the fleet and Darlan doesn’t deliver. He said I’d become the Minister of Maritime. What does that mean? What was he trying to do?09:14S3

Their bargain. So, first of all, a very pregnant letter in these chapters is the letter that Churchill wrote to Roosevelt on the 15th of June.09:24S2

Oh, yes.09:25S3

And I invite people to read that and see that Churchill appeals to Roosevelt entirely on the basis of the interest of the United States of America. Yep. He says if their fleet goes bad, that’s a grievous fact. But what will be become of our fleet? I would never surrender our fleet to the Germans. But will I be in charge if there’s an invasion? You have to think about that, because the British fleet was bigger than the American fleet at the time. And if you put it together with the French fleet, and he points this out.10:05S2

And the German.10:05S3

Fleet, that would.10:07S2

And the German way bigger.10:09S3

That’s right.10:10S2

And so don’t go anywhere, America. We’ll come back and talk about FDR, Churchill, the considerations that went into everything. The dialogue is underway. All things [email protected]. And everything. All the Hillsdale Dialogue at Q four hillsdale.com. I’m Hugh Hewitt with Doctor Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, talking about Winston Churchill, World War II memoir. We’re talking about the fleet and the very delicate dance of memos between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt at the time. Doctor Arnn.10:41S3

Another very delicate thing, because, you know, first of all, these memos are really great to read because you’ve got to remember Churchill’s writing these things when he’s traveling four times to France during the collapse of France and after he’s been prime minister since the 10th of May, and all this is over by the middle of June. And he writes these memos to the French and to Roosevelt. The most important memos he wrote were to those two parties. And and, uh, uh, the French say to him, we want you to release us from our obligation not to make a separate peace. That’s that’s hard. You know, we’re collapsing. We’re suffering there. We’re disorganized. They’re going to take over France and subject the whole of France to the Gestapo. And we don’t want that. We can make a deal to prevent that. Release us. Think of the strength of that appeal. And what does Churchill reply? Once he gives, he gives the reply twice. He gives it once. And he says, we are never going to waste any time recriminating against France, whatever it does. But this is not the last battle that will happen in England, and you should exhaust your resources all the way down to North Africa, if you must, to carry on the battle. Then they retire and. And Churchill. And who’s with him? Beaverbrook, his good friend, who he gives him a huge Churchill compliment in this chapter. Always a good man under pressure. And Lord Halifax, a reformed appeaser there with him, and they retired to the garden and talk for half an hour and then come back. Churchill comes back and gives the same answer, and he gives that answer in writing again later. And then he tells Roosevelt. He gave that answer, that, in other words, I didn’t agree with them, to release them from a pact that we made a blood pact, not to make a separate peace because we’re going to fight on. And they should too. And that, you see that’s. Aren’t those.12:57S2

They are.12:58S3

Cataclysmic.12:59S2

What do you make of of FDR in this exchange for the benefit of the audience? Um, FDR writes France, encouraging them not to surrender and not to give up the fight. And Churchill, although it’s very I went full Strauss in here, tried to read it 3 or 4 times to figure out whether or not Winston Churchill was willing that FDR had agreed to publish the telegram, or whether FDR had actually agreed to publish the telegram and changed his mind. I can’t decipher it. I so I can’t say for certain whether or not FDR said, go ahead and publish my telegram, because Churchill thought it would buck up the French and Reynaud thought it would buck up the French, because FDR is saying, fight on, fight on. And FDR says, oh, the State Department says, I can’t publish the Telegraph. What did you make of that by FDR? I thought it was disappointing.13:51S3

No, it’s a good thing. uh, that, uh, we were reluctant to go into that war. Uh, we were reluctant to go into the First World War two. And, and we went into both of them upon being attacked. Right. And that’s, and we didn’t have agreements in advance of either of those wars that we would come to the defense of those countries. Roosevelt wanted to. And, and the reasons he wanted to are in that memo that Churchill wrote him. When Churchill and Roosevelt began writing each other, they write each other as former naval persons. Roosevelt had been assistant secretary to the Navy. And see, you have to make a link if you can, between the thought of the American founders, the authors of the Declaration of Independence and this policy in the Second World War. And that link is broken in part because Franklin Roosevelt was a modern liberal reinterpreting the Declaration of Independence into something else. I argue right? That’s a big argument, right? We’re not making it here, but it’s also maintained because Roosevelt reads about what’s going to happen to America if the seas are dominated by hostile powers. And that becomes a prospect that’s open. Right. Roosevelt was. He was assistant secretary of the Navy. And, you know, the great, the great. What the great explainer of British power is a man named Alfred Thayer Mahan, who was a late 19th, early 20th century figure at the Naval Institute in America. And he wrote The Influence of Sea Power on history. And he it’s a very powerful book, and it’s still fundamental to strategic thinking in West today in China, too. Yeah. And what does it say? It says the cheapest, fastest way to to move goods. Goods around the earth is by sea. And so sea power matters a lot. It mattered very much to the founders of the country. And so, uh, Roosevelt knows that, right? And we’ve always been for freedom of the seas. We always had serious navy from the Revolutionary War on. And, and so to have that under the hands of a continental power, I mean, it’s just a fact that the Chinese Navy is bigger than ours today. And China has a multiple of our shipbuilding capacity today. That’s a serious fact.16:36S2

And did you notice, though, doctor, that when our Apache helicopter went down, we dispatched a drone made by Saronic. And it looks like, God forgive me. I hope I don’t offend the PT boat people. It looks very much like a PT boat from World War Two or a swift boat from Vietnam, but it doesn’t have anyone on it. It just goes and picks up our pilots. That’s a revolution.17:05S3

Well, there’s a very good. I just got it this morning. I haven’t read it all yet, but there’s a man named Dennis Blair who was a big naval commander in the Pacific. And he published an article about the question, Can China take Taiwan? And he says there’s just a lot of developments that make that very doubtful now. And we can’t rest on our laurels. But, you know, I mean, one of the things that’s been displayed in Iran is that we have made a lot of progress against these. And with these drone weapons and in knocking them down, not having to spend a $2 million weapon to knock down a $30,000 drone. And so there’s a lot of innovation going on right now. A lot of it comes from Anduril, and that’s Palmer Luckey’s company. And that’s just awesome to me.17:55S2

It’s awesome to me too. And there in Ohio, doctor or not. Michigan. There in Ohio. We’ll come back. Hopefully I’ll evade some anti Ohio talk from Doctor Arnn. Don’t go anywhere America. Welcome back America. I’m Hugh Hewitt talking with Doctor Larry Arnn about the new technologies of war everywhere. A lot of it comes as well from Ukraine I’ll remind you. Four years ago when the Russians invaded and we thought it would be a two week war, you made the comment. And then history has surprises like this. Zelensky fellow. Ukraine’s a surprise. And the ability that they have demonstrated with drones is a remarkable surprise. I mean, world changing. Yeah.18:32S3

Yeah. And they’re getting a lot of help.18:34S2

And we’re helping them.18:37S3

You know. Yeah. Well, a lot of people are. And I probably especially us and you know, we’re learning from that and, uh, uh, it, you know, we, it is a sad commentary. That we’re in danger all the time now, right? And for much of American history, that wasn’t true. And we’re safer than anybody, at least anybody powerful. But we’ve got we’re subject to immediate attack. And that means being ready and having a superior military at the cheapest possible cost is urgently needed to any republic like ours.19:27S2

Let me also, we’re talking about naval power. And man, uh, the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates again that, uh, what seems like a fight far away with a country we know much about Oman and UAE and Iran is actually about the world’s health. You can’t allow international waterways to be dominated by a malign power by by any power, unless it’s the Panama Canal and they own it, or we own it and gave it to them. You can’t let the Straits of Malacca or the Strait of Hormuz or any of the narrow waterways, the Taiwan Strait, be dominated by one power, or the whole world suffers. That’s why I think you mentioned that our Constitution specifically doesn’t say anything about a standing army says we are to provide and maintain a navy that’s in the Constitution.20:16S3

Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. We didn’t see that’s and see put a point right. First of all, as I say, all proper reasoning about international security and foreign policy begins with the interest of the United States. Well, we’re a net oil exporter and we hope to remain so. I hope we do. But we’re also a huge oil importer, and that has to do with refining capacity and kinds of oil and which kinds we can refine and which kinds we produce and don’t produce. And those are sticky problems, right. And so, you know, the world has a world price and we got to buy a lot of it. And so, yeah, the interest of the United States is wrapped up in this. And, uh, the Strait of Hormuz turns out to be a very sticky problem. Uh, and, uh, we will see because we haven’t, we haven’t, we have won the war in Iran so far. We will see how it comes out.21:18S2

Let me go back to last week and then bring it forward. Uh, you mentioned last week that Churchill wrote the prime Ministers of the dominions. In that letter, he wrote, uh, to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, quote, Hitler will have to break us in this island or lose the war. He then on June 18th, gives this remarkable speech. We don’t have the audio of it. Um, uh, which is the finest hour speech? Do you have an account of how the British people reacted to that speech?21:52S3

Yeah, many. It was, uh, that that is the one where like it is first of all, he did broadcast the speech. That is the one where people were now focused on the problem. Uh, you know, in other words, uh, when the war started, nobody knew what to expect, you know, and then to be losing on such a scale and so fast that violated the pace of the First World War, which, you know, they lost some battles in the beginning, but within three weeks that settled down into trench warfare and France didn’t surrender. And what, six weeks, how long it took. So they’re getting used to that. And then he gives the speech. And it’s worth noting, you know, the peroration of the speech at the end is, uh, if the British Empire should last a thousand years. Men will still say this was their finest hour. Remember that? That’s kind of a doleful prediction, too. This is the peak. What comes later is lower. And that means the Churchill against its will and never willing to do that. Another time in his life was putting all the chips on the table. Uh, that when he said to the French nations that die fighting, rise up again, those that surrender tamely are gone forever. He was prepared to live by that creed himself.23:23S2

And he, in fact, did live by that creed. He put all the chips on the table. More with doctor on coming up on the Hillsdale dialogue, all things [email protected]. Stay tuned. Welcome back America. I’m Hugh Hewitt, we’re talking about the French Navy with Doctor Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, which is why he then goes on and he’s very harshly critical of Admiral Darlan and very, uh, full of praise for de Gaulle. De Gaulle, he calls the Constable of France. It’s a fine turn of phrase. He also says about Darlan. And he’s such a beautiful writer. I had his great grandfather. Darlan is the admiral of the French Navy. His great grandfather had been killed at the Battle of Trafalgar. October 21st, 1805. So we’re going back a long way from 1940, Churchill says. I therefore thought of him as one of those good Frenchmen who hate England, which is a fine turn of phrase, but it’s a nice way to distinguish between French, who are who are defeatist and French, who just hate England. But he has to bomb, and I don’t think many Americans know this now. Larry Arnn, the Brits had to destroy the French navy. They had to seize it wherever they could and scuttle it wherever they had to. It’s really kind of a remarkable episode in history.24:40S3

Churchill was very reluctant to do that. Remember, the British Navy and the French Navy have been training in common for Since 1905, roughly. So there’s no there’s no British officer who doesn’t know the French Navy and regard it as their closest ally, and now he’s going to sink their ships. And Churchill tells in this book he tells the story in the in the French North African port of Oran is where the French navy went to under Darlan’s orders. Churchill tells about the negotiations between. Is that in this chapter I’m kind of lost where we are now.25:24S2

Yes.25:25S3

Yeah. So it’s in the book, um, he tells the story of the negotiations and the British commander comes and says, I need you to give us these ships or scuttle them. And the French, and it’s very civil, their allies and they negotiate for several rounds, and the French admiral is conferring back. And then he tells him. Not going to do it. And the British says, we’re going to sink your fleet. And they do. And that’s a terrible thing. Churchill regretted it deeply. On the other hand, there’s a lot of evidence that it had a big effect on Franklin Roosevelt because he remember in that thing we talked about where Roosevelt won’t publish his statement. Well, he really couldn’t, you know, because he, he he didn’t have the authority to go to war. He didn’t have the authority to help. But he’s also hearing from the French. And the French don’t sound like people are going to keep on. And they didn’t. Right. And so when he sees Churchill and he later sent Harry Hopkins, who lived with Roosevelt in the white House for many years, very close to him when he sent him to talk to Churchill. And when he saw this destruction of the French fleet, he thought Churchill hinted that they were going to keep fighting. And therefore this is a enterprise we might invest in.27:08S2

Page 213 he writes, the elimination of the French navy had, as an important factor, almost at a single stroke by. Violent action produced a profound impression in every country. Here was this Britain, which had so many had counted down and out, which strangers had supposed to be quivering on the brink of surrender to a mighty power arrayed against her, striking ruthlessly at her dearest friends of yesterday, and securing for a while to herself the undisputed command of the sea. It was made plain that the British War Cabinet feared nothing, and would stop at nothing. This was true. He’s right about that. If you kill all your friends, you’re not going to. You’re not going to stop.27:54S3

Yeah. Here we go. It, uh. You know, uh, I used to keep on my wall a war photograph of of Abraham Lincoln. And next to it, a war photograph of Winston Churchill. And beneath each of them quote. And the quote from Lincoln was, you don’t fight wars by throwing by blowing rose water through elder stalk squirts. And the quote and the quote from Churchill is in the Canadian parliament. He in the middle of the war, he said, uh, we have not traveled all this way across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy. And, uh, in other words, yeah, this guy is formidable. This guy is conquered Europe. We’re not nothing either. And, uh, that is very important. After Alamein first really big land battle that the British one. Churchill celebrated that and said, you know, we know that our soldiers are prepared to die for their country. They can also kill for their country. And that, in other words, you’re going to have to act like a winner if you’re going to win.29:03S2

You do indeed have to act like a winner if you’re going to win. Stay tuned. Doctor, I’ll be right back after the break. All things [email protected], including their fabulous new course on the Odyssey. Welcome back America. I’m Hugh Hewitt. Doctor, we’re about to talk about the rhetoric that is used deployed by Churchill. Well the the ability of his to message is really quite extraordinary. Uh, the gift of rhetorical flourish. Boy it’s rare. FDR had it. Reagan had it. I think President Trump sometimes has it in conversation, but not in set piece rhetoric. Do you disagree with that? He’s not a set piece, rhetorician.29:45S3

Yeah. Churchill. That’s right. Churchill is, uh, I mean, there Churchill prepared everything, right? But he prepared it. But then in addition, there are these many times when he just waxed eloquent, like, here’s a phrase that I liked. He writes to some of his colleagues. I really think that you, Lloyd and Amory, ought to be able to lift our affairs in the East and Middle East out of the catalepsy by which they are smitten. Who writes that? You know.30:19S2

Last thing I want to mention this week he writes to Smuts. A day or two weeks after his finest hour, Smuts is running South Africa. If Hitler fails to beat us here, he will probably recoil eastwards. Indeed, he may do this even without trying invasion. I just wanted to point out he’s a brilliant man. He’s forecasting the future in their darkest hour might be their finest hour, but he’s saying, you know what? If he doesn’t get this island? He’s going to attack Stalin. And he’s exactly right.30:50S3

So the. So this chapter ends. I’m going I’m going to go find it. The sentence really great. I can’t find it, but it’s. And it would all come to be just what he predicted.31:05S2

All right. We will come back next week to talk to Winston Churchill’s. A remarkable gift of prophecy and rhetorical skill, but most importantly of statesmanship. Doctor Oren, thank you.31:19S1

Thanks for listening to the Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you find your audio. For more information about Hillsdale College, head to hillsdale.edu.

The post Churchill’s The Second World War, Part Twenty-Nine appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Rosa Kubala, kindergarten teacher and student leadership advisor at Founders Classical Academy of Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada, joins host Scot Bertram to discuss how parents can help to prepare their child for success before they enter the classroom, the role of parents in education, and the many lessons she has learned in her time as a kindergarten teacher.

Learn more: https://k12.hillsdale.edu/

A 20-minute podcast featuring professors, K-12 teachers, and friends of Hillsdale College, all speaking about classical education—what it is, why it’s still relevant today, and what makes it unique. Hosted by Scot Bertram.

Welcome to the Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula, and teacher led classrooms. Now, your host, Scott Bertram.

Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show at our website, k12.hillsdale.edu. We’re joined by Rosa Kubala. She’s a kindergarten teacher and student leadership advisor at Founders Classical Academy of Las Vegas, also part of the committee that formed the first governing body of the school. Rosa, thanks so much for joining us.

Absolutely. I’m so excited to be here this morning.

Talking about partnering with parents to ensure student success today in classical education. We do hear that parents are the child’s first teachers. And you’re a kindergarten teacher. You’re the literal first teacher inside the school. When we say parents are a child’s first teachers, what does that mean in practice, especially for those students that you see for the first time?

So parents are the models and the teachers for students from birth until basically oftentimes the first time they bring a child to someone other than themselves, which is usually me, the kindergarten teacher. So it’s kind of a pass off. And I like to say that once that is made, we are co-parenting and they are co-teaching because now it becomes a partnership between the two of us.

How can parents help to prepare their child for success before they enter the classroom.

This is something that comes up quite often in kindergarten, especially. Parents are usually surprised when I tell them that it’s not an academic answer. It is more of a social answer and learning how to go to school. Students need to learn to listen and ask questions. In turn, they need to raise their hand before they use the restroom, which is huge. Nobody does that at home. And so as far as kindergarten, that is something that’s really important. At our school, we wear uniforms and those require belts. So students sometimes learn that they don’t know how to use a belt. The first time. They’re finally at the front of the line to use the restroom. So things that you don’t necessarily think about are things that, especially in kindergarten, they need to know. And this changes with the age of the child. Of course, when we have students coming in at different levels. They need academic help, and usually the school will help counsel students when they enter our school. Because we are such a rigorous program and different from the mainstream. There’s a lot of foundation academically that the students will need, and the teachers are a fabulous resource for that.

So you mentioned that it’s a bit of a surprise when they find out it’s kind of social things, not academic things. Are there any other misconceptions or surprises that a lot of parents have about kindergarten?

Absolutely. I have some really, really great parents who send their students to really, really great preschools, and the students will come knowing how to count to 100 and they’ll know their ABCs. And in our program specifically, those things don’t necessarily help students get farther along. In our case, our explicit phonics program is so basic. We start from the beginning and a child that knows letter names for letters is actually sometimes a detriment, because we want those students to know the sounds those letters make instead of their letter names, because when we’re reading, that doesn’t really help them. Mhm. I like to tell parents, as far as academics, numeracy is the best thing that they can learn. If the students can understand the concept of what numbers are. And this doesn’t mean counting to 100. This means counting to ten, but understanding what ten really is instead of saying, yeah, I can rattle that off. Well, how much is ten? How many fingers do we have? How many more would I need if I only have eight? In order to make ten. So it is somewhat surprising. Even students that can read coming into kindergarten are not necessarily ahead of the the rest of the group, because none of them really have the foundation that we’re going to set.

Mhm. So what do parents need teachers to know about their student entering kindergarten?

Parents need to know that teachers are going to take care of them. It’s a very huge leap of trust to let your child be in the care of somebody else. And so what I like to do, especially in kindergarten, is I’ll have parents fill out a getting to know your child’s sheet. It has everything from fun facts to health concerns. And that way they know that I am listening and paying attention. Once I have that information, I’m going to make sure that I am a good steward and take care of their children more so than just academically. But I have their wellness in mind as well.

And on the flip side, other than some of those surprising things, misconceptions, what do teachers need parents to know?

Parents should know that foremost, separation anxiety is natural. It’s normal for children and parents to experience anxiety during the first weeks of school, tears that dropped off do not necessarily mean a child is unhappy or unsafe. Consistent routines and confident short goodbyes help children adjust more quickly. Parents need to know that teachers will care for their children. We are concerned with teaching them all the things we want them to know, and we want this for the whole class. Nobody likes to think of themselves as selfish, but as a parent, I know I’m going to pull my child out of a fire first. That’s just human nature. Parents want us to have this level of care for their children. As a school, we have procedures and rules to make sure that everybody is safe. But also parents need to know that we think about these things, and our actions have reasons behind them that are meant for the good of all students. We understand that students overall wellness is part of our responsibility. We need to show the parents that we are paying attention and we take this responsibility seriously.

So what can parents do to support a child if he or she is struggling in that first year of kindergarten.

Yeah, this is a real fear for parents when their child’s not doing well. Things get a little tricky because it’ll often get emotional and rightly so. Teachers should be a parent’s first resource. Parents have every right to ask for a conference if they feel something is going wrong. Our program is rigorous and different by design. A teacher is likely to identify why a child is struggling and offer suggestions. Students that transfer from Non-Classical schools need time and support to adjust to their new situation, academically and socially. Parents who want a classical education for their child do not always recognize what a significant academic and cultural adjustment this can be. Teachers can offer suggestions and help pinpoint the specific support needed for their child. This is a huge education investment. A child who struggles will inevitably start to feel unsuccessful, and. This is damaging to the spirit Without awe and wonder, education becomes a dry obligation.

Are there particular aspects of classical education, as you find at Founders Classical in Las Vegas, that naturally reinforces the role of parents in education?

I think we do offer some unique opportunities for the parent to be involved with their child’s education. We often invite parents to come in and observe lessons because they are again co-teaching, and the more they understand what we’re doing and the reasoning behind it, the better off we are all together. We have even parents come in to support our curriculum. Sometimes if they do something that is well within the boundaries of what we’re teaching. They can come in and do that. And I think our parents are a little bit more understanding of what we do at a classical school, because I know in our K 12 Hillsdale schools. We are all schools of choice. So parents research us hopefully, and they are bringing their child to us. I like to say on purpose, you guys are here because you have a reason to be here. They’ve read our mission statement. They understand that we’re going to talk about civics. We’re going to talk about virtue, which is not always accepted in the mainstream schools.

Rosa Kubala is with us, kindergarten teacher, student leadership advisor at Founders Classical Academy of Las Vegas, talking about partnering with parents to ensure student success. If there is a little bit of contention, if there’s a contentious feeling between teacher and parent, why is that usually so, and is there a best way to help with that between parents and teachers?

Yeah, this is definitely the elephant in the room. We all kind of worry about this on both sides. We both have the same goal. Parents and students, parents and teachers both want success for the students. Teachers want all the students to succeed, and parents in general have their eyes on just their child because that’s natural. I have always advocated for my children. In fact, that is largely why we have a Hillsdale K-12 classical school in Las Vegas. But as you might imagine, this can sometimes cause that friction. In my kindergarten class, I often make the point that students need to learn an entirely new set of rules and procedures for school. Children do not need to raise their hands at home or wait in line to use the restroom. In my classroom, there are 29 other students to consider. So this unnatural procedure needs to be learned. And from the parent perspective, it can be frustrating to realize that students don’t always have their needs met. As soon as we would all actually prefer during the school week, our students are with teachers for about the same number of waking hours as they are with their parents. So this partnership needs to be strong and honest. Communication is key. Personally, I try to put myself in the shoes of the parents and answer questions they’re likely to have before they have them. I really appreciate when my parents voiced their concerns. I can’t repair a situation that I’m not aware of. The sooner I know of an issue, the faster it can be addressed. Clear and honest communication, I think, is the best answer for these kinds of situations.

Communication is key. What are those sorts of things that you as a teacher, need to know about over the course of a school year, be it academic, social. What are those topics that will be helpful to you as a teacher in the classroom?

This is great. Yeah. A lot of times parents don’t think about telling us, you know, our pet died last night, or if there’s an extenuating Situation that might cause a child to not be up to their best, because we get to know their children quite well. And if something is off, we can usually tell pretty quickly. And having that knowledge beforehand can help us support the child emotionally, which is usually the difference. Academics kind of roll forward in a very steady progression unless something comes up. And most often those things are emotional family things that we wouldn’t be aware of.

How do you deal with a child that is perhaps overly disruptive inside the classroom?

Well, this depends on the type of disruption that the child is causing. Basically, we all love our children, but we know they are not flawless. And in the parent teacher partnership, this is where we most need to be on the same page. Strategies are going to differ by grade level in school. Teachers and parents both need clear guidance from school administration as to how these situations are handled. Depending on the severity of the disruption, the answer may include a quiet moment with the teacher to de-escalate the situation or the assistance of a counselor or administrator. I personally love praising the children who do things correctly. If there’s a small disturbance in my classroom, I’ll look for a child that is behaving properly and let them know what a good job they are doing. Children generally want to do well, and when they see someone succeed, they will usually do their best to follow suit. If this does not adjust the behavior sufficiently, I’ll ask that child to stop and think about what choices they’re making. For anything more than this, I’ll send a note home to the parent. Support from families can make a huge impact. Sometimes parents will let me know of extenuating circumstances or there’s, you know, all kinds of things that can cause this type of behavior. Often parents will reinforce classroom rules, and then the child gets a clear understanding of the importance of the standards of conduct. I’ve actually had some parents tell me that they implement our rules at home and the whole household benefits.

I think we touched on this a little bit previously, but explicitly. More specifically, is there a difference in the relationship between parents and teachers at a classical school than perhaps something that a parent might be might be more accustomed to?

Yeah. Again, our parents are choosing a specific type of education that we spend a lot of time preparing and delivering. Most parents who come to our school recognize this and support what we do. On occasion, parents jump into our program without doing their research, and this can be problematic. Our websites abound with information about who and what we are and what we do. We. We are dedicated to delivering a classical education to those who want it. This includes Socratic seminars and a robust list of classical literature under government and political thought. Our program guide reads, and I have a little quote. The sixth grade history curriculum introduces students to moral and political philosophy, and thus should inform how they think about government by focusing on the ideas of Judaism, Christianity, ancient Greece, and ancient Rome. Students should begin to see the ideas undergirding their own country. The mission statement at the Hillsdale School, where I teach reads, we aim to train the minds and improve the hearts of young people through a rigorous classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue. For comparison, the current mission statement at the County middle school where my children would be zoned to attend reads. We challenge students to explore their curiosity through hands on, inquiry based learning in science, technology, engineering and math. We empower them to navigate real world problems with critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity. We inspire them to excel academically, socially and personally, preparing them for success in high school, college and beyond. Current educational offerings are quite diverse. Parents who know what they have signed up for are poised for success.

And are there ways. Simple things parents can do at home that have an outsized impact on student success, perhaps specifically with homework, or those tasks or duties that you are expecting those students to complete?

This is actually more of an important question than it seems. Teachers teach and students learn in the classroom. Homework is intended for practice, habit building, and reinforcement. Parents should not be expected to teach new concepts. Parents can best support their child by providing a well-lit space where student has uninterrupted time to work independently. This time should be scheduled into the daily routine, not necessarily right after school, and definitely not in the car on the way home or on the way to an activity. Homework time should be treated as a valued and necessary component to the school day. It should never be a punishment or a prerequisite for a reward. I think it’s also important to keep in mind the purpose of the homework. Sometimes life happens and there is no time to fit everything in. Let’s say a child in my class is up late at a ballpark because a sibling is in a playoff game, there are choices to make. This is a great time to remember the partnership. I would allow a student to submit an assignment late if the parent reached out in this situation. Sadly, sometimes parents can only see the missing grade and they themselves will complete the assignment just to turn it in on time. I would much rather have the assignment late or even missing, because this is definitely not a good example for the child. I like the notion of letting children know that they can still be successful without being perfect all the time. Knowledge, mastery and understanding are the goals of education, not perfection. Good grades will follow when the children learn with wonder or joy and integrity.

Is there anything in particular that you have learned from parents, or perhaps just through your interaction with parents over the years, that you think maybe has made you a better teacher?

I think overall, just being, being open to listening what every parent says, every new. I’ve taught kindergarten, I just finished my 11th year and there is a new surprise every year. Parents have different, um, a lot of it honestly stems from fear. Once a parent tells me what their their needs and concerns are, we can deal with that. And that really supports the partnership.

Rosa Kubala is a Is kindergarten teacher and student leadership adviser at Founders Classical Academy of Las Vegas. Also on the committee that formed the first governing body at the school governing board at the school. Talking today about partnering with parents to ensure student success. Rosa, thanks so much for joining us here on the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education podcast.

Thank you so much. It’s my pleasure.

I’m Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook. Search for Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education. You also can follow us on Instagram at Hillsdale underscore k12. That’s Hillsdale underscore k12 on Instagram. Thank you for listening to the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. [email protected] or wherever you get your audio.

The post Partnering with Parents to Ensure Student Success appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Guests: Donald P. Hodel and Stephanie Lauback

Host Scot Bertram talks with:

Donald P. Hodel, former secretary of energy and former secretary of the interior in the Reagan administration, about the leadership lessons he learned working for President Reagan, as well as his new biography, Called to Serve: My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond.

And Stephanie Lauback, associate professor of physics at Hillsdale College, discusses her research into nanotechnology and magnetism.

From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true and the beautiful are taught, nurtured and honored. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.00:25S2

He was the most congenial man, but also a man of firm convictions. And I think that amazed the press. Their feeling was that a man who was that congenial wouldn’t be tough. He was tough.00:40S3

This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. That was Don Hodel, former secretary of energy and secretary of the interior under President Ronald Reagan. He has a new memoir called Called to Serve. We’ll talk in depth with Don in just a little bit. And later in today’s program, Doctor Stephanie Laubach from Hillsdale’s physics Department tells us about nanotechnology and magnetism. First, we’re joined now by Don Hodel. He is a former secretary of energy and former secretary of the interior in the Reagan administration, also served in leadership in the Christian Coalition and focus on the family, among other things. Throughout his long and distinguished career, he has a new memoir out. It’s called called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. Don, thanks so much for joining us.01:35S2

It’s my pleasure. Thanks, Scott.01:37S3

You serve as secretary of the Interior of Energy, Undersecretary of interior. I mentioned your leadership roles elsewhere throughout your life. You say early in the book that you always felt led to take on new assignments, new challenges from time to time throughout your life. Our leaders like you born that way. Do you feel like you were always supposed to be in that sort of position inside whatever environment you were in.02:03S2

You know, Scott, I really don’t know. But as I wrote this book, I realized that in my life I had not sought these positions over and over. Positions seemed to seek me, and I responded positively on most occasions. Occasionally I felt I was not called to do something, but most of the time I didn’t seek the position. But when it came knocking, I rose to the challenge.02:38S3

You also describe your leadership style as collegial. How would you describe that for the audience, and how does that perhaps contrast to other types of styles that you served under during your life?02:51S2

Well, it was interesting. Again, as I wrote the book, something came rather sharply into focus, which was that my preferred role was as the assistant or the number two man to a decisive leader. So I had the experience several times in my life in the legal department at Georgia Pacific and again at Bonneville Power Administration, and again with Jim Watt at the interior. And President Reagan to serve decisive leaders, people who seemed to know what they wanted to do instinctively. And they they made that decision decisively. My approach to a decision when I became the number one man, when I became the secretary or the head of the Bonneville Power Administration, or president of Christian Coalition or president of focus on the family, my approach was to bring in the key people involved in that matter and discuss with them what our objective was, what our alternatives were, and glean from that process a consensus decision as to what we ought to do. And that was much more gratifying and effective for me than trying to make a decision on my own part, and then just tell people what they should do.04:22S3

Don Hodel with us. His book is called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. We’ll take a few stops along your long career. I want to start back in the late 1960s and your career in politics, when it started working in 1968 for Oregon, Reagan for president, and being involved in the Reagan campaign at that time. What was politics like in the late 1960s, and how did you find yourself attracted to a candidate like Reagan in 68.04:55S2

Well, my as I relate in the book, I think my interest in politics was triggered partly because my father was impressed when I was age five at having met a state representative and I followed politics. Read about it, listened to it, and was active in college in the Young Republicans. And, uh, at that time in Oregon in 1964, we went through a very hostile campaign in the Republican primary for president between Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. And my goal was to try to fill precincts at a time when people were polarized, which is akin to what we see today. But it was within the party.05:53S3

Mhm.05:54S2

Very disruptive. A disagreement between them. And I found myself having to play the role of a peacemaker. And it was only marginally successful in in doing that.06:07S3

You go on to work for the Bonneville Power Administration, and as part of that position, end up testifying in Washington, D.C., in front of congressmen and senators and inside call to serve. You say you learned that however thin your knowledge of the subject matter might be, you almost always knew more than the senators or representatives asking questions. Do you think, or at least feel that’s still likely the same case today in our politics? Is it something that we should be concerned about?06:40S2

I don’t think it’s something we should be concerned about. I think it’s a very natural aspect of the process. The congressman or the senator has before him one of many agencies that may report to his committee. His knowledge is going to be relatively superficial, except in special cases. Staff may have deeper knowledge, but the person from the organization, the agency that’s testifying to him, ought to have a great deal more knowledge about the agency because he’s working in that one agency. So I think that’s a very natural accompaniment to the system that we have.07:20S3

Don Hodel with us, his book called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. You’re at Bonneville Power Administration through the end of 1977, and we perhaps pick things back up with the beginning of Reagan’s first term, when you are serving as the undersecretary of the interior, eventually you’d be secretary of energy, eventually secretary of the interior. How does one become a cabinet secretary or a cabinet undersecretary? What is that process like?07:51S2

Scott. There are as many paths to a cabinet position as there are positions. Some people have excellent personal relationships with the president, and he turns to them for the expertise that he knows they have. Other people are well connected with key senators or congressmen who push for their nomination. Others, as in my case, I was known to somebody that President Reagan trusted and relied upon for an for recommendation for the Secretary of Energy’s job, gained my position as the number two man, the undersecretary of interior, because years earlier I had worked with Jim. What we had become close personal friends, had great respect for each other’s abilities, and he recognized that I had management skills that would be very helpful to him as secretary. So he pressed to have me become his undersecretary, even though that was not one of my aspirations. So my path to being his, his undersecretary, was because of our experience. My path to being Secretary of Energy was because I had met and worked with a man named Tom Reed when he was running the Reagan campaign for president in 1968, and I ran the campaign for him in Oregon.09:25S3

I want to ask a number of questions about this particular time in in the book. And I want to start, I guess, with with Jim Watt, who you knew very well and served under and with throughout your career in a couple of places. And the Reagan administration. And what specifically had a reputation was criticized in the media during this time for not supporting the environment. And you were there with him along the way. What was wrong about that characterization of Jim Watt and the Interior Department at that time, and how did you consider environmental questions during that time in the Reagan administration?10:07S2

Very interesting question, because under Jimmy Carter, the Secretary of Interior, Cecil Andrus, announced publicly that whenever the environment, as it was involved in an issue, the environment. One period, end of discussion. And we came in with an absolutely different attitude, which was that environment was one of the many important things that needed to be considered. But we really believed that a balanced approach made great sense and that we did not have to choose between an improving environment and an adequate economy in this country. But it meant making decisions from time to time, specifically on what environmental matters had to be protected and what non-environmental matters needed to be protected or advanced. By the time we left Washington, I was pleased to see that even the Democratic National Convention recognized that we did not have to choose between the environment and economics. So we were successful to that extent. But the single issue environmental approach was in the Carter administration. And after the Reagan administration, it began to show up again in the national process.11:37S3

That’s Don Hodel, former secretary of the interior and secretary of energy under President Ronald Reagan, will continue with his story in just a moment. First, I want to remind you about the new Hillsdale College online course on The Odyssey. Find it at hillsdale.edu/new course NEWCOURSE. Maybe you’ve already seen the new adaptation of The Odyssey in theaters, or you’re planning to see it. It’s even better to read it. In the words of Homer, the father of Western literature, Homer’s epic poems like The Odyssey look at the noblest ways of life for man. The Odyssey itself contains themes about love, marriage, fatherhood, kingship, duty, loyalty. Now’s the best time for you to learn more and to read The Odyssey, along with Doctor Ben Whalen, your teacher for this course, The Odyssey, right now at hillsdale.edu/course. hillsdale.edu/ewcourse for the Odyssey. We continue with Don Hodel, former secretary of the interior and secretary of energy under Ronald Reagan. His memoir is called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. Don, we had just talked about Jim Watts and some misrepresentations, misunderstandings about him and how he ran the department. I’ve got to ask about the Beach Boys. I’m a music fan and a great music lover, and it’s, of course, a story that music lovers know or think they know. And even those who aren’t perhaps know the story about the Beach Boys and the 4th of July shows in the early 1980s. And the story goes that Jim. What the Interior Department band, the Beach Boys from performing on July 4th in Washington, D.C.. Unsavory characters. You were part of the department as this was unfolding. What do we have wrong? What do most people have wrong about the story about the Beach Boys? on the 4th of July.13:44S2

Well, I go into quite a bit of detail there, because neither Jim Watt nor I were fans of that kind of music. We had no idea who the Beach Boys were. The National Park Service decided on its own while he was secretary, that it would not have that type of music. It wasn’t even the Beach Boys who had performed, but that type of music was bringing a drug culture, violence. We had rapes occurring during these performances. It was a mess on the National Mall, and so the Park Service, on its own, announced that we would not be having these performances in the future. Well, the Washington Post wrote an article that The Beach Boys had been banned by Jim Watt, and this was a big deal. And I walked into his office that morning and and he looked at me and he said, who are the Beach Boys? And I had to say, I didn’t know. However, there was a furore over it and the story ran and the press pushed it. Nancy Reagan commented how she had raised her kids on the Beach Boys and, uh, Jim took a real beating over that. It was apparent to me later that it was because they were looking for something to beat him up with. Because when I was secretary, the Beach Boys were once again banned, and this time the Beach Boys specifically were banned by the National Park Service. And I didn’t get a question about it for two years. So it was not the decision. It was the decision maker that was the target. So but it’s become it’s become part of the history that he took the decision to ban them, which was never true.15:42S3

Don Hodel with us, former Secretary of the interior. Secretary of energy under the Reagan administration. His book is called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. I want to ask a question or two about your beloved wife, Barbara, who passed away a few years ago. At this particular time. And throughout the book, there are so many allusions to consulting her, talking to her about what your job might be or where you’re going to move, or when you’re going to, how long you’re going to serve in a certain place. And you say you included your wife as much as possible, the secretary of Education, meaning you wanted her to be along on on trips. I think later as secretary of Interior, she was actually in some of the meetings but not talking in the meetings. She said hello. And then and then that was it. Didn’t want to seem like she was involved, but you wanted to have your wife as close to you as possible during your service and during these years in Washington. is that common among secretaries, at least in your experience? And did you need to ask for approval to make this happen? How family friendly is a position like Secretary of the interior, Secretary of Energy?16:54S2

It’s not. It is very uncommon. I don’t know of anybody else who did anything like what I did. My wife and I had an unusually close and warm and loving relationship. She had no interest in outside activities. She was very interested as an observer in things, and she was willing to adjust her life activities in a way that would allow her to come into any meeting of mine that I would include her in. As secretary, I had great latitude in who I would include in meetings and for meetings where they were with staff. She would come anytime she had the time, which was a lot with outsiders if she knew them or there was nothing sensitive about the meeting. I would include her. She agreed that the one thing she couldn’t do is talk about a substantive matter in the meeting, because that would confuse people as to where the decision was coming from. But she was perfectly comfortable with that. And so, as far as I know, nobody else did what we did. But nobody was critical of it. And it was a great relationship for us. And I worked when I was undersecretary, I worked from 730 or 8 in the morning until 11, 1130 at night. She would come in after hours and sit in my office and, and do cruel work or read while I worked on stacks of paper. And it was like me being at home, working on something and in our living room.18:41S3

Your wife is also involved in what I think is a pretty interesting piece of advice, or one that I had not considered before. As you were in the cabinet, you said that you figured out you weren’t really happy something was wrong. You figured out you couldn’t feel good about your successes because you didn’t want to be too prideful, but you could feel bad about your mistakes or failures, so there was no upside at all. It was only only bad. And you talk to Barbara and said, I need someone that I can brag about without trying to, to, to hide my pride without trying to be modest. And she filled that role for you as you worked and continue to work in DC as at Interior and Energy. What did that arrangement allow you to do? How did that change the way you felt.19:26S2

In my head? Scott. I always heard my mother when I was a young boy, when I got a little happy about something I had done, she would say, don’t get a big head, baby. So I would hear that as an adult. Now I’m in the president’s cabinet. I do something that I’m pretty pleased with. And I hear that voice. And so I don’t allow myself to feel pleased about it. That’s getting a big head. But if I do something for which I get hammered or I’ve made a mistake that I can, that I can do. So all I had was downside. And I realized the job was becoming burdensome because I could not enjoy successes when they occurred. So because of a wonderful relationship I had with Barbara, I just went to her and laid that all out and asked if she would be willing to play the role of a listener who would not be critical and not suggest that I was getting a big head if I wanted to brag about something that I thought I had done well. And it worked beautifully. Yeah, she was wonderful at that.20:37S3

A few more minutes here with Don Hodel. His book is called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. As I’ve mentioned, you served then as Secretary of Energy for a few years and then came back as secretary of the interior for President Reagan’s second term. It was during that second term that you describe perhaps the biggest crisis you attended to during your time in D.C., and those are the 1988 Yellowstone wildfires. For those who don’t remember, or even those perhaps who weren’t around. Tell us a bit about why that was such a big deal and how the Department of Interior could or could not respond to that sort of tragedy.21:14S2

Well, Yellowstone National Park is about 2 million acres, and it is largely covered in forests. There are some incredibly beautiful areas and wildlife in that park in the summer of 1988. Very dry. I. Several fires were started by lightning. A couple of fires occurred outside the park caused by. In one case, a logging operation, another a human action and fire campfire or something. The Park Service standard. The routine was that they would not fight naturally occurring fires because fire was a natural part of the habitat, but they would fight. A man caused fire. Well, very rapidly these fires merged and pretty soon a large part of the park was burning. mid-July, I was informed that they had gotten the fires under control, and that very day, the winds came at in excess of 50 miles an hour, and we had the fires jump all the fire lines, and pretty soon the fire was completely out of control. At that point, we had help from the Department of Defense with 9000 soldiers on the fire lines. We had 400 fire trucks from all over the west in the park trying to help fight the fire. And all we could do at that point was try to protect buildings and bridges infrastructure, because there was just no way to get out there and stop the forest fire. At one point, somebody suggested that we needed to bulldoze a fire line. But the problem was two things. One, the winds were such that the sparks from the fire would jump hundreds of feet, so that the fire line would have had to be wider than a six lane highway, and that fire line would be a visible scar on the landscape for the next 200 years. So we decided against doing that. The net result was that there was nothing really we could do to fight the fire until September came and the air got cooler and we got some. Finally some snow to help dampen the fire. And finally it went out.23:40S3

MM. At the end or near the end of President Reagan’s second term, you helped describe what it’s like to be a lame duck secretary as that second term comes to an end. And there is literally, as you point out, in call to serve nothing for you to do. There are cabinet secretaries and President Trump’s second term who are about to experience this. Do you have any advice that you might like to pass along to them?24:05S2

Well, my advice is don’t kid yourself that you’re going to have a great deal of influence after the presidential election. And in fact, your influence will decline as you get closer to the election. And once the election is over and any policy decisions that you can still make have been made, there’s nothing left for you to do. Nobody really cares at that point what you think or what you’re going to do. Unless I would think somebody like the Secretary of State might be in the middle of a negotiation, but even there, his hands are substantially tied by the fact that his president is outgoing and the new president is coming in regardless of party. So you just power moves quickly, and the bureaucracy quickly recognizes there will be a new sheriff in town. And you’re not that guy.25:02S3

Don Hodel with us, his book called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond a few minutes on the beyond, because there’s there’s more there are additional chapters after your service in Washington as you become involved in the Christian Coalition with Pat Robertson, focus on the family as well. You have public service and now private service as well. I don’t know if it’s a stretch to say that that the private service. I don’t know if you were more unhappy during that time, but both seemed to end in ways that weren’t quite satisfactory. How would you how would you contrast your time in public service and your time in private service with Christian Coalition and focus on the family?25:43S2

As I say in the book, I did not do my due diligence before going to Christian Coalition. Had I done it, I really would not have gone.25:54S3

Mhm.25:55S2

And, uh, in the long run, Pat and Robertson and I simply were not a good, good match. Uh, so that was not, in my view, a very productive or successful effort. By the same token, I did what I did because I felt called to serve. And so I, you know, things came out of it for which I was better off. But it was not a high point in my life when I went to focus on the family because of my tremendous respect and admiration for Doctor James Dobson, and I had served there temporarily as a volunteer, and in 96 we’d established a wonderful relationship, and later I went back when he was finally willing to relinquish the presidency. And I went as president. And I went knowing that there was a substantial chance that in that role, the relationship, the wonderful relationship we had, would be damaged. And of course, it turned out to be in that case, it was, I would say, an inevitable side effect of taking on that role. He was a founder, a very decisive man, incredibly gifted, great Christian leader. But as a founder, He just had a terrible time relinquishing his baby, and that’s totally understandable. And my love for the man never changed. And I was very regretful that in the end, we had a somewhat ruptured relationship.27:45S3

We spent some time with Don Hodel. Haven’t talked about Ronald Reagan, the man, the president, the person you served under for, I believe, all eight years of his time in office. What qualities did you experience first hand that Ronald Reagan possessed that made him an exceptional president?28:07S2

You know, Scott, I don’t think most people recognize the importance of his Christian commitment. You go back historically, and his mother was very staunch, and he accompanied her to her witnessing. And that was a part of the man he was. He was the most congenial man, but also a man of firm convictions. And I think that amazed the press, because I think their feeling was that a man who was that congenial wouldn’t be tough.28:43S3

Mhm.28:43S2

In fact, he was tough. He knew what he wanted to accomplish. He had a vision for America. He was wonderful at casting that vision for the American people, the shining city on a hill. And he really understood the importance of his vision to helping the country move forward. And I think he did that remarkably well.29:08S3

Stories about Ronald Reagan and much more in the memoir by Don Hodel, it’s called To Serve by Path to President Reagan’s cabinet and beyond. Don, thank you for your service to the country, And thank you for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.29:26S2

Scott, thank you for giving me this opportunity to be with you.29:29S3

Up next, Doctor Stephanie Laubach from Hillsdale Physics Department tells us about her research into nanotechnology and magnetism. I’m Scott Bertram. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour. Welcome back to the Radio free Hillsdale Hour. I’m Scott Bertrand. Be sure to check out older episodes of this program, plus tons of other fantastic Hillsdale audio presentations and podcasts on Hillsdale College Podcast Network, podcast.hillsdale.edu, or wherever you get your audio. We’re joined by Doctor Stephanie Lorbek. She is associate professor of physics here at Hillsdale College. Doctor Lorbek, thanks for joining us.30:20S4

Yeah, thanks for having me on.30:21S3

Talking today about your research and work into nanotechnology and magnetism. Interesting stuff. When people hear nanotechnology, they might imagine some sort of science fiction novel. What does it really? And how small are we talking about when we talk about nanotechnology?30:40S4

Yeah. So nanotechnology is just any sort of a system that is manipulating matter or material on the nanoscale, which is between 1 to 100 nanometers. I’ll give you an idea of what that size is. It’s very small, but there’s lots of different places where these are used. My a lot of the applications that I’m more familiar with is in medicine. So just to give a couple examples, if you there’s labs that have built little boxes out of DNA and they’ll put drugs inside and the lid of the box can be closed and have a key on it. That’s a receptor that will only be opened if it has another different receptor on it. And cancer cells have certain receptors that are different than other receptors. So essentially, they can admit this drug and it will directly open once it hits a cancer cell. And so that’s a way of doing direct, um, drug drug delivery. Um, so a lot of different drug delivery methods that people use. Um, I love another one. And Doctor Castro’s lab, which I collaborated with when I was at Ohio State. Um, they had a cool system where bacteria basically had become resistant to drugs and the, um, they would hide basically the drugs inside of a DNA, uh, structure. They called it the Trojan horse. And it wasn’t shaped like a horse, but it was called the Trojan horse because essentially it would trick the bacteria that it would trick the bacteria into thinking that it wasn’t a drug and it would just take it in and think, oh, this is just some DNA, and it would bring it in, and then it would break down and deliver the drug to it. So it was like a way of directly delivering drugs to resistant bacteria. So there’s lots of different uses in nano like in medicine, but even in like material science, you can use it to change properties of things. So like, for example, graphene is a really big hot topic, one which is basically a 2D layer of carbon that you can make, say nanotubes where you roll the carbon on itself to make a tube, or you can make nanoribbons where they’re just cut in strips. And if you add this to materials, you can strengthen the material. People are using it in concrete and things like this. You can also change the electrical properties of it because it’s very conductive. So there’s lots of ways that you can change basically material properties using this. And then even in like computers and electronics, nanotechnology is a huge part of this. Making transistors smaller, which makes a computer run faster, helps us to store more information, process things at faster speeds. So there’s lots of different areas that’s being used.33:12S3

And as far as size, when it comes to this nanotechnology, how small exactly are we talking about?33:19S4

It’s anything that’s on the nanoscale. And to give you just an illustration, how small this is. If you had if you imagine one nanometer being the size of a pea, like a pea that you eat, a school bus would be what we’d consider a micrometer. Okay. A micrometer is 1000 times smaller than a millimeter. So if you think of your ruler, you have millimeters on your ruler. Those are the smallest division. So a thousand times smaller than that is micrometer. That’s your school bus. And then the, the meter, which is, you know, how long your meter stick is. Your arm span is like one and a half to two meters, depending on how tall you are. A meter when one nanometer is a pea would be driving from LA to New York and back again. So you can imagine that pea to that meter. Um, and as far as like on the biological side, your hair is actually, you can see the diameter of your hair. I mean, it’s obviously pretty small that you can’t. Yeah. It’s, um that is about 0.1mm. So that’s a 10th of that division. Your white blood cells or cells in general are more like on the micrometer region. And then the proteins, which are the things that do all the work inside your cells. Those are on the nanometer size. So you can imagine the P is sort of like moving around inside of the school bus. And that’s the cell, right? Which we have to look under the microscope in order to see. Yeah.34:47S3

Let’s talk a little bit more about this DNA work. A lot of your work involves building these little structures out of DNA. How does DNA become a building material for machines?34:58S4

Yes, that’s a good question. Picture would help with this, but I can give a little bit of an illustration. So I mean, essentially you build you can build material machines out of anything, right? You can build out of wood, you can build out of metal. Our building material is DNA. And the reason why DNA is so helpful on the nanoscale is because it has these small base pairs that interact or bind with one another. And so most people are probably familiar with the four bases adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. Adenine and thymine will bind together with two hydrogen bonds based on their chemical structure. And guanine and cytosine will bind together with three hydrogen bonds. And um, essentially these base pairs will form a sequence. We call it single stranded DNA. And they don’t like to stay single stranded. So they naturally want to find that other base that will compliment them. And when they do that, they form the double stranded DNA, which most people can know that forms a helix, a helix. And so that helix is essentially what we view as our building block. In that helix has a very specific diameter. It’s about two nanometers across. So you can imagine it’s sort of like a cylinder. It’s two nanometers across. And as far as how tall it is depends on how many base pairs you put in. So let’s say you want to make it to be 3.4 nanometers tall. That would be ten base pairs that you stack on. Every base pair you add is a 0.34 nanometer increase. So you can imagine you have the precision. Unlike if you’re building out of wood or metal, you can’t cut down something to the nanometer scale, right? This one allows us to be with precision of 0.4 or 0.34 nanometers. So so that’s that’s the basic right is essentially we have these helixes that are just rods. And we can change how long they are. And you might say, well, what if I want to make more than a rod? Well, let’s say you want to make a platform, a 2D platform. Well, then you just put the rods or the helixes side by side and you can make a bigger platform. And let’s say you want to make something 3D. Well, you can stack those platforms on top of each other and you can make it more of a creative shake. Of course, you can imagine a cube pretty easily, but I can make it into a football shape by changing how long each of those rods at each of those places are at. And so that’s essentially what we do. We use a technique called DNA origami, which came out in 2006. And that actually was what sort of revolutionized a lot of building structures out of DNA because we were able to actually, we were able to self-assemble them, meaning that we could encode all the information of exactly what we wanted it to build and design into. And then by applying some heat, some salt, it actually forms into that structure itself. So and it’s very reliable. You get a very high efficiency. So forth. And so it’s about 2006 when sort of this DNA nanotechnology actually sort of took off because of this technique.37:48S3

Stephanie Lobeck is with us, associate professor of physics here at Hillsdale College, talking about nanotechnology and magnetism. So again, some of your research here uses magnetic fields to move some of these DNA structures. So how does magnetism help to control something again that is so small.38:06S4

Yeah. So the magnetism allows us to apply what we’d call magnetic forces. And of course you say, well, DNA doesn’t seem very magnetic. Right. And it’s very true with with weak forces, you’re not going to magnetize DNA at all. And so what we actually do is we use magnetic particles. So a lot of times there’s beads, there’s ones that are on the micron size. There’s also ones on the nano size that you can attach to the DNA nanomachines. And then by applying an external magnetic field, essentially, you can think of this bead as being like a little bar magnet that wants to line up with the field, just like a compass needle. So if I point the field in one direction, the needle will turn to line up with that field. And so if it’s attached to our structure, it will then move our structure. So if it’s a hinge and you have a bead on the end, you can open and close the hinge just by sweeping the field across. And essentially you’re just allowing it to apply a force directly through the bead onto the nano structure itself. So it’s actually, it’s, it’s really cool. That was one of honestly, the, the big questions when first people started building these nanomachines was actually like, these are really cool, but how do we move them? Sure. And, um, that was yeah, a big question for a while. And the cool thing about using magnetism is it actually allows us to do direct actuation. Most methods, there’s only one other one that is a direct actuation, which is using electric fields. But all the other ways are indirect. They’re probabilistic. And they they take more time oftentimes to do it.39:33S3

One application that people hear about is targeted drug delivery. Can nanotechnology help to change the way that medicine works?39:42S4

Yeah for sure. So one of the big things that we’re sort of working on in my lab is moving towards trying to make nanomachines that will be used for medicine. And one of the. So there’s sort of two main things. So one is bacteria that have become resistant to our antibiotics. So we start to call these super bacteria. Once they start to become very resistant to drugs, they it’s hard to kill them. And so a lot of our drugs today are basically chemical reactions that are taking place. And bacteria easily change can more easily morph to change, to react and not to resist basically those chemical reactions. And so what the Nanomachine would allow us to do is actually a mechanical mechanism to kill the to kill the cell instead of a chemical one. And so an example of this would actually be one, a professor actually at Rice University. His name is Doctor Tour. He has developed machines not out of DNA but just from molecules. They’re nanomachines. And some of them are like a jackhammer. Mhm. And what he does is he can actually shoot light, different wavelengths of light at it, and it causes it to sort of vibrate up and down. And if he can basically put a molecule on there, so it finds this bacteria cell, he can then jackhammer and destroy basically the membrane of that cell. And then it now it’s either killed or now you can administer the drug and it can get inside. And so what we’re looking at doing. I was like, that’s a really creative idea. So I thought we could do something like this to light, of course, can’t pass all the way through your body, but magnetic fields do and they’re very safe. We apply very large magnetic fields, say for example, in an MRI. Right. And so this would be a great way of if we could build a machine that would essentially, you know, be like a jackhammer or hammer or something like this that would basically mechanically destroy a cell. And again, you can target it by putting certain receptors on it that would, you know, respond to only cancer cell receptors or these bacteria receptors and so forth. You’d actually be able to target them and destroy them directly instead of killing other things. So that’s, um, those are sort of yeah, cancer cells. And then these super bacteria, sort of two big topics that that people are working on doing.41:54S3

Doctor Stephanie Lobeck is with us, associate professor of physics here at Hillsdale College. Nanotechnology and magnetism. When you’re working at this tiny scale, how do you observe what’s actually happening? What does what does a lab look like?42:08S4

Right. That’s a really good question. So you can actually look at something on the nanoscale in a microscope. So a lot of people sort of maybe picture us looking down in a microscope that actually only sees or can only resolve on the micron level. So what you have to do is actually label these nanostructures with something that we call fluorophore. And a fluorophore is something where when you shoot a certain wavelength of light, it will emit a different wavelength of light. It will it will excite the electron, and it will then emit a different wavelength of light. Essentially, what we can do is we can label our structures with different fluorophores, and then based on the light signal that they’re emitting, because light spreads out, we can see the light that it forms even though we can’t see the structure. And so that’s one way visually, like if you want to see it happening in real time, you actually have to use fluorescence essentially. So that’s a big one. But there’s other ways like right now, um, a lot of the structures we’ve been working on, we actually been using micron sized beads to attach to these nano structures. And you think, how can that happen? That’s like a huge scaling difference. We use these nanorods that are micron in length but have nanometer thickness. And so they can attach to the nanomachine, but also reach out to the micron sized rod and the micron sized beads we can see. And so it’s very interesting. You’ll see a bead moving in a certain way, but you can’t see the machine itself. But because it’s constraining how the bead moves, you can actually observe exactly what’s happening to the bead. So that’s another way. Now if you want to observe like a static, like you don’t need to actually see it in action. You just want to like image, get a nice good image of it. You can use things like an AFM. We have one of those on campus, which is basically like a way of seeing like the height profile, essentially of the structure. It shoots a little cantilever and it shoots a laser down at the cantilever. And as it goes across the surface, it has to go up to go over the surface. So the laser beam goes up and it sort of traces out the structure of the surface. So that’s one way. So we use an AFM to visualize. People use other things like a Tem which is using electrons to visualize stuff. But there’s there’s many different ways. But you those are just some examples.44:21S3

You have students who have worked on some of these projects who are working on some of your projects. What do Hillsdale College undergraduates get to do with this kind of research?44:31S4

Yeah. So they get to do a lot of a lot of stuff. Like pretty much they’re involved in every step of this, this part of the project. So my students will build the structures in the lab, which involves a lot of biological techniques using pipettes and thermocyclers and centrifuges and all this stuff. So they get to learn the DNA origami technique. They will run experiments where they’re applying the magnetic fields and watching the structures change, looking at them under fluorescence or observing the micron sized beads in bright fields. And then they’ll also do the analysis like normally afterwards. We’re analyzing, we have to analyze the videos and things that we’re taking. And so there’s a lot of, you know, maybe even coding and just analysis that goes involved in that. So there’s like a whole stretch of what they do, but they, they get to be a part of, of all of it.45:20S3

As you’re talking, I’m thinking back to a conversation I had with Doctor Russell from the biology department about bacteria and films. So does your research ever cross over with work that other professors here at Hillsdale are doing?45:34S4

Yes, that’s actually a great question. So actually this summer I’m collaborating with him on a project and we have a student. He actually reached out to me because he’d seen a presentation I gave at a faculty meeting. And, um, he was like, hey, I grow these biofilms. And they are very resistant sometimes to drugs. And so we have to get the drugs past the biofilms. Can you use your machines to drill into them? And I was like, well, I don’t have the machines yet. We’re still working towards that. Probably in the next couple of years, we’ll have the machines that we can drill into these. But I said we could try just some preliminary testing with the beads. So there are actually people right now that have used, um, nano sized beads as well as micron sized beads to either drill into, you know, materials or plaque or things like this. And so I said we could just try the beads. And I have two, I have a nano sized beads and I have a micro sized bead in my lab. And so we are doing very early on experimental result tests. Right. And we have a student working with us. I’ve showed her she’s growing up the bacteria, and I’m also showing her how to run the magnetic fields. And so yeah, we’re early on in this stage, so we’re excited to see. We either expect that the beads might just the larger beads might just swipe the films off the surface, which would be good. It would be also a good way of getting rid of them. They actually do this right now with like dental stuff. Like they actually it’s actively being used. And then the other one with the, with the nano sized beads, we think that one has more potential to actually drill holes through the the biofilm. So. So we’ll see what we get. But we are actively working on doing a project based on this.47:05S3

So are we in the early days of this research meaning nanotechnology. Are we already starting to see changes or impacting everyday technology.47:15S4

Yeah. So I would say it’s definitely already impacting the technology. People probably just don’t realize where it’s all being used. I mean, even in medicine, it’s already there and probably a lot of your materials and stuff and even computers. So just people don’t realize it’s there because you just don’t see it, but it’s making things more efficient and better. But I would say there’s still a lot of growth. And even in the DNA origami community. I mean, 2006 was when it first that technique first came out. And people could make, you know, simple structures. They would make 2D static structures. Then they made 3D, you know, static structures. Then by like about 2015, we started seeing more like dynamic structures, but no one knew how to move it. And so now we’re starting to get into the time where people are like, oh, we can actually move the parts on these machines. And in order to use a machine as a machine, right, where it can do work, you have to be able to move them. And so we’re really just now starting to see that. And of course, especially in medicine, there’s a lot more higher standards you have to do before it gets into it. So a lot of even the stuff I was mentioning in like Doctor Tours Lab, that stuff is all things that like they’re doing clinical testing in mice and things like that or doing, you know, tests on petri dishes. You know, we’re going to test it with bacteria that’s grown on a film, right? But not in a body or anything like this. There’s so much testing that you have to do initially before it gets into there. But even in medicine right now, like, I mean, they use nanoparticles for MRI contrast and things like this. You probably didn’t realize maybe you got contrast and you didn’t know, oh, there’s nanoparticles in there that allowed them to image this better. So it’s definitely already affecting our society. But I do think there’s still a lot of growth and potential that it has.48:56S3

Doctor Stephanie Laubach is associate professor of physics here at Hillsdale College. Talk about her work in nanotechnology and magnetism. Doctor Laubach, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.49:08S5

Yeah, thanks so much.49:10S3

That will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to Don Hodel. His memoir called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. And Doctor Stephanie Laubach from Hillsdale Physics Department. Remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews, or listen any time to the podcast. Find [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. Until next week, I’m Scott Bertrand, and this has been the radio free Hillsdale Hour.

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On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan introduce the brand new course “The Odyssey.”

Odysseus, the man of “twists and turns,” has been away from his home of Ithaca for twenty years. His home is plagued with a pack of suitors who court his wife, devour his goods, and mock his son. 

The Odyssey tells the tale of the cunning and crafty hero of the Trojan War on his journey home. After ten years of war, Odysseus faces another ten years of fantastic temptations, deadly monsters, treacherous seas, and impious men. Meanwhile, Ithaca is threatened by suitors who plague his wife and plunder his wealth. When Odysseus reaches home, he must slay the suitors, test the loyalty of his friends and family, and restore order to his marriage and his kingdom.

Discover the beauty of the Bible in “The Genesis Story,” encounter the brilliance of Plato and Aristotle in “Introduction to Western Philosophy,” and explore the true meaning of America in “Constitution 101” all with Hillsdale faculty. 

Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I’m Jeremiah Regan.

And I’m Juan Davalos. We are on to a new course today, The Odyssey. We’re going to be covering lecture one today, Ithaca. And I’m going to start by making a confession here, which is that unlike Jeremiah, I know very little about Homer’s Odyssey for now. That’s right. So I am going to be actually just a student of this course, and I’m really excited about it because it’s one of those things that I’ve always wanted to dive into. And I started obviously watching with lecture one, and I’m really excited because it’s a beautiful course and Jeremiah can tell us a little bit more about it.

The Odyssey is an epic poem that was, we would say authored, but really because it was transmitted verbally, was created by the poet Homer, who was also the author of The Iliad. And the Odyssey takes place after the Iliad. The Iliad is mostly about the last few days of the Trojan War. It’s about the rage of Achilles and the will of Zeus. The Odyssey is named after its protagonist, Odysseus, and Odyssey, in our modern parlance, has come to mean like a long journey. And that’s because that’s what Odysseus undertakes in The Odyssey. He’s been in Troy, fighting the Trojan War for ten years. It takes him ten more years to journey home through many twists and turns, through many travails and temptations. But he makes his way back to his home, where he is a king and will have to re-establish his kingdom.

So I know that Doctor Whalen is going to go into more detail on this, but why should we? Obviously, this is a great story. It has survived the test of time. But why should we care about a story like this one?

It’s for several reasons. One is that it’s beautiful. Homer is an outstanding poet. He writes memorable nuggets, but also this is a very long extended poem. So he’s the master of the short and the long. It’s about ancient Greeks and Greek mythology. But Homer taps into the universal human condition, and he tells us something about all men at all times, the types of virtues and vices that men have, the temptations they face. So Odysseus, for example, does not have necessarily, though he is an accomplished warrior, the same martial skill as Achilles, the greatest warrior. Odysseus has other traits, though he’s very cunning, prudent. That means he’s able to look at circumstances and determine what actions will lead to the most good. But he’s also a character who undergoes development and improvement. Throughout the course of the poem, we watch as he learns lessons about hubris or arrogance that he later Applies to great success. The hubris early in the poem causes many problems for him and his men. Later in the poem, he is more humble and he’s wiser, and he’s able to avoid the types of disasters that could befall him had he not learned his lesson. So it’s a great historical work, and it’s a great human work. It’s as relevant today for human beings who are examining themselves as it was for the Greek listeners 2500 years or more ago. But on top of that, it’s filled with colorful characters, adventures, all kinds of things that make a story great.

If this is your first time jumping into this amazing story, I encourage you to go to hillsdale.edu/course and pick up a copy of the book. That’s hillsdale.edu/course. At the top, you’ll see the tab that says books, and you can buy a copy of The Odyssey. The translation is by Robert Fagles. That’s Edu forward slash course.

Now, let’s turn to Professor Whalen with lecture one of the Odyssey. Ithaca.

This is an epic poem from archaic Greece, composed perhaps around the year 750 BC, but set in a heroic age even more distant than that around maybe 1100 or 1200 BC at the end of the late Bronze Age. We know nothing about the author of this poem. We call him Homer. Other than the tradition that he was blind, he was, though undoubtedly a master storyteller and poet. I want to dive into the poem. But first, a word of encouragement. Nothing I say can replace or stand as a substitute for the reading of Homer’s Odyssey here at Hillsdale. We like our students to encounter the primary works, to read the great books. We don’t want our students just to read about them or to just know about the story, but to actually hear Homer’s voice. And in case you are intimidated by the thought of reading a nearly 3000 year old poem, I want to encourage you. You will be surprised at how readable, accessible, and even downright delightful Homer’s story is. We are working with Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey, which is quite easy to understand and quite readable. It’s gripping and striking in many ways. So don’t be intimidated. Grab a copy, crack it open. You’ll find it as readable as any contemporary novel, and it’s one of the greatest works of Western literature. Hello, I’m Benedict Whalen, professor of English at Hillsdale College, and I’m delighted to have you join me as we read through Homer’s The Odyssey. Book one of the Odyssey starts with these words sing to me of the man muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course. Once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy. Many cities of men. He saw and learned their minds many pains. He suffered. Heartsick on the open sea, fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home. But he could not save them from disaster. Hard as he strove, the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all the blind fools. They devoured the cattle of the sun and the sun. God wiped from sight. The day of their return. Launch out on his story. Muse, daughter of Zeus. Start from where you will sing. For our time to buy. Now all the survivors, all who avoided headlong death. Were safe at home. Escaped the wars and waves. But one man alone. His heart set on his wife and his return. Calypso, the bewitching nymph, the lustrous goddess, held him back deep in her arching caverns, craving him for a husband. But then, when the wheeling seasons brought the year around, that year spun out by the gods when he should reach his home. Ithaca. Though not even there would he be free of trials, even among his loved ones. Then every God took pity. All except Poseidon. He raged on, seething against the great. Odysseus till he reached his native land. Now the first 12 lines here are what we now call or describe as the epic invocation. It’s the part at the beginning of a great epic poem where the poet raises a prayer to the goddess, the muse, for inspiration. This becomes a convention in epic literature, following Homer, Virgil, Dante and following epic poets all offer invocations in a similar style. The epic invocation also establishes the subject of the poem. Here, the man of twists and turns. Now, to know more about this man, we need to establish a little bit of our background. What was this Troy that Odysseus plundered? To learn more about Troy, We would need to turn to Homer’s earlier epic poem, The Iliad. That epic poem is about a great war fought over a woman named Helen. Helen, the daughter of Zeus, the chief of the gods, was the most beautiful woman in the world. And when she was young, all of the greatest men, princes and kings of Greece, came courting her as they were trying to win her hand. They made an agreement. They swore an oath that they would all band together and support and defend and protect the marriage of whomever Helen ended up with. Helen ended up marrying the king of Sparta, Menelaus. Several years after their marriage, however, a young prince from the city of Troy. His name was Paris. He came and according to different traditions, he either seduced or abducted Helen and carried her off to the city of Troy. In keeping with the oath that they had all sworn, all of the great princes and men of Greece gathered their subjects together and joined Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon as they sailed to Troy to win back Helen. While there the great hero of the Greeks, Achilles fought, and after the close of the epic, finally died. He is the primary character of the Iliad. While at Troy, Achilles and the other great princes of the Achaeans fought to regain Helen. But they also fought to gain glory. Or, to use the Greek phrase kleos kleos means glory, or fame, or that which is heard about a person. It is the thing that heroes strove for as well as victory. Now different things can denote kleos, the armour of an enemy whom one has defeated the prizes one wins in a contest with one’s peers, or even the songs that bards sing about, one that carry one’s renown and fame, or kleos abroad to the larger Greek population. Now, in the Iliad, Achilles is given a unique choice. He hears a prophecy regarding his death. He can either fight and die at Troy while gaining undying Cleo’s undying glory, or he can live through the war and return home. But he returns home in obscurity and won’t have the kleos that he fights for now in the Iliad. Achilles is uncertain as to what he’ll really do until his friend Patroclus joins the combat and his friend dies at Hector’s hands, and Achilles desire to avenge his friend’s death leads him into the battle and finally to his own death. Now, in the larger mythology, after the close of Homer’s Iliad, the Greeks, the Achaeans do finally sack Troy. They do this through the plot of the Trojan Horse, Odysseus’s idea. Odysseus counsels his fellows to build a giant, hollow wooden horse that they leave behind as a trophy for the Trojans. The fleet should sail away and the horse should be left there on the shore. They follow this plot, but they fill the horse with all the greatest warriors of the Achaeans. The Trojans thinking they’ve won the war, bring the horse into their walls, and at night the Greek warriors burst out of the horse. They open the gates to the army that has returned in the night, and they sack the citadel. Now, this story is a famous instance of Odysseus cunning, or to use the Greek word, his mates. Odysseus was famous, renowned throughout the Achaean forces for his cunning, for his wisdom, for his practical intelligence. But in the sacking of Troy, many atrocities are done, different rapes and pillages happen, and certain temples of the gods are desecrated. This offends various of the gods of Olympus, and so the gods then punish the triumphant Greek warriors as they attempt to return home. Now, a triumphant homecoming or a return home was known among the Greeks as a nostos, and this was also very valued, very sought after by the Greeks. If, on the one hand, the Achaean warriors wanted Kleos, they also want to do accomplish a nostos a triumphant return home. The gods, angered by the behavior of many of the Achaeans during the sack of Troy, decide to punish the Greeks and interfere with their triumphant homecomings, their nostos. Some are struck down by the gods, some are blown all over the Mediterranean, and Menelaus brother Agamemnon, the leader of all the Achaean forces, as he returns home, is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, who had taken up a lover Aegisthus, while he was gone in the ten years at Troy. Eventually, their son Orestes comes and avenges his father’s death by murdering his mother, Clytemnestra. Orestes will prove an important role model that characters in The Odyssey will think about. Now, all of that is important background information for us. But if we look at this poem, Homer’s epic invocation for the Odyssey, we learn several other interesting things. For instance, we learn that much time has passed since the sack of Troy, since the fall of that great city, before this poem opens. In fact, so much time has passed that all of Odysseus’s men have died. The passage of this time leads us to the convention that epic poets follow after Homer, which is. They start their poems in the middle of things, or, to use the Latin phrase in media res, the Iliad for Homer started nine years into the war against Troy. The Odyssey starts nine years into Odysseus attempt to get home. Now, the very first word in the Greek of the Odyssey is the word andra, which means man. And in the first line of the Odyssey in Greek, we have one important adjective that describes the man named there, and that is poly tropin, a form of that adjective is rendered here in Fagles translation as the man of twists and turns. Other translators render polytrope as crafty, or of roundabout ways, or of resourceful or of many ways. This is one of the most important attributes of the man that our poem is going to be about. Now, on one level, he is of many twists and turns of many ways because he has been driven time and again off course. That is physically in his journey. He has had twists and turns. But on a deeper level, metaphorically and about Odysseus’s character, he’s a man of twists and turns in that he doesn’t quite follow a straight line. He’s a deep man. He’s a man who’s hard to grasp, a man who’s hard to pin down. He will be a challenge for us to understand. This characteristic of Odysseus as a polytropic, tropin as a man of twists and turns is related to that earlier term. I already mentioned that Odysseus has Mattis. He has cunning. If he is a man of twists and turns of poly tropin, he is also a man of cunning and intelligence in many ways a man of poly moieties. That is, he has many different forms of understanding and thought. Poly moieties is one of Odysseus primary epithets. An epithet in ancient Greek literature is repeatedly used. Descriptive phrase Homer attaches many different epithets to his different characters. As you’re reading this epic, you’ll notice that Athena might be described as the sparkling eyed goddess or grey eyed Athena. We hear of weary Penelope or cautious Penelope. We even get epithets describing inanimate things like rosy fingered dawn before Odysseus. His most important and most commonly used epithet is Poly Mattis. It’s related to his being of twists and turns. He’s a man of many different forms of thought. Now, one of the ways in which Odysseus is a man of twists and turns and is hard to pin down, is reflected in the very poetry of this beginning. That is, we actually don’t get Odysseus name until 24 lines in. In Fagles translation in the original Greek. We don’t get the name of Odysseus until 21 lines in. So we hear, sing to me of the man muse, the man of twists and turns. But even his name escapes us for nearly 25 lines. This delay increases the dramatic nature, the quality. It emphasizes the man. He is slow to reveal himself to us. He is slow to come into vision for us. This is in contrast to Achilles, the main character of the Iliad. Achilles and his wrath is named in the very first line of that poem. Here Odysseus, with his very name, waits and lingers in the background. And when he does come before us, he will be a challenge for us to understand. Now, Odysseus’s name itself is also an interesting one. There’s some scholarly debate about the exact roots, the linguistic origins of Odysseus’s name. We certainly think that it is perhaps related to words meaning to be angry at, but it also seems to be associated with a verb that can mean who suffers pain or also, conversely, inflicts pain. And I actually like this duality in Odysseus’s name. That is, he is one who suffers pain and one who inflicts pain. Now, a few other important details that we get here in these opening lines is that we hear Odysseus, many cities of men. He saw and learned their minds. It’s a sort of a curious phrase. Here. We have emphasis here again on Odysseus intellectual qualities. That is, he sees cities, and he doesn’t just know their architecture or their religion or their cuisine, but he understands their intellectual makeup. He learns their minds. Odysseus is a penetrating and deep thinker. We also learn that Odysseus has survived something that destroyed all of the rest of his men. There is something grizzled, something hardened, something of the survivor. In Odysseus. He survives where others die. Then also interestingly, we learn that Odysseus is beloved by goddesses. There’s this nymph Calypso, who loves him, who wants him as a husband. But then he’s also hated by other gods. Poseidon, the brother of Zeus, a very powerful god, is bent on Odysseus destruction. So Odysseus has this funny quality where he’s beloved of some gods and hated by others. And despite it all, he manages to survive. The final, really important thing we see here in these opening lines is that Odysseus is striving to get home. He wants to get home to his wife, his heart set on his wife and his return. But this nymph, this goddess Calypso, wants him as her husband. That, as we see right at the beginning of this epic, that there is a threat to Odysseus marriage. Now, if we recall in the Iliad, we can think of a whole political order, a whole city of men brought to its destruction because it committed itself to the violation of the marriage of Helen and Menelaus. Here in the Odyssey we are immediately informed of a threat to Odysseus marriage. And we should, after reading the Iliad, also wonder about the political order that that marriage supports. We will discuss this more as our narrative unfolds. But marriage and its relation to the political order is of primary importance for Homer. Now, after this opening invocation, Homer takes us to Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, where we hear an interesting conversation between several of them. The very first spoken words of this epic are spoken by Zeus, the king of all the gods, and he has this complaint to make. But the other gods at home in Olympian Zeus halls met for full assembly there, and among them. Now the father of men and gods was first to speak, sorely troubled, remembering handsome Aegisthus, the man Agamemnon’s son, renowned Orestes, killed. Recalling Aegisthus, Zeus harangued the immortal powers. Ah, how shameless the way these mortals blame the gods from us alone, they say, come all their miseries. Yes, but they themselves, with their own reckless ways, compound their pains beyond their proper share. Look at Aegisthus now. Above and beyond his share. He stole Atreides wife. He murdered the warlord coming home from Troy. Though he knew it meant his own total ruin. Far in advance. We told him so ourselves. Dispatching the guide. The giant killer. Hermes. Don’t murder the man, he said. Don’t court his wife. Beware. Revenge will come from Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, that day. He comes of age and longs for his native land. So Hermes warned with all the goodwill in the world. But would Aegisthus hardened heart give way? Now he pays the price all at a single stroke, and sparkling eyed Athena drove the matter home. Father, son of Cronus, our high and mighty king. Surely he goes down to a death he earned in full. Let them all die so all who do such things. But my heart breaks for Odysseus, that seasoned veteran cursed by fate so long, far from his loved ones. Still he suffers torments. Now, this opening conversation is very interesting. On the one hand, we return to the theme of a threat to marriage. And here we see the threat to marriage from the other side that is, Aegisthus courted the hero’s wife while the hero was away at Troy. This, in fact, represents something that we will see with Odysseus’s wife, Penelope on Ithaca. Not only is Calypso a threat to the marriage in her pursuit of Odysseus, but there are suitors who are courting Odysseus’s wife, Penelope. So we see possible threats to marriage, both with the man and with the wife. But more largely, Zeus’s complaint here is that men blame the gods for the suffering that they bring on themselves. This raises another important theme for the Odyssey as a whole. What are the sources, the causes of the suffering that mankind endures? Are the gods the source of our suffering? Is it chance or is it the actions of men themselves? Homer will look closely at this in the following narrative. Now, as the story continues, Athena convinces Zeus to let them dispatch Hermes, the messenger god to Calypso, telling her she has to let Odysseus off her island, and she herself decides to go down to Ithaca. Odysseus. Home island to inspire his son Telemachus. Telemachus was an infant when Odysseus left for Troy, but the war took ten years, and Odysseus has been traveling for nine years. So Telemachus is about 19 years old, about 20 years old. At the opening of this work, and Athena decides to go down to inspire Telemachus to start to move him, to prepare for his father’s return. And so Homer tells us. And down she swept from Olympus, craggy peaks and lit on Ithaca, standing tall at Odysseus gates, the threshold of his court gripping her bronze spear, she looked for all the world like a stranger now like mentees. Lord of the Taphians. There she found the swaggering suitors just then amusing themselves with rolling dice before the doors, lounging on hides of oxen. They had killed themselves, while heralds and brisk attendants bustled round them, some at the mixing bowls, mulling wine and water, others wiping the tables down with sopping sponges, setting them out in place. Still other servants jointed and carved the great sides of meat. First by far to see her was Prince Telemachus sitting among the suitors, heart obsessed with grief, he could almost see his magnificent father here in the mind’s eye. If only he might drop from the clouds and drive the suitors, all in a rout throughout the halls and regain his pride of place and rule his own domains. Daydreaming. So as he sat among the suitors, he glimpsed Athena now and straight to the porch he went, mortified that a guest might still be standing at the doors, pausing beside her. There he clasped her right hand and, relieving her at once of her long bronze spear, met her with winged words. Greetings, stranger. Here in our house you’ll find a royal welcome. Have supper first, then tell us what you need. He led the way in Pallas. Athena followed. Once in a high roofed hall. He took her lance and fixed it firm in a burnished rack against a sturdy pillar there, where a row on row of spears, embattled Odysseus spears stood stacked and waiting. Then he escorted her to a high, elaborate chair of honour. Over it draped a cloth, and here he placed his guest with a stool to rest her feet. But for himself, he drew up a low reclining chair beside her, richly painted clear of the press of suitors concerned. His guest, offended by their uproar, might shrink from food in the midst of such a mob. He hoped once more to ask her about his long lost father. A maid brought water. Soon, in a graceful golden pitcher and over a silver basin, tipped it out so they might rinse their hands, then pulled a gleaming table to their side. A staid housekeeper brought on bread to serve them, appetizers aplenty too lavish with her bounty. A carver lifted platters of meat toward them, meats of every sort and set beside them golden cups. And time and again a page came round and poured them wine. Now we see here several important things. Of course, Telemachus is here as a young man yearning for his father’s return. We see his great desire for his father. We also see the presumptive and offensive behavior of the suitors. And in fact, Telemachus is worried that this guest, this stranger to his house, might be offended by the bad behavior of the suitors. We also see Telemachus attention to this guest. And this introduces another motif or theme that is quite important for Homer’s work as a whole. And that is the theme of hospitality, or Xenia in Greek. Hospitality was very important in this culture for many reasons. First of all, of course, travel was very difficult at that time, and so strangers, travelers from distant lands had already encountered great difficulties before arriving at your palace, at your house. But travelers were quite important because travelers could bring news of distant events, and news at that time would travel quite slowly. Travelers also could establish bonds between different cities, palaces, peoples and communities. That is, if you accept with hospitality, a traveler from distant Sparta say, then when you are traveling to Sparta, you might expect reasonably similar hospitality. So hospitality formed a sort of glue, a social bond that knit these different cities and peoples together. Travelers, in fact, were said to be sacred to Zeus. This principle of hospitality, this principle of Xenia, was a virtue that Zeus himself enforced. He said that we must be hospitable to strangers. Now, in this culture, the guest also has certain obligations. If he can expect to be fed, washed and housed, he should share news. He should entertain his hosts, tell stories, sing songs, perhaps compete with them in games, perhaps exchange gifts with the host. And he must be careful not to tread upon or violate this principle of hospitality. That is, while he can expect to be treated well, he should not over extend his welcome. He shouldn’t overstay his welcome. This is part of what we see the suitors doing. They are violating the principle of hospitality by using their hosts. Now, while the suitors are carousing in Odysseus halls, Athena and Telemachus have a conversation, and Athena inspires Telemachus by assuring him that his father is still alive. Then she turns and observes the behavior of suitors. Homer tells us. Still, the clear eyed goddess reassured him, trust me, the gods have not marked out your house for such an unsung future. Not if Penelope is born a son like you. But tell me about all this and spare me nothing. What’s this? Banqueting, this crowd carousing here? And what part do you play yourself? Some wedding feast, some festival. Hardly a potluck supper, I would say how obscenely they lounge and swagger here, look, gorging in your house. Why, any man of sense who chanced among them would be outraged. Seeing such behavior, Athena provokes Telemachus. With this, Telemachus goes on to complain that he doesn’t have the power or the authority to dismiss the men. The men are there ignoring young Telemachus and always trying to win the favor of Penelope. Telemachus goes on to say this curious detail about his mother’s behavior. Listen. All the nobles who rule the islands round about Dulichium and same and wooded Zacynthus too, and all who lord it in rocky Ithaca as well. Down to the last man they caught my mother they lay waste my house and mother. She neither rejects a marriage she despises. Nor can she bear to bring the courting to an end. While they continue to bleed my household white. Soon you wait. They’ll grind me down as well. Shameful! Brimming with indignation, Pallas! Athena broke out. Now Telemachus here presents us with an interesting detail and a difficult question. Mother neither rejects a marriage she despises, nor can she bear to bring the courting to the end. Why, if Penelope despises the proposed marriages. Why? If she is not interested in these suitors, does she not bring the courting to an end? It’s a very interesting question, one that Telemachus himself can’t answer, and one that sits for us as a very important issue at the opening of this poem. In fact, this question is repeatedly phrased over the course of the Odyssey and becomes one of the dominant motifs or questions that we have regarding our characters. What is Penelope really up to with the suitors who are besieging her household? We’ll follow this question as we go. Indeed, Penelope, like Odysseus, is going to be somewhat difficult to pin down. If Odysseus is a man of twists and turns and of Metis Penelope two, and presents interpretive difficulties for us. What exactly does she want? What are her ends? What are her aims? Now we’ll get a glimpse of Penelope in just a moment. But first Athena encourages Telemachus. She tells him he should gather all the nobles in a council the next morning to see if they will restrain the suitors. And then she says, if they won’t, he should sail to the mainland of Greece to visit Nestor in the city of Pylos, and then Menelaus in the city of Sparta, visiting those two men who had been with his father at Troy. They had both returned home. Their veterans who knew Odysseus well, and Telemachus, Athena advises him, should go to those cities to see if those veterans had heard anything about his father. We can see here Athena’s important role in the Odyssey in getting all of our action moving. She sends Hermes to Ogygia to free Odysseus, and she inspires Telemachus to move to the mainland of Greece. Now, at the end of this inspiring speech to Telemachus, she flies off like a bird, and Telemachus realizes that he’s been speaking to one of the gods. He is heartened and and inspired by this. And then our narrative turns to Penelope. Homer tells us amidst them. Still the famous bard sang on, and they sat in silence, listening as he performed the Achaeans journey home from Troy. All the blows Athena doomed them to endure. And now, from high above, in her room and deep in thought, she caught the inspired strains. Icarius daughter Penelope, wary and reserved. And down the steep stair from her chamber she descended. Not alone. Two of her women followed close behind that radiant woman. Once she reached her suitors, drawing her glistening veil across her cheeks, paused now, where a column propped the sturdy roof with one of her loyal handmaids stationed either side, suddenly dissolving in tears and bursting through the Bard’s inspired voice, she cried out, phemius! So many other songs, you know. To hold us spellbound. Works of the gods and men that singers celebrate. Sing one of those as you sit beside them here. And they drink their wine in silence. But break off this song, the unendurable song that always rends the heart inside me. The unforgettable grief. It wounds me most of all. How I long for my husband. Alive in memory. Always that great man whose fame resounds through. Hellas right to the depths of Argos. Now Telemachus, having been inspired by Athena, tries to act like the man of the house and tells his mother to go back to her chamber, and that he will deal with the suitors. But the depiction of Penelope here is quite interesting, that she is high up in her room and deep in thought, and that when she comes to the suitors, she descends to them. Penelope is high, both because her chambers above them, but also symbolically she sits above them. She is the thing the suitors are striving for. She’s also the person Odysseus is striving to return to. She’s also deep in thought. She resonates with Odysseus in this way. She is Matisse. She has her own cunning, her own intelligence. Here now why? Penelope will come down to the suitors and in front of them express her longing for her husband without dismissing her. Sending the suitors away again expresses this question what is it that Penelope is after? What is. What is she motivated by? What is she aiming for? We have here in book one of the Odyssey, a very interesting situation. Clearly we have a police in crisis. We have a marriage under assault, we have a lost ruler and a god setting things in motion. What Penelope is up to on Ithaca and Telemachus. Adventures on the Greek mainland are what we’ll look at in our next lecture.

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Once per week, Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss Great Books, Great Men, and Great Ideas.

Dr. Larry P. Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, joins Hugh Hewitt on the Hillsdale Dialogues to continue a series on The Second World War, Churchill’s sprawling memoir and history of World War II in six volumes.

Release date: 17 July 2026

Read more about Sir Winston Churchill including the official biography of Churchill by Martin Gilbert at the Hillsdale Official Store.

Every week. Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss great books, great men, and great ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you find your audio.00:31S2

Morning glory needed. Grace America. I’m Hugh Hewitt. That music means the Hillsdale dialogue is underway this week. Doctor Larry Arnn and I are back into Winston Churchill’s World War II memoirs. We’re in the second volume, Their Finest Hour, chapters eight and nine, which are titled Home Defense and the French Agony. It’s a lot to cover in a half an hour of talking, but we want to start on what my volume is. Page 143. Doctor Aaron, the reader of these pages and future years should realize how dense and baffling is the veil of the unknown. Why does. Why does Churchill tell us that? He reminds us of that a few times in the course of these books. Well, he’s writing knowing what happened, but he didn’t know what happened or what happened in 1940.01:17S3

Yeah. Well, he. So anybody living his life doesn’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, you know. And so if you read history where the examples are about what life is like, you can experience through one life things and you get that experience as you go. And you don’t have much when you start and you only get one life’s experience, but you can get a lot of experience if you read history. But when you read it, you have to remember that the people who made it didn’t know any more about tomorrow than we know today. And that means that these shocking and cataclysmic and wonderful things that are told in this chapter and in this book. They were all accomplished or failed at by people who are just as ignorant as we are about tomorrow and even the state of things today. Because right now what we’re hearing is in these chapters is that the French army is collapsing on a scale and at a pace that an army that size had never collapsed in human history. And of course, nobody could predict that’s what would happen. In fact, Churchill definitely predicted it would not happen on the radio right after he became prime minister, and then a month later, he was proved wrong. And he’s coping with that every day while he’s getting ready to figure out how to stop the Germans from coming ashore.02:46S2

Well, that’s what he that’s what I took away from this, is that he wanted to communicate to everyone who would read this book, and we’re reading it 85 years after the fact, that the Brits were really worried about an invasion. I mean, they really were worried about invasion. Churchill writes, or would they go to Ireland? So maybe they’d go to Ireland first and then come across the Irish Sea. But that’s a palpable fear that we’ve never had in the United States, even after nine over 11. We weren’t worried about an invasion even after Pearl Harbor. We might have been worried about coastal California, but we weren’t worried about an invasion in force. We were worried about attack. They were worried about waking up some morning and seeing a reverse Normandy. That’s quite a burden to bear.03:31S3

Yeah, Churchill learned he doesn’t. Some of the best things are not in this book, in part because he was such an important man. And he’s writing about recent events. But one of them is the day he was informed when he went over the first war plans, that they couldn’t defend the beaches. He sort of implies otherwise in this book. But the truth is, if the Germans got ashore with a sizable force, they couldn’t contest it unless they had an equal, equal size force to fight them. But that meant that they had to gather the serious troops. And, you know, there was one division that was serious troops and well equipped. There were other divisions that were well trained, but they didn’t. They left their equipment behind in France. And so they had to they had to gather more higher up north. They had to gather away from the coast in concentrated areas and try to attack. And that meant that probably large swaths of territory in the South would be lost. London is in the south. And so when he saw that, and he sees at one point them, uh, because they didn’t have equipment, uh, he, you know, when he writes to the Dominion Prime ministers in the second chapter, we’re reading and all that, he doesn’t go into all this, but he actually witnessed them. uh, getting 55 gallon gas, petrol drums and putting wicks in them and timing how to make them explode at the right place. When they got down by the beach, that’s what they were going to try to do. And so it was a very bad situation. And if they had come, they would have taken a lot of territory.05:23S2

If Hitler had only kept up his momentum. He stopped once outside of Dunkirk because he didn’t know what was going on. We talked about that a couple of weeks ago. The fact that Hitler is in the fog of war as well, and he doesn’t want to get overextended, but then he pauses Operation Sea Lion and he doesn’t. Come on. Churchill is a is a realist. I long for more regular troops with which to rebuild and expand the army. Wars are not won by heroic militias. And he’s also doing very practical things. He asked the Admiralty, the Navy for the benefit of the Steelers fan to transfer 50 trained and half trained pilots to Fighter Command because he realizes it’s all going to be in the sky. Um, it’s all going to depend upon who owns the sky. So he has a good strategic grasp of the situation. He just doesn’t have the instruments of war in his hand.06:16S3

Yeah. Well, so I refer everybody to Victor Hanson’s very great book, The Second World Wars. It’s a wonderful book, and I learned from it. And I’ve been studying that war for 40 years now or more. Uh, he goes into the British war effort and he, he describes how much it got out of itself, especially adjusting for its size. In the end, British war production was greater than German war. Production in Germany is a significantly larger country, and the reason for it is in this chapter, this, uh, avalanche of memos coming out, you know, they actually did invent a stamp here in 1940 that he would put on the memo saying, action this day, let’s, you know, and, and one of the memos we read in here is that the Indian troops were going to get we got a whole lot of troops in India. Bring them back. They can fight here. We’ll send some lesser troops to India. And then he says, two weeks later, we were told we could get some of them back in two weeks. And I learned that some of them have only just embarked for the journey. What’s going on? We gotta hurry, you know. Of course. It’s just think how? Think of an idea. And he also, by the way, arranges right after he becomes prime minister. And we’re in the second month of his premiership right now. And Germany is attacking and France is falling and all the world’s falling apart. Right. He says orders are given in writing. And he just dictated streams of these things. And, you know, Don Rumsfeld, whom I knew well and admired very much. He was famous for his snowflakes. Yep. As I say, these little memos would fall on people from all over. He was very good administrator, and he’s a very good man. I miss him, but he, uh. And I talked to him about it one time because I had heard complaints from people working for him, and I brought it up to him. He said, yeah, he says, it annoys people. And I said, did you know that Winston Churchill did just the same? And, you know, you could never win a point on Don Rumsfeld. He was a very competitive human being. He would say, of course I knew that.08:31S2

Well, since we’re talking rummy, he was a dangerous interview, meaning that if you were unprepared or said something stupid, he would be the first to let the audience know that you had done that. So more than once I got scorched by rummy, and that was endearing. I actually thought he was going to run for president at one point, I believe in 1980 against Reagan. Maybe it was 88 against H.W., and then he chose the better part of valour and decided not to.09:06S3

So I know some gossip that I’ll relate. Why not? It’s the honor of Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was waiting by the phone in 1980, and George. George H.W. Bush was waiting by the phone. Reagan was going to call one of them to be vice president, and things happened. I won’t say what those were. And Reagan called H.W. and, uh, then he called Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld told me this, and he said, uh, I’ve called George Bush. And Rumsfeld said, thank God for it, Mr. President. Uh, there was another deal offered to him. I won’t say what it was. And, uh, and Rumsfeld replied, I was afraid you were going to take that deal. And, uh, Reagan replied, never. So the point is, he was a very important man, and he was not far from the presidency, at least, at least.09:59S2

Pause right there, doctor. At least for 20 years, not far from the presidency. Much more coming ahead. Don’t go anywhere, America. I’m talking with Doctor Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, all things [email protected]. All the prior Hillsdale dialogues at Q four hillsdale.com. New courses, by the way, [email protected]. All for free as is in Primus, the monthly speech digest. Just go to hillsdale.edu and sign up and stay tuned. I’ll be right back with doctor R. Welcome back America. Hugh Hewitt with Doctor Larry Arnn. When we broke off, we were talking about the 1980 Republican Convention and a deal that was under discussion there a couple times.10:40S3

In his.10:40S2

Life for the benefit of the audience. We should tell them what the deal was, because that’s a matter of historical record. Jerry Ford’s people had approached President Reagan, then candidates Reagan, then Governor Reagan’s people with the proposition of being a co-president. And Reagan dallied with that and then firmly rejected it. And I think, is that what the Secretary Rumsfeld was referring to? Thank God you didn’t accept that.11:04S3

Yeah. And see, Reagan, when the convention opened in 1980, Reagan was 17 points behind Jimmy Carter. You eventually beat him by 8 or 9, I think, anyway. The argument was you can’t win. People don’t trust you. But if I join you and Henry Kissinger joins you, then they will have confidence and we can win the election. That was the arrangement. And there’s nothing discreditable about it. But it’s much to Reagan’s credit that he didn’t take it and, uh, change, you know, it’s a good thing, but.11:38S2

Well, they proposed an extra constitutional solution, not constitutional. It’s a unitary executive. You can’t have a co-president. Let me go back to a line in home defense doctrine. This was a time when all Britain worked and strove to the utmost limit, and was united as never before. He You referred to that the one desire of all the males and many women was to have a weapon. The sense of fear seemed entirely lacking in the people, and their representatives in Parliament were not unworthy of their mood. You know, if the people of Iran had had a weapon, this would not be the despotism that it is.12:15S3

Yeah. That’s right. It. And remember, the habits of self-government are good for a person, right? That’s. We talked about socialism last week. If you don’t take care of yourself, right. What kind of person will you be? And then then if you get a citizen body that, uh, you know, it’s the two 50th here directly and we did a movie about it. Right. And, uh, last last week, you know, this week you quoted Churchill. Wars are not won by heroic militias. Well, the early battles of the American Revolution were, in fact, won that way. And later there was an army and a French army too involved. And that was necessary. But that army, our army was built on a heroic militia.13:06S2

And on heroic men. Just last week, our mutual friend, Eric Metaxas has a new book out on the American Revolution, and we spent the large part of our time talking about one man, Henry Knox, about whom not many people know the Large Man, 300 pounder bookseller. And Washington says to him, I need some cannon from Saratoga. And he leaves. Boston goes all the way too far. And heck, back to upstate New York in the middle of winter, grabs £15,000 of cannon and gets them on sleds and brings them back and forces the Brits out of Boston, which remains forever thereafter, free. That’s one guy, and that’s a militiaman. He’s not a soldier. He’s a bookseller.13:50S3

Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. I mean, you know, Paul Revere, who was a really radical guy. He was a silversmith, I think. And, uh, he, you know, but, you know, they lived in the country even if they lived in the city and they knew about horses and they knew about work, and they knew about axes and hatchets and farm equipment, and they knew about guns and, uh, you know, come to find, you know, the British, uh, there’s a, in this, we made this film Revolutionary America, which you’ll soon be able to watch on streaming. And there’s a wonderful quote from the General Burgoyne, I think was the first British general. And he said, they’re fighting with great spirit, and he insults us more than in the in the Seven Years War, the French and Indian War. And we’re not used to this kind of warfare. Well, that’s the only that’s the only kind the colonists knew how to wage.14:44S2

Because they had been waging it on the frontier forever. But before we move on to the French agony, I do want to bring the fact that Churchill was so much in the weeds, I imagine, um, that you are in the weeds at Hillsdale College and people don’t know when to expect something. He writes a memo to his Minister of information who’s not like in the war cabinet. It’s just some fellows, the Ministry of Information, asking him to ask the public, quote, to handle air raids in a cool way and on a diminishing tone of public interest. In other words, to make the abnormal normal and not to lose your head. Even if the neighbor’s house gets blown to bits, that’s that’s in the weeds.15:27S3

Well, if I’m not mistaken, the Minister of Information at that moment was Alfred Duff Cooper. Oh, great. A great Churchill friend, and he certainly was later that I think he was on this day. And, uh, he was a firm man. His what son? John Julius Norwich, one of the great historians of Venice, is I think he’s still alive. He’s older now, Anyway, he was like his daddy. They were both great characters. They were really great people to have a good dinner with. They could talk into the night and they were not averse to drink. And Alfred Duff Cooper was quite a guy. And, uh, good to be able to say a word about him here.16:12S2

I want to also, before we move to French, you mentioned this, that Churchill summoned the troops from India and was upset that the troops from India had not arrived. I think it is little appreciated. I put in my notes that the British Empire, as in Empire one, saved the the West saved democracy. You know, colonialism is much abused now and it will never come back, I don’t think. But it was the British Empire that saved the world from Hitler, and only the Empire could have done it.16:44S3

Yeah, well, I looked it up this morning to refresh my memory. It was only in July of 1944. That’s six weeks after D-Day that the Americans had more troops fighting on the continent than the British. And for from what? From June 1940, the month we’re in right now until the summer of 1941, the British were alone and we didn’t join them. And that’s when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. It’s his former ally. And we didn’t join the war until December 1942. So that’s two years, two and a half years alone, more or less. And, uh, the fact that they stood up to that is just amazing. And, uh, uh, the fact that the Empire and remember, there was no imperial soldier in the dominions or in India, the remaining part of the empire that was not self-governing. There was no power in London to conscript any soldier in any of those countries. They sent them. And see India had an all volunteer army in both World Wars, and they had A million, 2 million in the first war, and a million something in the Second War fighting. And in the first war, very large part of them fought in Europe and they were all volunteers. And so that meant that Churchill was right about something, and that is that the empire is a association of sentiment.18:13S2

He is right about a lot of things, doctor. We’ll come back and talk about more of the things. He was right. An association of sentiment. Love that. Don’t go anywhere, America, except over to hillsdale.edu, where you’ll find all things, including applications for you rising seniors to Hillsdale. Stay tuned. Welcome back America. Hugh Hewitt with Doctor Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, all things [email protected]. We are talking about the Empire. When we went to break Doctor Arnn, the empire that Winston Churchill presided over as Prime Minister during the war.18:46S3

When Indians worth commenting here. When Indian independence came, the Indian soldiers were all offered service in the British Army if they wanted it. And the British Army was generally surprised that almost all of them didn’t. In fact, a minority did, which indicates something. I don’t know a lot of places where I think Winston Churchill was wrong, but I think he was probably wrong in thinking that India had not yet become a country, because it’s had a very difficult history and it’s a very promising nation today. But it showed even from 1945, 1948, when independence came, it showed that it was becoming a nation. It had been a conglomeration of different.19:36S2

He might have been right on the timing, though. Doctor, I just finished rereading Freedom at Midnight. It was a pretty awful birth. It was a massacre. Yeah.19:45S3

And well, he he predicted a million dead. And there were about that that were killed in the Civil War that ensued. And of course, Pakistan split off. And that’s chiefly Muslim nation. And India is chiefly a Hindu nation, and they’re both mixed up. Some too. And they, you know, don’t get along very well today. And they both have nuclear weapons. So he was right about some important things, too. And, you know, the main thing to comment about that was, in my opinion, Churchill. Well, all you gotta do is read it. I’ve written about it. Churchill was well meaning to the Indians, and he never denied their right to govern themselves. He just thought they weren’t ready to do that yet.20:28S2

So let’s move to the French, who ought to have been better prepared to govern themselves than they were. I’m not sure what to think about the average Frenchman in 1940. De Gaulle is all honor to de Gaulle. He’s a strong man from beginning to end. He never wavers. He gets out of the country in time. Churchill is driven crazy by him throughout the course of the war, but he had a great courage. I don’t know what to think about Reynaud or or. I know what to think about Patton. What do you make, generally of the collapse of so many Frenchmen at the top? Because they could have withdrawn to Burgundy. They could have gone to the south of the country, and they. Darlan could have kept on the fight, and he chose not to either. Well.21:12S3

France is a great nation. The best. I can explain it, of course, because there was a lot of heroism. By the way, Churchill had several friends who comported themselves beautifully in this collapse. But I think that maybe they were afflicted by the same thing that afflicted British politics in the 1930s. And that was the cost of the First World War was so grievous. And, you know, we on a on a global scale, we met in the First World War lessons that were apparent in 1864 in our country, in the last battles of the Civil War. But of course, Much expanded and much intensified, and the body count was enormous and the fighting conditions were terrible. And then now here, what are we going to do that again? And they just weren’t ready to do it. And their army was not ready to do it.22:08S2

And you can sort of understand that. Uh, stay on standby, doctor. We’ll be right back and continue on with the French collapse and all that followed. Welcome back America. I’m Hugh Hewitt. Hillsdale dialogue time all things [email protected]. All of our dialogues with Doctor Larry Arnn, my guest collected at hue for hillsdale.com. Doctor Arnn, when we went to break, we were talking about the rapid French collapse in 1940. And why did it happen?22:36S3

They built this, uh, they staked their hopes on a wonderful defensive line, maybe the strongest ever built, called the Maginot Line. And Churchill tells the story of that in these chapters. What the Germans did was go around it using the tanks. Right? And then they didn’t. They penetrated it in a place or two very late. But most of it was intact when the armistice came. And one of the commanding generals said, I don’t want to lay down my arms. All of our defenses are still intact here. Right. So they had staked so much on that. And, I don’t know, maybe they put their best troops in there, too. But the ones that were not in there were just basically not ready to go. And they, you know, and you got to hand it to the Germans, even to Hitler, their plan until about two years, I think it was before the war, was to repeat what they had done in the First World War, to go around through Belgium, swing to the right, you know, take the the army from the north West, and they built this Maginot Line to force that. And the Maginot Line runs from basically the beginning of the Ardennes forest, which is thought to be impassable. North and west, up toward Belgium. And then the idea was the British and the French armies would gather at the Belgian border and maybe go over into Belgium. Belgium was an ally and fight the fight the German army there. That was the plan. Well, what Hitler did was he got Rommel and Guderian, his best generals, probably. Rommel certainly was one of the best to come up with another plan. And they thought they could get tanks through the hilly, even mountainous passageways and through the Ardennes forest and attack them from behind. And that’s what they did. And they got between them in Paris, and they cut the communications of the Allied armies and everything was a mess. It was chaos, right. And communications broke down. And the British, it’s very it’s a wonderful story how all this happened. And, you know, my father in law was in this retreat and left Dunkirk Beach the last day. And he could recount to you about it, you know, first of all, everything’s a mess. The maps are completely disorganized, and there never really was an order given. You guys fight your way to the beach and come home. And there never was an order given you guys the French. You guys break with the British and retreat to the south toward Paris and maybe south of it. The British just sort of started moving that way. They just it was chaos and nothing was working. The communications were terrible and they started fighting their way home. And they did fight in good order and kept themselves together marvelously. I mean, it’s remarkable how they performed and are in retreat. And, you know, the famous soldiers of Calais that we talked about in the previous week. They rescued their army and considerable part of the French army. But the French, they just got their way back toward Paris, and they basically just fell apart.26:14S2

General Alan Brooke, who later becomes the George Marshall for Great Britain, the chief of the General Staff, sends a note to the Secretary of War, Anthony Eden. At that point, the position is hopeless. All further reinforcements should be stopped in the remainder of the British Expeditionary Force. Now about 150,000 should be re-embarked at once. And they did indeed get 136 136,000 Brits and 20,000 poles off Churchill. Though I think this is a wonderful note on which to end. He. He censors bad news. There’s sinking of boats even as France collapse. And he says, quote, the newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today. At least he he realises he’s got to buck up a country that that maybe is the difference between he and the French Prime Minister Churchill is. Yeah, well, the task of revitalizing his country.27:07S3

If you want to read, you should read this book. And then I would suggest that you read the chapters in Martin Gilbert’s big biography, the eight volume biography. Just go find. Volume six is what this is in the volume is entitled Finest Hour. Read the story of his visits to the French. I’ve recounted crazy on this show, but they’re very. And he. Churchill is trying to get them to say, send out an order that everyone is to fight and fight their way someplace south and keep it up till the coast and then run to Africa. If you’ve got to write Churchill, then in these chapters shows that he’s giving similar orders to the British civilian population in the event of an invasion. In other words, there was no command at the top that we’re going to go on no matter what. And and Churchill, in a very moving moment, says, you can destroy two German Army corps in the streets of Paris and says, we’ve ordered the surrender of Paris. And Churchill says nations that die fighting rise up again. Those that surrender tamely are gone forever. And that’s a very low moment in the in the story of these four trips.28:30S2

It is indeed. And hold that thought. We’ll be back for a little bit more on the collapse of France from Winston Churchill’s memoir, all the prior dialogues on the World War Two memoirs are [email protected]. Welcome back America. I’m Hugh Hewitt with Doctor Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, all things Hillsdale hillsdale.edu. Doctor, since we’re talking about the low point of France in 1940, let’s also talk about Charles de Gaulle, who gave some hope in that moment. But Churchill de Gaulle gets out.29:00S4

Of France.29:01S2

De Gaulle keeps fighting, and he has de Gaulle address the British nation the night he arrives in the United Kingdom. I think that’s a brilliant stroke, even though they’re collapsing across the channel. We’ve got this French general here, and he says, fight on, because they got all the North African Empire to worry about, right?29:18S3

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And they, you know, de Gaulle was a he was a serious man. He was a wonderful man. Uh, Churchill was mentioned in this chapter that he walked up. He just noticed de Gaulle, who was not a senior. He wasn’t a general. Why was he in the room? Uh, he had to spit for it. And people recognized that. Churchill just noticed his demeanor, his countenance, and he walked up to him at one point and said, man of destiny. Man, Amen. Man. My mom, Justine. And, uh, Churchill was right about that. Now, it is true that they fought like cats and dogs through the war, and de Gaulle fought with Roosevelt like cats and dogs. He got to the place where Roosevelt would hardly talk to him. And, uh, uh, and, you know, later, de Gaulle would not join certain parts of NATO. Correct. Very independent minded costs. And whatever was the spirit that kept him strong in the face of this defeat, he he kept France together. And the spirit that led him do that also made him a very difficult ally.30:28S2

When we come back next week, I want to talk about French exhaustion and maybe American exhaustion, but we’ll leave that for next week. All of you are interested in this. All of the dialogues on Churchill’s World War II memoirs are collected [email protected], and they go back quite some time. We’re on volume two, and we’ll be picking up on chapter nine and or ten and 11 next week. If you want to catch up with us and read the Bordeaux Armistice and Admiral Darlan and the French Fleet. Quite the dramas them both. Until then, stay tuned. And I’ve got to say about Admiral Darlan, if any of you do not know if it hadn’t been for de Gaulle, Darlan would be the last Frenchman that you’d ever have heard of from World War Two. But de Gaulle got out and Darlan, who went back and forth. And we’ll get into his complicated story next week. Admiral Darlan went back and forth. Uh, he could have stood up as de Gaulle did, stand up just as France was falling. But he didn’t. He made his peace with the Vichy government in Pétain and the. And, uh, it was just a very sad moment for the Admiral. He redeemed himself a bit. We’ll talk more about that next week. Until then, though, we’re in volume two. I have the paperback edition, as I was just mentioning. Uh, I think it’s easiest one to work with rather than the expensive and original first edition volumes or the memoirs that are everywhere. You can find and use bookstores. They’re heavier to carry. I like the paperbacks. They’re easy to work with. All the Hillsdale dialogues are [email protected] and everything. Hillsdale, including brand new online courses for free and the opportunity to sign up for Imprimis, the monthly speech digest for free. You can find [email protected]. Thank you Adam. Thank you doctor. Thank you Harley. Thank you Generalissimo. I’ll talk to you on Monday on the next hear your show.32:23S1

Thanks for listening to the Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you find your audio. For more information about Hillsdale College, head to hillsdale.edu.

The post Churchill’s The Second World War, Part Twenty-Eight appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Kathleen O’Toole, associate vice president for K-12 Education at Hillsdale College, delivers a lecture elaborating on the relationships between liberal, civic, and moral education and their aims.

Dr. O’Toole delivered this lecture as part of the Classical Education Forum on Hillsdale College’s campus on February 12th, 2026.

Learn more: https://k12.hillsdale.edu/

A 20-minute podcast featuring professors, K-12 teachers, and friends of Hillsdale College, all speaking about classical education—what it is, why it’s still relevant today, and what makes it unique. Hosted by Scot Bertram.

Welcome to the Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula, and teacher led classrooms. Now, your host, Scott Bertram.

Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show at our website, k12.hillsdale.edu. Thanks for listening. Liberal and civic education. Two essential components of a real human education are united in purpose through an honest approach to history and civics. During the Classical Education Forum hosted on Hillsdale campus earlier this year, our associate vice president of K-12 education, Doctor Kathleen O’Toole, elaborated on the relationship between liberal civic and moral education and their aims. Here’s doctor O’Toole.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk with you this evening. This year is America’s Semiquincentennial have you been calling it that Semiquincentennial or have you just been saying two 50th birthday? We try to say semiquincentennial, but then we get together and practice to make sure that we do it properly. Here in this room, all of us are doing the hard and important work of educating students at a divided and perhaps increasingly polarized time in America. Our nation is divided over many things. How ought we to educate students? We’re perhaps even more deeply divided over how to talk to them, about America, about our common past, and about the regime that has shaped and formed us all. It seems like a good time to reflect on liberal education or classical education and its relationship to civic education. And so that’s what I’d like to do this evening, briefly, in what does real education consist and how can we recover it? I think traditional or classical education can be divided into three subcategories. One would be liberal education, which I’ll say a few things about. One would be civic education, which I’ll say a few things about, and one would be professional or technical education. That’s those three things are kind of the traditional way of educating students. Now, no one seems to doubt the value of that last part of traditional education. There can be no doubt that one crucial purpose of education is to equip individuals with the knowledge and the skills that they need in order to take care of themselves and their families and be productive members of the community. That seems uncontroversial. But what is controversial, and what raises some fundamental questions, is the relationship between liberal education and civic education. Let’s take liberal education first. The end or purpose of liberal education is simply to see the truth. The truth about any and all things falls under the horizon of liberal education. But there is only so much time, and so liberal education prioritizes the pursuit of truths that are the most fundamental or important for us. What are those things? Well, we human beings are that part of the universe that seeks to know where we stand in it. We are the ones who wonder about the universe’s ultimate origins and character, and were driven by a desire to know ourselves, to understand our essential natures and purpose in life. We’re interested in the natural things and in the human things. Thus, liberal education seeks knowledge of the natures of things, and especially the nature of man and the universe as a whole. The surest guides for this two fold quest are the greatest works of philosophy and political thought, and the greatest works of art that mankind has produced. The former analyzed the natures of man in the world, whereas the latter reveal those natures by amplifying certain aspects of them, by depicting their ideal forms and the ideals that drive them, and by throwing them into action, by telling stories about them. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, these works aren’t that difficult to identify. They’re marked by their revolutionary, foundational, and intransigent character. No honest, intelligent surveyor of human civilization could unite the. Could deny the unique brilliance of Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Locke, Rousseau or Melville. But liberal education requires something else, too. The broad base of its pyramid is the study of history. Like Odysseus, the student of liberal education, must learn of the mines and cities of many other men. That is, he must learn of their politics, their ideas, their way of life. That is what history provides. By studying the variety of political, social and economic arrangements under which men have lived, as well as their actions and deeds, and their competing philosophical and religious beliefs, students greatly expand their appreciation of human nature, the breadth and limits of its capacities, as well as its dominant characteristics and needs. But it should be said that the liberal study of history isn’t only pursued for the purpose of general reflections on man or politics. We also want to know the particular stories themselves. That’s because to know himself, man must learn his place in the world. A major part of which is his place in the unfolding of the human story. This story fires the imagination and fascinates the active mind. It need not tell of some developmental ascent, as the progressive educator hopes it does. Its scope is truly global, though. In order to appreciate the most profound philosophical, religious, and political ideas mankind has grappled with, as well as the ideas that have most decisively shaped the world. The student of liberal education must especially study Western history. This includes Greek and Roman history, the Middle Ages and the modern age. And further still, men are bound to their own and they need to know their own place within the broader human story. That’s one reason why it’s especially important for Americans to have a rich and robust knowledge of their own American history. Liberal education liberates man in the true sense. It liberates us from ignorance and confusion, from prejudice and delusion, and from the wild passions and fanciful hopes that can degrade and destroy us. It liberates human beings by making us rational, allowing us to see the world clearly and honestly in revealing our nature. It necessarily reveals what we need by nature, what is right and good for us. For these reasons, liberal education provides in part a moral education rather than do violence to human nature in a vain attempt to remake it. Liberal education cultivates human nature so it can grow properly and flourish. It takes up the hard but essential task of character formation. Liberal education aims to guide us into freedom by making us self-reliant and responsible, capable of governing ourselves and taking part in the self-government of our communities. Liberal education makes us fit to be true citizens, but still, serious thinkers have always recognized some tension between liberal education and civic education. The former is open minded and seeks truth and wisdom wherever it may be found. The latter aims to make men dutiful and devoted citizens of a particular regime. The inquiries of the former necessarily call into question the commitments of the latter. Plato, the first and greatest thinker to take up this theme famously distinguished the virtues of the human being and the citizen. He divided liberal education from civic education and the philosophical understanding of virtue from the political understanding. Yet he and the greatest thinkers have also always recognized the necessity of civic education. It turns out that the serious pursuit of liberal education leads one to conclude that the life of the mind and the very existence of liberal education depend on the existence of civilization. Not to mention political order, security, and freedom of thought. And it turns out these goods are very hard to achieve. Of course, it’s not only thinkers who need these goods. All peoples, and especially free peoples, depend upon them for their well-being. The essential foundation for these goods is an education that forms the people and inculcates in them the virtues that maintain Civilization. If free people are to remain free, they must be taught their rights and duties how to exercise their freedom responsibly and the principles and institutions that make self-government possible. On this point, our American founders were most instructive. Unlike the progressives, they didn’t think that progress would make the threat of tyranny and strife things of the past. These dangers are ever present. Freedom can only survive where there is a vigilant and enlightened citizenry. Here’s how George Washington made the point in his farewell address to substantially true. He said that virtue, or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who, that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of this fabric. Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge in proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened. Civic instruction and moral instruction are not the sole objects of education. But, as the founders saw, they are its most important objects for the country. And for this reason, they wrote, we should place those things at the heart of all levels of schooling. Once we look to the content of liberal and civic education, we find that any tension between the two approaches dissipates and they end up complementing each other. This is because an honest assessment of the truth has a sobering effect, making one wiser and more realistic about the ways of the world, and more capable of appreciating what makes civilization thrive and what destroys it. In the American context, it allows one to grasp the merits and prudence of our founding principles and our constitutional system. How well they take into account both the noble and base aspects of human nature. And it makes one less prone to exaggerating or getting angry at their imperfections. When history and civics are taught properly, the truth is sovereign. And this is. Actually what allows them to achieve and align the dual purposes of liberal and civic education. Consider how those subjects should be taught. What distinguishes the honest approach to history and government from indoctrination is the refusal to condescend to students. The honest approach respects their intelligence and their thirst for the truth. An honest approach doesn’t offer them crude summaries that simplify complicated issues. It weighs the merits of the competing claims, seriously giving all sides their due. In doing so, it makes liberal use of primary sources, allowing students to encounter the actual books, speeches and arguments in all of their complexity and depth. The honest approach to teaching history checks the mistake of reducing the causes of human affairs to vast, impersonal social forces, and it thereby teaches students of the significance of human freedom, deliberation, and choice. It makes use of social, economic and cultural history, but it goes up against the grain of recent times by restoring, alongside those historical studies, the serious study of political, military and intellectual history. Indeed, it recognizes the preeminence of politics in human affairs, and it accordingly restores politics to its preeminent place in the study of history. It is unafraid, then, to give special focus to the special contributions made by a powerful or elite few. It doesn’t neglect groups and classes that are less powerful, less fortunate or weaker, but it gives them their proper due, neither dwelling on their hardships too little nor too much. Similarly, it doesn’t shy away from, but rather embraces the study of injustice and tragedy in human affairs, including the darker sides of the American story. But where it defies the contemporary trend is its insistence on understanding such episodes with rigor and intelligence. Its perspective is moral without being moralistic. Now consider the effect of the honest approach to history and civics, how it combines the purposes of liberal and civic education, or how in pursuing truth, it also trains students for citizenship. The honest approach presents the human story in all its harshness and glory. In effect, it acquaints students with the full complexity of human affairs, including the persistence of strife, injustice, and misfortune. And it acquaints them with human greatness and virtue at their peak. It shows students that arguments often have many intelligent, competing sides. And it shows them how difficult political decisions often are, how they always involve tragic trade offs, and always fail to satisfy everybody. Thus, it further has the effect of teaching students the limits of what man, no matter how enlightened, can achieve in this world. It chastens his longing for heaven on earth and thereby cultivates a spirit of sobriety, moderation, and wisdom. The student of this education learns to understand and deal with, rather than lose heart in the face of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Rather than learning to hate his country or the world for its evil and injustices, he learns to appreciate and cherish those pillars of civilization in the rare places in which they stand. those pillars he comes to understand include strong families, mores, traditions, and communities. Effective, stable, representative and limited government. The rule of law and the protection of civil rights and property. A powerful military that defends rather than threatens the people’s freedom. Religion, the arts, and, of course, public support for education. He also learns of the inherent fragility of civilization and thus its persistent need for fortification and defense. That it depends upon the virtues of citizens and statesmen who are willing to fight and sacrifice on its behalf. And he sees that reason must play a role in founding, building, and guiding great civilizations. And when great civilizations decline and fall, reason must play a role in rebuilding or refounding them. Finally, in our American context, an important effect of this honest approach to history and civics is to cultivate patriotism. One can begin to acquire a serious and mature form of love for country simply by gaining knowledge about the country. This sort of love isn’t superficial. It’s not infatuation. Rather, it’s like a love that comes about from spending a long time in a marriage or a family where one comes to know his or her spouse or the other members intimately seeing their faults, yes, but more importantly, truly understanding them and being therefore in a position to truly recognize their virtues. As the student becomes an enlightened patriot, he can love his country both for what it is and for its ideal form as as expressed in the founding. And he can measure the health of the former in light of the standards set by the latter. It turns out, then, that it’s not foolish to expect that liberal education and civic education should work together. That we should provide an education in America that both teaches the truth honestly and produces patriotic citizens. It’s the progressives who despise what they don’t understand, who actually seek to vulgarize and distort education for the purposes of propaganda and indoctrination. And it’s no coincidence that in America today, the enemies of patriotism are also the enemies of learning. Thank you very much.

We’ve been hearing Doctor Kathleen O’Toole, associate vice president of K-12 education here at Hillsdale College, from her lecture during the Classical Education Forum earlier in 2026 on Hillsdale College’s campus. Thank you for listening to the Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast.

The post Kathleen O’Toole on Liberal and Civic Education appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Host Scot Bertram talks with:

Benedict Whalen, chairman and associate professor of English at Hillsdale College, to preview his brand-new online course, “The Odyssey.” 

And Carson Holloway, department chair and professor of political society at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a Washington fellow at the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life, discusses the shortcomings of American libel law and his new book, No Liberty to Libel: The Constitutional Case against New York Times v. Sullivan.

From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true and the beautiful are taught, nurtured and honored. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.00:25S2

We are living in a new age technologically, in which anybody can publish anything almost instantaneously, and we need to think through how to handle that, because you need legislation to protect reputation, you need libel law.00:37S3

This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. That was Carson Holloway, author of the new book No Liberty to Libel The Constitutional Case Against New York Times v Sullivan. Yes, we talked in depth about libel law later on in today’s program. First, we’re joined by Doctor Ben Whalen. He’s associate professor of English here at Hillsdale College. Also your teacher for the brand new Hillsdale College online course, The Odyssey. Find more hillsdale.edu/new course. Doctor Whalen, thanks for joining us.01:18S4

Oh, thanks so much for having me.01:19S3

Excited to talk today about the Odyssey. Every Hillsdale College student reads The Odyssey as part of the Great Books curriculum here. Why has Homer and this work remained at the foundation of a liberal arts education for now? Hundreds, actually, thousands of years.01:39S4

Uh, it’s it’s, it’s really a sort of a funny thing that the oldest work of literature we have in Western culture is, is also, uh, so great. Um, it’s, it’s sort of a remarkable thing. It actually, um, it’s well known that Homer, uh, probably didn’t write the story down himself that this it emerges from an oral culture where bards are reciting and singing songs. And, uh, it’s a testament to the excellence of the story, uh, that, uh, it’s been preserved from Homer’s time on. It was, in other words, it was immediately recognized as a truly great work. Uh, and people wanted to hear it and they wanted to hear Homer’s version of it. And, uh, so it was preserved and then eventually set down in writing and has been passed on to us. It’s a story that it obviously it part of its excellence is it just has so many great, uh, narrative moments. So of course, you have things like the Cyclops and the homecoming, the, the, the fight with the suitors, the Lotus eaters, these different goddesses, etc.. But it’s also excellent because it really does have, uh, philosophical, uh, reach. It’s got, it gets after deeply, universally human things. And so it’s, it’s really excellent because it, it not only has those sort of gripping, uh, moments of, of, of a really thrilling story, but, but it, it really helps you understand what’s, what’s proper to a human life and in all sorts of ways. So it’s, uh, it makes sense that even those earliest Greeks would retain and retell and, and finally write down Homer’s story.03:22S3

So we’ve got this major new film adaptation of The Odyssey. It’s one of the reasons we have the online course out. One of the reasons we have this conversation today. Why is this a good time to, to go back and maybe not just see the movie, but actually read Homer himself?03:38S4

Yeah. Well, I’m excited to see the movie, obviously. Christopher Nolan, great director, very interesting and thoughtful, uh, filmmaker, the, uh, the book itself though, and this, I love this about Hillsdale College that they, they wanted to produce a course on on the book itself, because we can’t let or we shouldn’t let even a great film, uh, obscure or or stand between us and the book. Uh, it is one of the things I love about the Odyssey in particular, both the Iliad and the Odyssey is that it’s, uh, remarkably easy and accessible despite its riches. And so I’ll tell students this, we’ll dive in and we’ll read a lot here. I teach it every year, uh, at Hillsdale. Uh, but, but that actually, as soon as you get into it, you’re having fun. You’re studying like very serious literature with real serious questions. But, but it’s delightful. It’s accessible. It’s a joy to read. And so I’m happy Nolan has made the film, and I hope it just inspires more people to actually go and read the book, because the book also will be fun and delightful. It’s not a labor to read. It’s a joy.04:51S3

Talking with Doctor Ben Whalen. He’s your teacher for the new Hillsdale College online course, The Odyssey. Find [email protected] slash. New course NEWCOURSE for the Odyssey. Your lectures here in the course follow this journey all around. Finally, at the end back home. How does each stop along this journey reveal something new about Odysseus?05:18S4

Yeah. Uh, so, um, in, in terms of overall chronology, the Odyssey essentially starts, um, uh, we hear about it in the middle of the work after the fall of Troy. Odysseus has been at Troy, they’ve sacked the city, and Odysseus starts his journey home. And one of the really interesting things is that what you see is that Odysseus, when he leaves Troy and starts to head home, the very first thing they do is they land on the shores of another city of the Cicones, and they sack that city and they they haul off plunder. And so you see that this immediately post Troy version of Odysseus is not actually a man who is most profoundly driven by a desire for home, yet. And he’s he’s not really ready for the role of king and husband and father. Instead, he’s more a marauder. He behaves more like a pirate than, than the king of a of an island or a husband or father. So the different stops over the course of the Odyssey, in fact, show a growth and an education, even for the old grizzled veteran. Odysseus needs to go through to learn that he really does belong back in Ithaca. And, and that that really is where his heart is. And he has to fight to get there. And he has to correct and change certain aspects of his character that were shaped by ten years at war. And so it’s, it’s a really wonderful thing to watch that. And it’s, it’s, it’s painful in parts. And it’s also illuminating. Eventually, Odysseus goes to the underworld at the very center of the book, we hear about this, his his journey to the land of the dead. And it’s there that he meets his mother. And she has died from heartbreak, yearning for Odysseus to return. And you see, that’s one of the moments where you see Odysseus learning, I really have to change what I’m what I’m doing, and I do. I need to go home.07:12S3

Throughout the lectures, throughout the course, you show that Odysseus isn’t just fighting monsters, but there’s also confrontations with various temptations along the way, too. Why are the internal battles that we learn about just as important as the external battles through the work?07:30S4

Yeah, I like when you say The Odyssey. I think people think of a Cyclops or maybe the suitors, and those are those are external trials, uh, man versus monster, man versus other men. But it is true. What what we see with Odysseus is that he’s given multiple, in fact, uh, I sort of joke with my students. Multiple options of island women that he could stay with. But but actually what he does is he these are sort of temptations and they entail different things. So one of these one of these goddesses offers him immortality. It’s a remarkable thing. And it only grows more profound as you read the work that Odysseus turns down the offer of immortality. He chooses his wife and his home and death, all of those things together. And not only death, but also Ithaca involves difficulty and suffering. He chooses all that together. Because as as Homer reveals to us, in fact, sort of a meaningful, noble human life, one in which a happiness can be true happiness. The deepest forms of happiness can be found also entails mortality and suffering and struggle. And that all this together makes up that which we find humanly meaningful.08:49S3

Doctor Ben Whalen is your teacher for the new Hillsdale Online course on the Odyssey. hillsdale.edu/new course. Uh, Odysseus is famous for his cleverness, but he also matures over the course of this story. How does Homer depict that growth for the reader? What lessons should we take from it?09:11S4

Yeah, one of the things I think that the work is particularly rich on is it’s, um, the education of Odysseus, both in his need and desire to get home. He has to prioritize that, but also that there’s a difficulty for men who become habituated to violence and force as the means of resolving problems that arise in life. And so in these ten years at Troy, Odysseus is he’s a he’s the he’s described as the, the masterful Tactician. Um, he’s he’s he’s brilliant. Uh, and he’s thoughtful, but it’s entirely in terms of the sort of exercise of force to get your way to conquer a city. And I think that one of the things that Homer shows us over the, over the course of the work is that the virtues of the warrior are not enough, uh, for the husband, father, uh, King, that the husband, father king does need to be able to exert force like Odysseus does have to actually kill these suitors when he gets home. But there’s something more that’s required for a a truly good and virtuous man. There are these other sort of domestic and more more intellectually, uh, or, um, peaceful if or if not peaceful, more sort of properly ordered ways in which a man has to direct his life. And we see Odysseus grow in that over the course of the over the course of the work. So that finally, when he does arrive home on Ithaca, for instance, uh, he he does not reveal himself, but instead, uh, thinks, okay, I can suffer this too, and I can. And he’s very slow and very careful and thoughtful. And it’s those it’s being slow and careful and thoughtful that are actually some of these virtues most necessary for a good king, a good husband, a good father.11:10S3

Talking with Doctor Ben Whalen, associate professor of English at Hillsdale College, also your teacher for the new online course, The Odyssey at hillsdale.edu/course. If you’re online a bit, there’s a little bit of side conversation around the release of the film about the women in the Odyssey. Yeah. The course that your course highlights Penelope as much as Odysseus. Really what makes her one of the truly great characters in Western literature?11:39S4

Yeah, I, I have strong opinions about this, actually. If you get to a book 24 at the very end of the work. Odysseus has butchered all these guys. I’m going to plot spoiler here, but he 2500 years. That’s right, that’s right. He butchers all these suitors who were paying court to his his wife and. And book 24 opens with this scene where all of these suitors souls, the shades of the of the suitors go down to the underworld, and they’re greeted by some of the great heroes from the Battle of Troy. And in this remarkable moment, Agamemnon says to these suitors when he hears how they came to die, he. He says the gods will lift up an immortal song in praise of the glorious Penelope. This song that will never die. And that’s. That’s actually really what the Odyssey is. It’s. It’s Homer’s great song in praise of Penelope. Penelope is, uh, she’s an awesome character. She’s she’s. I always stress this to my students. She is certainly beset by these different suitors. So she’s sort of holding the household together and it’s under assault. Um, but she’s the opposite of a just a helpless damsel in distress. That’s not Penelope. Instead, she’s resourceful, she’s cunning. She, uh, she tricks the suitors. She she she really holds the whole kingdom together, uh, through her wit and intelligence. Until Odysseus returns. And it’s been 20 years, for heaven’s sakes. So, I mean, it’s that’s no minor undertaking. She’s she’s a great character. And really, uh. Homer. Homer’s work points towards her. Homer does not neglect her significance or. Homer’s work does not neglect the significance of women. Uh, really, the poem is much more ambivalent about Odysseus character than Penelope’s. She’s the one who has the sort of virtue and consistency and excellence that you. You can’t help but admire and, and think about, uh, throughout the whole work.13:42S3

Loyalty is one of the defining virtues in The Odyssey. And of course, that ties into Penelope as well. Why does Homer place so much emphasis on faithfulness inside the Odyssey?13:53S4

Yeah, I that’s a that’s a great question. At one point in Odysseus journeys, he comes to the land of the lotus eaters and, uh, the land of the lotus eaters. It’s, it’s this sort of strange, drug like substance that makes people forget their home and where they’re from and who they, they have no desire for anything but to just sort of lie around eating Lotus. And, uh, that’s sort of the, uh, in a certain respect, the antithesis of loyalty. So loyalty entirely. It consists of remembering who you are, who you have debts towards, who’s been your benefactor, who you love. And, and you stay true to that. And so, yes, throughout the Odyssey, there’s this interesting tension Between, say, the call of the lotus Eaters, where you. You could just lose yourself in momentary pleasure and in in the in the day to day and forget and and the man. And that’s that’s in contrast to the man of loyalty or the woman of loyalty who remembers and recalls and lives according to that code. So Penelope is a great figure for loyalty. There’s another wonderful figure, Eumaeus, the swineherd who has taken care of Odysseus, flocks on Ithaca, and he’s he’s described by Homer as the soul of loyalty because he remembers. He remembers his master, he loves him and he serves him. And it’s it’s it’s it becomes very obvious to us that that sort of memory and loyalty is, is a virtue of, of great significance compared to just momentary pleasure and forgetfulness.15:31S3

Readers who are experiencing the Odyssey for the first time might be familiar already with some pieces Cyclops, the Trojan horse. There’s a lot more to it than that. What are some of the overlooked moments that students tend to appreciate after reading The Odyssey?15:51S4

Oh, that’s a great. There are so many. I’ll share one that’s just a personal favorite. When Odysseus finally escapes from this island where he’s been held captive for 7 or 8 years, he. He’s sailed on a raft, and then he gets shipwrecked. And so he lands on this island, the island of the Phaeacians, where Nausicaa is the Princess. He lands there with with absolutely nothing, not even a shred of clothing. He is. He is naked and alone has nothing. And so he. He climbs ashore after this great storm, and he sleeps under this bush. And so he’s covered in leaves and twigs, and he’s. He’s filthy. And then the next morning he wakes up and he hears these young women playing with this ball. They’ve done. They’ve been washing some clothes in this stream, and they’ve been throwing a ball back and forth. And Odysseus hears them and he comes out of the bushes to to see what they are and, and where he is. And Homer has this wonderful simile where he likens Odysseus to suddenly this this lion about to come and prey on this, this well-defended homestead with these rich flocks. And I like to pause there with my students and encourage them to think about like, what does it mean that Odysseus naked without a weapon, without a tool, in a strange land, he’s got nothing. And yet in this simile, Homer likens him to a predator, you know, rather than rather than the suppliant, the beggar. He’s that’s how um, how dangerous he is, how forceful, how resourceful Odysseus is. So you get these wonderful little moments where this is another thing that Homer is so wonderful in is his similes. So you have on the level of the story, just this action going along. But then Homer will liken it to something and that shows you a whole different angle, a whole different way of, of seeing the character or the situation.17:53S3

Is there a particular one of these lectures inside the new online course, The Odyssey that you’re excited for students to experience?18:01S4

Uh, that’s yeah, the, I mean, I’m excited for students to think about what Odysseus goes through when he goes to the land of the dead. Uh, it’s actually a katabasis is the phrase or the term that refers to the a great hero’s journey to and return from the land of the dead. It’s actually a sort of in a certain sense, and I’m not trying to Christianize this, but there’s, there’s a way in which, in fact, early Christians would even read these stories and see that there’s a sort of resurrection motif, or the greatest of heroes, your Hercules or your Odysseus. They. They travel to the land of the dead, and then they return with with some sort of profoundly deepened knowledge or understanding or it’s the mark of the greatest heroes. And so what’s interesting though, is when Hercules does that, it’s. It’s simply because one of his feats and he’s he’s the archetypal hero. When Odysseus does it, though, it’s about reordering the very desires of the human heart. And so it’s, it’s intellectual has to do with one’s loves and with one’s self understanding. And so I’m excited for students to, to get to that, to see Odysseus confront Achilles and Agamemnon in the land of the dead, to meet his mother, and then and then to realize really in part through that where he belongs and how he should conduct his life.19:29S3

Doctor Ben Whalen is associate professor of English here at Hillsdale College, and he’s your teacher for the new Hillsdale College online course. The Odyssey hillsdale.edu/course. NEWCOURSE, the Odyssey. Available now. Doctor Whalen, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.19:54S4

Thank you very much, Scott.19:55S3

Up next Carson Holloway is with us. We’ll talk about his new book, No Liberty to Libel. I’m Scott Bertram. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour. Welcome back to the Radio free Hillsdale Hour. I’m Scott Bertram. Be sure to find more great Hillsdale College audio on Hillsdale College Podcast Network. You can find it [email protected]. Older editions of this show, plus more from The Larry Arnn Show, Imprimis and the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast, wherever you get your audio. We’re joined by Carson Holloway. He’s department chair and professor of political science at the University of Nebraska Omaha and a Washington fellow in the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life. His brand new book is No Liberty to Libel The Constitutional Case Against New York Times v Sullivan. Carson, thanks so much for joining us.21:05S2

Thank you for having me, Scott. I really appreciate it.21:07S3

I have to say, I enjoyed the the typeface on the book, which makes it look like it’s New York Times type typeface. I’m sure that was somewhat intentional.21:15S2

Yes, yes. I think they did a great job encounter books did an excellent job with the look of the book.21:20S3

Very good. All right. So look, there’s a there’s a subset of Americans who likely have no idea what we’re about to talk about, which is libel law. And New York Times v Sullivan. Take us inside. Why New York Times v Sullivan matters. why? It’s an important First Amendment case. And then after that, we’ll get into why you think it’s wrong.21:39S2

Okay, that sounds great. New York Times versus Sullivan is considered by practically everybody to be one of the great landmark First Amendment freedom of the press rulings of modern times. It was decided by the Supreme Court in 1964, the Warren Court Justice William Brennan, one of the very consequential justices, a liberal justice, wrote the opinion for the court in that case. And the opinions important or the ruling is important because it changed the libel standards that the country has for public officials. And then later, the court extended the new standards to public figures as well as public officials. Libel, of course, is when people sue for defamation for the publication of false information that damages their character. And the court decided in New York Times versus Sullivan that libel cases involving public officials. And then, as I say later on, public figures raise a First Amendment problem. They. They create a problem in relation to the freedom of the press that the First Amendment is supposed to protect. So seeing that problem in the court’s mind, the justice’s mind. In 1964, they came up with a solution for that problem. And that solution is called the actual malice test or the actual malice standard. What the court said in the Sullivan opinion was that if you are a public official and you sue to protect your reputation in a libel suit, you will have to show not only that the publication about you was false and defamatory or injurious to your reputation. You’ll also. That’s what ordinary people would have to show, right? You’re going to have to show something else in addition to that, which is that the publication was made with actual malice. And that’s a technical term that the court devised to mean the following. Either the publisher knew that it was false, or they published with reckless disregard for the truth or falsity of the report. So I would say the significance of New York Times versus Sullivan is that it sets up under the allegation that the First Amendment requires this. It sets up a two tiered libel system in which ordinary people basically have to show that they were defamed by a false report, and public officials have to show that, plus this actual malice. Right. And one other thing I’d like to say about that, just by way of clarifying what it means in practice, the court was very clear in subsequent cases in which it elaborated on the doctrine that actual malice is something far more extreme and far worse than ordinary negligence. So basically what it means is it gives the press running room to be negligent with the reputations of public officials and public figures, because they’re going to have to show something worse than negligence. They’ll have to show, again, actual malice. And in practice, it turns out to be very hard to meet that standard, which is why there are not very many successful libel suits brought by public figures in the kind of Sullivan era.24:33S3

Come back to that question about reputation a little bit later on in the conversation. Americans today, I would guess a good number of them assume that freedom of the press means that there is broad protection, even for false statements about public officials. Is that how the founders understood freedom of the press?24:50S2

No. I think we are laboring under a delusion that’s been created by the Supreme Court. The founders, of course, did value freedom of the press very highly, including a kind of wide ranging and brawling culture in which you’re going to be criticized if you’re a public official, for sure. But they did not think about it in the same way that the court did in New York Times versus Sullivan. My book is an originalist argument, so I’m basically saying the courts departed from the original understanding of the freedom of the press that’s embodied in the First Amendment and in the broader public and legal culture of the founding. You know, there were protections for freedom of the press in many of the state constitutions. It’s not just a federal issue. So let me go back a moment to what I said about the Sullivan court. When I said they saw a problem, they saw that a libel suit involving a public official is impinging on freedom of the press. See, I think that’s the first error. The founders did not look at it that way. Their view was simpler. It was derived from what they learned from Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England. And it’s based upon the kind of classical moral distinction between liberty and license or licentiousness. I think the founders believed that libel, in the sense of defamatory, false publication about somebody, is simply outside the scope of the freedom of the press. It’s something that’s not protected. And in fact, there’s a long tradition in the Supreme Court and American courts prior to New York Times versus Sullivan, in which the justices or judges would say, kind of transmitting that tradition, that libel is one of the forms of unprotected speech, along with obscenity and fighting words and things like that. It’s not the kind of expression that was intended to be protected by the freedom of the press. It’s an abuse of the freedom of the press, or it’s an act of licentiousness that is outside the lines, so to speak. So the founders would not have thought that this kind of suit raised the kind of problem that the New York Times court thought that it did. And the other part of my argument would be that there’s nothing like the idea of actual malice in the thought of the founders not seeing this problem. They don’t devise the solution. There is some ways in which they would say that the standards are different in a libel case for public officials versus ordinary people. And I can talk more about that if you want me to explain that. But suffice it to say, in relation to what the court did in the Sullivan decision, there’s nothing like the actual malice doctrine at the time of the founding. They don’t think that a certain class of people have to prove something extra in order to prevail in a libel suit.27:25S3

Let’s talk about some guys with Carson Holloway, the author of the new book No Liberty to Libel, James Wilson, James Kent, Joseph Story, these legal commenters of the early Republic. Did any of these thinkers from the early Republic anticipate this more modern argument that public figures, or just some figures, should receive less protection than from libel than private citizens?27:50S2

Right. Yeah, they don’t anticipate that. And let me explain using them what I was hinting at just a moment ago. They do. They’re building on Blackstone, who I mentioned before. These are Americans of the early Republic who are great jurists and great legal commentators wrote big, massive, learned treatises on American law. They do anticipate the idea that the standards would be different for a public official versus a private person. In the case of the truth defense for libel. Now, let me explain the background to that just a little bit. Blackstone, the great English legal commentator, made clear that according to the common law, a criminal libel could even be a true statement because, he said, the libel, the criminal libel laws of the English common law are looking to prevent breaches of the peace more than they are looking to protect reputation. And since a humiliating publication about somebody that happens to be true might provoke them to violence, you could be punished for a true publication under the English common law. The founders liberalized that and come up with a more permissive and they thought, a more reasonable standard, which was that there ought to be a truth defense in a criminal libel proceeding. Alexander Hamilton, in the famous case, people versus Croswell, New York, case from around 18031804. Maybe. Hamilton said the truth defense should be understood as. You can defend yourself against a charge of libel. If what you published was true and published with good motives and for justifiable ends. Now that tells you that they understood the truth defence as being qualified. If you publish something true about somebody out of pure desire just to hurt them or to humiliate them in front of the public, you might still be, you know, liable for libel, so to speak. So where they’re anticipating a different standard for public and private people is that they basically all say, especially Kent, that, uh, there should be much more running room for a truth defense if you’re dealing with a public official. Right. Because the people have a right and a need to know about that person’s character. So if what’s published is true and actually relevant to your reputation, we’re going to give you more room to make that defense. But they all talk as if the publication is false and defamatory. Then if you’re the defendant, you lose already. Right. They’re all pretty close to what you might call strict liability for false defamatory statements. So there’s nothing in them to anticipate what the Sullivan Court is doing, which is creating a kind of protection even for publications that are admittedly false and that are damaging to reputation.30:33S3

That’s Carson Holloway. His book is No Liberty to Libel. We’ll continue with him in just a moment. First, I want to make sure you are aware there’s a brand new episode of The Larry Arnn Show available now, talking about leadership, talking about being a Navy Seal. Leif Babin is Doctor Arne’s guest. He’s a former U.S. Navy Seal officer, co-author of The New York Times best seller Extreme Ownership How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win, and co-founder of Echelon Front. They’ll talk about the lessons that he learned about leadership from his time in the Middle East, what real ownership, humility and command under pressure looks like from someone who’s learned the lessons the hard way and the challenges and threats America’s military faces. Today, Doctor Arne asks the questions Leif Babin provides the answers. The brand new episode of The Larry Arnn Show is available now. Find it at YouTube for the full video version. You can also find the audio version wherever you get your audio, including podcasts.hillsdale.edu. Check out the brand new Larry Arnn show. We continue with Carson Holloway, his new book, No Liberty to Libel The Constitutional Case Against New York Times v Sullivan Libel Law here in the U.S., Carson chapter four begins this look at the case itself New York Times v Sullivan and the Brennan majority opinion, which relied on discussions around the Sedition Act of 1798. And you argue that this use is I think it’s opportunistic and unconvincing, meaning that it’s it’s it’s sort of using originalist language when the opinion of Brennan is not originalist in any real way. Is that is that about right?32:24S2

That’s right. Like I said, I’m making an originalist critique of Brennan’s opinion, especially what the court did in the Sullivan case. He does have a kind of originalist window dressing, I would say, in his appeal to the Sedition Act controversy, which you just mentioned, and which takes up a few paragraphs in the opinion. And if you want to argue for a very permissive or libertarian approach to freedom of the press and freedom of speech, you can get some mileage out of great American founders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who were opponents of the Sedition Act of 1798. But I think that that’s not a convincing argument. So let me try to explain that here. Basically, what Brennan does is to show that the Sedition Act included a truth defense along the lines of what we were talking about before. Nevertheless, it was assailed as unconstitutional by great men like Madison and Jefferson. So Brennan concludes from that. And also we should say that the Sedition Act was kind of, as Brennan points out, repudiated by the country. Right. The Jeffersonians won overwhelmingly in 1800. And and, uh, the Federalists took a real beating, and the country seemed to come around to the view that the Sedition Act was not constitutional. So the lesson that Brennan wants to derive from this is that there is evidence at the time of the founding that even false statements that are defamatory are protected by the First Amendment. I find this unconvincing because, frankly, Madison and Jefferson are arguing in the Sedition Act controversy that Congress has no power at all over the press because there’s no enumerated power in the first place. And then they think that’s confirmed by the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press. When people would say to them, in the context of that controversy, wouldn’t it be terrible if public men had no way to vindicate their reputation? Their response is, well, they can sue in the States, they can sue in state court where they can bring a libel suit. So I think that the the use of the Sedition Act controversy by the Brennan opinion in the Sullivan case is opportunistic and unconvincing, because it’s really proving something that the Sullivan Court doesn’t even affirm, namely, that there is no power at all in the federal government over the press. That’s not really a position that many people would defend these days. And in any case, it’s not a position that has to do with the meaning of the constitutional concept of freedom of the press.34:51S3

Mhm.34:52S2

You really can’t find Madison or Jefferson saying that public officials would have to demonstrate actual malice, say, to approve, to prove their case in a in a state libel proceeding. And in fact, they try to reassure people in various places, including in one of Jefferson’s inaugural addresses, that it’s perfectly legitimate for public officials to have recourse to libel law, to vindicate their reputations in that inaugural address, Jefferson kind of makes a show of saying, you know, I didn’t sue anybody because I’ve got better things to do. The administration has a lot of work to do. But he says that’s not to denigrate the purpose of libel law implicitly, even for public officials.35:31S3

Carson Holloway with his book No Liberty to Libel. There’s a chapter in which you go over a number of cases, some including Teddy Roosevelt. Um, these cases through the through the 1900s, including were courts generally capable of protecting vigorous public debate before this actual malice standard, before New York Times v Sullivan.35:53S2

I think so. Um, now, this is one of the big arguments about what would be the consequences of going back on New York Times versus Sullivan. A lot of the arguments that I find that are made are consequentialist in their character. I think it’s very hard to be an originalist and think that the Sullivan opinion is correct. But a lot of people have worries about abuse of libel law to silence people and stop them from criticising the government or criticising public officials. That’s understandable. I mean, I think as someone who’s fairly conversant with American political history, that our our history shows that our public discourse has been pretty candid and powerful and even brawling a lot of the time, even in the old days when when a public official or a public figure could bring a libel suit under the old standards. Interesting remark on this, by the way, is by one of the great jurists of the period. You were mentioning, William Howard Taft, who of course, later went on to be president of the United States, and Chief Justice. I’m talking about a period in his life where he was a federal judge, and he heard a libel case involving a public figure, we might say, a candidate for the House of Representatives. And, um, some of these arguments that the court relied on in New York Times versus Sullivan were brought up, or versions of them were brought up by the newspaper trying to defend itself. And basically Taft. This is in the late 19th century, batted those away and said, well, the standard really is that if, uh, if it’s false and defamatory, you’re going to have to answer for it. And then he talked about this concern that, uh, to use a term that the, uh, gets used much later on, that there would be a chilling effect on properly protected speech by this danger of libel. Taft just says, and it’s based on his observation at the time, he goes, nobody who knows the politics of Great Britain or the United States would think that the press is unduly hindered in its commentary on what public officials are doing. So, I mean, I take him as a serious observer of the scene. And yeah, I think that, uh, you did have a robust public discourse, even though there was a danger of libel suits. One other thing to remember on that, by the way, is that it ought to be possible, ordinarily, to have a very forceful discourse about public issues without defaming somebody’s character. Right. I mean, sometimes it’s necessary to do if someone really is guilty of wrongdoing and therefore disqualifying disqualifies themselves for public office. But I think one of the problems with the culture that’s created by the Sullivan Standard is that it permits so much running room for attacks on reputation that it distracts us from what we really ought to be concerned with, which is debates about public issues and what policies to pursue rather than, you know, often unconfirmed reports about alleged wrongdoing by public officials.38:46S3

Carson, a couple of things I picked up while reading No Liberty to Libel. There seems to be this underlying argument at times that that reversing New York Times v Sullivan is also additionally a benefit, a way to fix our media. Right. There’s so many issues people don’t trust the media. Overturning New York Times v Sullivan. Does that have the ancillary benefit of perhaps, uh, Improving media’s standing among Americans.39:15S2

I hope so. Um, again, the core of my argument is kind of a principled, legalistic or constitutionalist originalist argument. I think one of the key benefits, therefore, of reversing New York Times versus Sullivan would be simply returning to the country to the correct understanding of the First Amendment. Another benefit would be creating better protection for reputation, which the founders did think is a very important right. Just as important as property or personal security. It’s a natural right, I think, in their thinking. But there is this other problem, which is, as I mentioned in the book, trust in the media is at a very low point. I don’t know if it’s at an all time low, but it’s not great. The publisher of The New York Times gave a speech about this a couple of weeks ago, and he even admitted this and kind of blamed it on President Trump for his attacks on the media. But I think it’s more plausible that the media’s reputation is at a low point because they report a lot of hysterical charges that are designed to damage the reputations of certain public officials that don’t always pan out and don’t turn out to be true. So they generally Revere the ruling because they think it’s essential to their work. But I would counsel them to reflect on the fact that the way they’re doing their work undermines the public’s confidence in them. And so it might be better if there were a legal standard that were more strict to hold them, to be more careful about the reputations of the people on whom they’re reporting more careful of the truth generally. I mean, I would say one more thing about that, though, since I mentioned the expression truth, even if you were to reverse New York Times versus Sullivan, there would still be a lot of room for media to make mistakes and even to publish things that turn out to be not true, because libel is not an action against any untrue statement. It’s an action against one that’s damaging to an individual’s reputation. So even if you had the older standards, there could still be a lot of fake news. But I think having the older standards would nevertheless encourage a greater respect for truth in relation to the reputations of leading public figures and public officials, which would help our public discourse. And this is, by the way, the way a lot of the early jurists talked about it. And I go over this in the book, you’ll find the early Republic judges saying things like, well, the public has an interest in knowing only the truth about the people they entrust with public authority. So they, you know, they think that the standard is helpful to keeping the public discourse the way it should be.41:48S3

Carson, you write in no liberty to libel that reputation is a right as precious as any other. The public has a vital interest in receiving true info about public figures. I know it’s an originalist argument, but in this social media age, when false claims can can rattle around all that more quickly, Does the argument against Sullivan then become even stronger when it comes to reputation?42:14S2

Yeah, I think so. Um, we are living in a new age technologically, in which anybody can publish anything almost instantaneously. Uh, and we need to think through how to handle that. And even correcting our constitutional interpretation won’t solve all of our problems because you need legislation, uh, to protect reputation, you need libel law. And it may be that things need to be treated differently depending upon how they’re published or what kind of platform is used. But it’s an old principle, I think, of defamation that, you know, slander is spoken, defamation libel is published, defamation. And the traditional approach was to treat slander as less serious because less damaging. If you publish something, you’re basically telling it to the whole world in principle. But if you simply say something, the reach of that may not be as great. So the sense was that the threat to reputation and the damage is worse in a libel case. But now we live in a situation in which practically anybody can publish their thoughts immediately and kind of individualistically through these social media platforms. So there’s a lot of there’s just a lot more publication going on, and it might require some thinking that I admit I haven’t done yet to figure out how to regulate those kinds of things. Um, and maybe treat them differently from what other like more formalized publication is doing. But the underlying principle we would get from the founders would certainly be that there has to be accountability for people’s right to publish and to speak, because you can’t use those precious rights in such a way as to damage the rights of other people, namely, their right to reputation.43:50S3

Carson Holloway is a department chair and professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. In a Washington fellow in the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. His brand new book is No Liberty to Libel The Constitutional Case against New York Times v Sullivan. Carson, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.44:12S2

Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.44:14S3

That will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to Doctor Ben Whalen from here at Hillsdale College, your teacher for the new online course, The Odyssey. Find it now at hillsdale.edu/course. hillsdale.edu/course. And Carson Holloway, his book is No Liberty to Libel. Remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews, or listen anytime to the podcast. Find [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. Until next week, I’m Scott Bertram, and this has been the radio free Hillsdale Hour.

The post  Appreciating Homer’s Odyssey appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Dr. Matthew Spalding, vice president for Washington Operations and dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government, discusses the events in the aftermath of the Founders signing the Declaration: the King’s repudiation, Parliament’s reaction, and the war that ensued. 

Celebrate America’s 250th anniversary with Hillsdale in D.C. professors, co-hosted with WMAL radio host Larry O’Connor. Discover the historical and philosophical underpinnings of the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, American culture, and more. New episodes every other week! 

To celebrate 250 years of freedom. Hillsdale College’s Matthew Spalding, along with professors from Hillsdale in D.C., sit down with Larry O’Connor of WMAL to discuss the truths that make this country great. This is Hillsdale on the Hill.

We are pleased, as always, to be joined by Doctor Matthew Spalding. He, of course, from Hillsdale, DC, where he shapes minds full of mush into future leaders here the Hillsdale way. I borrowed a little from Rush Limbaugh Doctor Spalding, but I doubt you mind. Thanks for joining us as always. Nicely said. Listen, we’ve been we’ve been having this year long conversation here on a regular basis about America. 250. And so last week was the big kahuna. We had the fireworks. July 4th has passed us. Story over. Right. That’s it. We declared independence and everyone walks away. It’s done.

Right, right. Well, this is this is always, you know, one of the hard things in teaching this era. And, and especially from a civic citizens point of view, you know, we a lot of times we think, well, there was nothing was going on. All of a sudden, Jefferson wrote the declaration, and then there was a little war in between. And then all of a sudden, James Madison came along and, and with a bunch of other guys wrote the Constitution, whereas it’s much you know, that didn’t happen that way. Indeed, it was a close fought thing. I mean, you know, if we did didn’t mention it before. I’ll mention it here. When those guys signed the the Declaration of Independence, it was literally their death warrant. They after the after they signed it. Once the war starts moving, they’re all hunted. Many of their children are captured. Some of them are captured and shot. In one case, a signer from New York named Lewis. He wasn’t home, but they went to his home. Calvary went to his home, and his wife were there. So they. They had a gunboat. She refused to surrender. So a gunboat in Long Island Harbor opened fire on her until she surrendered and she was imprisoned. So, you know, this is not exactly a just an armchair intellectual exercise that that we, in hindsight, we know, played out. This is an exciting story. And but what was accomplished in the midst of all that was, was extremely important. And, and recall, this declaration declared independence. But it also announced a nation which meant, among other things, it triggered a war which quickly became a worldwide war once the French get involved and reshaped, you know, obviously our history, but really much of all, all of world history, when you think about it, that that’s yeah, this is a very important moment. And it’s not just a life worth.

Yeah. It’s funny, I always sort of get amused by the British Embassy and, and various newspapers in England. When we celebrate July 4th, they always, you know, jokingly say happy treason day colonialist, you know, that sort of thing. But but in reality, you know, let’s, let’s transport ourselves. 250 years ago this week, the week after the signing of the declaration, and we’re walking the streets of London. What was the buzz like there? What what was their reaction?

Well, so the so the, the document signed on July 4th. And that afternoon, John Adams, uh, was, was ordered by the Continental Congress to take it around the block, literally to a guy named Dunlop, an Irish immigrant who had a print shop. And that night, meaning literally overnight, all night on July 4th, they printed about 200 copies of what are called the Dunlop Broadsides. That’s the broadside that, among other things you see currently hanging in the president’s office, the Oval Office. Mhm. Uh, there are very few copies around. You’ve got one. Hold on to it. They’re worth, uh, many, many millions of dollars. Uh, but the British also got one of those copies surreptitiously. We don’t know how they probably, you know, caught it in transport somewhere. They put it on, put it on a packet ship and sent it immediately to England. Um, and it didn’t get there till August 10th.

Oh. Okay. So it wouldn’t have been now. It would have been in a couple of weeks.

Well yeah, there was no internet. There was no email. There was no telegraph. There was nothing. Uh, but to your, to, to your point, right. The, the king has already declared them to be rebels before things get moving. He’s already refused to read the olive branch petition. Uh, so they all know this is moving towards war very rapidly. So the declaration was kind of a potential in the air, but it does, you know, when it gets there, when it arrives, it’s, you know, if you think of it’s on a ship on its way over there now. Well, obviously the British commanders in, in the North American colonies, they know about it. They know it means war. Um, they send it back to England. And, uh, let’s put it this way. They were not happy. And indeed, there’s actually no evidence the King of England actually saw it or read it probably didn’t, because he’d already decided war was going to be the outcome. And they couldn’t they couldn’t officially recognize it because if they did so, that would be to recognize these colonies as independent nations. So, Larry, you’ll appreciate this. They did what, uh, what any good political leader would do when he can’t put his fingerprints on it. They hired a hack. A hack political writer named John Lind wrote a response to the Declaration of Independence on behalf of the Parliament.

Uh, wow.

Uh, which was it’s it’s an attack on the on the declaration. You can look it up. It’s a long pamphlet, mostly going after the grievances because that was the attack on the king. Uh, so they saw it for what it was. But the, the, the overarching thing is they knew it meant for sure. War. And the Americans are now the British had already decided on war. Uh, the Americans have now accepted war by declaring independence. So it really did seal the deal.

Uh, let’s get back to that Dunlop broadside. Uh, they made all of these copies, sent one to London or one got surreptitiously sent to London. What about the others? They they had, they had to distribute them around the colonies. Right.

This raised this raised the question, what who is the audience for the Declaration of Independence? You know, we we oftentimes think, well, it was the European audience, and they were especially appealing to the French court. I can tell you, the French court wasn’t exactly excited about an attack on on the monarchy, uh, whether it was in England or France for that matter. So, uh, the other thing we know and, you know, keep this between.

Can I, can I pause there for a second? Because this is important to point out that this the declaration is not just about our grievance. I mean, a lot of it is our grievances with King George the Third. But the fundamental principle is that we, the people, are allowed to govern ourselves. That affects every monarch. That’s why I think it’s.

It’s not outright attack on monarchy per se, the way, say, um, common sense by Thomas Paine was. But but clearly, I mean, you can’t read without seeing that. It’s about all men being created equal. I mean, that’s that’s exactly not not exactly good for the sun god of France. Right. So they weren’t necessarily happy. But but here and this is, you know, very secret and confidential. Don’t tell anybody this, Larry, but I’m convinced the next, um, American Treasure movie is going to be on this topic. So they sent a, the right after the declaration, they sent one of those copies to France to their agent in France that would translate, uh, take it to the king or the King’s men because they wanted support from the French. Oh. Well, that copy of the declaration in a sealed pouch was tossed overboard somewhere in the Atlantic when the ship was boarded by the British. So I’m convinced the next great movie about the declaration is going to be a subversive movie. Looking for a lost copy of the declaration somewhere at the bottom of the sea. But don’t tell anybody. I’m going to make millions. So keep it.

I tell you. what, we had Jon Voight on a couple of months, I think about eight weeks ago, and I asked him about the next day. He he was tight lipped, but it does seem like there’s a script in in the works. That would be brilliant. Uh, what about up and down the colonies, though? Uh, what about getting the word out to the Americans?

I think the international audience wasn’t the primary objective. It was the domestic audience. This is a a document declaring that there’s going to be a war and rallying the troops. So most of those Dunlop copies go to all the colonies, all the committees of correspondence, all over the colonies. But by order, it specifically went to, uh, George Washington to be read to the troops and all of his armies. So we just celebrated on July 9th. They got a copy to Washington very quickly on on July 9th, he ordered to be read aloud to his troops. So it’s read aloud on July 9th to his troops. And then in great American tradition and fashion, a bunch of his soldiers went down to the park on lower Manhattan and got some ropes and tore down a huge statue of George the Third, which did not make George Washington happy. He thought that was a little too revolutionary. He doesn’t like that kind of rabble rousing. Yes.

This is this is a gentleman’s rebellion. We don’t do that sort of thing.

But he. But he did give permission and allow it to be melted down to make bullets. Musket balls.

I love that story so much. I for the longest time I thought that was apocryphal. It was just sort of like George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. But yeah, when you go to lower Manhattan, they actually have a little plaque there that shows where it happened. It’s so cool.

Yeah.

And that means obviously the war is on. And when we last checked in in New York, that British Armada was right there. They’re sitting there in the harbor. They were approaching our troops.

What’s so great? What’s so great about this story about the declaration? You know, we think, oh, it’s a document. And they sit around writing it in comfort and and, you know, in their little safe space in Philadelphia. But all the while, Washington is reporting on on the British, and he reports early on June early June that the ships have left Halifax, Nova Scotia. And then he reports a little bit later they’re heading south. And then, you know, come the end of June, June 29th, they’re spotted off of Sandy hook, which is a spit of land in new Jersey, which is right across from the New York Harbor. And so on July 2nd, the same day they pass independence. And this is just one of those coincidences of history which is overwhelmingly fascinating and powerful. The same day they decide independence, which they they same day they sign their own death warrants. Uh, the British Navy is landing troops on Staten Island in preparation for another attack, which will be a cross strait attack onto Long Island, formerly which is launching the war.

We’re going to get into what comes next with the military campaign. And also, I want to ask Doctor Matthew Spalding of Hillsdale about this report that we discussed last week coming out of the white House about some problems with the Smithsonian and how they’re viewing American history. So we’ll get to that all coming up next. This is O’Connor and company. Keep it here. And we’re continuing on O’Connor and company here. Our regular conversation with Doctor Matthew Spalding. By the way, you need to know about Hillsdale’s great programs, especially the graduate program in Washington, D.C. in government, you will get an education like none other. And I often mention Doctor Spalding, that Hillsdale Mafia. You get into Hillsdale family and there are a lot of job opportunities, professional opportunities in this town.

As a good family, we protect each other. So I kind of like being called Mafia because that means I’m a don.

There you go. We kiss the ring when you see Doctor Spalding around town. And, uh, and so it’s, it’s a great education, but it’s also a great career move. So you’re going to get all that information for you at Hillsdale. Uh, what? When we last, uh, spoke here moments ago, the Navy was landing Staten Island. They’re looking at Long Island. Uh, this is very real now. And is that part of why George Washington, General Washington wanted to read the declaration to the troops for a morale boost. He wanted to let these men know what they’re fighting for.

Of course. Well, let’s put it this way. If he’s. He’s literally on the tip of Manhattan Island. Well, the the the you know, the harbor of New York is some, you know, I don’t know, 3 or 4 nautical miles. It’s a pretty big harbor. But if you’re looking across the harbor on a clear morning and you see a massive British warship, those are huge 60 gun warships. The with with your naked eye, you could probably see British ships in the distance. So absolutely, he wanted to read that declaration because now, after a year of warfare, they have formally declared independence, which now is this is now a cause. So it changed the whole dynamic. Uh, they’ve been preparing for this potential invasion. It’s now upon them. They know it’s coming. They don’t know where. They don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. And this then becomes the, um, the great battle of Long Island. So this will be in August when we next can talk about we come back. We’ll probably be at that point, but that formally begins the war. But the British, they’re already landing those troops, including which was not known until Washington’s intelligence. It’s announced in the Declaration of Independence. And now they’re landing to a Hessian soldiers hired German mercenaries who are ruthless. And they know they’re. Those guys are there, too. So this is not exactly a nice little warm welcome to to, uh, they’re giving the British here, uh, and recall, how about this, that the British naval invasion of Staten in Long Island. This is what we’re talking about right now that Washington is watching before his very eyes. It’s the largest naval and land invasion in world history prior to World War Two. So think about that for a moment. These guys have just signed a death warrant and they’re about to be overwhelmed.

But before I lose you, Doctor Spalding, I do want to ask you about this report. We discussed it quite a bit last week. The white House came out with kind of a scathing analysis of what the Smithsonian Institute’s been doing with the museums in Washington, D.C. I think tourists, especially international tourists, will be surprised to come to Washington and go to the Museum of American History and not hear stuff like this. They hear very different narratives coming out of that museum. Talk to me about this report, what you know about it, and why it is important in terms of reorienting the Smithsonian’s role.

It’s it’s extremely important. First of all, it’s it’s a it’s a massive report. It’s it’s 140 pages, 150 pages or something. So it’s, this is not a light, uh, you know, small little thing. It’s a, it’s a serious report. Tons of stuff in it. But you know, the, what I find most compelling, uh, which you can’t ignore. And this, the key audience here in many ways is the Regents of the Smithsonian, which is headed up by the chief Justice. And the vice president is one of the regents and some other appointed members of the Senate and the House. They can’t ignore this. This is not a petty, small minded stuff. There’s a lot of detail, a lot of little stuff, a lot of shocking little things having to do with every issue you might dislike. But what’s overwhelming is this the the put it all together. And the accusation here is this amounts to ideological capture. And it has a lot of it’s their own internal documents, their planning documents, their annual reports, those kinds of things. And they say it themselves. They their purpose here is to kind of reorient history to, to reframe it, to change it away from the narrative. There’s no story. I don’t know if you’ve been there. You’re I went there recently myself. Looking around, it doesn’t tell a story at all. There’s no narrative. It’s not like we’re disagreeing about the narrative. They don’t tell one. Instead, what they want to do is, is tell kind of the shocking things around the edges, which granted, or the bad aspects of American history which we should teach, by the way, slavery in particular. But that’s all.

It’s not the entirety of.

All it is. And so there’s no story to go. Go with it. There’s no context. There’s nothing. So they make it very clear. The purpose of this is to undermine the American story to decenter, as they say, the American founders, that narrative and to make it the ground for an activist population. So it’s it really is crazy radical and it has to be addressed.

It is. And the report is the beginning. But now action needs to take place. And Doctor Spaulding, I’d love to have you back to talk about what actions need to be taken, but we’re up against it. Go to Larry for hillsdale.com to get information about the great graduate program in DC. And we’ll be back on O’Connor and company.

Thanks for listening to Hillsdale on the Hill, presented by Hillsdale College. To learn more about the Van Andel Graduate School of Government and Hillsdale’s work in our nation’s capital, visit dc.hillsdale.edu. That’s dc.hillsdale.edu.

The post What Happened After the 4th? appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Prepare for the upcoming The Odyssey online course from Hillsdale College as Jeremiah and Juan discuss Homer’s Odyssey before introducing a lecture from Dr. David M. Whalen.

Enroll in The Odyssey here: https://online.hillsdale.edu/courses/promo/odyssey

Homer’s Odyssey—which tells the tale of the Greek hero Odysseus and his journey home after the fall of Troy—is one of the great works of Western Civilization. With this poem, Homer establishes the context in which the great cultural and political flowering of 5th century Athens takes place.

Discover the beauty of the Bible in “The Genesis Story,” encounter the brilliance of Plato and Aristotle in “Introduction to Western Philosophy,” and explore the true meaning of America in “Constitution 101” all with Hillsdale faculty. 

Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I’m Jeremiah Regan and.

I’m Juan Davalos, and we’re back on a special episode. If you remember, last week we did Homer’s Iliad, and this week we’re doing Homer’s Odyssey.

These are both lectures from our Great Books 101 course, one of the original online courses, one of the foundations for our program. And we’re doing them because of a big Hollywood movie coming out about the Odyssey. We want to teach people who are interested in that story. In addition, we ourselves are producing two courses, one on the Iliad, one on the Odyssey, 12 lectures each that will really dive into the story. The Odyssey is a story of homecoming. It’s the story of prioritizing family and statesmanship over mere glory on the battlefield, and it deserves a lengthy retelling. This lecture again from our Great Books 101 course is an outstanding introduction. It is taught by the father of our forthcoming course. Professor, this is David Whalen and you will later this summer see and hear from his son, Ben Whalen.

So now let’s turn to Doctor Whalen on Homer’s Odyssey.

Homer’s odyssey. Sing to me of the man, muse. The man of twists and turns driven time and again off course. Once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy. But we have to stop right there, don’t we? Sing to me of the man muse itself. The opening of this poem is arresting. It’s arresting because we wonder why he says sing instead of tell. We wonder why he’s asking the help of something called a muse to begin with. Sing to me of the man muse. So begins the poem, but also begins Western civilization. We’ll come back to that in just a moment. But let’s let’s look at this invocation, this famous invocation of the muse at the beginning of the poem. First of all, the poet asks for help. Divine help from a goddess, a muse. The help is necessary because it’s understood that the poem is not simply an evening’s entertainment, although it’s certainly that the poem is not simply a story, though it certainly is. That, or maybe I should say it is a story, but we tend to give stories too little credit for the amount of work they do in our ability to understand the world. So Homer begins with a request, a prayer, asking the muse to assist him in telling this story and singing this song. And it’s appropriate that it’s a prayer, because the burden of poetry is not, as I say, merely entertainment, but rather an attempt to penetrate, to cut through the chaos, the randomness, the clutter of everyday life and everyday experience in order to discern meaning, in order to penetrate through to mystery. Now, mystery may sound like it is the opposite of meaning, but. But there’s a great deal of human experience which if you consult your own experience, you can confirm at once that is understood but difficult to articulate. That is grasped, but difficult to drop into some convenient propositional form. That’s the kind of mystery that attaches to the very deepest things in human experience love, mortality. War, Home family. Those are real, evident, immediate things and none of us can claim to understand them fully. We understand them, but mysteriously. And the burden and the weight of that kind of understanding does seem to be a little bit beyond the ordinary man or woman’s grass, beyond our ability to simply do or discuss with the easy grace with which we approach what we have for dinner, or what is the price of gasoline this week. So it’s appropriate that it begins. The poem begins with a prayer and a request for help. Um, though it comes many, many years later, another poet by the name of Robert Browning has one of his poetic creations. Say this world’s no blot for us nor blank. It means intensely and means good to. Find its meaning is my meat and drink. Let’s put a little heart. Not harshly, but crudely. It’s put a little bluntly and directly. But that really is the work of poetry itself, and Homer is doing the work of poetry itself. To find the world’s meaning. That’s Homer’s meat and drink. It is Homer’s prayer. But I also said, this is the beginning of Western civilization. That’s something we should dwell upon for just a moment as well. It’s the start of Western civilization precisely because. This poem and its. And its companion, the Iliad. This poem has furnished, has filled. But. But you might think. Furnished the Western imagination. Since its composition in the ninth century B.C. this poem filled the minds and imaginations of all those great Greeks in the classic fifth century BC. The Greeks, who gave us so much poetry, drama, philosophy, history, politics that Athens that launched Western civilization was educated by and in Homer. Even when they repudiated Homer or Homeric things, even when they stepped aside or developed or said, we’re going to do something a little bit different from our great forebear, Homer. Homer. He was the context, as it were, within which they worked. So this, this it sounds melodramatic, but it isn’t. It’s really true that this poem, this poet, is very seriously the father of Western civilization. Well, I want to say something about this muse to this divinity. We understand, I hope, a little bit why we might have to pray to a divinity to assist us carry the burden of this mysterious inquiry or inquiry into the mysteriousness of of human experience? Sure. But what about a muse in particular? Why not Zeus? Why not Apollo? Why not Athena? She’s the goddess of wisdom, right? Well, the muses. The muses don’t get a lot of press. They’re not talked about a great deal. You might expect that the word is etymologically related to our word music or amusing or muse. Also, it seems to be related to words like mute, which is even more mysterious. But we don’t have time to explore that relation or connection. But it’s worth noting that the muse or the muses were nine daughters. They’re all female, their daughters of Zeus, so they have some important Olympian parentage. But their mother, the mother is the key here. The mother of the muses is a goddess named Mnemosyne MNE. Now, the neat thing about Mnemosyne is that those of you who picked up the etymology know that that has to do with memory. She’s the goddess of memory. So what we have are these muses, little minor deities given the responsibility to endow or to inspire. People with understanding things that are generally beyond our Ken. Understanding things that are generally beyond our ability to understand readily, especially things that that, that, that are framed in what we would call beauty. The beauty could be astronomical. There is a muse of astronomy. The beauty could be epic poetry, the beauty could be lyric poetry. There was even a muse of history. But the point is, these muses are, are to inspire us so that we can do the work of this form of understanding and their mother’s memory. Now, this doesn’t mean the muses are memory tricks or I’m not suggesting that the muses are related to memory by way of. Here’s a nifty way to remember this or that tidbit. Rather, if you think about Homer’s humility before his subject matter, if you think about Homer’s. I need divine help. I can’t do this on my own. I’m going to have to begin with, frankly, a prayer. If you think about that, what. What is clear is that the memory transcends mere individual retention. What? What Homer is appealing to by invoking the help of a muse, is the ability of man, both individual and a culture, to preserve, to maintain its identity. I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Think about it without memory, we lose our identity as individuals. Without memory, a culture loses its. Identity, it loses itself. Homer seems to be aware of all of these things as he opens his poem. When I teach this in an ordinary class. I usually use the phrase. I adapt my translation somewhat. Sing to me, muse. And we spend 50 minutes on that alone. So this condensed introduction will have to suffice us here. But I emphasize the point that in such little things as that is all the burden and the weight of great beauty, the great beauty of this poem, but also the great meaning and the import for individual readers and for, as I say, Western civilization itself. So Homer’s Odyssey, the muse assists Homer in telling the story of this man Odysseus, this great chieftain who fought with the Achaeans at Troy. Odysseus is known as the wily one, the clever one, the trickster, the great tactician. He, of course, is great and mighty in combat as well, but he is credited with having devised the scheme of the Trojan Horse. In the main, however, we should understand that Odysseus, in terms of the epithet he is given the first time is mentioned. His name is mentioned in the poem, and that is Odysseus, which means man of many turnings, poly trapos. When I teach this in. In an ordinary class, students will sometimes stop thinking while they’re taking notes and just turn into Transcriptionists. At that moment, I’ll do something like tell them that poly means poly plastic means teeth. So it’s Odysseus, the man with dentures. If they inscribe that into their notes, then I know we’re in trouble and we’re going to have to start all over. Um, it’s important to think with the professor as the subject is undertaken and rather just rather than just transcribe these words. But, but Polytrope was man of many turnings is an echo of his own name, which is a man of pain or son of suffering. Many turnings means clever. It means much experienced. It even means well traveled. But. But it applies especially to that capacity. Odysseus has to apply a kind of tactical wisdom that can extricate him from the difficulties in which he very often finds himself, often through his own fault, by the way. But this Odysseus, after having helped win the Trojan War, departs for home with his men and his ships. He is a chieftain, the king of Ithaca. Ten years later, when he finally steps onto Ithaca alone, having lost all of his men and all of his ships, he is a somewhat chastened. But he’s still a vigorous warrior, and he’s still an ingenious tactician. This polytropic. Um, it took ten years to get home for a variety of reasons we can’t detail here, but he has a series of adventures. Stories within stories occur to Odysseus over that ten year period, delaying him sometimes for years at a time, and eliminating ship after ship, man after man, until finally he arrives home alone. And at at a certain point in that trip, in that journey home, Odysseus is asked to recount his adventures. Thus far. It’s actually very close to his having to his returning home, and he’s asked to recount his adventures. And in fact, the bulk of this poem is Odysseus speaking to. They’re called the Phaeacians King, Alkinoös and Phaeacians who want to know his story. He actually tells the bulk of this story, but by the time he steps back onto his home island of Ithaca, his house is besieged by 108 suitors, all of whom have presumed, perhaps Wishfully, thinking, that Odysseus is dead and they’re courting, if you want to call it that, his wife. We’ll come back to that a little bit later, too. That’s extremely important. They essentially have the house under siege. Odysseus returns, adopts a disguise with the help of Athena, and ends up. In rather decisive fashion, killing them all. He even kills the. The waiting women who were in collusion with these suitors. The poem, as all of this story is underway, takes up many things that are of perennial importance permanent things. It takes up the nature of home ordered and disordered. It takes up the nature of hospitality, which in this poem is not simply being nice to people, being nice to strangers. It is a virtue looked out for by Zeus himself. It’s taken extremely seriously. It is a kind of index of civilization itself. It’s not going too far to say this is a poem about hospitality. I once knew a fellow who said, it’s not going too far to say this is a poem about eating, since so much of it concerns meals, feasting, dining. But that is part of hospitality, In fact, this is a poem about fidelity. Odysseus wife those 20 years he was gone. Ten at Troy, ten coming home. Odysseus wife Penelope is is loyal, faithful to him. Agamemnon, a colleague of Odysseus. Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra is compared to Penelope in this poem. She not only was unfaithful to her husband Agamemnon, but she killed him. She and her lover killed Agamemnon when he returned home from the Trojan War. At one point, Agamemnon. Odysseus ventures into the underworld and speaks to Agamemnon, the spirit of Agamemnon, and Agamemnon praises Penelope and says she would not behave as did Clytemnestra. So this is very much a poem about loyalty. Um. This, one of the most famous characters in all of literature is a swineherd, Eumaeus, Odysseus, loyal swineherd, while so many other people in the island have, as it were, made their peace with the barbarous suitors. Eumaeus did not. Odysseus takes shelter with him initially on his return to Ithaca, and enlists his help in taking back in repossessing his. His home. But the essential quality of mind I mentioned a minute ago. This. This thing that Homer describes as the ability to overcome adversity through clever, quick, tactical thinking is not always seen in adversarial situations. Homer depicts that quality of mind, that cleverness in other ways as well. At one point in his journey, he’s alone. Now Odysseus is beset by Poseidon, who for various reasons, wants to thwart Odysseus intentions to return home. And. And he. He’s alone on a raft. Poseidon kicks up a storm. Odysseus raft is smashed. He’s thrown into the raging ocean. His clothes are ripped off. He swims for days and finally crawls. He’s lost. He has no idea where he is. He crawls exhausted onto shore, naked, hungry, sleepless, exhausted. He crawls into an olive bush and falls asleep. He wakes up to the sound of young girls playing. They’re actually playing ball and the ball goes into the water. Odysseus wakes up, sees his condition, and sees that these young teenage girls are his only hope for some kind of help. Now think. Think about the rhetorical situation. Think about the challenge. You’re a 40 odd year old man, Very powerful and build very strong but naked, covered with brine from the sea. Beaten up. You look like death warmed over. You look like a dangerous death warmed over. And you’ve got all these 1416 year old girls you need to enlist the help of. And I repeat, you’re naked. How do you get out of that one? That takes some skill, Odysseus says when he wakes up. Man of misery, whose land have I lit on now? What are they here? Violent, savage, lawless, or friendly to strangers? God fearing men listen, shouting, echoing around me. Women, girls, or the nymphs who haunt the rugged mountaintops in the river springs and the meadows lush with grass. Or I really close to people who speak my language up with you. See how the land lies. See for yourself now. And he does. Muttering so great. Odysseus crept out of the bushes, stripping off with his massive hand a leafy branch from the tangled olive growth to shield his body, hide his private parts, and out he stalked as a mountain lion, exultant in his power strides the wind and rain in his eyes ablaze. And he charges sheep or oxen or chases wild deer. But his hunger drives him on to go for flocks, even to raid the best defended homestead. This violent hunting imagery is exactly the kind of association that Odysseus in this situation doesn’t want to excite, right? He needs these girls to stay put and not feel threatened. So Odysseus moved out, about to mingle with all those lovely girls, naked now, as he was for NE drove him on a terrible sight, all crusted, caked with brine. They scatter, they run. But the king’s daughter is there among them. Now. Sitka is her name. The local king, Alcinous, has this teenage daughter who’s just beginning to think about marriage. She stands firm with Athena’s help. She turns and faced Odysseus, torn. Now. Odysseus has to think there’s a certain protocol. If you’re beseeching someone’s help. The normal thing, the proper thing to do. The protocol, is to run up and grab their knees. You embrace their knees. You reach around them and hold them. Should he fling his arms around her knees, the young beauty plead for help or stand back, plead with a winning word, beg her to lead him to the town and lend him clothing. This was the better way, he thought. Plead now with a subtle winning word, and stand well back. Don’t clasp her knees. The girl’s might. The girl might bridle. Yes, he launched in at once endearing sly and suave. What follows is a speech a little bit I hope we can read that demonstrates Odysseus’s exquisite rhetorical skill. Now, when people hear about rhetorical skill, they often assume that means some kind of deception, some sort of sleight of verbal hand, as it were. But this is not this is not the case at all. The the the the cleverness, the tactical wisdom Odysseus has doesn’t in this case move him to deception, although he’s perfectly happy to deceive when the need arises. He’s got this horrible circumstance he’s got to overcome. And the best way to do that is to put her at ease. Here I am, at your mercy, Princess. Are you a goddess or a mortal? Now everyone chuckles and says, ho ho ho! Isn’t that flattery, you know? Wow, look at this goddess. But remember, Odysseus has been spending a lot of time with goddesses. And when he woke up said to himself. Who are these women, girls or the nymphs who haunt the rugged mountain tops? So Odysseus actually doesn’t know with whom he’s dealing. Um, but nevertheless, he does know that if it’s a goddess, one would not want to be mistaken for a mortal. If it’s a mortal, one wouldn’t mind being mistaken for a goddess. Here I am. At your mercy, Princess. Are you a goddess or a mortal? If one of the gods who rule the skies up there. Your Artemis to the life. The daughter of mighty Zeus. I see her now. Just look at your build, your bearing, your lithe, flowing grace. Now you might be thinking. Oh, back away. Oh, no no, no, don’t go. There it is. Just watch. He knows. He knows what he’s doing. But if you’re one of the mortals living here on earth three times. Blessed are your father, your queenly mother, three times over. Your brothers too. How often their hearts must warm with joy to see you striding into the dances. Such a bloom of beauty. True, but he is the one more blessed than all other men alive. That man who sways you with gifts and leads you home. His bride. I have never laid eyes on anyone like you. Neither man nor woman. I look at you in a sense of wonder. Takes me. Clearly, by mentioning family things sacred, or at least very likely sacred to this young girl. Father, mother, future hope and husband, her brothers, home. All of these references that he makes are designed to signal to her. I think they’re perfectly sincere, but they’re designed to signal to her, you have nothing to fear. You have nothing to fear. If he had evil intentions, he would not be mentioning father and brothers and mother and marriage and home and those. grand staples of a stable family life. He then asks for her help. Athena, um, gives her courage and indeed she does help him. Gives him a covering and some oil. He bathes, dresses himself, and she takes him to her father’s court. And it is at that court that we get the bulk of the poem. So so this, this ability that Odysseus has to extricate himself from difficult and complex situations isn’t always just having a clever trick to deceive your enemy or a good right arm. It is also understanding human nature. What does a young girl who’s just beginning to think about marriage, what does she regard as, as as sacred, as valuable, as precious, as. As important for a good life? How can I appeal to that? How can I, as it were, move or navigate into that in order to get her to see my fundamental need? And also her fundamental safety with him. Now, this reception that Odysseus receives here is in violent contrast with the reception that he receives in the famous famous episode concerning the Cyclops. I won’t read the passage. I hope you will. But the Cyclops episode is almost an archetypal presentation of everything barbaric. That is. How does man or monster get public social common life wrong? And by public social common life I mean everything from family, home to community. The Cyclops is is spoken of as lawless as not having any communities, not having a council where people meet and deliberate. He rules his wife Tyrannically, his wife and his children Tyrannically. He lives in caves, not in real homes. He doesn’t even cultivate the earth. He doesn’t grow food. He. He’s a shepherd. He keeps sheep. But. But he won’t, even, as it were, exercise the discipline necessary to cultivate a crop. Okay. These are the things that that that Homer will point out often very rapidly, almost as an aside. But as as you probably know, the the Cyclops encounter turns out very badly. Odysseus goes there with several men, the Cyclops in it’s, shall we say, a rather shocking breach of hospitality eats them. Not all of them. But he takes one man in each hand, smashes their brains out on the floor and stuffs their bleeding bodies in his mouth and swallows. Odysseus finally manages to work out an escape, which involves, by the way, his playing on the barbarous intemperance of the Cyclops. He manages to get him drunk, and when drunk, injures the Cyclops in a way that isn’t fatal, but does render him harmless to the remaining the remaining Ithacans with with Odysseus. Well, this this this is a pattern you see over and over in the poem you see the presentation of the. A proper kind of welcome or hospitality and reception and a barbarous welcome. Absence of hospitality, non reception. You see it over and over again. And of course most graphic. Maybe that was the most graphic, but you see it very graphically when Odysseus gets home and his house is besieged by these suitors eventually. Um, this is a very difficult poem to talk about in a summary fashion because the richness is so much not just in the plot, but in the details you really want to read the lines? The words you want to notice all the details? Homer certainly notices them. Um, but but for our purposes. Suffice this. When Odysseus returns disguised as a beggar, he is reunited with Telemachus. He, Telemachus and Eumaeus conspire together to trap the suitors in such a way that allows Odysseus to destroy them. This is successful. Um. Penelope is unaware or apparently unaware of Odysseus identity. Again, he’s disguised as a beggar. The the the ruse that they they scheme they devise is successful. They’re all slain. And Odysseus then presents himself as the long lost husband to Penelope. Now Penelope is a wife worthy of of Odysseus. Um, she’s no fool. She’s been putting those suitors off for many years by weaving this funeral shroud by day and unweaving it by night, promising that she’ll make some choice of a future husband when she finishes the shroud. Well. She weaves. She’s finally caught out at that. So darn it all, she has to finish the shroud. Um, but but she is no fool. She knows that Odysseus has been gone a long time. She’s inclined to think this must be Odysseus, but she puts him to a test. And I think we have time to read a snippet of that test. She says, well, I think you might be Odysseus, but I’m not sure we’re going to wait and see. We’re going to hold off for a while. And Odysseus says, strange woman, so hard that gods of Olympus made you harder than any other woman in the world. What other wife could have a spirit so unbending, holding back from her husband home at last for her after bearing 20 years of brutal struggle. Come, nurse, make me a bed. I’ll sleep alone. She has a heart of iron in her breast. She replies. Strange man. Wary, Penelope said, I’m not so proud, so scornful. Nor am I overwhelmed by your quick change. You look how well I know the way he looked. Setting sail from Ithaca years ago aboard the long oared ship. Come, Eurycleia, move the sturdy bedstead out of our bridal chamber. That room the master built with his own hands. Take it out now. The sturdy bed that it is, and spread it with deep, deep with fleece blankets and lustrous throws to keep him warm. Odysseus. Homer then clues you in that this is a test, putting her husband to the proof. But Odysseus blazed up in fury, lashing out at his loyal wife. Woman, your words cut me to the core. Who could move my bed? What we. What we learn is that Odysseus made their marriage bed out of a living rooted olive tree, not lumber cut down a tree rooted into the earth. That tree he shaped into one of the posts of the of the bed attached. The rest of the bed literally built the room and the house, around that tree and around that bed. Clearly significant of the stability, the strength, the rootedness of family, of marriage, of man and wife, of home. This is clearly the perfect symbol for a home restored to order, strength and stability. This is the resolution, as it were, of the poem. That symbol, I think, sums it up perfectly. So this this is very much a poem about family. It’s very much a poem about the thing that gives rise or that gives birth to all social order, to all public peace. It can certainly, as we have seen, be a place of great disorder disruption. But if there is going to be peace and harmony, it begins there in families, in marriages, men and women, and in homes. Odysseus, you recall, had said to Nausicaa, and I will conclude with this. He said to Nausicaa. He offered her a blessing. I hope this for you. It’s worth noting that the Odyssey concludes, there actually is reference to one little journey. He’s going. This big journey, but a journey he’s going to have to take in addition. But it comes with the promise of peace and stability thereafter. So I say that the poem does conclude with Odysseus realizing, Restoring in his own world, in his own family, that which he wished for and blessed. Now sick with that is again a husband and house and lasting harmony to no finer. Gift in the world than that when man and woman possess their home. Two minds, two hearts that work as one. Despair to their enemies. A joy to all their friends. Their own best claim to glory. Not Odysseus martial valor, not Odysseus tactical cleverness. Not even Odysseus. Brute strength and force or rhetorical ability. His best glory is his home, his family stability there. And with that, we’ll conclude a very cursory, hopefully mildly tantalizing discussion of Homer’s great poem, The Odyssey. Thank you.

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