Great Courses

If you’ve ever sneezed while driving your car, did you immediately think, “Cars Cause the Common Cold!”? No, of course not. A headline like that wouldn’t make any sense. And yet, some of the sources we rely on for health and medical news are not much better. Many media outlets are perfectly happy to grab us with a wacky headline or an article that reflects none of the nuance of the study on which it’s based—as long as we buy the magazine or click through to the article. And we do. We take the bait. With 50,000 scientific studies published each week in English, many media outlets don’t put in the time and effort to adequately decipher and report on even a tiny fraction of those studies. But they publish news about them, anyway.

Economies are deeply complex systems. The global marketplace even national, state and local economies involve many economic actors behaving in rational and irrational ways, sustaining a dizzying array of interconnected activity. Because of the number of participants involved in this global exchange, the unpredictability of their actions, and the sheer variety of possible actions, some degree of economic uncertainty is inevitable.

There’s the Renaissance we all know about: the cultural flourishing that produced iconic works of art, sculpture, and architecture. But underneath all the paint and marble is another side of the Renaissance with which we’re much less familiar.

Key Points of Learning: 01. How British Anglicanism came to be replaced in the South by evangelical Christianity. 02. Trace the rise of abolitionism and antislavery societies, and the violent backlash of anti-abolitionists. 03. Investigate the vibrant musical culture of the postbellum South and the African musical elements that converged in the birth of ragtime and jazz, as well as the evolution of blues, country music, and gospel. The American South holds a special place in the minds of people around the world. The South’s extraordinarily colorful and dramatic history, its competing narratives of prosperity and cruelty, its role in the American Civil War, and its influence on the emerging conception of human rights are, for many, the stuff of legend.

Dr. Stanley K. Ridgley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Management at Drexel University's LeBow College of Business. He holds an M.A. in Political Science from Duke University, an M.B.A. in International Business from Temple University, and a Ph.D. in International Relations from Duke.