Monday afternoon 11/16 from 4-5 PM our students in grades 7+ will have a special FPRI opportunity that was just added to the FPRI schedule.  The subject is “Munich 1938: New Revelations from the Czech Archives,” relative to the famous Munich Agreement which permitted Hitler’s takeover of the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia prior to WW II.

The speaker, Milan Hauner, is an associate scholar of FPRI who grew up in Prague and has earned two PhDs at prestigious European universities and who taught at other important institutions.  Hauner has written and co-edited ten books and many scholarly articles and has most recently edited several unpublished manuscripts of the former Czechoslovak president Edvard Benes, as well as reconstructing 3 volumes of this leader’s wartime memoirs.

The lecture will be held at the FPRI library/offices at 1528 Walnut, a smaller venue around the corner from the Union League.  TAA students who are interested in attending should notify Mrs. Anthony; we will need to make reservations.

• Mr. Pat Devine, former TAA Board member, now an army chaplain, deployed on December 4.  Prayers are welcome! Our school has adopted an additional military man, Lt JG Garrett Moore, who is a Navy SEAL in California. Our other military adoptees are: Lt JG Matthew Anthony, deployed in early December to the Arabian Gulf, LCpl Jonathan Guelzo, Marines, and Cpl James Chun, Marines, and member of Antioch Presbyterian Church.
• Older students started a unit on Greek pottery in ceramics in early December at the Whitemarsh Community Art Center. We will study Greek pottery and produce our own, which shall be entered in the Philadelphia Classical Society Art competition in February.
• Special thanks to Mr. Tom Anderson for an enlightening discussion on John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  We celebrated Milton’s 400th birthday with a special birthday cake and a pencil with the Milton quote, “What is dark in me, illumine.” (We trust that students know that Milton also wrote Paradise Regained.)
• The final installment in the fall FPRI lecture series on the Middle East was Thursday, December 11, at the Union League.  The lecture was “U.S. Policy Toward the Middle East,” by one of our favorite speakers, Dr. Harvey Sicherman, President, Foreign Policy Research Institute. Mrs. Chagan prepared her world affairs student over the last several weeks on this important and timely subject.

On October 27th, Dr. James Kurth gave a lecture entitled What are We Fightin’ For? Western Civilization in the 21st Century for the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.  From the FPRI website:

James Kurth is the Claude Smith Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College, where he teaches defense policy, foreign policy, and international politics. Professor Kurth is the author of numerous articles and editor of two volumes in the fields of defense policy, foreign policy, international politics, and European politics. His recent publications have focused upon the interrelations between the global economy, cultural conflicts, foreign policy, and military strategy. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York) and of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London).

This was the inaugural Robert Carr Lecture on Western Civilization, made possible by a grant from FPRI trustee Robert E. Carr.

This is an excellent lecture by an accomplished scholar who is a friend of TAA.  Dr. Kurth emphasizes the importance of teaching the rich history and values of western civilization to our children, and laments that mainstream education has largely abandoned it.  Several members of the TAA community were in attendance, including Mrs. Lee Anthony, head of school.  During the lecture, Dr. Kurth twice singled out TAA as an example of the kind of education our society must promote if we hope to defend western civilization.  TAA is both thrilled and humbled to receive the endorsement of a scholar of Dr. Kurth’s stature.

FPRI posted the entire lecture available in streaming video format from its website.  Dr. Kurth mentions TAA and Mrs. Anthony twice, once at the 56 minute mark, and once at the 1:11 mark.

Throughout July, TAA students, faculty, and friends are attending exciting lectures at The Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Philadelphia offices. Upcoming topics are listed on FPRI’s site here and include:

Wednesday, July 9, 11-12 noon - Inside Pakistan: A Trip Report

Nicholas Schmidle, Fellow, New America Foundation

Nicholas Schmidle is a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, and a freelance writer whose work focuses on the intersection of culture, religion and politics in Asia. He has reported from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Central Asia and Iran, and his work has been published in Slate, New Republic, Washington Post and other publications. He lived in Pakistan as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs from February 2006 through January 2008, when he left under threat of deportation following the publication of his “Next-Gen Taliban” in the New York Times Magazine. He is now writing a book about his experience in Pakistan, to be published by Henry Holt.

Tuesday, July 22, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - The New National Defense Strategy

Thomas Mahnken, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning

Dr. Thomas G. Mahnken has served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning since November 2006. From 1997-2006, Dr. Mahnken was a Professor of Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, and from 2004-06 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He is author of Uncovering Ways of War: U.S. Intelligence and Foreign Military Innovation, 1918-1941 (Cornell, 2002). He is editor (with Emily O. Goldman) of The Information Revolution in Military Affairs in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and (with Richard K. Betts) of Paradoxes of Strategic Intelligence: Essays in Honor of Michael Handel (Frank Cass, 2003). As a Navy Reserve intelligence officer, he served with Naval Special Warfare unites in Iraq and Bahrain and was part of NATO’s initial deployment into Kosovo in 1999.

Wednesday, July 30, 11-12 noon - From Stone to Silicon: A Brief Survey of Technology and Inventions

Lawrence Husick, Senior Fellow, FPRI, and co-project director for FPRI’s project on Teaching Innovation

Lawrence Husick is a Senior Fellow at FPRI, where he has helped develop a project on Teaching the History of Innovation. He is also an adjunct professor in the Organizational Dynamics Masters Program of the University of Pennsylvania and at the Whiting Graduate School of Engineering of the Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Husick was co-founder and principal system architect of Infonautics Corporation (now HighBeam Research, Inc.), which offers the Electric Library on the World Wide Web, for which he has been awarded five U.S. patents. He serves as Chief Innovation Officer of TeraDisc, LLC, a pioneering company in the field of in silico drug research. He has been a consultant to both government and private organizations as a systems analyst and design engineer. Husick served as the Senior Legal Fellow of Apple Computer, Inc. for seven years.

On Thursday March 13, our older students were privileged to attend Dr. Walter McDougall’s spellbinding lecture at the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the Union League on his new book, Throes of Democracy: America in the Civil War Era, 1829–1877 (HarperCollins), sequel to McDougall’s Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585–1828.  Walter A. McDougall is Co-chair of FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers and Co-chair of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West. He is also the Allyn-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 1974 and is a veteran of the Vietnam War.

Last Monday, our students had the privilege of attending a lecture by George Weigel, entitled Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism. The lecture was sponsored by the Foreign Policy Research Institute and was given at the Union League of Philadelphia. George Weigel is a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. Mr. Weigel is very concerned about American “cultural self confidence,” and whether Americans know enough about our country to be convicted that the American system is worth preserving. Mr. Weigel was heard on Thursday being interviewed by WNTP radio host Dennis Prager, about the deplorable state of law in Britain where enclaves of muslim sharia law has been protected, including allowing “honor killings” of young women who do not wear the veil, etc.

On Monday, January 14, students from grades 7-12 attended a special Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) lecture, entitled Hizballah’s Military Strategy.  The lecture was presented by Andrew Exum of King’s College, London.  From the FPRI website:

Andrew Exum served in the US Army from 2000-04, leaving active duty as a captain. He was decorated for valor in 2002 while leading a platoon of light infantry in Afghanistan. Subsequently, he led a platoon of Army Rangers into Iraq in 2003 and into Afghanistan in 2004. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he has lived in Beirut, where he studied at the American University. He is author of This Man’s Army: A Soldier’s Story from the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism (Gotham, 2004).