Lifelong Learning

Programs begin Mondays at 4 p.m., in the Assembly Room.

World War II: Up Close and Personal

World War II was one of the defining moments in modern history, a global conflagration that transformed the world through battles, shifting alliances and horrors unlike anything in recorded history. The story of the war is often told as a series of great campaigns by famous generals, dramatic turning points and cataclysmic combat. But what about the millions of ordinary people — the citizens and soldiers whose names most of us don’t know but whose impact rippled through every aspect of the war?

Sept. 5

The Captured and Pursued in the Philippines

We have all heard about the horrors of the Bataan Death March and the internment camp in Manila after the invasion by the Japanese. Here, we present first-hand accounts.

The U.S. Home Front as a Secret Weapon

This episode deals with the American manufacturing dynamo with an abundance of natural resources. Advances in science flooded the world with the production of aircraft, tanks, etc.

Sept. 12

Masters of Death in Nazi Concentration Camps

This is a very hard lecture to watch. We see how an ordinary businessman profited from the camps and how a policeman became the commandant of Treblinka.

A “Red Tolstoy’s” Vision at Stalingrad

A Russian writer emulating Leo Tolstoy writes of the fighting in the streets from house to house and accounts of the Red Army pushing the Germans back to Berlin.

Sept. 19

The Bomber Will Always Get Through

We see a history of the U.S. bombing of Japanese aircraft carriers in the Pacific and in Romania, as well as the bombing of oil refineries and devastation in Dresden.

“The Tuskegee Airmen and ‘The Experiment”

The segregation before the war slowly began to crack the military’s wall of discrimination.

Sept. 26

Panzer Leaders Who Changed the War

With the innovation of German tanks, we see how new technology defeated the old ways of war.

A Child and a Pilot in the London Blitz

We see the Blitz through the eyes of a Jewish child from the East End of London, a bureaucrat performing mundane tasks and an Oxford student flying against the Luftwaffe.