Learning From the Roman Empire: Are We Repeating Their Rise and Decline?

Virtual Lecture | This class is completed

FIU Biscayne Bay Campus 3000 NE 151st Street, ACI-224 North Miami, FL 33181-3000 United States

Virtual

Learning From the Roman Empire: Are We Repeating Their Rise and Decline?

4/20/2021 (one day)

1:00 PM-2:30 PM EDT on Tue

Download iCalendar

Join One Day University and OLLI at FIU for this free recorded lecture followed by live, virtual Q&A with the professor. This free event is open to members and non-members.

The rise and fall of ancient Rome is one of the greatest stories in the history of the world. From a group of settlements huddled along the Tiber in Italy, Rome rose to conquer much of the Mediterranean world and Europe. At the height of the Roman Empire, one in every five people in the world lived within its territory.

For Americans, Rome's unlikely ascent, spectacular ambitions, and gruesome decline have provided endless fuel for our national self-examination. Is the United States an empire? Are empires good or bad? What makes great civilizations decline and fall—and how can America avoid that fate? This talk will explore the great American question—"Are We Rome?"—and show why this ancient empire continues to fascinate our very modern nation.

  • Delivered virtually via Zoom.
  • This is a 45-minute pre-recorded lecture followed by live, virtual Q&A with the professor. OLLI at FIU and One Day University are collaboratively hosting this event. It is open to members and non-members who register in advance.

Caroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and Professor by courtesy of Classics. She specializes in American history before 1900, especially the history of ideas, political thought, material culture, and the history of science. She is currently writing a book on the history of deep time in America, to be published by Princeton University Press. She teaches classes on American history until 1900, including American cultural and intellectual history, the American Enlightenment, the history of science, and the trans-Atlantic contexts of American thought. She is the author of five books, including most recently Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era (Chicago, 2020), edited with her Stanford colleague Karen Wigen. Assembling a group of distinguished historians, cartographers, and art historians, the book shows how maps around the world for the last 500 years have ingeniously handled time in the spatial medium of maps. Her book American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (Yale, 2016), showed how early Americans grappled with the promises of the Enlightenment – how they used new questions about the plants, animals, rocks, politics, religions and peoples of the New World to imagine a new relationship between the present and the past, and to spur far-flung conversations about a better future for all of humanity. Earlier books and articles have explored America's long tradition of looking at the ancient classical world for political, artistic, and cultural inspiration. She received an American Ingenuity Award from the Smithsonian Institution for mapping the social network of Benjamin Franklin.