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I shall post videos, graphs, news stories, and other material there. We shall use some of this material in class, and you may review the rest at your convenience. You will all receive invitations to post to the blog. (Please let me know if you do not get such an invitation.) I encourage you to use the blog in these ways:
To post questions or comments about the readings before we discuss them in class;
To follow up on class discussions with additional comments or questions.
To post relevant news items or videos.

There are only two major limitations: no coarse language, and no derogatory comments about people at the Claremont Colleges.


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Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Profile in Courage

You may have noticed that all the profiles in Profiles in Courage are of men.

Next week, I will assign your last paper, but here is an one option.  Do a profile of a courageous woman in Congress.  Indeed, if you are pondering senior thesis topics for next year, you could consider developing the idea at greater length.

Last month, Time featured the late Margaret Chase Smith:
On June 1, 1950, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith—then the only woman in the U.S. Senate—stood before the world’s greatest deliberative body and confronted a fellow Republican, Senator Joseph McCarthy, over his destructive witch hunt for American communists.
Her “Declaration of Conscience” should be remembered as one of the seminal addresses in the history of the Senate. Americans, she said, possess “the right to hold unpopular beliefs.” They also have a “right to protest” and a “right of independent thought.” Moreover, “The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood, nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs.”

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