Magazine writer Dan Moskowitz has, for more than a decade, tapped his avocational interest in American popular music to lead study groups in the subject at the OLLIs at American University and George Mason. The Library of Congress maintains a national registry of recordings that show the "range and diversity of America," reaching from Edison recordings to the original cast album of Hamilton. We'll hear selections from the 600 titles now in the registry, discuss the role they played in shaping our country, and perhaps add a memory of the impact the piece had on our own lives. Each session will be devoted to a specific genre—pop, jazz, folk, classical, etc.—with the emphasis on recent additions to the registry.

Christina Fleps is a retired lawyer who has served as a docent at the National Gallery of Art and art lecturer at the Woman’s Club of Chevy Chase. This course examines Renaissance art from Giotto and Masaccio to Caravaggio and Gentileschi. Embarking from Byzantine icons, our Renaissance tour explores: how artists developed new techniques for realistic depiction of space, form, and emotion; how private powers like the Medici came to rival the Church as art patrons; and how artists changed from anonymous guild members to renowned "rock stars" like Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian.

Linda R. Freeman, PhD, retired after teaching for 15 years on the College Park campus as a University of Maryland lecturer in Victorian literature. She has also taught for Smithsonian Associates, Montgomery College, and for 26 years, at OLLI. This class will cover two well-known but totally different Hardy novels. Published in 1878, Far From the Madding Crowd was Hardy's first major literary success. Bathsheba Everdene, its brave, bold heroine, despite her confidence and high spirits, makes serious mistakes in love among the three men in her life before she finds true happiness. Sober and remorseful Michael Henchard, mayor in The Mayor of Casterbridge, is the hero of this flawed but tragic Hardy masterpiece of 1886. He makes one awful mistake as a young man and pays a high emotional price for it throughout the novel in terms almost as dire as those of classical Greek drama. Some of Hardy's engaging poetry will be read throughout as forms of relief.