Chautauqua Institution's Department of Education has announced the following Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selections for 2022:

Erica Chenoweth Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know
Week Three — “The Future of Human Rights” 3:30 p.m. Thursday, July 14, 2022 – Hall of Philosophy

In Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, Erica Chenoweth — one of the world's leading scholars on the topic — explains what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance. Featuring both historical cases of civil resistance and more contemporary examples such as the Arab Awakenings and various ongoing movements in the United States, this book provides a comprehensive yet pithy overview of this enormously important subject.

Erica Chenoweth is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. At Harvard, they direct the Nonviolent Action Lab, an innovation hub that provides empirical evidence in support of movement-led political transformation. Chenoweth has authored or edited nine books and dozens of articles on mass movements, nonviolent resistance, political violence, revolutions and state repression. Their work has been honored with the 2013 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, the 2012 best book award from the American Political Science Association, and the Karl Deutsch Award, which the International Studies Association gives annually to the scholar under 40 who has made the greatest impact on the field of international politics or peace research. They hold a Ph.D. and an M.A. in political science from the University of Colorado and a B.A. in political science and German from the University of Dayton. 

Ryan Busse Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America
Week Eight — “New Profiles in Courage” 3:30 p.m. Thursday, August 18, 2022 – Hall of Philosophy

For 30 years, Ryan Busse chased his childhood dream and built a successful career selling millions of firearms for one of America’s most popular gun companies. He is an avid hunter, outdoorsman, and conservationist — all things that the firearms industry was built on.

In Gunfight, Busse argues that the gun industry has abandoned its self-imposed decency in favor of hardline conservatism and McCarthyesque internal policing, sowing irreparable division in our politics and society. America's gun industry has shifted from prioritizing safety and ethics to one that is addicted to fear, conspiracy, intolerance, and secrecy. He recounts his personal transformation and shows how authoritarianism spreads in the guise of freedom, how voicing one's conscience becomes an act of treason in a culture that demands sameness and loyalty. 

Ryan Busse is a former firearms executive who helped build one of the world’s most iconic gun companies and was nominated multiple times by industry colleagues for the prestigious Shooting Industry Person of The Year Award. Busse is an environmental advocate who served in many leadership roles for conservation organizations, including as an advisor for the United States Senate Sportsmen’s Caucus and the Biden Presidential Campaign. He remains a proud outdoorsman, gun owner, father, and resident of Montana.

Sleigh/Wagon rides will again be offered at Chautauqua Institution this winter.  Provided by the Stateline Draft Horse Club of southwestern New York and northwestern Pennsylvania, these tours of the Chautauqua Institution grounds are a popular wintertime tradition. Tickets must be purchased in person at the Chautauqua Bookstore, and rides load and unload in the adjacent parking lot.

The expected schedule is:

Sunday December 19th
Sunday December 26th
Every Saturday and Sunday from January 1st - February 27th

First ride at 1 pm, last ride at 3 pm
Rides leave roughly every half hour.

$6 Adult, $4 Child

All ticket sales are first come, first served on the day-of; no reservations.  We will begin selling tickets only after we have been able to confirm rides for the day; for the safety of the horses, rides may be cancelled due to weather or road conditions.

We look forward to seeing you!

Ward off the chill with our newly arrived and newly restocked cold-weather items.

The Department of Education has announced Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond as the 2022 Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection for Week Seven: “More Than Shelter: Redefining the American Home.”  We are so pleased Desmond will be joining us Tuesday, August 9, 2022 for a dual Chautauqua Lecture Series and Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle presentation.

MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City draws on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data to transform our understanding of inequity and economic exploitation in America. In addition to the Pulitzer, Evicted — a landmark work of scholarship and reportage — won the National Books Critics Circle Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, the Heartland Prize, and more, and was named one of the Best Books of 2016 by nearly three dozen media outlets. In 2018, he received the Stowe Prize for Writing to Advance Social Justice, awarded by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center to authors whose work shines a light on critical social issues. Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also the founder and principal investigator of the Eviction Lab, which in 2018 published the first-ever national dataset of evictions in America, collecting millions of data points going back to 2000. 

Desmond is a former member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and was formerly the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He is also the author of the award-winning book On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters, the coauthor of two books on race, and the editor of a collection of studies on severe deprivation in America. His work has been supported by the Ford, Russell Sage, and National Science Foundations.  

Desmond received his Bachelor of Science degree in communications and justice studies from Arizona State University and his doctorate in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Check out some of our boxed sets -- there's something for everyone. What could be better? (Or easier to wrap!)

Chautauqua Literary Arts has announced Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson as the 2022 Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection for Week Four: The Future of History. We are thrilled Wilkerson will join us on Thursday July 21, 2022 for a dual CLS and CLSC presentation.

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.  Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller & previous CLSC selection The Warmth of Other Suns. Her debut work won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s and The New York Times’s list of the Best Nonfiction of All Time. She has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.

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