This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to debates about the ways professional and amateur sports are both shaped by and shape society. We will read articles on the history of baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, and the Olympics. We will discuss sports as both entertainment and businesses, and analyze how issues in American society are often reflected in sports. We will consider the question of whether or not sports lead the way in social change or lag it.

Career and happiness sound like mutually exclusive life goals. However, according to David Starr Jordan, founding president of Stanford University, they are inseparable from each other: ?There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living.? This statement is the opening quote of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the most influential self-help books in history. This class will use the concepts discussed in The 7 Habits and The Analects (by Confucius) to explore career, happiness, stages of personal development, and other related topics.

Positive psychology is the study of well-being and flourishing. This course will teach concepts and practices backed by scientific research that students can apply directly to their lives in college and beyond. Methods of positive psychology can be applied to enhance professional accomplishment and personal happiness. Research also shows that people learn effectively and exhibit marked creativity in situations where there is substantial autonomy and real-world relevance. Coursework activities will center on personal application of the subject through action and reflection.

This seminar reviews social and economic developments in U.S. history traditionally understood within local, regional, or national frameworks from a supranational perspective. Readings and discussion track the uneven, gradual, and contested development of work processes, labor relations, classes, and economic life in the late nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S.

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This class will place this year's Common Read selection, Piper Kerman?s Orange is the New Black, in the context of major works by US prison authors. To help the class consider in more depth how incarcerated US writers have represented their lived experience, throughout the semester I will provide short excerpts of work by prisoners including Angela Davis, Jean Harris, Kim Wozencraft, and Malcolm X that relate to our two central texts, Orange is the New Black and On the Yard (1967).

As any journal-keeper, or blogger, knows, writing can be a good way to work through major changes in your life. And starting college is a major change! For most of you, you?ll be leaving home for the first time in your life, moving into a dorm with hundreds of strangers, and beginning a phase of your education that will be more demanding, and more dependent on your own initiative, than ever before.

This is an opportunity to be engaged in discussing, reading, thinking through some pertinent themes, and contemporary issues linked to the `common read? Orange is the New Black. Spend this time part?nering with each other, and using your own competencies for critical engagement with the book. You will be delighted with the outcomes.

The Pioneer Valley is a hotbed for prison abolition activism -- a movement that seeks not only to improve conditions for prisoners but to dismantle the ?prison-industrial complex? that many argue continues the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In this course, we will analyze writings, hip-hop music, and art produced by prisoners and prison abolitionists, discuss their perspectives on race, class, gender, and sexuality in the prison system, and debate their tactics.