The Aspen Institute

Session Themes

Challenge of Leadership: justice, courage, vulnerability, and integrity

Know Yourself: core values, purpose, responsibility and conviction, living a good life based on virtue

Community and Society: social good, community values, and social change

Power, Privilege, and Class: freedom, democracy, suppression, and oppression

Readings:

• “Dad to Son: ‘Live with Hands Unfolded…Release Your Gifts  to the World’”
• “2008 Election Night Victory Speech,” Barack Obama
• “Gettysburg Address,” Abraham Lincoln
• “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass
• Hamiliton: The Revolution, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter
• “Moon Speech (Rice Stadium)”, John F. Kennedy
• “40th Anniversary of D-Day,” Ronald Reagan
• Innovator’s DNA, Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton M. Christensen
• “Art of Conflict: Portraying American Indians, 1850-1900,” Hana Layson, Patricia Marroquin Norby
• “Father’s Memory of a Mexican Mining Camp,” Cindy Williams Gutierrez
• The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
• “Piecing Me  Together,” Renee Watson
• “We Are All Dreamers,” Pablo Stanley

Film:

• “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Adichie, TED, 2009
• “Hamilton’s America: Full Film,” PBS, 2016
• “Hidden Figures,” Theodore Melfi, 2017
• “13th,” Ava DuVernay, 2016

Music:

• Hamilton Original Broadway Cast Recording
• “Strange Fruit,” Nina Simone
• “The Blacker the Berry,” Kendrick Lamar