Upcoming Events

Man Up? The Culture Wars Behind America's Favorite Sport

Is football making men—or breaking them? Throughout the 20th century, American football was more than a game; it became a cultural battleground for defining masculinity. This event explores how debates over football's physicality, violence, and moral value reflected broader tensions about what it means to be a man in America. Was the sport a proving ground for courage and character—or a dangerous relic of outdated ideals? From locker rooms to living rooms, the contest over football's place in American culture reveals the evolving story of masculine identity, and the powerful role sports play in shaping our collective values and symbols.

Speaker Bio: John Rochford is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University. His primary interest involves exploring martial masculinity and the relationship/s, continuities, and discontinuities between affect, masculine ideology, and masculine behavior in the context of soldiering in wartime.

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Bottled Up - Past, Present, & Future of Recycling in America

We will explore how the recycling systems in America are broken. Many of us struggle to think about what to do with our waste. Focusing on beverage containers, we'll take a deep dive into the past as we think about future solutions to our growing waste problems. Along the way we'll learn the history of Coca-Cola and what that companies past can teach us about creating a more eco-conscious economy in the future.

Speaker Bio: Bart Elmore is professor of environmental history and core faculty member of the Sustainability Institute at Ohio State University. He is an award-winning author of three books, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (W. W. Norton, 2014), Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future (W. W. Norton, 2021), and Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet (Ferris & Ferris, 2023). In 2022, he was honored with the Dan David Prize, the world's largest history prize.