Courses

French, Tense by Tense: the Curb Appeall Story

Learn to speak French by following one continuous story about Curb Appeall and friends learning healthy-living and money habits. Each unit teaches one tense (present, near future, passé composé, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive) and ends with a conversation challenge so you produce the language yourself.

Italian, Tense by Tense: the Curb Appeall Story

Learn to speak Italian by following one continuous story about Curb Appeall and friends learning healthy-living and money habits. Each unit teaches one tense (present, present progressive, passato prossimo, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive) and ends with a conversation challenge so you produce the language yourself.

Portuguese, Tense by Tense: the Curb Appeall Story

Learn to speak Brazilian Portuguese by following one continuous story about Curb Appeall and friends learning healthy-living and money habits. Each unit teaches one tense (present, near future, preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive) and ends with a conversation challenge so you produce the language yourself.

Spanish, Tense by Tense: the Curb Appeall Story

Learn to speak Spanish by following one continuous story about Curb Appeall and friends learning healthy-living and money habits. Each unit teaches one tense (present, near future, preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive) and ends with a conversation challenge so you produce the language yourself.

FAA Part 107: Pass the Remote Pilot Exam

An audio-first course to earn your commercial drone license. Learn the knowledge behind the FAA Part 107 rules, module by module, then pass the written test. Some questions reference the official FAA figure supplement (FAA-CT-8080-2H) the test uses, so keep it handy for those. Connects to FlyWitUS for pre-flight checklists and flight records.

Education Leadership: A Self-Study Doctoral Equivalent (Ed.L.D.)

A rigorous, self-directed program modeled on the Harvard Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.). You read the primary sources behind the idea of learning beyond schools (Illich, Klinenberg, Ito), study the real places that have built it, stress-test the public-finance case, and then defend your own design against the questions a dissertation committee would actually ask. The goal is not praise; it is an argument strong enough to survive city councils, unions, and skeptics.

Alabama Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Alabama governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Alabama's constitution is famous for one thing: length. Its 1901 constitution grew into the LONGEST constitution in the world (hundreds of thousands of words and hundreds of amendments), largely because power was centralized in Montgomery and even local matters required statewide amendments. In 2022, voters approved a recompiled 'Constitution of Alabama 2022.' You'll learn why Alabama's constitution is so long, its weak-home-rule tradition, its large plural executive, its Legislature of 35 senators and 105 representatives, its PARTISAN elected judiciary, and its 67 counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.alabama.gov. Cited to Alabama's own official sources (legislature.state.al.us, sos.alabama.gov, judicial.alabama.gov).

Alaska Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Alaska governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Alaska is unlike any other state: it uses BOROUGHS instead of counties, and most of its vast area lies in a single 'Unorganized Borough' with no local government at all; it elects officials through a 'top-four' open primary followed by a ranked-choice general election; and it pays residents an annual Permanent Fund Dividend from its oil-wealth savings, while collecting NO state income tax and NO statewide sales tax. You'll learn Alaska's modern Constitution of 1959, its strong governor and small executive, its Legislature of 20 senators and 40 representatives, its merit-selection judiciary, and its powerful citizen initiative. Time-sensitive facts (the voting system, the dividend) are flagged, pointing to elections.alaska.gov. Cited to Alaska's own official sources (akleg.gov, elections.alaska.gov, courts.alaska.gov).

Arizona Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Arizona governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Arizona's constitution (drafted 1910, statehood February 14, 1912) and its unusually strong direct democracy: citizen initiative, referendum, and recall built right in; the three state branches; how a bill becomes an Arizona law in a legislature of 30 senators and 60 representatives elected from 30 shared districts; local government across Arizona's 15 counties (Arizona has NO townships); and Arizona's elections: the Active Early Voting List, merit-selected judges in large counties, and the Voter Protection Act (Prop 105, 1998) that shields voter-passed initiatives from the legislature. It closes on how to get involved where you live. A prominent, flagged lesson covers a change IN PROGRESS: Arizona historically had no Lieutenant Governor, but Proposition 131 (2022) creates one beginning with the 2026 election cycle, so the course tells you to confirm the current status at azsos.gov / azleg.gov. Cited to Arizona's own official sources (azleg.gov, azsos.gov, azcourts.gov).

Arkansas Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Arkansas governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Arkansas's 1874 constitution and its 100-plus amendments; the citizen initiative & referendum added by Amendment 7 (1920); the three branches, including SEVEN separately-elected executive officers (with a separately-elected Lieutenant Governor) and a nonpartisan-ELECTED Supreme Court (Amendment 80, 2001) rather than merit selection; how a bill becomes an Arkansas law in a General Assembly of a 35-member Senate and a 100-member House, where a veto is overridden by a SIMPLE majority; local government across Arkansas's 75 counties (a county judge plus a quorum court of justices of the peace; no townships); and Arkansas's elections: photo ID, no-excuse early voting, excuse-required mail voting, and a 30-day registration deadline. It closes on how to get involved. Cited to Arkansas's own official sources (arkleg.state.ar.us, sos.arkansas.gov, arcourts.gov). Because state facts vary and change, the course flags that Arkansas's initiative rules were recently tightened and remain in flux, and points you to the Secretary of State's current handbook rather than asserting fixed signature-distribution rules.

California Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of California governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn California's 1879 constitution (one of the longest and most-amended in the nation) and its powerful tools of DIRECT DEMOCRACY: the initiative, referendum, and recall added in the 1911 Progressive era; the three state branches, including a plural executive of separately-elected constitutional officers (the Lieutenant Governor is elected independently, not on a ticket with the Governor); the 120-seat Legislature (an 80-member Assembly and a 40-member Senate); and the courts (a 7-justice Supreme Court, Courts of Appeal, and Superior Courts in all 58 counties), whose appellate justices are appointed and then confirmed by voters in retention elections. You'll learn how a bill becomes a California law (including the Governor's line-item veto and the two-thirds override) and California's local government (58 counties, charter vs. general-law cities, thousands of special districts, and NO townships). Finally you'll learn California's distinctive elections rules (automatic and same-day registration, a ballot mailed to every active voter, the top-two primary, and the citizen initiative) before a lesson on how to get involved. Cited to California's own official sources (leginfo.legislature.ca.gov, sos.ca.gov, courts.ca.gov). Because state facts vary and change, the course flags time-sensitive items (like turnout-dependent initiative signature thresholds and judicial retention timing) and points you to California's own sources to confirm the current rule.

Capstone: Choose a Form and Defend It

The final course of the 'How a Business Is Formed' path, and its graded capstone. It is not legal, tax, or financial advice, and it says so throughout, including inside the assignment: it teaches you what to ASK a lawyer or accountant, not the answer for your situation. This course does not teach a new form. It teaches you to REASON: given a real scenario, read it into the four decisions (who pays the debts, who pays the tax, who owns it and how ownership moves, and who decides), choose a plausible form, and defend that choice against all four decisions and against one specific alternative you rejected. It pulls the whole path together, the four decisions and the formation documents from course 1, the US forms and the S-corp-as-a-tax-election from course 2, cooperatives and one member one vote from course 3, the invent-an-entity story of financing without access from course 4, the foreign forms from course 5, and governance from course 6. You will work three or four scenarios end to end, a solo freelancer, a founder raising venture money, a worker collective, and a community nonprofit, watching the trade-offs and the honest 'it depends' at each step, without asserting a single invented statute, rate, or fee. Then the graded capstone asks you to do it yourself: pick a scenario, name a form, and defend it against the four and against a named alternative, to a rubric. You are not proving you know the one right answer. You are proving you know the questions.

Capstone: Map Your Own Stack

The capstone of the path, and its last course. You have learned the method (find the body, its enabling authority, the document that grants it, and who can overturn it), the middle layer of states and provinces, the local layer of cities and the special districts that outnumber them, tribal nations as a separate sovereign, and the governments that exist without a state at all. Now you put the whole toolkit to work on the one place you know best: the block you live on. This course teaches you where each layer's PRIMARY RECORD actually lives, the state constitution and its statutes, the county or city charter, the special district's enabling act and the assessor and elections offices, tribal jurisdiction, and an HOA's recorded covenants, and how to find the document for each. Then it sets the graded capstone: document every government with authority over your block, cite the primary record for each, and note which ones surprised you. Most people find six to twelve, and are surprised by half. It closes with a rubric you grade yourself against. This course teaches how to READ authority. It is not legal advice, and it never asks you to publish anyone's private address or parcel data, including your own.

Citizenship & Naturalization Basics

A clear, non-partisan guide to U.S. citizenship: who is a citizen at birth (birthright and through parents), how the naturalization process works step by step, what the civics and English test cover, the Oath of Allegiance, and the rights and responsibilities that come with citizenship. Cited to USCIS, the National Archives, and Congress.gov. Rules and fees change, this course teaches how the system works and where to confirm current requirements, and takes no position on immigration policy.

Colorado Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Colorado governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Colorado's Constitution of 1876; its strong direct democracy (initiative, referendum, recall); the three state branches; how a bill becomes a Colorado law in a General Assembly of 35 senators and 65 representatives; how Colorado picks judges by merit selection plus retention elections; and Colorado's signature feature, the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR), which requires VOTER approval for tax increases and caps state revenue, refunding the excess. It also covers Colorado's all-mail elections and its independent redistricting commissions, flagging TABOR's evolving mechanics and pointing to sos.state.co.us. Cited to Colorado's own official sources (leg.colorado.gov, sos.state.co.us, coloradojudicial.gov).

Connecticut Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Connecticut governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Connecticut is 'The Constitution State,' a nickname honoring its 1639 Fundamental Orders, often called the first written constitution to frame a government. It is also one of the few states that ABOLISHED county government entirely (in 1960): Connecticut has no county governments at all. Its 169 towns and the state do everything. You'll learn Connecticut's Constitution of 1965, its plural executive, its General Assembly of 36 senators and 151 representatives, how the Legislature appoints its judges, and its town-based local government. It also notes Connecticut recently added early voting. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to the Secretary of the State. Cited to Connecticut's own official sources (cga.ct.gov, portal.ct.gov/sots, jud.ct.gov).

Cooperatives

A cited, high-school-and-up course on the business form most people have used without ever reading: the cooperative. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and it says so throughout. The organizing idea is one line, and the whole course is a consequence of it: a cooperative answers the ownership and governance questions with ONE MEMBER, ONE VOTE, not one share, one vote, which makes capital the servant of the members rather than their master. You will read the co-op against the four decisions from course 1 (liability, taxation, ownership and transfer, governance), then meet the Rochdale Pioneers who opened a store in 1844 and left behind the principles the world still uses, codified today as the seven cooperative principles of the International Co-operative Alliance. You will learn the five main types, worker, consumer, producer, housing and purchasing, and then study three worked cases that prove the form is not a curiosity: Mondragon, one of the largest worker cooperatives in the world, and the honest debate about whether it still lives up to its ideals; the rural electric cooperatives that, under the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, brought power to an America the private utilities would not serve; and the credit union, a financial cooperative built under the Federal Credit Union Act of 1934 that a large share of Americans belong to without thinking of it as a co-op at all. The last section takes on the money and governance question head on: how a co-op shares surplus through patronage dividends, why raising member capital is its hardest problem, and how the whole structure can be reversed through demutualization, the same move the building societies made in the financing course. The capstone asks you to design a cooperative for a real scenario and defend its member governance against a plain corporation, in the language of the four decisions. Where accounts disagree, this course teaches the disagreement rather than smoothing it over.

Delaware Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Delaware governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Delaware, 'The First State' to ratify the U.S. Constitution, has two features found nowhere else: it is the ONLY state that can amend its constitution WITHOUT a public vote (the Legislature does it alone), and it is the corporate capital of America, home to the famous Court of Chancery where most of the nation's big companies settle their business disputes. You'll learn Delaware's Constitution of 1897, its plural executive, its General Assembly of 21 senators and 41 representatives, its politically balanced appointed judiciary, and its three counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to elections.delaware.gov. Cited to Delaware's own official sources (legis.delaware.gov, elections.delaware.gov, courts.delaware.gov).

District of Columbia Civics: How Your Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the District of Columbia governs itself, and why it is different from a state. DC is NOT a state; it is a FEDERAL DISTRICT created by the U.S. Constitution as the seat of the national government, and Congress holds ultimate authority over it. You'll learn how the Home Rule Act of 1973 gave DC an elected Mayor and Council; why DC has no voting representation in Congress (only a non-voting Delegate) yet gets three electoral votes for President under the 23rd Amendment; how its distinctive Advisory Neighborhood Commissions work; how its judges are appointed by the U.S. President; and the ongoing DC statehood debate. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to dccouncil.gov and dcboe.gov. Cited to DC's own official sources and the U.S. Constitution.

Financing Without Access

A cited, high-school-and-up course on the oldest problem in business: how do you finance anything when the credit system will not have you? It is not legal, tax, financial or religious advice, and it says so throughout. The through-line is a single idea, tested across the world: when the capital system excludes you, you invent an entity. You will meet the fraternal benefit society and the friendly society, the burial club and industrial insurance, the building and loan association that carried excluded families into homeownership, the rotating savings and credit association that runs under a dozen names on six continents (susu, tanda, chit fund, hui, kye, ekub, tontine), and the structures of Islamic finance that finance real things without charging interest at all (murabaha, ijara, mudaraba, musharaka, sukuk, takaful). This is the general case of which the shipped course 'What They Built' is a worked example, where fraternal orders and building-and-loans turned out to be entity choices, and it extends the method of course 1, 'What a Business Entity Actually Is': every one of these is a different answer to the four decisions. Along the way you will learn to read any financing workaround the same way, by asking which door was closed, what pool replaced it, and who bears the risk. The capstone asks you to document one real financing-without-access institution and show how its entity choice fit its constraint. Where accounts disagree, this course teaches the disagreement rather than smoothing it over.

Florida Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Florida governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Florida's 1968-revision constitution and its unusually many ways to amend it, including the once-every-20-years Constitution Revision Commission that can place proposals straight on the ballot, and the citizen-initiative petition, where any amendment now needs 60% of the vote to pass; the three branches, including Florida's distinctive plural executive (a Governor plus a separately-elected Cabinet: Attorney General, Chief Financial Officer, and Commissioner of Agriculture); how a bill becomes a Florida law in a 120-member House and 40-member Senate, with a two-thirds veto override; local government across Florida's 67 counties (charter vs. non-charter) and its municipalities: Florida has NO townships; and Florida's elections rules: closed primaries, voter ID, and vote-by-mail rules that were tightened in 2021 to 2022. It closes on how to get involved where you live. Cited to Florida's own official sources (leg.state.fl.us, flsenate.gov, dos.fl.gov, flcourts.gov, and the Florida Constitution). Because state facts vary and change, the course flags time-sensitive items, like the recently tightened mail-ballot rules and the 60% amendment threshold added in 2006, and points you to Florida's own sources to confirm the current rule.

Forms of Government, Honestly

A course about the labels we put on governments, and why sorting the world's states into 'democracy,' 'autocracy,' 'monarchy,' or 'republic' is a contested argument, not a vocabulary quiz. It is course 2 of the path whose method course, Who Has the Power to Do This?, taught you to read authority from the primary record. Here you learn the classical forms and what they actually mean (democracy, republic, monarchy, autocracy, oligarchy, theocracy), and then the harder and more useful skill: how to read a classification critically. The heart of the course is that the four major measurement projects, V-Dem at the University of Gothenburg, the Polity project, Freedom House, and the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index, rank the same countries differently, on published methodologies, because they define democracy differently and measure different things. You will learn what each project measures, who codes it, and the four reasons their rankings diverge, especially for the hard cases in the middle: hybrid regimes, competitive authoritarianism, one-party states, and constitutional monarchies that are functionally democracies. It closes with a map of who measures democracy and from where, and a capstone: classify one real country by two different indices and explain the gap between them from the published methodologies. The course never asserts a country's current score from memory; it teaches you to read the current report yourself.

Georgia Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Georgia governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Georgia's 1983 constitution (the most recent of the state's several constitutions) and why Georgia has NO citizen initiative: constitutional amendments are proposed by the General Assembly (a two-thirds vote of each house) and then ratified by voters. You'll learn the three state branches: a plural executive of separately-elected constitutional officers (the Lieutenant Governor is elected on their own, not on a ticket with the Governor, and presides over the Senate), plus the Attorney General, Secretary of State, and several commissioners; the 236-seat General Assembly (a 180-member House and a 56-member Senate); and the courts (a 9-justice Supreme Court and a 15-judge Court of Appeals whose members are chosen in NONPARTISAN statewide elections). You'll learn how a bill becomes a Georgia law (including the Governor's veto and the two-thirds override) and Georgia's local government: 159 counties (the SECOND-MOST of any state, after Texas), home rule, consolidated city-county governments like Athens-Clarke and Columbus-Muscogee, and NO townships. Finally you'll learn Georgia's distinctive elections rules: photo ID, in-person early voting, no-excuse absentee-by-mail (with the recent SB 202 changes), and the MAJORITY-VOTE RUNOFF system that sends the top two to a second election when no one wins outright, before a lesson on how to get involved. Cited to Georgia's own official sources (legis.ga.gov, sos.ga.gov, gasupreme.us / georgiacourts.gov, and the 1983 Constitution). Because state facts vary and change, the course flags time-sensitive items (like the recent SB 202 election-law changes and current ID/deadline rules) and points you to Georgia's own sources to confirm the current rule.

Governance: Who Actually Decides

A cited, high-school-and-up course on corporate and organizational governance, and the sixth course in the 'How a Business Is Formed' path. It is not legal or financial advice, and it says so throughout: it teaches you what to ASK a lawyer or a governance professional, not the answer for a real company or a real investment. Course 1 taught that any entity is a bundle of four decisions, and governance was the fourth: who gets to decide? This course takes that one decision to its depth. The spine is the gap between OWNING a business and DECIDING for it. In a large company the owners are many and scattered, and the people who actually run it are few, so governance is the set of devices that keep the deciders answerable to the owners. You will learn what a board of directors is and does, how directors are elected, why independent directors and board committees exist, and the long argument over whose interests a company serves: shareholders alone, or a wider set of stakeholders. You will learn fiduciary duty, the highest obligation the law puts on a director, split into the duty of care (protected by the business judgment rule) and the duty of loyalty (which conflicts of interest test). You will see how founders concentrate control through dual-class, super-voting shares, and how other systems answer the same question differently: the German two-tier board with worker codetermination, the cooperative's one member one vote, and the nonprofit board that answers to a mission rather than to owners. The capstone asks you to read a real governance structure, say who actually decides, and find where a minority owner's protection comes from.

Governments Without States

Course 7 of the path whose method course, Who Has the Power to Do This?, taught the four questions (who acted, under what authority, where the power comes from, who can overturn it) and the vertical stack of national and subnational government. This course is about the authority that stack leaves out: governance that happens in bodies that are NOT sovereign states. It opens with the question underneath the whole subject, what even makes a state a state, teaching the Montevideo Convention's four criteria (1933) and the long argument between the declarative and constitutive theories of recognition. Then it climbs above the state to the supranational bodies: the European Union, which is neither a country nor an ordinary treaty organization but its own autonomous legal order (Van Gend en Loos, 1963; Costa v ENEL, 1964); the United Nations, an organization of sovereign equals rather than a world government (UN Charter, 1945); and the African Union (2002), successor to the OAU. Then it turns to the hardest case, unrecognised and contested states, taught neutrally: the course describes the recognition disagreement, attributes each claim, reports the documented facts, and does not adjudicate anyone's status. Finally it comes down BELOW the state to self-governing communities, the homeowners association that governs by covenant, the housing co-op that governs by membership, the union that governs by collective bargaining, and the mutual-aid network that governs by voluntary agreement, which is the hand-off to the business path, because each holds its power through an entity and an instrument rather than through sovereignty. It closes with a capstone: find a body with real authority over someone that is not a sovereign state, and map where its power comes from. This course teaches how to read authority. It is not legal advice, and it does not take sides in any sovereignty dispute.

Hawaii Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Hawaii governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Hawaii runs the most CENTRALIZED government of any state: it has just FOUR counties and essentially NO city or town governments below them, and it is the ONLY state with a single, statewide school system (no local school districts). You'll learn Hawaii's Constitution of 1959, its executive, its Legislature of 25 senators and 51 representatives, its merit-selected judiciary (where a commission, not voters, decides retention), the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, and Hawaii's status as the only state with an official second language (Hawaiian). It also runs elections entirely by mail. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to elections.hawaii.gov. Cited to Hawaii's own official sources (capitol.hawaii.gov, elections.hawaii.gov, courts.state.hi.us).

How Countries Constitute Themselves

The course about the constitution itself: the document course 1 kept walking the chain of authority up to, and the machinery every country builds to say who holds power and how it is limited. It is course 3 of the path whose method course, Who Has the Power to Do This?, already taught the four questions and the vertical stack, and it treats that course as its prerequisite. You will learn to read any constitution on three axes. The first is the horizontal question: who holds executive power, and how is it linked to the legislature? That is the difference between a parliamentary system (where the executive sits in the legislature and survives on its confidence), a presidential system (where a separately elected president holds executive power for a fixed term), and a semi-presidential system (a president and a prime minister at once), and you will learn the trade-offs and the genuine scholarly fight over whether presidentialism is more fragile and whether semi-presidential is even a coherent category. The second axis is territorial: federal or unitary. The third is the form: codified into one written document or uncodified and scattered, as in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Israel, and rigid or flexible to amend. Then the course turns to how constitutions are actually made, taught through four real cases on four routes: the United States in 1787 by a convention that then had to be ratified, South Africa in 1996 by a negotiated transition a court had to certify, Japan in 1947 by a text the occupying power largely wrote, and Germany in 1949 by Germans drafting at home inside limits the Allies set. It closes with a world map of constitutional systems and a capstone: trace how one real constitution was made and classify its system from the primary documents. This course teaches how to read authority. It is not legal advice.

How Other Countries Form Businesses

A cited, high-school-and-up tour of how businesses are formed outside the United States, and the fifth course in the 'How a Business Is Formed' path. It is not legal or tax advice, and it says so throughout, doubly so for foreign law you cannot casually check: it teaches you what to ASK a professional, not the answer for your situation. Course 1 gave you the method, that any entity is a bundle of FOUR decisions (who pays the debts, who pays the tax, who owns it and how ownership moves, and who decides), and course 2 walked the US menu as the baseline. This course carries the same four questions abroad to prove the one thing the US baseline cannot: the American set of forms is not universal. You will read the United Kingdom's private limited company, public limited company, and the community interest company with its asset lock; Germany's GmbH and AG, their two-tier board, and Mitbestimmung, the mandatory worker representation on the supervisory boards of large companies that connects straight to the unions track; France's rigid SARL and flexible SAS; Japan's kabushiki kaisha; the Nordic countries, where the one-member-one-vote cooperative the US treats as niche is a mainstream, mass-membership institution; China's state-owned enterprises and the VIE structure, a contractual workaround of contested legality that is not an entity type at all; and India's private limited company and its Section 8 not-for-profit company. Every difference is read as a policy choice with consequences, not an accident of translation, and where a form's legal standing is genuinely debated, the VIE above all, the course teaches the uncertainty rather than faking an answer. The capstone asks you to match a foreign form to its nearest US form using the four decisions, and then to name, honestly, what does not translate.

How Power Changes Hands

The course about the moment authority moves from one set of hands to another, and it has two halves. The first half treats elections as machines: the same ballots, counted under different rules, produce different winners. You will see one identical set of votes seat three different candidates under three different systems, and then learn the moving parts that make that happen: first-past-the-post and the two-party pull of Duverger's law, wasted votes and the spoiler effect, party-list proportional representation, district magnitude and thresholds, ranked-choice or instant-runoff, and mixed-member proportional. The claim underneath all of it is that the counting rule, not the votes alone, picks the winner, which is why changing the rule is itself a way of changing who holds power. The second half leaves the ballot box for the routes power takes when elections are not the mechanism: coups seized from inside the state, revolutions driven from below, negotiated transitions like Poland's Round Table in 1989 and South Africa between 1990 and 1994, and term limits as a design choice that schedules the handover in advance. It is course 8 of the path whose method course, Who Has the Power to Do This?, taught the four questions, and it is the general case of that course's fourth question, who can overturn it, asked about the rulers themselves. It builds on that method and complements the constitution course without repeating it. This course teaches how to read the rules by which power changes hands. It is not legal or political advice, and it takes no side in any contested election or dispute.

How a Bill Becomes Law (Federal): From Idea to Public Law

A non-partisan, step-by-step deep dive into how a bill actually becomes federal law: who can introduce a bill and how, the committee process (hearings, markup, discharge petitions), the different floor rules in the House (the Rules Committee's 'special rule') and the Senate (unanimous consent, the filibuster, cloture, and the budget-reconciliation exception), how the two chambers reconcile different versions, what happens when a bill reaches the President's desk (sign, veto, pocket veto, override), how it's published as a Public Law, and how you can track and weigh in on a real bill. Cited to Congress.gov, the House and Senate, and the National Archives. This is the process, not an argument for or against any bill.

How to Help a Campaign: A Practical, Non-Partisan Guide

A clear, non-partisan, hands-on guide to helping ANY campaign or cause you choose: a candidate, a ballot measure, or a local issue. Learn the real ways to help (volunteering, donating, canvassing, phone and text banking, hosting events, and digital outreach), the difference between volunteering and a paid role, and the rules that govern your help: when volunteer time is NOT a contribution but spending your own money can be (in-kind contributions), federal vs. state donation limits and disclosure (which vary by state), the guardrails on outside spending and truth-in-advertising, and how to protect your own time, safety, and data. Cited to the FEC, USA.gov, Vote.gov, NCSL, and Ballotpedia. It teaches you how to help, not who to help.

How to Run for Office: A Practical, Non-Partisan Guide

A clear, non-partisan, step-by-step guide to running for elected office in the United States: deciding whether and which office to run for (local to federal), the eligibility basics (which vary by office and state), how to get on the ballot, the rules that govern campaign money (the FEC for federal races vs. state and local rules), building a campaign, fundraising ethics, finance disclosure, and what happens on Election Day and after. Cited to the FEC, USA.gov, NCSL, and Ballotpedia. It teaches you the process, not who should win.

Idaho Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Idaho governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Idaho's Constitution of 1890; its plural executive; its part-time citizen Legislature of 35 senators and 70 representatives, elected from 35 shared districts (each district elects one senator and two representatives); its citizen initiative and referendum, which come with a demanding, geographically distributed signature requirement; its nonpartisan elected judiciary; and its 44 counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.idaho.gov. Cited to Idaho's own official sources (legislature.idaho.gov, sos.idaho.gov, isc.idaho.gov).

Illinois Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Illinois governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Illinois's modern Constitution of 1970; a plural executive of six separately elected statewide officers (including BOTH a Comptroller and a Treasurer); a General Assembly of 59 senators and 118 representatives; a Supreme Court elected in PARTISAN district races; Illinois's unusually LIMITED citizen initiative, usable only to change the structure of the Legislature, the route that produced the famous 1980 'Cutback Amendment'; and one of the nation's strongest HOME-RULE traditions, the opposite of Dillon's Rule. It also covers Illinois's 102 counties and Cook County, its voter-access rules, and flags time-sensitive facts, pointing to elections.il.gov. Cited to Illinois's own official sources (ilga.gov, elections.il.gov, illinoiscourts.gov).

Indiana Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Indiana governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Indiana's 1851 constitution and its distinctive strict state-debt clause (a de-facto balanced budget); the three state branches, including a deliberately weak governor whose veto can be overridden by a SIMPLE majority; how a bill becomes an Indiana law in the General Assembly (a 100-member House and a 50-member Senate); local government across Indiana's 92 counties and its more than 1,000 townships; and Indiana's elections rules: strict photo voter ID (upheld in Crawford v. Marion County), excuse-required mail voting, and a registration deadline 29 days out. It closes on how to get involved where you live. Cited to Indiana's own official sources (in.gov, iga.in.gov, in.gov/sos, in.gov/courts). Because state facts vary and change, the course flags time-sensitive items (like the Superintendent-to-Secretary-of-Education change and the Auditor-to-Comptroller rename) and points you to Indiana's own sources to confirm the current rule.

Free

Iowa Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Iowa governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Iowa is famous for going first: its precinct caucuses have traditionally opened the presidential nominating season, giving a small state outsized attention. Iowa is also admired for something quieter but important: a nonpartisan redistricting process widely held up as a national model. You'll learn Iowa's Constitution of 1857, its plural executive, its General Assembly of 50 senators and 100 representatives, its merit-selection judiciary, its nonpartisan redistricting, and its 99 counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.iowa.gov. Cited to Iowa's own official sources (legis.iowa.gov, sos.iowa.gov, iowacourts.gov).

Jury Duty & the Courts (the citizen's side)

A clear, non-partisan guide to jury duty from the citizen's side: why juries exist under the Sixth and Seventh Amendments, what to do with a summons, how voir dire selects a jury, the difference between grand and petit juries, how a trial actually unfolds, civil vs. criminal juries, the practical logistics of serving (pay, exemptions, and job protection), and why jury service matters. Cited to uscourts.gov, the National Archives, and the U.S. Code. Built to make you a confident, informed juror, not to take a side.

Kansas Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Kansas governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Kansas was born in conflict: 'Bleeding Kansas' was the violent 1850s struggle over whether Kansas would be a free or slave state, and its free-state Wyandotte Constitution (1859) is still in force today. You'll learn the Kansas Constitution's origins, its plural executive, its Legislature of 40 senators and 125 representatives, its merit-selection Supreme Court, its strong home rule, and its 105 counties, while noting Kansas is unusual for a plains state in having NO statewide citizen initiative. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.ks.gov. Cited to Kansas's own official sources (kslegislature.gov, sos.ks.gov, kscourts.gov).

Kentucky Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the Commonwealth of Kentucky governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Kentucky has some distinctive traits: it is one of only four 'Commonwealths'; it elects its Governor in odd-numbered years (separate from the presidential cycle); and it has 120 counties, the third-most of any state, so county government is a big part of civic life. You'll learn Kentucky's Constitution of 1891, its large plural executive, its General Assembly of 38 senators and 100 representatives, its nonpartisan elected judiciary, and its many counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.ky.gov. Cited to Kentucky's own official sources (legislature.ky.gov, sos.ky.gov, kycourts.gov).

Know Your Rights at Work

The labor-side companion to The Bill of Rights: Know Your Rights. Six women, Addie Wyatt, Dolores Huerta, Crystal Lee Sutton, Sara Nelson, Fran Drescher and Meredith Stiehm, and one argument in six movements: what a contract actually is, how you build power when you have none, what retaliation costs the person who absorbs it, where leverage really comes from, and what happens when an employer restructures the job so the old contract stops protecting you. You finish able to read your own contract and find the clause that protects you, recognize protected concerted activity and retaliation under the National Labor Relations Act, and know what the law does and does not do about it. Every legal statement is quoted from the statute itself.

Louisiana Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Louisiana governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Louisiana is unlike any other state: it is the ONLY state whose legal system is built on CIVIL LAW (the French/Spanish/Napoleonic tradition) rather than English common law; it calls its counties PARISHES (64 of them); and it elects officials through a distinctive 'jungle primary' in which all candidates share one ballot and a runoff follows if no one wins a majority. You'll learn Louisiana's Constitution of 1974, its plural executive of seven separately elected statewide officers, its Legislature of 39 senators and 105 representatives, how it elects its judges, and its parish and city-parish local governments (including consolidated New Orleans). Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.la.gov. Cited to Louisiana's own official sources (legis.la.gov, sos.la.gov, lasc.org).

Maine Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Maine governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Maine's Constitution of 1820 (when Maine separated from Massachusetts); why the Governor is the ONLY official Mainers elect statewide, while the Attorney General, Secretary of State, and Treasurer are chosen BY THE LEGISLATURE; that Maine was the FIRST state to adopt ranked-choice voting; its strong direct democracy (the citizen initiative and the 'people's veto'); how Maine appoints (not elects) its judges; and its New England traditions of town meeting and 16 counties. It also notes that Maine, with Nebraska, splits its presidential electoral votes by district. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to maine.gov/sos. Cited to Maine's own official sources (legislature.maine.gov, maine.gov/sos, courts.maine.gov).

Maryland Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Maryland governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Maryland's Governor holds what many call the STRONGEST executive budget power in the nation: the Legislature can generally only CUT items from the Governor's budget, not add spending. You'll learn Maryland's Constitution of 1867, its compact plural executive (Governor/Lt. Governor, Attorney General, Comptroller), its General Assembly of 47 senators and 141 delegates, its recently renamed Supreme Court of Maryland, and its distinctive local map of 23 counties PLUS the independent City of Baltimore. It also covers Maryland's referendum (but no initiative) and its voting rules. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to elections.maryland.gov. Cited to Maryland's own official sources (mgaleg.maryland.gov, elections.maryland.gov, mdcourts.gov).

Massachusetts Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the Commonwealth of Massachusetts governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Massachusetts's Constitution of 1780, the oldest functioning written constitution in the world, drafted by John Adams; a Legislature officially named the 'General Court' of 160 representatives and 40 senators; the elected Governor's Council, a colonial holdover that must approve judicial appointments; a judiciary whose judges are APPOINTED (not elected) and serve to age 70; the state's indirect initiative process; and its unusual local map, where several county governments were abolished. It also covers elections (the 2022 VOTES Act) and flags time-sensitive rules, pointing to sec.state.ma.us. Cited to Massachusetts's own official sources (malegislature.gov, sec.state.ma.us, mass.gov/courts).

Michigan Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Michigan governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Michigan's Constitution of 1963; its strong direct democracy (initiative, referendum, and recall); the three state branches; how a bill becomes a Michigan law in a Legislature of 38 senators and 110 representatives; local government across Michigan's 83 counties, cities, villages, and townships; and Michigan's elections, including two recent, voter-approved changes flagged prominently: the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (Proposal 2 of 2018), which took district-drawing away from the Legislature, and the expanded voting access of the 2018 and 2022 proposals (no-reason absentee, automatic and same-day registration, nine days of early voting). It closes on how to get involved. Cited to Michigan's own official sources (legislature.mi.gov, michigan.gov/sos, courts.michigan.gov).

Minnesota Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Minnesota governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Minnesota has two civic signatures: it usually leads the nation in voter turnout, powered by being an early adopter of same-day (Election-Day) registration, and its major left-of-center party is the uniquely named Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party. You'll also learn that Minnesota's Legislature was officially NONPARTISAN for 60 years (1913 to 1973); Minnesota's Constitution of 1858; its plural executive; its Legislature of 67 senators and 134 representatives; its judiciary; and its 87 counties. It notes Minnesota has no statewide initiative. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.mn.gov. Cited to Minnesota's own official sources (leg.mn.gov, sos.mn.gov, mncourts.gov).

Mississippi Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Mississippi governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Mississippi has changed in real, recent ways: in 2020 voters replaced an unusual Jim Crow-era rule that could send statewide elections to the state House, and Mississippi adopted a new state flag; and in 2021 the state's ballot-initiative process was struck down by its Supreme Court. You'll learn Mississippi's Constitution of 1890, its large plural executive (with an unusually powerful Lieutenant Governor), its Legislature of 52 senators and 122 representatives, its nonpartisan elected judiciary, its odd-year elections, and its 82 counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.ms.gov. Cited to Mississippi's own official sources (legislature.ms.gov, sos.ms.gov, courts.ms.gov).

Missouri Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Missouri governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Missouri gave American government a nationally copied idea: the 'Missouri Plan' for choosing judges by merit selection plus retention elections, now used in some form by many states. You'll learn Missouri's Constitution of 1945, its plural executive of six statewide officers, its General Assembly of 34 senators and 163 representatives, its citizen initiative and referendum, and its counties and independent city of St. Louis. Time-sensitive facts (voter ID, ballot measures) are flagged, pointing to sos.mo.gov. Cited to Missouri's own official sources (house.mo.gov, senate.mo.gov, sos.mo.gov, courts.mo.gov).

Montana Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Montana governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Montana rewrote its constitution in 1972 into one of the most distinctive in the country: it guarantees a 'right to a clean and healthful environment,' unusually strong individual privacy rights, and a right to know and to participate in government. You'll also learn Montana's part-time Legislature of 50 senators and 100 representatives, which meets only every other year for 90 days; its plural executive; its strong direct democracy; its nonpartisan elected judiciary; and its 56 counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sosmt.gov. Cited to Montana's own official sources (leg.mt.gov, sosmt.gov, courts.mt.gov).

Nebraska Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Nebraska governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Nebraska is unlike every other state: it is the ONLY state with a UNICAMERAL (single-house) legislature, and the ONLY state whose legislature is officially NONPARTISAN: members run with no party label on the ballot. You'll learn how that one-house 'Unicameral' of 49 senators works, its strong direct democracy (initiative and referendum), how Nebraska selects judges by merit and retention, and two more Nebraska distinctives: it is the only state where ALL electricity is publicly owned, and it splits its presidential electoral votes by congressional district. Time-sensitive facts (voter ID, electoral rules) are flagged, pointing to sos.nebraska.gov. Cited to Nebraska's own official sources (nebraskalegislature.gov, sos.nebraska.gov, supremecourt.nebraska.gov).

Nevada Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Nevada governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Nevada is the ONLY state that lets you vote for 'None of These Candidates' on its statewide ballots, a real protest option found nowhere else. You'll also learn how gaming (casino) regulation and revenue let Nevada run with NO state income tax; Nevada's Constitution of 1864 ('Battle Born'); its plural executive; its Legislature of 21 senators and 42 Assembly members that meets only every other year; its two-election rule for citizen constitutional amendments; its elected judiciary; and its 16 counties plus Carson City. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to nvsos.gov. Cited to Nevada's own official sources (leg.state.nv.us, nvsos.gov, nvcourts.gov).

New Hampshire Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of New Hampshire governs itself, and how you take part where you live. New Hampshire runs government unlike anywhere else: its House of Representatives has about 400 members (one of the largest legislative bodies in the English-speaking world) and legislators are paid just $100 a year, making it a true volunteer 'citizen legislature.' You'll learn New Hampshire's Constitution of 1784 (the second-oldest in the nation), its elected 5-member Executive Council that must approve the Governor's appointments, its 2-year governor term, its lack of a state income or sales tax ('the New Hampshire Advantage'), its appointed judiciary, its town-meeting tradition, and its protected first-in-the-nation presidential primary. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.nh.gov. Cited to New Hampshire's own official sources (gencourt.state.nh.us, sos.nh.gov, courts.nh.gov).

New Jersey Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of New Jersey governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn New Jersey's Constitution of 1947; a Legislature of 40 senators and 80 Assembly members elected from 40 shared districts; and a genuinely distinctive executive, long considered one of the strongest governors in the nation because so many officials (the Attorney General, Secretary of State, and more) are APPOINTED by the governor rather than elected. You'll learn why New Jersey had NO Lieutenant Governor until 2010, why the state has NO citizen initiative, how its appointed judiciary earns tenure to age 70, and how its 21 counties and 500-plus municipalities work, including the recent renaming of county 'freeholders' to 'commissioners.' Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to nj.gov/state. Cited to New Jersey's own official sources (njleg.gov, nj.gov/state, njcourts.gov).

New Mexico Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of New Mexico governs itself, and how you take part where you live. New Mexico has two features found nowhere else: its 1912 constitution contains special protections for Spanish-speaking citizens, making it effectively the most bilingual state, and it has the ONLY fully volunteer (unpaid) state legislature in the nation. You'll learn New Mexico's Constitution of 1912, its plural executive, its Legislature of 42 senators and 70 representatives, its hybrid judiciary, its 33 counties, and the sovereign Pueblo and tribal nations within its borders. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.nm.gov. Cited to New Mexico's own official sources (nmlegis.gov, sos.nm.gov, nmcourts.gov).

New York Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of New York governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn New York's 1894 constitution and its distinctive automatic 20-year ballot question ("shall we hold a constitutional convention?"); the three state branches, including a separately-elected Attorney General and Comptroller and New York's famously INVERTED court names (the "Supreme Court" is the TRIAL court, while the "Court of Appeals" is the state's HIGHEST court, whose judges the Governor APPOINTS from a nominating commission's list with State Senate confirmation); how a bill becomes a New York law in a 150-member Assembly and 63-member Senate (a two-thirds override); local government across New York's 62 counties (including New York City's five boroughs) with strong home rule; and New York's elections rules: early voting, no-excuse early mail voting alongside excuse-required absentee ballots, closed party primaries, and NO statewide citizen initiative. It closes on how to get involved where you live. Cited to New York's own official sources (nysenate.gov, nyassembly.gov, dos.ny.gov, nycourts.gov, cjn.ny.gov, elections.ny.gov) and the State Constitution. Because state facts vary and change, the course flags time-sensitive items (like the post-2019 early-mail-voting change and the Governor/Lieutenant-Governor joint-ticket reform) and points you to New York's own sources to confirm the current rule.

North Carolina Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of North Carolina governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn North Carolina's THIRD constitution (adopted 1971) and its amendment path: the General Assembly proposes by a three-fifths vote and the VOTERS ratify, because NC has NO citizen initiative; the three branches, including the COUNCIL OF STATE, a large plural executive of TEN separately-elected statewide officers (Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Auditor, Treasurer, Superintendent of Public Instruction, and the Commissioners of Agriculture, Insurance, and Labor); a General Assembly of a 120-member House and a 50-member Senate where, famously, the governor had NO veto until 1997 (NC was the last state to grant one) and a veto is overridden by THREE-FIFTHS, not two-thirds; and appellate judges elected in PARTISAN races. It covers how a bill becomes a North Carolina law, local government across NC's 100 counties (a board of commissioners, limited home rule under Dillon's Rule, municipalities, and NO townships as government), and NC's elections: photo voter ID (recently in effect after years of litigation), no-excuse absentee, early one-stop voting with same-day registration, and a 25-day regular registration deadline. It closes on how to get involved. Cited to North Carolina's own official sources (ncleg.gov, ncsbe.gov, sosnc.gov, nccourts.gov). Because state facts vary and change, the course flags the photo-ID litigation timeline and the absentee/early-voting deadlines, and points you to ncsbe.gov for current dates rather than asserting fixed rules.

North Dakota Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of North Dakota governs itself, and how you take part where you live. North Dakota does two things no other state does: it is the ONLY state with NO voter registration (eligible residents just show up with ID and vote), and it runs the ONLY state-owned bank in the nation (the Bank of North Dakota) plus a state-owned mill, legacies of its farmer-populist Nonpartisan League. You'll learn North Dakota's Constitution of 1889, its strong direct democracy, its large plural executive, its Legislative Assembly of 47 senators and 94 representatives that meets only every other year, its elected judiciary, and its 53 counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.nd.gov. Cited to North Dakota's own official sources (ndlegis.gov, sos.nd.gov, ndcourts.gov).

Ohio Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Ohio governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Ohio's 1851 constitution and its unusually STRONG direct democracy (the initiative and referendum Ohioans have held since 1912, letting citizens amend the constitution or make law by petition, with a citizen constitutional amendment still passing on a SIMPLE majority after voters rejected a 2023 attempt to raise the bar to 60%); the three branches, including a plural executive (a Governor and separately-elected Lieutenant Governor who run as a joint ticket, plus a separately-elected Attorney General, Secretary of State, Auditor, and Treasurer) and a 99-member House and 33-member Senate; how a bill becomes an Ohio law, including Ohio's unusual THREE-FIFTHS veto override (not two-thirds); Ohio's ELECTED judges (partisan primaries, and, since 2022, party labels on the general-election ballot too); local government across Ohio's 88 counties, home-rule cities and villages, active townships, and special districts; and Ohio's elections rules: photo voter ID (since 2023), no-excuse early and absentee voting, and the citizen initiative/referendum process. It closes on how to get involved where you live. Cited to Ohio's own official sources (the Ohio Constitution/Revised Code, the Ohio General Assembly, ohiosos.gov, and the Ohio judicial branch). Because state facts vary and change, the course flags time-sensitive items (signature thresholds tied to the last governor's race, the 2023 photo-ID law, the 2021 judicial-ballot change, and the failed 2023 supermajority proposal) and points you to Ohio's own sources to confirm the current rule.

Oklahoma Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Oklahoma governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Oklahoma has several distinctive features: it is one of only TWO states (with Texas) that has two separate highest courts: a civil Supreme Court and a Court of Criminal Appeals; it elects an unusually large slate of statewide officials; and its history as 'Indian Territory' means sovereign tribal nations are central to its civic landscape (underscored by the 2020 McGirt decision). You'll learn Oklahoma's Constitution of 1907, its large plural executive, its Legislature of 48 senators and 101 representatives, its strong direct democracy, its merit-selection appellate judiciary, and its 77 counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to elections.ok.gov. Cited to Oklahoma's own official sources (oklegislature.gov, elections.ok.gov, oscn.net).

Oregon Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Oregon governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Oregon shaped American democracy twice over: it gave the nation the 'Oregon System' (the modern citizen initiative and referendum, copied by states everywhere) and it was the FIRST state to run all its elections entirely by mail, later pioneering automatic voter registration too. You'll learn Oregon's Constitution of 1859, its plural executive (no Lieutenant Governor), its Legislature of 30 senators and 60 representatives, how it elects judges on a nonpartisan ballot, and its counties, cities, and nationally known land-use planning. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.oregon.gov. Cited to Oregon's own official sources (oregonlegislature.gov, sos.oregon.gov, courts.oregon.gov).

Pennsylvania Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Pennsylvania's current 1968 constitution and its unusual amendment path (a proposed amendment must pass the General Assembly in TWO consecutive sessions and then be approved by the voters, and Pennsylvania has NO citizen initiative, so only the legislature can start the process); the three state branches, including a partly-plural executive (the Governor and Lieutenant Governor run as a JOINT TICKET in the general election, while the Attorney General, Auditor General, and Treasurer are each elected separately); the General Assembly (a 203-member House and a 50-member Senate, the largest full-time state legislature in the nation); and a court system whose appellate judges (Supreme, Superior, and Commonwealth courts) are ELECTED in partisan races to 10-year terms and then face nonpartisan yes/no RETENTION votes. You'll learn how a bill becomes a Pennsylvania law (including the Governor's line-item veto on appropriations and the two-thirds override), and Pennsylvania's local government (67 counties; home-rule charters; and a full set of active municipalities: cities, boroughs, and townships of the first and second class; Pennsylvania does NOT abolish townships). Finally you'll learn Pennsylvania's distinctive elections rules (no-excuse mail-in voting since Act 77 of 2019, voter ID for first-time voters, closed primaries, and no citizen initiative) before a lesson on how to get involved. Cited to Pennsylvania's own official sources (legis.state.pa.us, pa.gov/vote, pacourts.us, dced.pa.gov). Because state facts vary and change, the course flags time-sensitive and litigated items (like the ongoing court fights over mail-in voting and voter ID) and points you to Pennsylvania's own sources to confirm the current rule.

Rhode Island Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Rhode Island governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Rhode Island, the smallest state, has several distinctive features: in 2020 its voters shortened its official name (dropping 'and Providence Plantations'); it has counties on the map but NO county governments (its 39 cities and towns do everything); its Supreme Court justices serve for LIFE (the only state high court with life tenure); and for centuries its Legislature was so dominant that voters passed a separation-of-powers amendment in 2004 to rein it in. You'll also learn Rhode Island's plural executive, its General Assembly of 38 senators and 75 representatives, and how to take part. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to the Secretary of State. Cited to Rhode Island's own official sources (rilegislature.gov, sos.ri.gov, courts.ri.gov).

South Carolina Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of South Carolina governs itself, and how you take part where you live. South Carolina is the classic 'legislative state': for most of its history the General Assembly dominated government, and it still ELECTS the state's judges (South Carolina and Virginia are the two states that do). You'll learn South Carolina's Constitution of 1895, its historically weak-but-strengthening governor, its unusually large plural executive of separately elected officials, its General Assembly of 46 senators and 124 representatives, how the legislature screens and elects judges, and its 46 counties. It also notes South Carolina has no citizen initiative. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to scvotes.gov. Cited to South Carolina's own official sources (scstatehouse.gov, scvotes.gov, sccourts.org).

South Dakota Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of South Dakota governs itself, and how you take part where you live. South Dakota holds a national first: in 1898 it became the FIRST state to give citizens the initiative and referendum (the power to make and repeal laws directly), years before Oregon's more famous system. You'll learn South Dakota's Constitution of 1889, its plural executive, its Legislature of 35 senators and 70 representatives, its merit-selection Supreme Court, its lack of a state income tax, and its 66 counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sdsos.gov. Cited to South Dakota's own official sources (sdlegislature.gov, sdsos.gov, ujs.sd.gov).

Spotting Misleading Marketing

Become a sharper consumer. Learn how advertising actually works (it isn't lying by default), where the legal line sits between harmless puffery and illegal deception, the common tactics (weasel words, fake urgency, fine print, fake discounts, fake reviews, undisclosed #ads, and dark patterns), plus how to read health and statistics claims, spot AI-generated marketing, verify a claim yourself, and use your rights. Practical, non-partisan, and cited to the FTC, FDA, FCC, and leading media-literacy organizations.

State vs Federal Power: How American Government Is Divided

A clear, non-partisan guide to American federalism: why power is split between the national government and the states, the enumerated, implied, and reserved powers (Article I, § 8 and the 10th Amendment), the Supremacy Clause and preemption (Article VI), the concurrent powers both levels share, the reach of the Commerce Clause, and the landmark cases that defined the balance (McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819; Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824). Cited to the Constitution itself and authoritative sources. Built to make you a confident reader of how the system divides power, not to take a side.

Tennessee Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Tennessee governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Tennessee's Constitution of 1870; a General Assembly of 33 senators and 99 representatives; and an executive branch full of genuine oddities: the Governor is the ONLY official Tennesseans elect statewide, there is no separately elected Lieutenant Governor (the Speaker of the Senate holds that title), the Secretary of State, Treasurer, and Comptroller are chosen BY THE LEGISLATURE, and (uniquely in the nation) the Attorney General is appointed by the STATE SUPREME COURT. You'll also learn Tennessee's unusually weak gubernatorial veto (overridden by a simple majority), its lack of a citizen initiative, its 'Tennessee Plan' for judges, and its 95 counties. Time-sensitive voting rules are flagged, pointing to sos.tn.gov. Cited to Tennessee's own official sources (capitol.tn.gov, sos.tn.gov, tncourts.gov).

Texas Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Texas governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Texas's long, much-amended 1876 constitution; its distinctive PLURAL EXECUTIVE (a deliberately limited governor sharing power with a separately-elected Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Comptroller, Land Commissioner, and Agriculture Commissioner); a part-time legislature that meets only every OTHER year (a 150-member House and a 31-member Senate); Texas's unusual TWO highest courts (a Supreme Court for civil cases and a Court of Criminal Appeals for criminal cases) with partisan-elected judges; how a bill becomes a Texas law, including the two-thirds veto override; local government across Texas's 254 counties (the most of any state) run by a commissioners court, with NO townships and home-rule cities; and Texas's elections rules: strict photo voter ID, no same-day registration (a ~30-day deadline), and no statewide citizen initiative. It closes on how to get involved where you live. Cited to Texas's own official sources (capitol.texas.gov, tlc.texas.gov, txcourts.gov, sos.state.tx.us / votetexas.gov). Because state facts vary and change, the course flags time-sensitive items (like the running count of constitutional amendments and the voter-ID and registration rules) and points you to Texas's own sources to confirm the current rule.

The Bill of Rights: Know Your Rights

A clear, non-partisan, practical guide to the 1st Amendment (speech, religion, press, assembly, petition) and the 4th Amendment (searches, seizures, warrants) in everyday terms: at school, online, and in encounters with police. Cited to the Constitution itself, the Supreme Court, and federal court education resources. Built to help you know what these rights protect, and their limits, not to argue any case, law, or politician's side.

The Local Layer

The course about the level of government most adults were never taught: the city, the town, the county, and the tens of thousands of single-purpose special districts that tax people who cannot name them. It is course 5 of the path whose method course, Who Has the Power to Do This?, already taught the four questions and introduced Dillon's Rule. This course develops that introduction into the real machinery of local power. You will learn Dillon's Rule and home rule as a spectrum rather than a slogan, and why state preemption can wipe out a local ordinance the week after it passes. You will learn the forms of municipal government, mayor-council (strong and weak), council-manager, and commission, and exactly what each one changes about who decides. You will meet the special districts that in the United States outnumber municipalities, learn why they exist and why almost nobody votes in their elections, and read a real one. You will see the New England town meeting, where the residents are the legislature, and then Unigov, where in 1969 the Indiana legislature redrew a major city overnight, by statute, with no referendum, the purest demonstration of the fact that in the United States a city is a creature of the state. It closes with a capstone: document every local government and special district over your own address, from the primary record. This course teaches how to READ authority. It is not legal advice.

The Middle Layer: States, Provinces, and Regions

The course about the level of government between the nation and the locality: the US state, the German Land, the Canadian province, the Spanish autonomous community, and the devolved nations of the United Kingdom. It is course 4 of the path whose method course, Who Has the Power to Do This?, already taught the four questions and the vertical stack, and it sits directly above course 5, The Local Layer. Its one load-bearing idea is the difference between federalism and devolution, taught as entrenched versus delegated. A United States state is a co-sovereign: its existence and its equal representation in the Senate are bolted into the Constitution, and the federal government cannot abolish it. Scotland's powers, by contrast, come from the Scotland Act 1998, an ordinary Act of the Westminster Parliament that, under the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, Parliament could in principle repeal. That distinction, whether a middle-layer government holds its power by constitutional entitlement or by a statute the center can rewrite, is the whole lesson. You will learn the US reserved powers and the anti-commandeering doctrine, why a state cannot be abolished, and interstate compacts; then Germany's Laender and the Bundesrat, Canada's provinces under the Constitution Acts of 1867 and 1982, and Spain's contested estado autonomico; then the United Kingdom's asymmetric devolution and the sovereignty question at its heart. It closes with a map of federal, devolved, and unitary systems and a capstone: classify a real subnational government as entrenched-federal or devolved, and defend it from the primary documents. This course teaches how to read authority. It is not legal advice.

The Supreme Court & the Judicial Branch

A non-partisan, institutional deep dive into how the federal judiciary actually works: the structure of the federal courts (94 district courts, 13 circuit courts, one Supreme Court), how a judge or justice is nominated and confirmed, how a case reaches the Supreme Court (certiorari and the 'rule of four'), what happens at oral argument and in the justices' private conference, how opinions (majority, concurring, dissenting) get written and what precedent means, how judges read the Constitution (described evenhandedly, not argued for or against), and how the other branches, and the People, check the courts. Cited to the National Archives, Congress.gov, the federal courts, and the Federal Judicial Center. This is how the institution works, not a verdict on any ruling.

The US Forms: Sole Prop to Corporation

A cited, high-school-and-up survey of the US business forms, and the direct sequel to 'What a Business Entity Actually Is.' It is not legal or tax advice, and it says so throughout: it teaches you what to ASK a lawyer or accountant, not the answer for your situation. Course 1 gave you the method, that any entity is a bundle of FOUR decisions (who pays the debts, who pays the tax, who owns it and how ownership moves, and who decides). This course applies that method across the actual US menu: the sole proprietorship and general partnership you can fall into without filing, the limited partnership and the LLP that add a liability wall, the LLC that became the modern default, the C-corporation built to raise money, and the nonprofits, where 501(c)(3), (c)(4) and (c)(6) are three different deals with three different rules on donations and politics. Two ideas get a full lesson each because they are the most misunderstood in the subject. First, the S-corp is a TAX ELECTION, not an entity type: it changes only how a business is taxed and leaves liability, ownership and governance to the entity underneath it. Second, a benefit corporation (a legal form a state recognises) is not the same thing as a Certified B Corp (a private certification granted by the nonprofit B Lab), two different things that most content blurs. The organizing insight is that a real menu mixes three kinds of thing, an entity, a tax status, and a private certification, and telling them apart is most of the skill. The capstone asks you to match a real scenario to a form and defend it against the four decisions, and against a specific alternative you rejected.

Tribal Nations and Indigenous Governance

The course that develops the one correction most civics teaching gets wrong: a tribal nation is not a rung on the federal, state, and local ladder at all. It is a separate sovereign, and its authority is pre-existing and inherent, older than the United States, not delegated down a stack the way a city's power is delegated from a state. Course 1 of this path, Who Has the Power to Do This?, introduced that idea in a single section; this course earns it in full, and with the care such content requires. You will learn where tribal sovereignty comes from and why the Marshall Court called the nations domestic dependent nations; why treaties rank as supreme law under the Supremacy Clause and how courts read them; how nations govern today, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and its model constitutions set against traditional and customary governance, with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as a named living case; and the hard legal edges, Public Law 280, McGirt v. Oklahoma, and Alaska Native corporations, which are corporations rather than reservations and are the sharpest crossover between this path and the business-forms path. This course leads with nations' own words and Indigenous scholarship, treats the 574 federally recognized tribes as 574 distinct governments, and stops deliberately short of any nation's ceremonies or restricted internal detail, because that is not the course's to give. It teaches how to read authority. It is not legal advice.

US Civics 101: How American Government Works

A clear, non-partisan foundation in how the United States government actually works: the three branches, federalism, how a bill becomes law, the courts, elections, and your rights. Built to make you a confident, informed participant, not to take a side.

US Constitution 101: The Document That Builds the Government

A clear, non-partisan walk through the United States Constitution: why the country needed one, the Preamble, the three branches it creates (Articles I to III), how separation of powers and checks & balances keep them honest, the federal-state split, the Bill of Rights, and how the document is amended. Cited to the text itself and the National Archives. Built to make you a confident reader of the Constitution, not to take a side.

US, State & Local Government: Who Does What

A practical, non-partisan guide to which level of government actually does what in your daily life, and how to engage with each one. Federal (defense, currency, Social Security and Medicare, interstate matters, federal courts), state (education standards, professional and driver licensing, state roads and police, running elections), and local (schools, zoning, police and fire, water and trash, property tax). You'll see how money and mandates flow between the levels, learn where to show up and be heard at each (town halls, school boards, public comment, contacting your representatives), and meet the special districts and boards people forget exist. Cited to USA.gov, the U.S. Census Bureau's Census of Governments, NCSL, the National League of Cities, and NACo. Local structures VARY by state, and the course says so and points you to your own state's rules rather than pretending one model fits all.

Utah Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Utah governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Utah has a distinctive way candidates get on the ballot: since 2014 they can qualify EITHER through the traditional caucus-and-convention system OR by gathering signatures (or both), a 'dual path' found in few other states. You'll also learn Utah's Constitution of 1896 (statehood came only after banning polygamy), its plural executive, its part-time Legislature of 29 senators and 75 representatives that meets 45 days a year, its merit-selection judiciary with retention elections, its all-mail elections, and its 29 counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to vote.utah.gov. Cited to Utah's own official sources (le.utah.gov, vote.utah.gov, utcourts.gov).

Vermont Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Vermont governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Vermont has deep small-d democratic roots: it was an independent republic before statehood, its 1777 constitution was the first in America to ban adult slavery and drop property requirements for voting, and it still celebrates Town Meeting Day as a civic holiday. You'll learn Vermont's Constitution of 1793, its 2-year terms for the Governor and all statewide officers, the unusual rule that the Legislature elects the Governor if no candidate wins a majority, its Legislature of 30 senators and 150 representatives, its viable third party, and its 14 counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.vermont.gov. Cited to Vermont's own official sources (legislature.vermont.gov, sos.vermont.gov, vermontjudiciary.org).

Virginia Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the Commonwealth of Virginia governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Virginia's Constitution of 1971; its General Assembly (the oldest continuous law-making body in the New World, dating to 1619) of 100 delegates and 40 senators; a genuinely unusual executive (the Governor is the ONLY governor in the nation who cannot serve two consecutive terms); a judiciary whose judges are ELECTED BY THE LEGISLATURE rather than by voters or the governor; Virginia's status as a Dillon's Rule state; and its distinctive local map of 95 counties PLUS 38 independent cities that belong to no county. It also covers elections (odd-year statewide races, no-excuse early voting) and the redistricting commission, flagging time-sensitive rules to confirm at elections.virginia.gov. Cited to Virginia's own official sources (law.lis.virginia.gov, elections.virginia.gov, vacourts.gov).

Voting & Elections 101

A clear, non-partisan guide to how U.S. elections actually work: registering to vote, primaries vs. caucuses vs. the general election, how ballots and polling places work (including early and mail voting), the Electoral College, ballot measures, and how votes are counted, canvassed, and certified. Cited to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the National Archives, Congress.gov/CRS, and the National Conference of State Legislatures. It teaches the mechanics, not who should win.

Washington Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Washington governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Washington's Constitution of 1889 and its strong direct democracy (initiatives to the people AND to the legislature, referendum, recall); a notably 'plural' executive in which voters elect NINE separate statewide officials; a Legislature of 49 senators and 98 representatives elected from 49 shared districts; a Supreme Court of nine justices elected on a nonpartisan ballot; and Washington's distinctive elections: an all-mail (vote-by-mail) system statewide and a 'top-two' primary in which the two leading candidates advance regardless of party. It flags time-sensitive facts (including Washington's contested no-income-tax tradition) and points to sos.wa.gov. Cited to Washington's own official sources (leg.wa.gov, sos.wa.gov, courts.wa.gov).

West Virginia Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of West Virginia governs itself, and how you take part where you live. West Virginia has a unique origin story: it is the ONLY state created by breaking away from another state, its western counties split from Virginia during the Civil War and joined the Union in 1863. You'll learn West Virginia's Constitution of 1872, its plural executive (with no lieutenant governor), its Legislature of 34 senators and 100 delegates, its recently nonpartisan judiciary, and its 55 counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.wv.gov. Cited to West Virginia's own official sources (wvlegislature.gov, sos.wv.gov, courtswv.gov).

What a Business Entity Actually Is

A cited, high-school-and-up method course on how a business is formed. It is not legal or tax advice, and it says so throughout: it teaches you what to ASK a lawyer or accountant, not the answer for your situation. The organizing idea is that any business entity is a bundle of FOUR decisions: who pays the debts (liability), who pays the tax (taxation), who owns it and how ownership moves (ownership and transfer), and who gets to decide (governance). Every form on earth, in every country, is a different answer to those four, so a learner who holds the four questions can read a form they have never seen. You will learn to read the FORMATION DOCUMENTS as primary sources: the articles of organization or incorporation, the operating agreement or bylaws, and the state's own filing portal. Then you take a first pass over the US forms (sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC and C-corporation) and settle the single most common misunderstanding in the subject: the S-corp is a TAX ELECTION, not an entity type. This is the general case of which the shipped course 'What They Built' is a worked example, where fraternal orders and building-and-loan associations turned out to be entity choices. The capstone asks you to pick a form for a real scenario and defend it against the four decisions.

Who Has the Power to Do This?

A method course for reading government authority. Given any government action, a zoning change, an annexation, a school-district line, a police stop, a tax, a permit denied, you will learn to find four things from the public record: the BODY that acted, the ENABLING AUTHORITY it claimed, the DOCUMENT that grants that power (a constitution, a charter, a statute, an ordinance, or a treaty), and WHO CAN OVERTURN IT. It is the general case of which the route series is fourteen worked examples: find the instrument, then find its source. Along the way it teaches the fact most adults were never taught, that in the United States cities are creatures of the state (Dillon's Rule, the Cooley Doctrine, home rule, and preemption), the vertical stack of authority from the nation down to the special districts almost nobody votes for, and the idea that tribal nations are not a rung on that ladder at all but a separate sovereign whose authority predates the United States. This course teaches how to READ authority. It is not legal advice.

Wisconsin Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Wisconsin governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Wisconsin was a Progressive-Era 'laboratory of democracy', home of the 'Wisconsin Idea' that state government and its university should serve everyone. You'll learn Wisconsin's Constitution of 1848, its plural executive, its Legislature of 33 senators and 99 Assembly members, its unusually powerful gubernatorial PARTIAL VETO, its nonpartisan spring elections for a high-profile Supreme Court, its strong recall power, and its 72 counties. It also notes Wisconsin has no statewide citizen initiative. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to elections.wi.gov. Cited to Wisconsin's own official sources (legis.wisconsin.gov, elections.wi.gov, wicourts.gov).

Wyoming Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Wyoming governs itself, and how you take part where you live. Wyoming is 'The Equality State' for a landmark reason: it was the FIRST place in America to grant women the right to vote (1869), it elected the nation's first woman governor, and it entered the Union in 1890 refusing to give up women's suffrage. You'll learn Wyoming's Constitution of 1889, its plural executive (with NO lieutenant governor), its part-time Legislature of 31 senators and 62 representatives, its merit-selection judiciary, its lack of a state income tax, and its 23 counties. Time-sensitive facts are flagged, pointing to sos.wyo.gov. Cited to Wyoming's own official sources (wyoleg.gov, sos.wyo.gov, courts.state.wy.us).

How to Create a Course That People Finish and Pass

The Learn.WitUS standard for building a course, distilled from a short shelf of books on how people learn and how to write plainly. It is a checklist you can follow: write like a person, teach audio-first, cite every claim, build quizzes that teach, and ship a course learners actually finish. Use it with or without an AI assistant.

AI Literacy: Use It Well & Wisely

Get more out of AI without being fooled by it. Learn what tools like ChatGPT and Claude actually do, how to prompt them well, how to verify what they tell you, how to spot deepfakes and synthetic media, and how to use AI ethically and privately. Practical, cited, and non-hype: the trust foundation for everything else.

Free

AI Product: Idea to Shipped Tool (Capstone)

The Builder-track capstone: take one real problem and ship one real AI tool, end to end. You'll scope the problem and pin a success metric, choose the right approach (prompt vs. RAG vs. agent vs. fine-tune), design the UX and human-in-the-loop, build a thin MVP, add guardrails and an eval set, run a cost/latency/security review, ship with monitoring, then document and iterate, finishing with a capstone brief you could hand to a teammate. It synthesizes F2 (Building with AI) and B1 to B5 of the Builder track and carries the Learn.WitUS trust DNA throughout: cited, validated, honest, affordable. F2 and B1 to B5 are the recommended prerequisites.

Advanced Prompting & Reasoning

Go from getting answers out of AI to getting reliably good ones. This is the next step after AI Literacy (F1), for everyone, not just developers. You'll learn what a prompt really is and why structure matters, how to frame role/context/task/format, give examples (few-shot), ask the model to show its reasoning step by step, request sources and self-checks, and run the iterate-and-refine loop that turns a mediocre first answer into a strong one. Tool-agnostic and practical, with reusable prompt patterns for learning, work, and writing, and the trust DNA throughout: verify, cite, and remember that good reasoning can still reach a wrong answer. AI Literacy (F1) is the recommended prerequisite.

Building AI Agents & Automations

Go past the intro: build AI systems that take action. This is the technical, builder-track course for people who ship. You'll learn what an agent actually is (and the more common case where you DON'T need one), the plan-act-observe loop, how to do tool/function calling well, when a fixed workflow beats an autonomous loop, how to handle memory and state, and how to wire real multi-step automations with triggers, queues, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints. Then the parts that separate a demo from production: orchestration patterns (routing, chaining, parallelization, evaluator-optimizer), guardrails and least-privilege (the agent can take real actions: sandbox it, confirm it, limit its scope), evaluating and debugging with traces, and shipping with monitoring and cost controls. Carries the Learn.WitUS trust DNA throughout: an agent that acts is a security surface. F2 (Building with AI) is the recommended prerequisite.

Building with AI

Go from using AI to building with it. Learn what you can (and can't) reliably ship with today's models, how to turn prompts into working code, when to reach for no-code vs. an API, and how to build a real automation and a simple assistant. We connect AI to your own data with RAG, add guardrails, evaluate the output, and deploy it, all while carrying the Learn.WitUS trust DNA: verify, cite, and never ship slop. F1 (AI Literacy) is the recommended prerequisite.

Deploying & Evaluating AI Apps (LLMOps)

You built an AI feature. Now keep it trustworthy in production. This is LLMOps: the discipline of measuring, guarding, observing, and operating an AI app once real users depend on it. Build an eval set and run offline and online tests, use LLM-as-judge (and know when not to), add guardrails for injection, PII, and moderation, instrument tracing and cost/latency/token dashboards, make calls reliable with timeouts, retries, fallbacks, and caching, cut cost and latency, and ship responsibly with staged rollout, a kill switch, rollback, red-teaming, and drift monitoring. Throughout we carry the Learn.WitUS trust DNA: you can't improve what you don't measure, and you treat every model output as untrusted. F2 (Building with AI) is the recommended prerequisite.

Fine-tuning & Model Basics

You can prompt, retrieve, and orchestrate. Now learn when to change the model itself. This builder course demystifies how models learn (pretraining → post-training and RLHF), what fine-tuning really is, and the decision that matters most: when fine-tuning beats prompting or RAG, and when it's an expensive mistake. We cover the method families (full fine-tuning, LoRA/PEFT, instruction and preference tuning), how to build a real training dataset where quality beats quantity, the training loop and how to avoid overfitting, how to evaluate a fine-tuned model honestly, the cost/latency/hosting tradeoffs of API fine-tuning vs open weights, open vs closed models and their licenses, and the real risks: catastrophic forgetting, data leakage, and bias amplification. You leave with a 'should I fine-tune?' framework and the trust DNA to use it: evaluate honestly. Fine-tuning isn't magic. B1 (Prompt Engineering) is the recommended prerequisite.

L2: Detecting AI (Deepfakes, Synthetic Media & Provenance)

Synthetic media (AI-generated text, images, voice, and video) is now cheap, fast, and convincing. This course skips the 'count the fingers' tricks that stop working within months and teaches the durable skill instead: provenance and lateral reading. Learn how content credentials (C2PA) and watermarking (SynthID) work, and where they fall short; how to run reverse-image and metadata checks; how to shut down voice-clone and video-call scams with a callback; what the 'liar's dividend' is; and how newsrooms actually verify before they publish. Empowering and practical, honest that detection is imperfect, and cited to C2PA, Google DeepMind, the Partnership on AI, WITNESS, the FBI, NIST, and Stanford's media-literacy research. Builds on AI Literacy (F1).

L3: AI Ethics, Bias & Society

AI systems now help decide who gets a loan, a job interview, or a longer prison sentence, and they can quietly encode human bias while sounding neutral. This literacy-level course (no coding required) explains what "AI ethics" actually means, where bias comes from, why there is no single definition of "fair," who is accountable when AI causes harm, and how AI reshapes work, democracy, and the planet. You leave able to use and question these systems responsibly. Cited throughout (NIST, UNESCO, the EU AI Act, the ACM Code of Ethics, and the open Fairness and Machine Learning textbook).

L4: Data Privacy & Security in the AI Age

Your personal data is both the fuel modern AI runs on and the thing AI now makes cheaper to steal. This course teaches the durable habits that protect you: understand what counts as personal data and how AI tools collect, train on, and retain what you type; know exactly what NOT to paste into a chatbot (secrets, your own PII, other people's data, confidential work); understand your privacy rights at a high level (GDPR and CCPA) and how to exercise them; see why 'anonymized' data so often gets re-identified; and lock down the security basics (a password manager, multi-factor authentication, and phishing radar) now that AI has supercharged scams, voice clones, and social engineering. Practical and empowering, not fearmongering, and not legal advice. Cited to NIST, the FTC, CISA, the official GDPR and CCPA pages, and OWASP. Builds on AI Literacy (F1).

LangGraph in Production: The WitUS Triage Agent

Build a real production LangGraph agent, one small piece at a time. You start by learning when a linear chain has outgrown itself and you actually need a graph, then design a clean state contract, wire typed tools, and add a durable human-in-the-loop approval gate with interrupt() and a Postgres checkpointer. The second module crashes the process on purpose to prove the gate survives a restart, and shows the two rules that keep your own interrupts correct. It's grounded in the open-source WitUS Triage Agent code, TypeScript first with a Python durability track. Written to code along.

Multi-Agent LangGraph with Per-Agent RAG

Build one real multi-agent coach end to end, a LangGraph supervisor that routes each health question to the specialists that can actually answer it. Every specialist owns its own retrieval namespace, so a nutrition query never wades through workout documents, and each answer carries citations back to the snippets it was built from. You'll design the routing schema with Zod, guarantee ordering through the graph's shape, and isolate specialists by type so none can read another's findings, then measure routing, citation coverage, and grounding with LangSmith evals that gate every change. It's grounded in the open-source Centenarian Coach repo, TypeScript first with a Python translation track, and written to code along.

Prompt Engineering in Depth

The Builder track's deep dive into prompting as engineering, not luck. You finished Building with AI (F2); now you learn to design prompts the way you design code: system vs. developer vs. user roles, structured output and tool/function calling with schemas, few-shot example selection, chain-of-thought and self-consistency, ReAct-style reasoning, decomposition and prompt chaining, controlling determinism (temperature, top-p, seeds), defending against prompt injection, and (the part most people skip) evaluating prompts with real test sets, budgeting tokens, and versioning prompts in production. Assumes you write code and call model APIs. Trust DNA throughout: treat model output as untrusted; evaluate, don't vibe-check. F2 (Building with AI) is the recommended prerequisite; L1 (Prompt Engineering, literacy track) is the plain-language sibling for everyone.

RAG & Working with Your Own Data

Make AI answer over YOUR content (docs, policies, a product catalog, a knowledge base) without retraining a model. This is the technical, builder-track course for people who ship Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). You'll build the whole pipeline: ingest and chunk your documents, embed them into vectors, store them (including in pgvector, which this app uses), retrieve the relevant pieces at question time, and assemble a grounded prompt. Then the parts that separate a demo from production: chunking strategy, retrieval quality (top-k, hybrid keyword+vector, re-ranking), context windows, and how to EVALUATE a RAG system: retrieval quality separately from generation quality, and groundedness above all. We cover the real failure modes (irrelevant chunks, stale data, prompt injection hidden inside documents), freshness and access control on your vector store, and the honest question most tutorials skip: when NOT to use RAG at all (RAG vs. fine-tuning vs. just-use-a-long-context-window). Carries the Learn.WitUS trust DNA throughout: a retrieved passage is evidence to ground and cite, never a fact to trust. F2 (Building with AI) is the recommended prerequisite; B2 (Agents & Automations) pairs well.

Reflection Loops in LangGraph: Write, Critique, Revise

You can build a LangGraph graph and call a model, but you haven't yet built an agent that judges its own output, revises it, and knows when to stop. This course builds that write, critique, revise loop one piece at a time on a running support-reply example, then hardens it: bounded termination so it always exits, a data rubric an LLM can actually score, LangSmith tracing that makes bugs legible, and an eval that reuses the very same rubric. Module 5 treats reflection as a budget on a cost and quality curve, and the capstone redeploys the whole stack on a brand-new domain (rewriting dense legal clauses into plain language) to prove the pattern transfers. It's TypeScript first with a Python translation track, grounded in the open-source wanderlearn-field-reporter repo, and every example runs offline with no API key. Follow along in the wanderlearn-field-reporter repo, and see the loop running in the deployed app.

Researching with AI (Cited & Verified)

Use AI to research faster without getting fooled. Learn what AI research tools can and can't do, why the hallucinated citation is the #1 risk and how to catch it, lateral reading and going to the primary source, how to judge source quality (who, when, why, funded by whom), how to use AI to find vs. to verify, how to synthesize without plagiarizing, attribution and APA basics (including how to cite AI itself), and how to build a verifiable research workflow with a source trail. Practical, non-hype, and cited to NIST, Stanford Civic Online Reasoning, APA Style, and a university library.

How to Research: Finding Out Whether It's True

The discipline underneath every documentary, oral history, news piece and civic record: how to ask a question that can be answered, find sources worth trusting, corroborate what matters, and be honest in public about what you could not settle. Built on the Trusted Documentation Rubric this platform grades real work against.

Learning How to Learn

Most of us were never taught how to study, so we reread, highlight, and cram, which feel productive but fade fast. This course replaces those habits with what cognitive science actually shows works: retrieval practice, spaced repetition, interleaving, sleep, and deliberate practice. Each lesson is cited to the original research. By the end you'll have a study system you can run on any subject, and know why each piece earns its place.

Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan: The Science of Actually Doing It

Everyone told you to visualize success. The research says that, on its own, it makes you less likely to get it. This course teaches what actually works instead: mental contrasting (imagine the outcome, then confront the obstacle inside you) combined with implementation intentions (if this happens, then I will do that). Together they are called MCII, and Gabriele Oettingen's team packages them for the public as Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. You will finish able to run the method correctly on a real goal of your own, explain why each of the four steps is there, and, just as importantly, say honestly what the evidence does and does not support. Every study is cited with a DOI. The effects are real and they are modest, and this course tells you which is which.

Cybersecurity: Get the Job

A hands-on, career-focused path into cybersecurity, from how the internet works to defending it, ending with the certifications, portfolio, and interview prep to land an entry-level role (SOC analyst and beyond). Ethics-first throughout: every offensive concept is taught only for authorized, legal, defensive use.

Knot-Tying & Rope Work

A practical, hands-on trade course in knots, hitches, bends, whippings, and splices, the foundational rope skills behind rigging, sailing, climbing, and survival. Description-first (every knot is taught in words: what it is, how to tie it step by step, when to use it and when NOT to, and the common mistakes). Built on the public-domain classic by A. Hyatt Verrill (1917). This course pairs with the Sports/Media Broadcasting course: rope and rigging skill is core to broadcast "utility technician" roles (cable and rigging) and to the trades, sailing, climbing, and survival.

Season 1

BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods

Better Vice Club: a cited, audio-first history of Chocolate — Food of the Gods.

Season 1

BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection

Better Vice Club: a cited, audio-first history of Coffee — The Daily Global Connection.

Season 1

BVC: Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom

Better Vice Club: a cited, audio-first history of Guayusa & Kola Nut — Forest Wisdom.

Season 1

BVC: Kava — The Root of Peace

Better Vice Club: a cited, audio-first history of Kava — The Root of Peace.

Season 1

BVC: My Daily Altar — Season Synthesis

Better Vice Club: a cited, audio-first history of My Daily Altar — Season Synthesis.

Season 1

BVC: Sugar — The Sweet Revolution

Better Vice Club: a cited, audio-first history of Sugar — The Sweet Revolution.

Season 1

BVC: Tea — The Way of Tea

Better Vice Club: a cited, audio-first history of Tea — The Way of Tea.

Off-Grid & Emergency Survival

A calm, cited, principles-first introduction to emergency preparedness and off-grid resilience: planning and kits, water, shelter and warmth, food, off-grid power, sanitation, first aid, and communications. Every lesson is grounded in public U.S. government and Red Cross guidance (Ready.gov/FEMA, CDC, EPA, USDA, NWS/NOAA) and points you back to those authorities. Educational only: it teaches you what to learn and where to verify it, not a substitute for hands-on training.

Break Into Sports & Media Broadcasting

A practical, career-focused path into sports and media broadcasting: the roles that actually hire (on-air talent, producer, camera/AV, broadcast engineer, editor, stream ops, and the utility-technician entry role), the calling card that gets you noticed, the audio/video and live-production fundamentals to be useful on day one, and the internship, freelance, union, and networking moves that land a first job. Cited to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the NAB, the SBE, and the FCC.

Voice Acting: The Instrument

Before auditions, demos, or a single paid read, there is the instrument: breath, vocal folds, articulators, the mic, and the room. This course teaches how your voice actually works, how to keep it healthy, how to record it cleanly at home, and how to break down a script, then closes with an honest map of the business, with no promises a course cannot keep.

Read Your Body's Data: A 5-Week Guide to Living

A five-week, audio-first course that teaches you to read your own fitness-tracker data, resting heart rate, steps, sleep, and intensity minutes, and turn it into small, compounding habits backed by longevity research. You run an N-of-1 experiment and finish with a personal health blueprint.

Africa Before Colonization: The Documented Record

In 1830s Berlin, Hegel told his students that Africa was "no historical part of the World." In 1963, on British television, an Oxford professor said African history was "largely darkness." This course opens with those claims in the deniers' own words, then spends seven sections walking the documented record that refutes them: the kings of Kush who ruled Egypt as its 25th Dynasty; Aksum minting its own gold coins and adopting Christianity a generation before Rome made it official; the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai on the gold roads, and the book culture of Timbuktu; the drystone city of Great Zimbabwe, and the documented campaign by a settler state to censor who built it; the Swahili trading coast Ibn Battuta called one of the most beautiful in the world; the Benin bronzes and the 1897 British looting; Ethiopia from the rock churches of Lalibela to the battlefield of Adwa. It is honest where honesty is uncomfortable: African states participated in slavery and the slave trades, and the course teaches that record plainly, because omitting it is its own distortion. It is equally honest about the opposite trap: romantic myth (a war-free golden age, invented net-worth figures for Mansa Musa) is as useless as the erasure, and the course flags every shaky claim as contested or estimated rather than asserting it. The last sections teach the transferable skill: HOW historians know, from archaeology, manuscripts, Arabic travelers in scholarly translation, and oral tradition, each with its strengths and limits. Cited throughout to the UNESCO General History of Africa, working Africanists (Thornton, Ehret, Gomez, Vansina, Hunwick), the Levtzion & Hopkins Corpus, museum records, and UNESCO World Heritage documentation. Every claim names a region, a people, and a period. Nothing here is "Africa did X."

Afrocentricity: How to Evaluate a Contested Paradigm

Afrocentricity is a specific, named academic paradigm: Molefi Kete Asante coined the term, and its intellectual roots run through the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop. It is also genuinely contested. This course does the hard thing, it teaches Afrocentricity as its proponents define it, presents its strongest claims from their own books, AND presents the substantive academic criticism from the critics' own books, without picking a side or asserting a contested claim as settled fact. You will work through the two most famous debates it produced (Was ancient Egypt a Black African civilization? and the Black Athena exchange), learn to separate rigorous Afrocentric scholarship from pop-Afrocentric myth, and walk away with a transferable skill: how to evaluate any paradigm that is part legitimate corrective and part overcorrection. Built for high school students and adult learners. Cited to Asante, Diop, Bernal, Lefkowitz, Howe, Appiah, mainstream Egyptology, and recent ancient-DNA research (APA 7 + a Sources list on every lesson).

Asia Before European Colonization: The Center of Gravity

For most of recorded history, the center of the world economy was not in Europe. It was in Asia, and this course shows you the map. In eleven survey lessons plus an honest-record section, you will meet the Indus cities and the script nobody has ever read; Ashoka, the emperor who published his conscience on rocks; the Gupta mathematicians whose place-value numerals and zero became the digits you use every day; the Mughals, Central Asian outsiders who ruled India two centuries before the British did; Han, Tang, and Song China, where printing, paper money, the magnetic compass, and gunpowder were in use while Paris was a muddy town; Heian Japan and the shogunates; Korea, which printed with movable metal type before Gutenberg was born; Angkor, the largest preindustrial city footprint archaeologists have mapped; and the maritime empires of Srivijaya and Majapahit that most world-history courses skip entirely. Between them ran the connective tissue: the Silk Roads by land and sea, the translation movement of the Islamic Golden Age, and the Mongol Empire, taught as neither pure destroyer nor pure connector, because the record shows both. The course's central claim is cited, not asserted: economic historians' reconstructions (Maddison, 2007; taught with their caveats) put China and India together at roughly half of world output as late as 1820, and the scholarly fight over when and why 'the West' pulled ahead (Pomeranz, 2000, versus Broadberry and colleagues, 2018) is presented as the live debate it is. It is honest where honesty is uncomfortable: caste, hereditary slavery, and conquest were Asian realities long before any European ship arrived, and 'colonization' was not a European invention, only a European escalation. Every claim names a civilization, a period, and a region. Nothing here is 'Asia did X.'

Baltimore: The Whole Chain

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on one American city that holds every link of the housing-segregation chain within its own limits: racial zoning, restrictive covenants, redlining, and a highway driven through the middle of a Black neighborhood and then abandoned. Baltimore is uniquely useful because you do not have to leave town to see the whole sequence. Its two prerequisites, The Green Book: How to Read a Route and Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It, teach the method and the idea of an instrument, a specific legal power exercised by a specific body under a specific statute leaving a specific document. This course lines up four such instruments as one lineage aimed at one end, and then does the harder thing: it tests whether the sequence is really as clean as it sounds. It is not. The ordinance was a chain of four laws, not one. The covenants ran alongside the zoning rather than after it. The redlining map's direct causal role is disputed by the historians who have read the lending records. Teaching that untidiness is the point, because a chain you can check is worth more than a story you cannot. You will read the ordinance, the covenant language, the map and the highway plan, walk the unfinished trench as an unusually legible absence, find the plan being written for that ground right now, look up a real Baltimore parcel in the state's own records, and write a piece of grounded nonfiction about one block. A 360 tour of the corridor is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.

Brazil: State-Chartered Unions, a Union-Made President, and the 2017 Rupture

The country course built around a controlled experiment nobody could have designed: what happens to unions that were funded by the state, when the state stops funding them? Brazil answers it. In 1943, Getúlio Vargas's CLT wrote corporatism directly into law, one state-chartered union per category per territory, financed by a compulsory union tax deducted from every worker, member or not. That machinery organized labor and controlled it at once, and it survived democracy, dictatorship, and redemocratization, until the ABC metalworkers' strikes of 1978-80 produced a new unionism, a new federation (CUT), a new party (PT), and, eventually, a president. Then Law 13.467 of 2017 abolished the compulsory tax, and union revenue collapsed by more than 90% within two years, the course teaches the documented figures, year by year, source by source. It also teaches who the CLT never reached: the roughly four in ten Brazilian workers in informality (IBGE), the app drivers whose employment status Brazil's Supreme Court had not resolved as of July 2026, and the workers rescued from trabalho análogo à escravidão, slavery-like labor, by a mobile inspection system and a 'dirty list' that names employers publicly. Neutral and dated on live politics; every figure carries its year and source. Cited to the CLT, the 1988 Constitution, IBGE, the ILO, the STF's published decisions, and Brazil's Ministry of Labor.

Chile: A Labor System Designed to Be Weak

Every other course in the Workers' Rights track shows you a labor system that evolved, pushed and pulled into shape over a century of strikes, statutes, and settlements. Chile shows you one that was designed. In 1979, under a military dictatorship, a 30-year-old economist named José Piñera wrote a labor code with a stated goal, published a book defending it, and signed his work, bargaining confined by law to the single firm, strikes that employers could wait out or replace their way through, union pluralism used to fragment rather than to free. This course reads that design the way an engineer reads a blueprint. You will see what stood before it: the strongest labor movement in Latin America, a third of wage earners unionised by 1973, and how it was destroyed after the coup, told soberly and cited carefully. You will hear the designers' case in their own words, steelmanned honestly before it is measured against the record. You will follow the design through the return to democracy, why elected governments reformed it only at the margins for a quarter century, what the 2016 reform (Ley 20.940) finally changed, and what it deliberately did not, and you will read the result in today's numbers: union density around 16% and bargaining coverage around 19% (2023, OECD/AIAS), among the lowest in the OECD, in a system the OECD itself describes as atomised. Then the comparison the whole track has been building toward: Chile against Sweden and Denmark, two systems with the same surface, no sectoral bargaining written into statute, for exactly opposite reasons. One is silent because unions are strong enough not to need it. One is silent because its authors wanted them weak. This is the recommended final country course in the track, because its closing assignment is the point of the whole track: go re-read your own country's labor law, and ask who designed it, and what they wanted. Cited to OECD/AIAS, the Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional, the Dirección del Trabajo, Memoria Chilena, Servel, and the designers' own published defense. Take "The History of Unions: America and the World" first.

Clean: A Global History of Bathing and Soap

A complete, cited history of getting clean, for high school students. You will visit the great bathing traditions of the world, each sophisticated on its own terms: the Indus Valley's Great Bath, Rome's thermae and the oil-and-scraper method that used no soap, the Islamic hammam and the hard olive-oil soap of Aleppo and Nablus, the Japanese bath born of Shinto purification and Buddhist merit, the Finnish sauna, and the Mesoamerican temazcal. Along the way you will learn where soap actually comes from (no single inventor), and you will meet the single most stubborn myth in this whole subject head-on: that medieval Europeans never bathed and had to be taught to wash. That belief is largely false, and this course shows you the real, documented story instead. The verdict is not 'civilized people versus dirty people.' It is many different, richly developed traditions, plus one specific European retreat from bathing and its slow return. Every claim names a source, and where a vivid story rests on a single observer, the course says so and hedges rather than dressing it up as fact.

Deep Time and the Dinosaur Renaissance

The dinosaur you learned as a child was a sluggish, tail-dragging swamp animal, and the people who taught you that were reading their evidence carefully. This course follows how the earth got old, who was allowed to say so, and how a field talked itself out of a picture it had held for fifty years. It ends on the end-Cretaceous extinction, where the argument is still running, because a course about revising beliefs that pretends the current picture is finished would be teaching the opposite of its own lesson.

Exported: How Others Studied American Race Law

A cited, high-school-and-up course on a narrow and well documented question: did the legal techniques the United States built for governing race travel to other countries, and if so, how. This is the capstone of the route series and the most carefully bounded course in it. It keeps two claims strictly apart because they rest on different kinds of evidence. The first is Nazi Germany, where a stenographic transcript of a 5 June 1934 meeting of Nazi lawyers records a long, detailed discussion of American immigration, citizenship and anti-miscegenation law, and where the leading study of that record, James Q. Whitman's Hitler's American Model, insists that the Nazis studied American law selectively and rejected parts of it, including the one-drop rule, as too harsh. The second is apartheid South Africa, where the honest framing is parallel development from a shared British colonial parent plus documented mutual observation running in both directions, not copying. You will learn what the word influence means in comparative law and what it does not, read the American instruments the claim rests on, meet the scholars who think the German link is overstated, and finish with a section on the limits of the analogy that is taught explicitly so the course inoculates against its own misuse. It teaches the transmission of legal technique. It does not equate outcomes, and it says so.

Fort Harrison: The Federal Footprint

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on Fort Benjamin Harrison, the Army post northeast of Indianapolis that opened in 1908, trained officers in two world wars, held prisoners of war, ran the Army's money for forty years, closed under base realignment, and became a state park, a redevelopment district and a federal finance center all on the same ground. Course 6 of the Indianapolis cluster, and the one that asks what happens to a city when the federal government is the landowner. You will learn how a post is laid out and how to read rank off a street, why federal land pays no property tax and what a school district gets instead, how the base closure commission was built so that no member of Congress could save a single base, and how a public benefit conveyance decided that two thirds of this ground would be public forest rather than subdivisions. The segregation question is handled the way the record allows: two documented items specific to this post, and a plain list of what the preservation documents do not say. You will look up a real parcel, find who actually zones it, and write a piece of grounded nonfiction. A virtual tour of the post is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is published.

Germany: Workers on the Board

Germany answers the question "who decides?" differently than any country an American student has ever seen, and the proof is a pair of numbers. About 14% of German workers belong to a union (2024). About half of them are covered by a collective agreement (2024). Those numbers are not in tension; they are the whole lesson. This course takes co-determination (Mitbestimmung) apart piece by piece: works councils elected by ALL employees under the Works Constitution Act, and the precise, unglamorous difference between a right to be informed, a right to be consulted, and a right to actually say no; workers holding half the seats on the supervisory board of a big company under the Co-determination Act of 1976, and the casting vote that means "half" overstates it; the dual system of sectoral bargaining above the firm and the peace obligation that comes with it. Then the honest part: coverage has been falling for twenty-five years, most German workplaces have no works council at all, roughly 40% of the companies big enough to owe workers a parity board have engineered their way out of it, and the best economics finds co-determination's effects to be real but modest. Cited to the German statutes themselves, Destatis, the IAB, OECD/AIAS, ETUI and the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung. A country course in the Workers' Rights track, take "The History of Unions: America and the World" first.

Giants, Dragons, and the Bones They Came From

For most of recorded history, people dug up bones far too large for any animal they knew and had to say something about them. They said giants, dragons, thunder horses, and the remains of a world before the Flood. This course takes those answers seriously as answers: what evidence was on the table, which premises made each conclusion reasonable, and what it actually took to change the verdict. It ends with a ten-foot stone man buried on a farm in New York, and with the harder question of what you would need to see to stop believing something you already want to be true.

How the Tools Traveled

The capstone of the route series, and the course that turns a shelf of city courses into a curriculum with a thesis. Each city course in this series documented a decision: a blight designation in Indianapolis, a Supreme Court opinion out of Southwest Washington, a school district line in Detroit and Indianapolis, a racial zoning ordinance in Baltimore, a public-private partnership in Pittsburgh, a closed Army post in Lawrence, Indiana. Told separately they look like local misfortunes. They were not. They were a shared toolkit, largely federal, applied locally, and this course teaches the transmission rather than the tools. You will start with a taxonomy of connection, ranked from source and use at the strongest to thematic rhyme at the weakest, and with the rule that governs the rest of the course: a shared pattern is a rhyme, and only a documented line, a citation, a copied plan, a named person or a funding stream, is a connection. Then you will read the federal upstream in its own words: the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, the Federal Housing Administration's Underwriting Manual, and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which was formally the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways and is the bridge between the war material and the city material. Then you will work the flagship connection all the way through, Berman v. Parker out of Southwest Washington, and watch it fail the chronology test in its strong form and survive in a weaker and truer one. Then you will test three more lines and one whole category the course could not close, without re-inflating a single claim a sibling course weakened. Fort Harrison shows the same federal upstream acting through a different mechanism, as landowner and employer rather than funder. The course ends where an honest one has to end, with what none of this proves, and with a drill and an assignment that make you test a connection of your own. Prerequisites: The Green Book: How to Read a Route, plus at least two city courses, of which Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It and Washington, DC: Where the Instrument Was Blessed are the two ends of the connection worked here.

India: When Most Workers Have No Employer

Every tool in the anchor course, the election, the contract, the grievance procedure, the duty to bargain, assumes one thing so basic it is never said out loud: that a worker is an employee, and an employee has an employer. India is where that assumption breaks. About 90% of Indian workers are in informal employment (India Employment Report 2024, ILO and the Institute for Human Development, built on the government's own Periodic Labour Force Survey): no written contract, no social security, often no identifiable employer at all. This course teaches what that number means and where it comes from; the full legal machine India built on paper (a union with seven members, a constitution that guarantees association, and a Supreme Court that found no fundamental right to strike); union federations that each belong to a political party, a third politics-and-labor entanglement to set against Poland and China; SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association, which since 1972 has organized millions of women who have no employer to bargain with, the one institutional invention in this track built for exactly that; the 2019-2020 Labour Codes that folded 29 laws into four and then waited five years to come into force (taught dated, because the states are still writing their rules); the first legal recognition of gig and platform workers anywhere in this track; and the honest part, caste and labor, the sewer deaths a ministry reported to Parliament in the same breath as 'no manual scavenging,' and child labor's real progress and real limits. Cited to the ILO, the Periodic Labour Force Survey, the Codes' own text, parliamentary answers, and SEWA's own record. A country course in the Workers' Rights track, take "The History of Unions: America and the World" first.

Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis: the Black business and cultural corridor that held the Madam C.J. Walker Building, a jazz scene with national reach, and dozens of Green Book listed businesses, and the documented decisions that removed most of it. This is the PILOT of the route-course series, and it applies a method rather than telling a story. The prerequisite course, The Green Book: How to Read a Route, teaches you to read a listing, chain a route, and research an address forward; this course takes that method to one nine-block corridor and asks the harder question: who decided, under which instrument, on what record. You will learn the actual tools of the decision (the blight designation, eminent domain, the highway alignment, a university assembling land, and the redrawing of a city's boundary in the 1970 Unigov consolidation), test a proposed historical argument against a chronology and watch part of it fail, look up a real parcel in Marion County's own records, find the plan currently being written for this ground, and write a piece of grounded nonfiction about it. A 360 tour of the corridor is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.

Mexico: The Protection Contract, and the Trade Deal That Came for It

The country course that teaches you to stop asking "is there a union?" and start asking "whose union is it?" Mexico put labor rights in its constitution in 1917, eighteen years before the United States passed the Wagner Act, and then spent most of a century with a union movement built into the ruling party. Out of that grew the protection contract: a collective agreement signed between a company and a union the workers had never heard of, sometimes before the factory had hired anybody, which then legally blocked a real union from organizing. This course teaches exactly how that worked, how Mexico's own 2019 labor reform set out to kill it (every existing contract had to win a free, secret, personal vote by 1 May 2023 or die), and how the USMCA's Rapid Response Labor Mechanism became the one international labor tool anywhere that actually bites, a tariff penalty aimed at a single factory. Then it teaches the mechanism's limits, including the cases the United States lost. Cited to the treaty text, the Mexican Constitution, the Ley Federal del Trabajo, Mexico's STPS and Federal Labor Center, USTR, and the US Department of Labor.

Monsters at the Edge of the Map

Mapmakers drew dragons, sea serpents and one-footed men in the places they had not been. This course asks what those drawings were actually for, which turns out to be a much better question than whether people believed them. You will learn to read a map as an argument made by someone with interests, and you will follow that same habit of description from the parchment margin to places where it was used on real people.

Mudsock: How a Rivalry Marks a Boundary

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on Fishers and Hamilton County, Indiana, built around one civic question: how does a suburb form, and who pays for what. This is the counterweight to Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It. That course follows a Black business corridor that was cleared; this one follows the ground that grew, twenty miles northeast, over the same decades, under a different set of legal instruments. You will learn where the name Mudsock comes from and what a nickname is and is not evidence of, read a county's growth out of the decennial census instead of out of a slogan, look at the subdivision and the campus high school as building types with assumptions built into them, and then spend the longest section of the course on the instruments themselves: incorporation, annexation and the remonstrance waiver almost nobody reads, the school district line drawn under Indiana's 1959 School Reorganization Act, and the property tax caps that decide when a wealthy district still has to ask its voters for money. You will test the claim in this course's own title against the record and watch part of it fail, look up a real parcel and a real taxing district in Indiana's public finance database, find the school referendum currently on the November 2026 ballot, and write a piece of grounded nonfiction about one street or one boundary. A virtual tour of the Mudsock rivalry and its ground is planned and will be added to the Now section when its embed URL exists.

Pan-Africanism: The Idea, the Movement, the Reckoning

In July 1900, a few dozen people met in a London town hall and gave a name to an idea: that Africans and people of African descent everywhere share a linked history and a linked destiny, and ought to act together. Within one lifetime that idea helped end colonial rule on a continent, built the Organisation of African Unity and then the African Union, and left its colors on dozens of flags. This is the anchor course of the Pan-Africanism track: the nineteenth-century roots and Edward Wilmot Blyden, Henry Sylvester Williams and the 1900 conference, Du Bois's Congresses and the pivotal Manchester Congress of 1945, Garvey and the UNIA taught honestly (the unmatched ambition AND the Black Star Line's collapse and the fraud conviction), Nkrumah and Ghana 1957, the OAU-to-AU arc, Négritude and its Harlem Renaissance bridge, Rastafari and Ethiopia as symbol versus fact, and the reckoning: the movement's internal tensions and the strongmen who wore its language while ruling by fear. Celebration-only history isn't credible, and this movement's documents are strong enough not to need it. Every date sourced; famous quotes verbatim-verified or explicitly flagged; APA 7 citations and a Sources list on every lesson. Built for high school students and adult learners.

Philadelphia: The University and the Block

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on the Black Bottom in West Philadelphia: the working-class Black neighborhood that was certified as blighted and cleared in the 1960s so that a consortium of universities led by the University of Pennsylvania could build the University City Science Center, the nation's first urban research park. This is the second metro-spine course after the Indianapolis pilot, and it exists to test one argument: that the Black Bottom is Indiana Avenue's closest twin anywhere, because the instrument that did the work at both campuses is the same, a university assembling land through a public redevelopment authority under a 1945 state blight statute. The prerequisite courses teach the method and the model: The Green Book: How to Read a Route teaches you to read a record and research an address forward, and Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It found that a university plus a redevelopment authority, not the highway, cleared that corridor. This course draws the comparison explicitly and stays precise about what is parallel and what is merely similar. You will learn the certification instrument under Pennsylvania's Urban Redevelopment Law, eminent domain and federal urban-renewal financing, and the West Philadelphia Corporation as the university's land-assembly surrogate; you will handle, with care and by way of the official commission report, a second and very different West Philadelphia decision, the MOVE bombing of 1985; you will look up a real parcel in the city's own Atlas, find the live civics of Penn's payments to the schools, and write a piece of grounded nonfiction. A 360 tour of the corridor is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.

Pittsburgh: Where the Playbook Was Written

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on Pittsburgh's Hill District: the majority-Black neighborhood that Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay called the Crossroads of the World, home of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Crawford Grill and the Hill District of August Wilson's ten-play cycle, and the Lower Hill of it that was declared blighted and cleared in the 1950s for the Civic Arena. This is a sibling of the Indiana Avenue course, and it goes one step further: Indianapolis did not invent the instruments that emptied Indiana Avenue, and neither did Pittsburgh, but Pittsburgh assembled and showcased the public-private redevelopment machine early and visibly enough that the postwar Pittsburgh Renaissance became a national reference case. This course applies the prerequisite Green Book method to one neighborhood, teaches the actual tools of the decision (the state redevelopment law, the blight designation, eminent domain, the public-private partnership, and the export of the model), tests the course's own headline claim against the record and reports where it weakens, looks at the arena as architecture and at the rare double absence left when that arena was itself demolished around 2011 to 2012, sends the learner to Allegheny County's own parcel records and to Pittsburgh's unfinished comprehensive plan, and ends in an August Wilson writing assignment. A 360 tour of the Lower Hill is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.

Poland: Solidarność, When a Union Brought Down a State

In August 1980, workers at a shipyard in Gdańsk went on strike and posted twenty-one demands on the gate. Demand number one was not about pay, it was the right to form a trade union free of the Communist Party. Within a year that union, Solidarność, had roughly ten million members, about a third of Poland. Nine years later it negotiated the communist state out of existence and swept the first partly-free election in the Soviet bloc. No other country in this track shows a trade union as the primary engine of a political revolution, a union that brought down a government. That is the spine of this course, taught with the repression and not just the triumph: martial law, internment, nine miners shot dead at the Wujek colliery, a decade underground. Then the honest ending, which is the actual lesson: the union won the country and then lost the workplace. Solidarity's own governments ran the shock-therapy reforms of the 1990s, unemployment climbed from zero to over 16%, and today Poland's union density (about 9%, 2022, OECD/AIAS) is among the lowest in the European Union, its bargaining fragmented to the single company. A union won a country and could not hold the shop floor. Cited to UNESCO's Memory of the World, the European Solidarity Centre, Statistics Poland (GUS), OECD/AIAS and ETUI. A country course in the Workers' Rights track, take "The History of Unions: America and the World" first.

Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica: Cities, Calendars, and the People Who Are Still Here

Before any European ship reached the Americas, the land between central Mexico and Costa Rica held some of the largest cities on Earth, a fully developed writing system, a positional number system with zero, calendars accurate enough to track Venus for centuries, and farms engineered on lakes and in rainforests. This course walks that record: the Olmec of the Gulf lowlands and the live scholarly debate about what they were to everyone else; Teotihuacan, a metropolis of perhaps 100,000 whose builders' very language is unknown, the best humility lesson in archaeology; the Maya city-states, their script and Long Count calendar, the real (and really debated) Classic collapse, and the roughly seven million Maya alive right now, because they did not vanish; the Mexica (Aztec) island capital of Tenochtitlan, its chinampa farms and tribute empire, and an honest accounting of human sacrifice, real, excavated, and routinely exaggerated by sources with motives; the Zapotec, Mixtec, and the Purepecha empire that stopped the Aztecs cold; Central America beyond Mexico, from the buried village of Joya de Ceren to the stone spheres of the Diquis delta; and the conquest told without myths, smallpox and steel, yes, but also tens of thousands of Indigenous allies who were fighting their own war, and a 'conquest' that did not reach the last independent Maya kingdom until 1697. The last section teaches the transferable skill: HOW we know, a bishop's book-burning at Mani in 1562 and the four codices that survived it, the Cold War decipherment that let the Maya speak in their own words, and the LiDAR surveys that found tens of thousands of structures under the Peten canopy in a single campaign. Numbers are taught as ranges, contested claims are labeled contested with a name on each side, and nothing here is 'mysterious ancient aliens', the mystery-mongering is itself one of the myths this course dismantles. Cited throughout to working Mesoamericanists (Coe, Houston, Miller, Martin, Restall, Cowgill, Smith), INAH excavation reporting, the Popol Vuh and Florentine Codex in scholarly translation, and UNESCO World Heritage documentation.

Seattle: The Modern Bookend

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on Seattle: who could live where, the neighborhoods that racial restriction built, and the two Supreme Court opinions that bracket a single argument thirty-three years apart. The building block is a boundary you cannot photograph. You will read Seattle out of a rare searchable primary archive, the University of Washington's Racial Restrictive Covenants Project, which has documented tens of thousands of deeds that once barred nonwhite families from most of the city. You will sit with the Central District, the corridor where a constrained Black Seattle built a full community, and with Bainbridge Island, the place the first forced removal of Japanese Americans began in 1942, now marked by a memorial the community keeps. Then you will read two opinions directly. Milliken v. Bradley (1974) stopped a court-ordered desegregation remedy at the school district line: it limited what a court could compel. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007) stopped a district that had never been segregated by law from using race in school assignment: it limited what a district could choose to do voluntarily. You will quote the operative language of both, including the plurality and concurrence split in Parents Involved that decides what the case actually held, correct what it is popularly said to have held, look up a real covenant or parcel in the public records, learn how Seattle assigns students today, and write one grounded, checkable piece. Prerequisites: The Green Book: How to Read a Route (the method) and The Gym and the Color Line (the district-line course this one bookends). A 360 tour of the ground is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.

South Africa: The Union That Helped End Apartheid, Then Joined the Government

Apartheid South Africa put Black workers outside labor law by name: the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 wrote them out of the word "employee," a 1953 statute criminalised their strikes, and "job reservation" saved the best jobs for white workers by law, the bluntest version of the exclusion move this track finds in country after country. This course follows what the excluded built anyway: the leaderless Durban strikes of 1973, the shop-steward unions that became COSATU in 1985 (about 460,000 members at launch, South African History Online), the three-week miners' strike of 1987, and the Tripartite Alliance with the ANC that helped end apartheid in 1994. Then it follows the harder story after the victory. The Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995 is among the most worker-friendly statutes anywhere, written partly by the unionists who had just won, and yet official unemployment stands at 32.9% (Q1 2025, Stats SA), labor broking moves workers outside the paper protections, and on 16 August 2012 police of the democratic state shot dead 34 striking miners at Marikana. That day is taught soberly, from the published findings of the Farlam Commission, what it found, what it did not find, and what is still unresolved, dated and left open. The course ends with the fracture the alliance produced, NUMSA expelled in 2014, the rival SAFTU federation founded in 2017, and with a question borrowed from this track's Poland course, offered and not answered: can a union movement win the state without losing the workplace? Cited to South African History Online, the statutes themselves, Stats SA, the ILO and the Marikana Commission report. A country course in the Workers' Rights track, take "The History of Unions: America and the World" first.

South Korea: Democracy, the Chaebol, and the Lawsuit as a Weapon

South Korea compresses a century of labor history into four decades. Under Park Chung-hee's developmental dictatorship, cheap and tightly controlled labor was not a side effect of the economic miracle, it was the policy, and the teenage women sewing in the Peace Market's attic workshops paid for it. On 13 November 1970 a 22-year-old tailor named Jeon Tae-il burned himself alive beside a copy of the Labor Standards Act the state refused to enforce; his reported last words, "We are not machines", became the founding sentence of the modern Korean labor movement, and his mother Lee So-sun spent the next four decades building the unions her son died asking for. In the summer of 1987, as the dictatorship cracked, more than three thousand strikes erupted in three months, the Great Workers' Struggle, and Korean workers won their unions and their democracy in the same season. Then the honest part: a wealthy OECD democracy that ratified the ILO's freedom-of-association conventions only in 2021; a workforce where 38.2% of wage workers are 'non-regular' (August 2025, Statistics Korea) and stand outside most of what the unions won; union density of about 13% (2022, Ministry of Employment and Labor) with bargaining coverage barely higher, because bargaining stops at the company gate; and a repression mechanism students will not have seen anywhere else in this track, civil damages suits and provisional seizure of wages and homes brought against individual strikers, which can financially destroy a worker without ever jailing one. The decade-long fight over that mechanism, the 'yellow envelope law,' is taught dated and unresolved. A country course in the Workers' Rights track, take "The History of Unions: America and the World" first.

Sweden & Denmark: The Wage Floor That Isn't a Law

In Sweden and Denmark there is almost no statutory national minimum wage, and that is not an oversight. It is the design. The wage floor is a contract, negotiated industry by industry between unions and employers, and the state deliberately stays out. For a student raised on "the government sets the floor," this is the most disorienting fact in the whole Workers' Rights track, and this course is built around it. You will learn the plumbing that makes it work: the Ghent system, in which unemployment insurance is run through union-linked funds, which pushes union membership toward two-thirds of the workforce, and the natural experiment that proves it, because Norway, a Nordic country WITHOUT Ghent, sits around half. You will see the strongest evidence for that mechanism anywhere: when Sweden raised its unemployment-fund fees in 2007, density fell, fast. You will meet the two agreements by which the state stepped back on purpose, Saltsjöbaden (Sweden, 1938) and the September Compromise (Denmark, 1899), and the Danish bargain called flexicurity: easy to fire, well cushioned if you are, and actively helped back to work, taught as a trade rather than a fairy tale, and honestly, as a trade under strain. You will learn the sharpest single comparison in the track: sympathy strikes, which US law bans, are legal here, and you will watch the model defend itself in real time in the still-unresolved 2023 Tesla dispute in Sweden. Then the honest limits: density is falling, migrant and platform workers sit outside the agreements, and (the lesson nobody expects) the Nordic unions themselves fought an EU law that would have guaranteed a minimum wage, because a legal floor would undercut the thing they built. Cited to OECD/AIAS, ETUI, Eurofound, the national confederations, and the EU directive itself. A country course in the Workers' Rights track, take "The History of Unions: America and the World" first.

The Great Migration: How Six Million People Remade America

A thorough, cited walk through the Great Migration (roughly 1910s-1970s): why six million African Americans left the South, the three routes they traveled, the cities they built (Bronzeville, Harlem, Paradise Valley, and (in the Second Great Migration) Vanport, Oregon), and the culture, politics, and long shadow that move created. Built for homeschoolers and adult learners: every lesson has a clear objective, a primary-source pointer, an activity, and a self-check, and pairs with an interactive green/black/red migration map. Cited to the National Archives, U.S. Census Bureau, Smithsonian, BlackPast, the Schomburg Center, and standard scholarship (Wilkerson, Gregory, Grossman). Companion to the Hoodoo and Civics courses.

The Great Migration: How Six Million People Remade America (and the World)

A cited, high-school-level history of the Great Migration, the movement of roughly six million Black Americans out of the rural South between about 1916 and 1970, and the country and culture they remade. The course follows the shape of the move itself: the forces that pushed people out (Jim Crow, sharecropping and debt peonage, racial terror, the boll weevil), the forces that pulled them north and west (wartime factory labor, the Chicago Defender, kinship chains), the three great routes they traveled, the cities and culture they built (the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago blues, Motown, the Black church and press, Black political power and a growing Black middle class), the costs they were made to pay (redlining, restrictive covenants, the second ghetto, white flight, deindustrialization), and the pillar most surveys skip: how the culture and the moral argument of the Migration went global. Built on Isabel Wilkerson's three-family narrative frame and standard scholarship (Wilkerson, Lemann, Grossman, Marks), with primary sources pointed to their real archives. Companion to this platform's homeschool 'Great Migration' course and its Hoodoo, History of Unions, and Pan-Africanism courses.

The Green Book: How to Read a Route

A cited, high-school-and-up method course on The Negro Motorist Green Book, the annual travel guide Victor H. Green published from 1936 to 1966 so Black American motorists could find lodging, food, fuel, and repair without being turned away or endangered. This is not a tour of famous places. It teaches you to DO something: to open a digitized edition at the Schomburg Center, read a listing down to its abbreviations and its silences, chain listings into an actual route across a state line, read a gap in the listings as evidence rather than as a hole, map the cities the book leaned on, and research what happened to an address after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after urban renewal, and after the interstates. It closes with a research assignment you carry out yourself on a real address. Prerequisite for every site course in the route series.

The Gym and the Color Line

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on Indianapolis high school gymnasiums and football fields, and on the one civic instrument that decides who plays in them: the school district line. Indiana builds the largest high school gyms in the United States, and it built Crispus Attucks High School in 1927 as the segregated Black high school for a city whose school board had been asked to build it. Attucks was kept out of the state tournament until 1942, sat on 8.4 acres when the state's own formula asked for more than three times that, and then won the state championship in 1955, 1956 and 1959. The building type is the hook. The boundary is the lesson. You will read three court opinions directly, United States v. Board of School Commissioners (1971 and 1974) and Milliken v. Bradley (1974), and watch a federal judge find that more than ninety percent of about 350 attendance-zone changes promoted segregation, watch the 1969 Unigov statute expand a city's limits while expressly leaving its school district where it was, and watch the Supreme Court turn the district line into a wall the remedy could not cross. Then you will test that argument against a chronology, correct two claims this course could not verify, look up a real school's district and its boundary in the federal and state records, and write about one gym. Prerequisites: The Green Book: How to Read a Route (the method) and Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It (course 1, the same metro). A 360 tour of the gyms and fields is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.

The History of Unions: America and the World

How working people organized, and what it cost them. The American arc from the Knights of Labor and Haymarket through the Triangle fire, the Wagner Act, Taft-Hartley, Memphis, and PATCO to today's union density, told with the parts a comfortable course skips: the law's deliberate exclusion of farm and domestic workers, unions' own record of racial and gender exclusion, and the corruption chapters. Then the world: there is no single "union" model. Nordic sectoral bargaining, German co-determination, Japanese enterprise unions, China's state-run federation, Solidarity and COSATU as democratic opposition, and the Gulf's migrant workers, who have almost no rights at all. You finish able to look at any country and ask the right four questions. Cited throughout to BLS, the NLRB, the ILO, the OECD, the Library of Congress, and the statutes themselves.

The President's House

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on the Benjamin Harrison house at 1230 North Delaware Street in Indianapolis, and on the question a president's house is the right place to ask: what could a presidency do about voting rights, and what happened when it tried? This is course 5 of the Indianapolis cluster and its civics anchor, and it is the one course in the series whose subject is a person with power rather than a place that lost it. Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president, lived and died in this house. During his single term a bill to put federal supervisors on congressional elections passed the House, was filibustered in a Senate that had no way to end a filibuster, and was set aside by one vote. You will read the bill, read Harrison's own messages, watch a bill die by the ordinary machinery rather than by a losing vote, and then test the flattering version of the story against the parts of his record that do not fit it, including the Geary Act and Wounded Knee. You will read the house itself as architecture and as a museum, and learn the difference between what a building is and what a preserved building has been chosen to show. Finally you will connect a failed federal remedy in 1891 to a local boundary decision in this same city in 1970, because national power and local boundaries are two levers on the same question. A 360 tour of the site is planned and will be added to the Now section when its embed URL exists. The prerequisite course, The Green Book: How to Read a Route, teaches the research method this course applies.

The Schoolhouse Network

A cited, high-school-and-up course on the Rosenwald school building program: roughly five thousand school buildings raised across the segregated South in the early twentieth century, on a matching model that combined a Chicago philanthropist's grant, public tax money, and cash, land and labor raised by Black communities themselves. It is the counterpart to The Gym and the Color Line, which teaches what a boundary did to schooling; this course teaches what communities built, and it runs on one hard rule stated in its first lesson: never use a positive to soften a negative. A school raised by people who were simultaneously being taxed for schools their children could not attend is not a happy ending, and this course does not offer it as one. The claim is co-occurrence, not balance. You will verify the famous numbers and find that the sources disagree about the building count, the date range and even the number of students served, then learn why they disagree. You will read the matching model as a four-column budget and work out what share the communities actually paid, which is the figure that complicates the way this story is usually told. You will read two real school cards out of the Julius Rosenwald Fund archive at Fisk University. You will learn why the buildings look the way they do, down to the orientation, the window banks and the two permitted interior paint schemes, because the light was the design problem. You will meet the people who raised the money and taught in the rooms. Then you will hold the program's calendar against the rest of the record for the same years, find a surviving school near you in the federal and state registers, and write a piece of grounded nonfiction about one building and the budget line that raised it. Prerequisite: The Green Book: How to Read a Route, which teaches the method this course applies. A 360 tour of a restored schoolhouse is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.

Training the Colonizer: The Knowledge That Was Taken

When Europeans built plantation economies in the Americas, they grew crops they did not know how to grow, on land they did not know how to work, using techniques they did not invent. This course walks the documented record of what enslaved and colonized people taught the people who enslaved them: West African rice-growers whose expertise fed the Carolina Lowcountry; the enslaved man Onesimus, who taught Cotton Mather the African practice of smallpox inoculation before the 1721 Boston epidemic; the herders, indigo-makers, blacksmiths, bridge-builders, boat-pilots, and cooks whose skill built colonial wealth. It is careful where the record is careful. The famous Black Rice thesis (Judith Carney, 2001) is taught as a thesis, alongside the scholars who challenged it (Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson, 2007) and those who answered them, with no winner declared, because learning to hold a contested claim honestly is one of the skills this course is really teaching. It refuses the two opposite lies: the old erasure that says Europeans built everything, and the romantic overcorrection that says Africans invented everything without a citation. And it never lets the story go soft: this knowledge was coerced, uncredited, and uncompensated. Being the person who knew how to grow the rice did not make you free. Cited throughout to working historians (Carney, Wood, Littlefield, Hawthorne, Hall, Dawson, Feeser, Schiebinger) and the Mather and Boylston primary record. For high school students.

Two Racetracks

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on the two racetracks of Indianapolis and the civic question that runs between them: who is admitted to a sport, and what gets built alongside when they are not? Five miles apart sit a 2.5-mile oval that opened in 1909, was paved with 3.2 million bricks, became a National Historic Landmark in 1987 and still runs the race it was built for, and a one-mile dirt oval that opened with the state fairgrounds in 1892, held the largest annually staged Black sporting event in America between 1924 and 1936, and was converted in 2019 to a crushed-limestone harness training surface and parking. Between 1924 and 1936 the Colored Speedway Association ran the Gold and Glory Sweepstakes on that dirt mile, because the premier race would not admit Black drivers; the first Black driver started the Indianapolis 500 in 1991, eighty years and seventy-five runnings after the first. This course does not repeat the story it inherited. It goes looking for the written rule that is supposed to sit under it, reports that it could not find one, and teaches the far more useful thing it found instead: how a license, an entry form, a club membership and a private gate can do the work of a rule while leaving almost no record. You will learn what an oval does to a farm and a town, why the Town of Speedway is one of the four places the 1970 Unigov consolidation left alone, who governs each of these two grounds today (one is private property, one is a state body corporate and politic, one is a town with its own redevelopment commission chartered to eliminate blight), test a claim against the record and watch part of it fail, look up a real parcel and a real public meeting, and write one piece of grounded nonfiction. Prerequisites: The Green Book: How to Read a Route (the method) and Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It (course 1, the same metro and the same instruments). A 360 tour of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is planned and will be added to the Now section when its embed URL exists.

Washington, DC: Where the Instrument Was Blessed

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on Southwest Washington, DC, and Berman v. Parker (1954), the Supreme Court decision that made clearing land as "blighted" constitutionally safe across the whole country. The pilot course in this series found that a blight designation and land assembly, not the highway, actually cleared Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis. This is the course where that tool was authorised. Its prerequisites, The Green Book: How to Read a Route and Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It, teach a method and apply it to one corridor; this course reads the opinion that licensed the method, quotes its operative language accurately, and is honest about what it did and did not hold, including that the plaintiff was a department store owner rather than a displaced resident. You will walk Southwest DC before clearance and read the surveys the Court relied on, see the modernist superblocks that replaced a working neighborhood, learn the instruments beat by beat, trace the holding forward to Kelo and back to Indiana Avenue while testing that link against a chronology, meet the freeway revolt that is one of the few victories in this series, learn why the people whose homes were cleared could not vote for the Congress that governed them, look up a real DC parcel, and write grounded nonfiction about one block. A 360 tour of the waterfront is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.

What They Built: Black Business Districts

A cited, high-school-and-up course on Black business districts as economies rather than as backdrops to their own destruction: Parrish Street and Hayti in Durham, Jackson Ward in Richmond, Sweet Auburn in Atlanta, Greenwood in Tulsa, and Bronzeville in Chicago. You will read them the way you would read any local economy, out of business records, charters, insurance filings, city directories and National Register nominations: which firms existed, what they sold, who capitalised them, and what the numbers do and do not support. The center of the course is the question nobody teaches, which is an economics question and not a sentimental one: how do you finance a business district when banks will not lend to you? The answer runs through fraternal orders, industrial insurance, building and loan associations and a generation of chartered banks, and it is documented down to the dollar in places. The course also states its own rule out loud and holds to it: a positive is never used to soften a negative. What was built and what was taken were happening at the same time, in the same country, often to the same people, and this course teaches the co-occurrence without editorialising it into balance. Prerequisite: The Green Book: How to Read a Route.

Where We Rested

A cited, high-school-and-up course on the Black resort and beach communities that Americans built and ran as businesses: Highland Beach in Maryland, Idlewild in Michigan, American Beach in Florida, Oak Bluffs and the Inkwell on Martha's Vineyard, and Bruce's Beach in California. It teaches them as property, business and government rather than as scenery: who bought the land and from whom, who platted and sold the lots, what the hotels and clubs actually were, where the capital came from, who governed, and what the season had to earn. It runs on one rule, stated in the first lesson and never relaxed: a positive is never used to soften a negative. These places existed because the rest of the coast was closed, and both things were happening at the same time, often to the same people. It closes on Bruce's Beach, condemned by a city ordinance in 1924 and returned to the Bruce family's heirs on July 20, 2022, and on what actually happened to that land afterwards, which is more complicated than the headline. Prerequisite: The Green Book: How to Read a Route (green-book-how-to-read-a-route).

Writing the World

One finding, written five ways. A field note, a paper, a press release, a headline and a post can all describe the same discovery while making five different promises about what is actually known, and the gaps between them are where most of what people believe about science comes from. You will learn to read each genre for the claim it is really making, to catch the moves that do the quiet work (the missing actor, the hedge, the loaded name, the caption), and to trace a claim back down the chain to the document it started in. The course closes with two graded research assignments.

Wrong for Good Reasons

Most of the famous stories about people being wrong in the past are themselves wrong. Educated Europeans never thought the world was flat, Columbus's critics had the better argument, and the geocentrists were reasoning carefully from real evidence. This course follows four beliefs that were reasonable and mistaken, one myth that was manufactured on purpose, and one fraud that lasted forty years because it fit, and it ends by turning the same question on you: what would change your mind?

Dental Health 101: What the Science Actually Says

A clear, cited walk through the biology of a healthy mouth: how cavities form, what brushing and flossing actually do (and don't), how fluoride works, how diet drives decay, why regular dental visits matter, and the honest, evidence-graded picture of how gum disease connects to the rest of the body. Sourced to Cochrane, the ADA, the CDC, the WHO, NIDCR, and the American Heart Association's 2026 statement, careful to say 'associated with,' not 'causes,' where the evidence is association, not proof.

NASM CES: Corrective Exercise Specialist

An audio-first study course for the NASM Corrective Exercise Specialist (CES) exam. Learn the Corrective Exercise Continuum, inhibit, lengthen, activate, integrate, plus assessment and joint-by-joint corrective strategies, with a cited knowledge check for each module.

NASM CNC: Nutrition Coaching Certification

An audio-first study course for the NASM Certified Nutrition Coach (CNC) exam. Build the science of nutrition coaching, macronutrients, energy balance, supplements, behavior change, and real-world meal planning, lesson by lesson, with cited sources throughout.

NASM CPT: Pass the Personal Trainer Exam

An audio-first study course for the NASM Certified Personal Trainer (CPT) exam. Work chapter by chapter through the science of training, anatomy, assessment, the OPT model, program design, nutrition, and special populations, then test yourself with a knowledge check after each chapter.

The Endocannabinoid System: Exercise & Fitness

How movement tunes your endocannabinoid system (ECS). This audio-first course covers the 'runner's high', finding your intensity sweet spot, cardio and strength effects on ECS chemistry, and building a personal ECS-friendly fitness plan, cited throughout.

The Endocannabinoid System: Foundations

An audio-first introduction to the endocannabinoid system (ECS), your body's own cannabis-like signaling network. Learn what the ECS is, the messengers and receptors it uses, and why it matters for health, with cited sources and a knowledge check per lesson.

The Endocannabinoid System: Neuroscience

Where the endocannabinoid system (ECS) lives and works in the brain. This audio-first course maps CB1 and CB2 receptors across brain regions, walks through synaptic transmission and neuroplasticity, and connects the ECS to mood, pain, sleep, the gut-brain axis, and healthy aging. Cited throughout, with a knowledge check per lesson.

The Endocannabinoid System: Nutrition

How the food you eat builds and tunes your endocannabinoid system (ECS). This audio-first course covers the macronutrients and micronutrients behind endocannabinoid synthesis, the omega-6 to omega-3 balance, cannabimimetic foods like cacao, and how to build anti-inflammatory, ECS-supporting meals. Cited throughout, with a knowledge check per lesson.

Chess: Play It, Study It, Build With It

A complete, cited chess course for high school students: how to actually play (the board, the six pieces, check and checkmate, castling, en passant, promotion, and how to read algebraic notation), the rulebook itself (the FIDE Laws of Chess, touch-move, the clock, and the five different ways a game can be drawn), how to think (opening principles, forks, pins, skewers, discovered attacks, and the endgames every player must know), fifteen centuries of verified history (chaturanga to shatranj to the fifteenth-century queen, Steinitz to Deep Blue to AlphaZero to the 2020 online boom), how organized chess fits together (FIDE, Elo ratings, the title system, the Olympiad, US Chess, and the online platforms), and the honest economics, why almost nobody earns a living playing chess, and the many real ways to build a life or a business around the board anyway.

Croquet: How to Play, How to Think, and How to Build in the Sport

Croquet is not a garden pastime with a mallet. It is a tactical game, closer to billiards or chess than to badminton, with one of the lowest barriers to entry and the most reachable competitive ladder in world sport. This course teaches you to actually play and think: the three codified games that share the name (Golf Croquet and Association Croquet under the World Croquet Federation; American Six-Wicket under the USCA), how a turn works in each, break-building, wiring, deadness, and the tactics that decide games. Then it does the part a normal croquet course skips: the history you can actually verify (and the beloved stories that fall apart when you check them), how leagues and handicaps work, and the genuine openings for an amateur or an entrepreneur, starting a club, coaching, courts and turf, equipment, tournaments, and a world championship whose entire field is under 100 players. Every rule cited comes from the governing body's own current rulebook. Where a rule number does not exist, this course says so instead of inventing one.

Football: Play It, Read It, Work In It

A complete, cited football course for high school students, the game most of the world calls football and the United States calls soccer. How to actually play it (first touch, passing, dribbling, finishing, defending, goalkeeping); how to think about it (formations, possession, pressing, transitions, set pieces); the 17 Laws and who really writes them (The IFAB, not FIFA); the history, told honestly, from ball games that long predate England, to the 1863 codification, to the Football Association's 50-year ban on women's football; how the leagues and governing bodies actually fit together worldwide; the money, the labor, and the contested human cost; and the honest, concrete opportunities for amateurs and entrepreneurs, refereeing, coaching badges, running a club, and the jobs that actually exist around a game almost nobody makes a living playing.

Golf: Play It, Know It, Work In It

A complete, cited introduction to golf for people who have never held a club, and a real look at the sport as an industry. Learn how to play (the course, the clubs, the swing, the short game), the Rules of Golf as they actually read today (cited to the 2023 code the USGA and The R&A write together), how to think your way around a course, the World Handicap System, golf's history including its documented record of racial and gender exclusion (read the trade magazine that reported the repeal of the PGA's Caucasian-only clause and never once mentioned the men who forced it), how the tours and leagues actually work in 2026 (the PGA TOUR and the PGA of America are not the same organization, and men's professional golf is still not reunified), and the part most golf courses skip: the genuine, checkable opportunities in this sport for amateurs and entrepreneurs, from the 2022 rule change that lets a high school golfer sign a sponsorship deal without losing amateur status, to the fact that anyone with a Handicap Index of 0.4 or better can enter the U.S. Open.

Lacrosse: The Creator's Game

A full course in lacrosse, the Haudenosaunee game it has always been, and the modern sport it became. Start with the Indigenous origins and the Haudenosaunee Nationals' fight to play their own game at the Olympics; learn how the game is actually played (men's field, women's field, box, and the Olympic Sixes format, four genuinely different games, taught separately and never blurred); build real skills and strategy; read the actual rulebooks; and then map the ways an ordinary person builds a life in this sport, coaching, officiating, stringing, running a program, or fixing the access problem the sport still has. Every rule is quoted from a current, cited rulebook. Every claim ties to a source.

Pickleball: Play It, Question It, Build With It

Learn to actually play pickleball, the court, the serve, the kitchen, the two-bounce rule, and the strategy that wins points, then learn the parts most players never do: how to read a rulebook that changes every year, why the sport's famous origin story is disputed, how the leagues and rating systems really work, and where the genuine money and opportunity is for amateurs and entrepreneurs in courts, coaching, equipment, and events. Every rule is cited to the 2026 USA Pickleball Official Rulebook by number; every statistic carries a year and a source.

Tennis: Play It, Read It, Work In It

A complete, cited tennis course for high school students: how to actually play (grips, strokes, footwork), how to think tactically (serve+1, court positioning, patterns, singles vs. doubles), the rules and who writes them (the ITF publishes them; the tours and the four Slams layer their own conditions on top), the sport's remarkable social history (the American Tennis Association, Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King and the Original 9, the Open era, and the 34-year climb to equal prize money), how the leagues actually fit together, and the honest economics, what tennis really pays, and the many ways to build a life or a business in it without ever turning pro.

Banking & Money When You Live Abroad

A practical, plain-language guide for U.S. citizens living abroad: why FATCA makes some foreign banks reluctant to open accounts for Americans, keeping and using your existing U.S. bank and brokerage accounts from abroad, a short pointer to the FBAR/FATCA foreign-account reporting covered in depth in the Taxes for Americans Abroad course, how to move money internationally (wires, transfer services, fees, and the exchange rate), currency risk, avoiding scams that specifically target people sending money across borders, and staying compliant (sanctions screening and using regulated providers). This course is educational only, not financial, tax, or legal advice, confirm current rules, forms, fees, and dollar thresholds with your bank, a qualified cross-border financial or tax professional, and at irs.gov, fincen.gov, and consumerfinance.gov. Cited throughout to the IRS, FinCEN, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Dual Citizenship & Renunciation Basics

A plain-language, non-partisan guide to holding two citizenships and to formally giving up U.S. citizenship: what dual nationality is and that U.S. law permits it, the general ways a second citizenship is acquired (by descent, naturalization, or marriage, rules vary by country), the practical implications (which passport to use, taxes, military service and other obligations), and the formal, in-person, irrevocable process for renouncing U.S. citizenship before a consular officer, including its tax consequences. This course takes no position on whether to acquire or renounce a citizenship, it explains how the systems work. Cited to the U.S. Department of State, USCIS, and the IRS. Educational only, not legal or tax advice.

Flying Internationally & Coming Home

A practical, plain-language guide to the airport-and-border parts of an international trip: check-in and documents, TSA security screening and TSA PreCheck, what U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) actually does, the Trusted Traveler Programs (Global Entry, PreCheck, NEXUS, SENTRI) and who each is for, and coming home, the CBP re-entry process, the customs declaration, duty-free allowances, prohibited and restricted items, and how to avoid problems. Cited throughout to tsa.gov, cbp.gov, and USDA APHIS.

Healthcare Abroad

For U.S. citizens traveling or living abroad: how healthcare systems and payment expectations differ once you leave the U.S., travel medical insurance for a trip versus international (expat) health insurance for living abroad, the key fact that Medicare generally does not cover care outside the U.S., getting and legally carrying medications abroad, routine and emergency care, medical evacuation and repatriation, and exactly what the State Department can (and cannot) do to help. This course is educational only, not medical or insurance advice; always confirm current coverage, costs, and rules with your own doctor, insurer, Medicare, and the official sources cited throughout. Cited to Medicare.gov, travel.state.gov, and the CDC's Travelers' Health resources.

How to Get a U.S. Passport

A practical, plain-language guide for U.S. citizens: passport book vs. card, applying for the first time (Form DS-11), renewing (Form DS-82), the documents and photo you need, fees and processing times (and why to always verify the current numbers), passports for minors, name changes, lost or stolen passports, and the travel-validity rules many countries enforce. Cited throughout to the U.S. Department of State's travel.state.gov.

International Travel Basics

The start-here hub for U.S. travelers planning an international trip: a pre-trip timeline, passport and visa readiness, STEP and Travel Advisories, travel insurance, health prep, money abroad, packing and documents, staying safe (and what to do in an emergency), and coming home through customs. Points to the deeper Passports and Visas courses rather than repeating them. Cited throughout to travel.state.gov, CDC Travelers' Health, and CBP.

Moving Abroad 101

The overview course for U.S. citizens actually relocating abroad, not just visiting: the big decisions (a long stay vs. residency vs. citizenship), the common categories of long-stay visas (work, study, family, retirement, and the newer digital-nomad visas), a six-factor framework for choosing a country, a realistic timeline and cost of relocating, how to keep your ties to the U.S. while living abroad (voting, mail, banking, taxes), and where to get authoritative help. Cited throughout to travel.state.gov, fvap.gov, ssa.gov, and irs.gov, with destination-government examples, teaches the framework, since immigration rules are country-specific and change.

Retiring Abroad

For U.S. citizens considering retiring in another country: whether Social Security payments keep coming (and the Payments Abroad Screening Tool that checks your specific country), the high-level landscape of retirement and passive-income visas, why the U.S. still taxes your worldwide retirement income, why Medicare doesn't travel with you, a retirement-specific take on choosing a country and budgeting a fixed income, estate and beneficiary questions to raise with a professional, and a planning checklist to pull it together. Cited throughout to ssa.gov, travel.state.gov, irs.gov, and medicare.gov. Educational only, not financial, tax, legal, or immigration advice.

Shipping & Logistics of an International Move

The practical logistics of physically moving abroad, once you've already decided where and how (this course's sibling, Moving Abroad 101, covers that decision): movers vs. shipping it yourself vs. selling and rebuying, air vs. sea freight and how to vet a licensed international mover, customs on your household goods at the destination, moving pets internationally, which documents to hand-carry instead of pack, closing out U.S. mail, and staying registered to vote from abroad. Cited throughout to travel.state.gov, CBP, USDA APHIS, the UK government, the Federal Maritime Commission, USPS, and FVAP.gov, teaches the framework, since destination rules vary by country and change.

Studying Abroad

A practical, plain-language planning guide for U.S. students (and parents) considering academic study in another country: the common program types (exchange, direct enrollment, faculty-led, degree-seeking), how to choose a program, the student-visa framework (each country sets its own rules, this course teaches the method, cross-referencing our Travel Visas 101 course), passport readiness, funding and financial-aid portability, health and safety abroad, credit transfer, and a full planning timeline. Cited throughout to travel.state.gov, EducationUSA and USA StudyAbroad (state.gov), CDC Travelers' Health, and studentaid.gov.

Taxes for Americans Abroad

A careful, plain-language introduction to U.S. tax obligations for citizens and green card holders living outside the United States: the core worldwide-income rule, who must file, the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (Form 2555) and its qualifying tests, the Foreign Tax Credit (Form 1116), foreign-account reporting under the FBAR (FinCEN Form 114) and FATCA (Form 8938), the automatic 2-month filing extension, state tax considerations, and common pitfalls. This course is educational only, not tax or legal advice, always confirm current rules, forms, and dollar thresholds with a qualified cross-border tax professional and at irs.gov. Cited throughout to the IRS, FinCEN, and Treasury.

Travel Visas 101: Getting a Visa to Travel Abroad

A clear, destination-agnostic guide for U.S. citizens to figuring out and obtaining a visa when traveling to another country: what a visa is, how to research any destination's current requirements, the four common visa categories, Europe's Schengen Area and the new ETIAS travel authorization, the documents you'll typically need, transit visas, and overstay/entry-exit rules. Teaches the method, not a fixed set of country rules, because requirements change, always confirm with official sources.

Surplus Funds Basics: Helping Homeowners Recover What Is Theirs

When a home sells at a tax or foreclosure auction for more than the debt against it, the extra money belongs to the former owner, and a great deal of it is never claimed. This course teaches where that money comes from and where it sits, what the Supreme Court settled in Tyler v. Hennepin County and what it did not, how to read a county surplus ledger, how to verify who is entitled, and how the claim is actually filed. It covers the honest economics of doing this as a service: the fee caps in Florida and Georgia, the fact that Texas prohibits a non-attorney from charging at all, the deadlines that end a claim, and the disclosure model that is both the ethical choice and the only one that works in all three states. It teaches the industry as it actually operates, including the practices that got the fee caps written, and it is honest about how much of the money in this field is made selling training rather than recovering funds. Built on statutes read directly and dated, with a method for researching any county rather than a summary table that goes stale. Not legal advice.

RIVER-05

Cairo: Where Two Rivers Meet

At Cairo, Illinois the Ohio joins the Mississippi and the expedition becomes a different journey. What happens physically where two large rivers meet, why a town at the most strategically perfect location in the interior did not thrive, and how to read a place by what is no longer there.

RIVER-09

Finding Your Way, and Losing It

How navigation actually works on a large river, why capable people still get lost, and what to do when a plan fails, resources run short, or the group stops agreeing. The judgment half of an expedition, which is the half that decides how it ends.

RIVER-08

Living on the Water

Months of camping, cooking, water treatment and resupply along a corridor that is mostly private land, levee district and regulated ground. What it actually takes to live beside a working river, and why the legal question comes before the practical one.

RIVER-06

Sold Down the River

The phrase is not a metaphor. For decades this water carried enslaved people from the Upper South to the markets of Natchez and New Orleans, and to be sent down it meant separation from family, almost always permanently. What the domestic slave trade was, how the river served it, and why the ordinary phrase carries what it does.

RIVER-11

Telling the River

The capstone. The expedition sent back both factual logs and fiction written from the same places on the same days, which makes the difference between them unusually visible. What each form can do, what neither may do, and a piece of work of your own about a place you can actually reach.

RIVER-07

The Delta, and the Way North

A century after the trade that carried people south, the movement reversed. Millions left the South, and from the Mississippi Delta the way out ran on rails that paralleled the river the expedition is paddling. How the route worked, how word traveled, and why this is the third direction on one corridor.

RIVER-04

The Engineered River: Locks, Dams and Barges

The Ohio and the Mississippi are not natural waterways with some structures added. They are machines for moving freight, maintained continuously and at enormous expense. What that machinery is, why it exists, and why it makes this the most dangerous part of the journey.

RIVER-03

The Ohio, and the Line

For decades the Ohio River was the border between slavery and freedom, and more people escaped through this valley than through any other region of the country. The expedition crosses that line in its first days, traveling the opposite way. What the river meant, who ran the networks on the northern bank, and why a river makes such a strange border.

RIVER-02

The Wabash, and What a Watershed Is

The first stretch of the journey, and the idea that makes the whole thing legible: every drop of water in this river came from somewhere, and everything upstream arrives downstream. How rivers form, why they bend, and why the Wabash matters far beyond Indiana.

RIVER-01

What an Expedition Is

A team is paddling from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico, roughly 1,100 miles of the Wabash, the Ohio and the Lower Mississippi. This course is how to follow it as an expedition rather than a trip: what the route actually is, what makes the water dangerous, and why the direction they are traveling is the most interesting thing about it.

RIVER-10

What the River Carries

The expedition ends by paddling into the consequence of everything it paddled past. Each summer a low-oxygen zone forms in the Gulf where the Mississippi arrives, driven by nutrients gathered across the whole basin. How it works, why it is nobody's fault in particular, and what that makes it.

STORY-00Storytelling

How Stories Work

Six decisions survive translation into any medium: the change, the owner, want and obstacle, withholding, scene and summary, and the turn. This is the core of the Storytelling series and it was written last on purpose, after the specialized courses had already put those six terms under pressure in a solo play, a ten-minute drama and a set of public meeting notes. It teaches each decision in depth, shows the same one operating in forms that look nothing alike, and is honest about what does NOT transfer: the things that are genuinely properties of a medium rather than of story. It covers structure as a promise to an audience, why most drafts fail at the change rather than the sentence, the ethics of telling stories about real people, and the discipline of knowing when not to make a story at all. Ends with a diagnostic you can run on any draft in any form.

STORY-T1Storytelling

Civic Documentation: Recording What Happened in Public

Public meetings decide budgets, contracts, zoning, policing and schools, and most of them happen in rooms with nobody watching. This course teaches the discipline of documenting them: what a public body actually is, how to read an agenda before you go, how to behave in the room, what open-meetings law protects and what it does not, note-taking to a standard a stranger can use, recording and photography with consent, interviewing after the gavel, and revising notes before memory fades. It covers where documentation ends and reporting begins, why that line protects you, and what defamation and the fair report privilege mean for someone publishing notes. Built on the Documenters Field Guide published by City Bureau, whose program trains and pays people to do exactly this work, with Indianapolis and Mirror Indy as the worked local example. Not affiliated with City Bureau or any local Documenters program. Education about the law, not legal advice.

STORY-T2Storytelling

News Storytelling

How do you tell a story when you are not allowed to invent any of it? News sits one rung up the permission ladder from documentation: you may select and arrange, and you may not make things up. This course covers what news is actually for, why the inverted pyramid puts the ending first and what that does to withholding, how to find the owner of a story about a policy, leads that are honest rather than merely arresting, attribution as the load-bearing habit, what you may and may not do to a quotation, numbers and the context that makes them mean something, the difference between a news story and a feature, corrections as a craft rather than an embarrassment, and the specific temptations of narrative journalism. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, with the discipline of verification as the thing that separates journalism from everything that looks like it.

STORY-T3Storytelling

Documentary

A documentary is a relationship that lasts long enough to change, and that is its central craft problem as much as its central ethical one. This course covers what documentary actually claims about the world, the recognized modes and what each one implicitly promises a viewer, access and the consent that has to be renewed rather than signed once, how structure is found in material rather than scripted in advance, interviewing at depth including the uses of silence, archive as evidence, the ethics of the edit where every honest film shapes and the question is how, the signals that keep reenactment and music honest, and who the film is finally for when the participant, the funder and the audience want different things. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, with the field's own account of its dilemmas rather than a list of rules.

STORY-T4Storytelling

Oral history

Oral history is the only form in this series whose primary evidence is a person remembering, which makes it the one where being wrong is sometimes the most valuable thing in the recording. This course covers what an oral history is and what it is not, why the word is narrator rather than subject, memory as evidence rather than as unreliable testimony, research before the interview, the life-review interview and the long silences it needs, equipment and metadata that will outlive your laptop, the legal and ethical layer of the deed of gift, transcription and the choices it forces, interviewing family and interviewing about trauma, and what an archive owes a narrator decades later. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, using the Oral History Association's published standard rather than a private house style.

STORY-P1Storytelling

Monodrama I: Writing the Solo Piece

One performer, no scene partner, nowhere to hide. A monodrama is the hardest place to bury a weak story and therefore the best place to learn how stories actually work. This course teaches the six decisions that survive translation into any medium (the change, the owner, want and obstacle, withholding, scene and summary, the turn) by making you apply them to the form that exposes all six at once. It covers what a solo piece can and cannot do, who the audience is to your speaker and why that question decides everything else, how to build place and time with no set, the reliability problem, structural options from the single-sitting confession to the fractured memory piece, how to end, and how to revise. Worked examples are real plays you can read or watch, from Beckett to Anna Deavere Smith to Duncan Macmillan. Ends with a performable draft. Part one of two: performing and staging it is Monodrama II.

$19

STORY-P2Storytelling

Monodrama II: Performing the Solo Piece

You have a draft. Now you have to stand up. This course takes a solo script onto its feet: direct address as a physical problem rather than a literary one, how one body builds a place with no set, what an audience does to a piece that a room alone never reveals, objectives and actions as tools for finding what a line is DOING, status and the psychological gesture, voice and breath for sixty minutes of speaking, memorisation that survives nerves, how to rehearse alone without going stale or going numb, the technical minimum for lights and sound when you are also the operator, and how to take a piece in front of people and change it afterwards. Includes the safety practice that solo autobiographical work requires and that nobody warns performers about. Part two of two: Monodrama I writes the draft.

STORY-P3Storytelling

Short-Form Drama: Constraint as a Structural Tool

Ten minutes is not a shortened play. It is a different machine, and the constraint is the teacher. This course covers what actually fits in ten minutes and what never will, how to start a story that is already in motion, the single-situation principle that makes short work possible, why most short pieces fail at the ending rather than the beginning, the one-act as a longer but still single-pressure form, and how short-form video drama inherits the same structure under different delivery. It teaches adaptation between runtimes in both directions, the production realities that decide whether a short play ever gets staged, and how to use the form as a laboratory: a ten-minute piece is the cheapest way to test a structural idea before spending a year on it. Real plays throughout, from Glaspell to Ives to Albee.

STORY-D1Storytelling

Digital and social storytelling

Every other form in this series gets an audience that has already agreed to pay attention. This one does not: attention is re-earned every few seconds, by someone holding a phone, sound off, mid-scroll, who did not choose your story and can leave at no cost. This course teaches what that constraint does to structure rather than what any platform currently rewards. The cold open and why the first three seconds are a structural problem and not a trick, the loop, designing for sound-off, the algorithmic middle that stands between a maker and an audience, serialization and the promise a series makes, comments as part of the text rather than a reaction to it, the ethics of a form built for spread including the corrections problem, and what survives a platform's death. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, with platform specifics labeled and dated because they are the part that rots.

STORY-99Storytelling

Mockumentary

The capstone of the Storytelling series, and the only course in it that requires the others. A mockumentary is invented work wearing the clothes of work that may not invent, which means you cannot make one well without knowing exactly why documentary conventions persuade. This course reads the True track backwards: what each convention promises, how a fiction borrows it, and where the borrowing becomes a lie. It covers the persuasion grammar of documentary, comedy and satire as separate engines, the character who does not know they are being watched, the frame of an audience that is in on it, the 1938 Welles broadcast and the panic that mostly did not happen, deepfakes and synthetic media as the same problem at industrial scale, and the one line that separates satire from fraud. Ends by asking you to make both a real documentary segment and a false one about the same subject.

SCI-01Science & Math

How to Read a Number: Statistics for Citizens

Every civics argument arrives with a number attached. This course teaches you to check one: what was counted, who counted it, when, and compared to what. Polls and margins of error, rates versus counts, the denominator that decides the story, charts built to mislead, and the arithmetic of representation itself. No calculations required, and none of the numbers in it are invented.

SCI-02Science & Math

How We Know What's Out There

Astronomy taught as evidence rather than as facts to memorize. Start where navigation ends, with finding yourself by the sky, then climb the distance ladder one rung at a time: parallax, spectra, variable stars, exploding stars, redshift. Finish able to take any number in a popular astronomy article and trace it back to the thing somebody actually measured. No equations.

SCI-03Science & Math

The River and the Watershed

The physical half of the river story: where the water comes from, what it carries, what it does to the land, what lives in it, and how you would tell whether it is healthy. Built alongside a real paddle from Indiana to the Gulf, and usable on whatever creek is nearest to you.

SCI-04Science & Math

Intro to Citizen Science

How to design a study you could actually run, and how to know what your own data can and cannot support once you have run it. The question, the protocol, the sampling, the confounders, the recording, and the honest write-up. Finish with a study you could start next month.