This course is designed to provide students with a study of contemporary and historical people and events.  This entire course is designed to promote individual thinking through the philosophy of Mortimer Adler. During the 1950s, Adler identified 102 abstract concepts which form the basis of the great conversation writers, artists, and philosophers have engaged in since the dawn of recorded discourse. We will use Adler's Great Ideas as a basis for critical reading, thinking, and writing. As a class, we will study and discuss George Orwell's 1984 and apply Adler's Great Ideas to this novel.