This Zoom course will be recorded. 
The year is 1900, just 100 years shy of the millennium and the United States is on the cusp of the brave new world of the 20th Century. Horses, oxen, and bicycles are about to cede place to the automobile … but wait… L. Frank Baum is about to request his audience to reflect upon the power of nature and magic at the threshold of this new era. Dorothy, the iconic maiden of the Midwest and her faithful companion, Toto, is about to be transported from the plains of Kansas to the Emerald City of Oz by a cosmic event not unlike those that have become more and more frequent in our new century. Baum’s prescient inaugural novel to the Oz series will transport us to a vision of utopia worthy of Saint Thomas More, where mindlessness can claim a brain, heartlessness can achieve empathy, and cowardice can claim courage, transforming protagonists and providing hope for future harmony. Let’s follow the Yellow Brick Road and see where it leads.