U.S. Congress
Course Title: The American Congress in History and in Crisis
Day & Time: Tuesdays, 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
This course will focus on three main areas: (1) contemporary challenges to the traditional operations of American government; (2) the intellectual origins of the design of the U.S. government, how has Congress changed over nearly two and a half centuries of its existence and how it operates contemporarily; (3) the structural and underlying features of the American political system that complicate effective governance and whether a new model is required in the 21st century? If so, how is that goal to be achieved without fragmenting the country even further?
John Lawrence
John Lawrence has taught the Congress research seminar at UCDC since 2013 after spending 38 years as a staff person in the U.S. House of Representatives, the last eight as chief of staff to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He is the recipient of the 2013 McCormack Award for distinguished service to the Congress, presented jointly by Speaker Pelosi and Speaker John Boehner. He is the author of Arc of Power: Inside Nancy Pelosi's Speakership 2005-2010, (Kansas, 2022), which has been praised as “one of the very best accounts of the internal workings of Congress we have ever had or are likely to have” and “masterful” 1 and The Class of 74: Congress After Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), which Kirkus described as “essential” reading on congressional history. His articles on Congress and national politics have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Hill and other publications . He is a weekly guest on XM-Sirius radio and has appeared on CNN, C-SPAN and NPR. He blogs on American politics at DOMEocracy and is the author of numerous historical mysteries including the novels Sherlock Holmes and The Affair at Mayerling Lodge (2023), Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Revolutionary’s Daughter (2025) and short stories, The Undiscovered Archives of Sherlock Holmes (2022), The Further Undiscovered Archives of Sherlock Holmes (2023) and numerous volumes of the MX Books of New Sherlock Holmes Stories. He has a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of California (Berkeley), and an undergraduate history degree from Oberlin College.
