Talks & Charts

Dan Leahy Prepared Talks.

Writing a good talk is about connection. Connecting ideas, connecting causes and effects, connecting to the people with whom you are speaking. One of the first things you notice when you are looking through the binders of talks that Dan Leahy has prepared is that he always offered gratitude. He thanked the group and the people who invited him to speak. He thanked the people there for the opportunity to stop and think. Dan’s talks were full of historical and political connections that help us all stop and think. His best talks were also full of heart and showed his love for working people. Link to Index of Dan’s Talks.

Dan Leahy Made Charts.

“Dan was always sitting in a basement or on a back porch, making a chart or building a list.” —Bethany Weidner

Dan was famous for his charts. The charts are tools for understanding the relationships between historical eras, political formations, systems, and anything you’re trying to make sense of in a coherent, analytical way. A chart is a way of organizing information to create an analysis. The comparison sheds light on the significance or a detail that distinguishes something from another thing. In 2019, Dan Leahy published a book of his charts that he had created over the years. One of his first charts compares market values to community values. A much later, well-utilized chart was his “Possible Policy Indicators” mapping Trump’s cabinet members in 2017, connecting their histories and key decisions to the potential future of the Trump administration policies. Here is Dan’s Book of Charts.

Dan Leahy Read Books.

Dan Leahy included a two-page article as part of his preparatory documents for most of his classes and trainings. “How to Read a Book” by Historian Susan Strasser provides tools for how to engage a text with rigor and critical thinking. The instructional essay directs the reader to pay attention to everything and stop to think about it – the title, the author, the context in which the book was written, the statement of the problem, and the central thesis. Dan’s books are filled with notes and underlines, mapping the questions, the references, and the analysis. He worked the book and then reflected on its most useful lessons and arguments. He shared that documentation as a gift towards our collective understanding. Here is link the Index of Dan’s Book Outlines.

Dan Leahy Created Archives.

As part of his practice to document and share organizing histories, Dan Leahy compiled, indexed, and established multiple archives based on the hundreds of well-maintained binders in his basement. He created detailed indexes and sent hundreds of pages to various universities and institutions. His Peace Corps letters from Turkey are housed at American University. His work at the Human Affairs Program (HAP) is housed at Cornell University. The Citizens’ Party documents are archived at the Library of Congress. The “Dan Leahy Papers” that document his incredible statewide work with Progress Under Democracy in the early 1980s is housed at the University of Washington. And the work of the Labor Education and Research Center is archived at The Evergreen State College. Link to Index of Dan’s Archives.

Dan Leahy’s Strategy Games.

Strategy Games: The Role of “Reality-Inspired Strategic Interaction” in Teaching and Learning. Here is a link to Anthony Zaragoza’s (a member of Evergreen’s Political Economy Faculty) introduction to “Strategy Games”, inspired by Dan Leahy. Excerpted from Evergreen’s 2021 Educator Handbook (pages 106-110).