≡ Category: History | ≅ Leave a Comment
Without Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Americans wouldn’t have the Declaration of Independence (listen to a reading here). Rather strangely, both men died on the same day, exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration - July 4, 1826. Quite the factoid. Below, we have a clip from HBO’s excellent mini series “John Adams,” [...]
≡ Category: History, Stanford | ≅ Leave a Comment
Throughout this year, my program at Stanford has been celebrating its 20th anniversary, and we’ve put together some special courses for the occasion. This spring, we offered a class featuring some of the finest American historians in the country, and together, they looked back at “The American Founders and Their World.” (Get it free on [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ 1 Comment
Timothy Leary had a wild ride. He started as a Harvard psychology professor, then went counterculture in 1960s and advocated the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of LSD. Before too long, his legal problems began. In 1965 and 1968, he was arrested for possessing marijuana (less than a half ounce) and given a 10 year prison sentence. [...]
≡ Category: History, Literature, Philosophy, Stanford | ≅ 1 Comment
A new season of Entitled Opinions (iTunes Feed Web Site) recently got off the ground, and it doesn’t take long to understand what this program is all about. Robert Harrison, the Stanford literature professor who hosts the show, opens the new season with these very words:
Our studios are located below ground, and every time I go down [...]
≡ Category: Art, Books, History, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Another big digital archive went live this week. Backed by the United Nations, the World Digital Library wants to centralize cultural treasures from around the world. Manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings — they will all be absorbed into this growing online collection, and users will be able to [...]
≡ Category: History, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
“Over the centuries a number of images have been put forward as life portraits of our greatest writer, but at present none of them is generally accepted as such. Up until now… With the emergence of the Cobbe portrait, we are presented with a contemporary portrait that has strong claims to represent the dramatist as [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Leave a Comment
John Hope Franklin, a prolific historian who shaped our understanding of the African-American experience and influenced the Civil Rights movement, died last week at 94. He was the grandson of a slave, and knew the Jim Crow South firsthand. Above, we see him talking just last summer about the nomination of Barack Obama, and whether he ever [...]
≡ Category: Google, History | ≅ Leave a Comment
In November, Google launched a 3D tour of Ancient Rome, circa 320 AD. The tour, produced with the help of the Rome Reborn project at the University of Virginia, features over 6,000 buildings, some rendered in fine detail, and it includes some interiors as well. The Coliseum, the Roman Forum, the Basilica Julia, the Temple of Vesta — they’re [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ 4 Comments
Although the flow of open educational resources has been slowing down lately (another casualty of the recession), the stream has not yet run dry.
Stanford has recently added another free course to its iTunes collection. Taught by Jack Rakove, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Colonial and Revolutionary America (iTunesU - Feed) covers the early phase of the traditional American history [...]
≡ Category: History, Life, Literature, Philosophy | ≅ 2 Comments
Writing in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier offers a response to the Feb 25 piece in the NYTimes: In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth. His argument is worth a read, and here is one lengthy money quote:
The complaint against the humanities is that they are impractical. This is true. They will not change the [...]
≡ Category: Books, History | ≅ 2 Comments
The Wall Street Journal asked Gordon Wood, one of America’s leading historians, to pick his favorite works of US history, and here is what he had to say.
1) The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It - Richard Hofstadter
2) The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution - Bernard Bailyn
3) White Over Black - Winthrop D. Jordan
4) Mothers of [...]
≡ Category: History, Life | ≅ Leave a Comment
Appearing at the TED Conference in 2008, Pulitzer-Prize Winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin talks about what we can all learn from American presidents, including particularly Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. This is not another talk about what makes presidents great. It’s more about the balance between work, love, and play, and how we can generally be [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, History | ≅ Leave a Comment
Through his books and documentaries, Simon Schama, a British born historian, has covered a lot of fertile ground. The French Revolution, the slave trade, the power of art, Rembrandt, early modern Dutch culture, the history of Britain — Schama has covered it all. And now he has pulled a Tocqueville on us. He spent the [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics, History | ≅ Leave a Comment
Jared Diamond became a household name with his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs & Steel (2003). Later, the UCLA geographer climbed the charts again with Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005). Now, based on this last book, he’s putting odds on whether the United States will survive this crisis, and he’s putting [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ 1 Comment
The Library of Congress has added a series of images to Flickr that will “let you see how Lincoln looked over 20 years—from the earliest known photographic likeness in 1846, through the U.S. presidential campaign of 1860, and the pressures of the Civil War years. Views from Lincoln’s funeral in 1865 and portraits of his immediate [...]
≡ Category: History, Religion | ≅ 1 Comment
I mentioned this course over two years ago, back when the Open Culture had about five readers. And given that the topic is hardly out of date, I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to bring it back to the surface. The course comes out of Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program (where I help give a hand). The topic [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ 1 Comment
Abraham Lincoln has never exactly gone out of fashion. More books have been written about him than any other American president. But even so, he has recently dominated our thoughts, our public discourse, in a way that we haven’t seen in some time. And that’s because he started something in American history that ended with the [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ 1 Comment
A good find over at Metafilter. Here you’ll find 22 inauguration speeches, starting with McKinley’s 1901 address. There’s some great footage in this series of videos.
Along similar lines, The New York Times has posted an interactive feature that covers every inaugural address. You can read the full text of each speech, and see which words [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, History, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
The full “I Have a Dream” speech. The place: The Lincoln Memorial. The Date: August 28, 1963. The Why: To bring about many small changes in American society, which eventually and collectively bring us to Tuesday. Take it away Martin:
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≡ Category: History, Online Courses | ≅ 5 Comments
For lifelong learners, courses on Ancient Greece and Rome always remain in steady demand. While these courses are poorly represented in undergraduate programs (at least in the States), they seem to make a comeback in continuing education programs designed for older students. Eventually, it seems, many come to the conclusion that you can’t skip over [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a logical (but unplanned) follow up to our previous post that looked back at Christmas Eve during World War I.
Here we present a Christmas propaganda film that came out of England during the Second World War. Britain is under German siege. But it’s enduring the Blitz and keeping a stiff upper lip, and Christmas will [...]
≡ Category: History, Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
Right in time for Christmas Eve…
World War I was a relentlessly grinding and brutal war. Europe had never experienced anything like it. But there was one notable moment of respite, a brief moment when humanity showed back through. Christmas Eve, 1914. The moving story of what happened that night gets recounted in John McCutcheon’s touching [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, History | ≅ Leave a Comment
Eric Rauchway, an American historian at UC-Davis (and an old grad school colleague of mine), published a timely book earlier this year, The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. And it sets him up perfectly to talk about an historical moment that’s now back on our minds.
Rauchway appeared last week on EconTalk [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Leave a Comment
Not long after Studs Terkel, the historian of the everyman, died in October, This American Life featured a series of interviews that Terkel once conducted with Americans who lived through the Depression. (Listen to the mp3 here.) The tapes would eventually provide the material for his book, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great [...]
≡ Category: History, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ 3 Comments
If you could sync up a photo with every name and event mentioned in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” you’d have a montage that offers a pretty good glimpse into the second half of the twentieth century. That’s what a University of Chicago grad student figured out when he put this viral video [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, History | ≅ Leave a Comment
We’re down to the next to last lecture, taking you from Nixon to Bush. (Next week, this Stanford course ends with a postmortem of Obama’s victory in 2008.) You can access Lecture 4 via Tunes U in high resolution or watch the YouTube version below. If you missed the previous lectures, grab them on iTunes here and YouTube here.
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≡ Category: Current Affairs, History | ≅ 2 Comments
Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the everyman, has passed away at the ripe old age of 96. (Get the NYTimes obit here.) Below, we have a lengthy conversation with Terkel, recorded when he was 91. As you’ll see, being a nonagenarian did little to slow him down.
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≡ Category: Current Affairs, History, Online Courses, Stanford | ≅ Leave a Comment
The Geography of US Presidential Elections keeps rolling along. With his well-crafted lectures, Martin Lewis shows you this week how America’s political map and its political parties changed dramatically following the Civil War. In the space of 90 minutes, he takes you through the Reconstruction period, The Gilded Age, the Depression, World War II and The [...]
≡ Category: History, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
Is there such a thing as the benign use of international force? It’s a question that Noam Chomsky and William F. Buckley, leading thinkers from the left and right, took up in 1969. And, of course, the whole question of Vietnam loomed in the background. As you’ll see below (and in Part 2 here) the debate is [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ 1 Comment
Thanks to $3 million dollars from IBM and three years of effort, you can now download a virtual tour of China’s Forbidden City. Based on gaming software, the project lets you take a three dimensional tour of the imperial palace built during the mid-Ming Dynasty, starting in 1406 (get more info here).
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