≡ Category: Art, History | ≅ Comments
The Bayeux Tapestry famously offers a pictorial interpretation of the Norman Conquest of England (1066), a pivotal moment in medieval history, and the events leading to the invasion itself. Currently residing in France, the tapestry measures 20 inches by 230 feet, and you can now see an animated version of the story it narrates. The [...]
≡ Category: History, Literature | ≅ Comments
We’re lucky to have Anne Frank’s diary — lucky that the diary was ever discovered, and lucky, too, that someone took a chance on publishing the eventual bestseller. This is all nicely outlined by Francine Prose, who has a new book out called Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife. You can listen to her [...]
≡ Category: History, Life | ≅ Comments
There’s no sound, and the clip only runs 20 seconds. But this is the only known footage of Anne Frank, and it’s now online. The Anne Frank House does a good job of setting the scene for the video taken on July 22, 1941. “The girl next door is getting married. Anne Frank is leaning [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Comments
Last fall, Yale University introduced a second round of open courses that included Donald Kagan’s Introduction to Ancient Greek History. A major figure in the field, Kagan takes students from the Greek Dark Ages, through the rise of Sparta and Athens, The Peloponnesian War, and beyond. You’ll cover more than a millennium in 24 lectures. Above, we start with [...]
≡ Category: History, YouTube | ≅ Comments
The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain collapsed a little more than 20 years ago (August 1989). And even though I watched the events on TV, my memory of it all has already started to fade. But that’s where YouTube comes in. Above, a quick refresher that makes my day. This clip comes from a [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Comments
Howard Zinn, a historian from Boston University, best known for his classic book, People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present, has been brought to YouTube. This video presents an animated version of Zinn’s essay, Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me about the American Empire. You can otherwise find this clip on [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Comments
I enjoy replaying this vintage gem every now and then – Malcolm X debating at Oxford University in 1964. In this classic video, you get a good feel for Malcolm X’s presence and message, not to mention the social issues that were alive during the day. You’ll hear X’s trademark claim that liberty can be [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Comments
You’ve all heard about Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan. Now, thanks to this vintage footage from the 1930s, you can see Keller in the flesh and discover how she learned to talk (then eventually became an author, lecturer, and champion of many progressive causes). It’s worth watching, particularly through the stirring finish. We’ve added this [...]
≡ Category: History, Science | ≅ Comments
Is Wally Wallington onto something?
Thanks Jillian for sending this one along…
≡ Category: History | ≅ 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’re popular in continuing education programs designed for older students. Eventually, it seems, many students come to the conclusion that you can’t skip over the foundations and [...]
≡ Category: Film, History | ≅ Comments
Robert McNamara, the architect of the failed Vietnam War, died earlier this week. He was a major force on the American political scene throughout the 1960s. Then, he re-emerged in 2004, when Errol Morris released The Fog of War, an Oscar-winning documentary that features McNamara looking back on his career and highlighting the lessons [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
“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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ 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 | ≅ 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 | ≅ 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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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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