The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: History, Life | ≅ Leave a Comment
During the past decade, Tony Judt emerged as one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He’s combative, often controversial (especially when talking about Israel), and sometimes disliked. But he’s taken seriously. And many have had nothing but sheer praise for his master work, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. The NYU historian had built up a [...]
≡ Category: History, Theater | ≅ 1 Comment
March 15th. It translates to the Ides of March on the Roman Calendar. And it’s the date when Julius Caesar was famously assassinated in 44 B.C. To mark the occasion (today is the Ides of March), we bring you a dramatic, six-minute clip of the assassination scene from the film version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, directed [...]
≡ Category: Art, History | ≅ Leave a Comment
How did the artist Kseniya Simonova win the Ukrainian version of Britain’s Got Talent? By using the art of sand painting to recount the story of Germany’s invasion of Ukraine in 1941. Life was somewhat ordinary, then it all fell apart. And, by the war’s end, an estimated 10 million Ukrainians were left dead. [...]
≡ Category: History, Politics, Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
You can’t get good democracy without science, and you can’t get good science without democracy. That’s why great political and scientific revolutions have historically gone hand-in-hand. It’s an intriguing argument that Timothy Ferris (UC Berkeley) makes in his new book, The Science of Liberty, and debates in an interview with Michael Krasny, aired last week on [...]
≡ Category: Art, Comedy, History | ≅ 4 Comments
This imaginative bit was a student’s final project for an art course. The flipbook, made entirely out of biro pens, was created with 2100 pages of drawings and took about 3 weeks to develop. Needless to say, the student got an A.
Thanks to @kirstinbutler for flagging this one.
≡ Category: Google, History | ≅ Leave a Comment
Google Earth’s historical imagery feature now includes aerial footage of the aftermath of World War II, allowing users to comprehend the extent of post-war destruction by comparing photos of cities as they are today to those of bombed out cities immediately after the war.
Here’s Warsaw in 1935, devastated in 1943, and restored today. You can [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ 1 Comment
Sad news. Howard Zinn, the American historian best known for his book, A People’s History of the United States, died today of a heart attack at the age of 87. The Boston Herald has more on his life and passing here. If you’re familiar with Zinn’s biography, you’ll know that he served in World War II [...]
≡ Category: Art, History | ≅ 5 Comments
Working with the BBC, Neil MacGregor, the Director of the British Museum, has launched a downright smart project. A History of the World in 100 Objects uses important pieces from the museum’s collections to recount the long history of humanity. Throughout the year, the serialized radio program will air 100 episodes, each averaging 15 minutes, and [...]
≡ Category: History, Stanford, Web/Tech | ≅ Leave a Comment
The Chinese language has tens of thousands of characters, and many have considered it nearly impossible to fit these characters onto a single workable typewriter. But that hasn’t stopped inventors from trying … and, to a certain degree, succeeding. Stanford historian Thomas Mullaney is now writing the first history of the Chinese typewriter, and he [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, History | ≅ Leave a Comment
Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs & Steel (and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed), offers some timely thoughts on why Haiti, once a fairly prosperous country, has sunk into enduring poverty — a condition not comparatively shared by its neighbor on the same island, the Dominican Republic. According to Diamond, Haiti’s [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Leave a Comment
For MLK’s birthday, we bring back the full “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at The Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. Seventeen eloquent and brave minutes that changed the world and made it a better place.
≡ Category: Current Affairs, History, Stanford | ≅ Leave a Comment
What would Martin Luther King Jr. think about America in 2010? Few would know better than Clayborne Carson, the Stanford historian who directs the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. In this talk, Carson describes MLK’s likely thoughts about America during the Great Recession. King cared deeply about economic justice, and it’s clear [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Leave a Comment
Let me quickly call your attention to an interview with Joseph Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian, who most recently published American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic. In this casual, wide-ranging conversation (listen below or here) with Russ Roberts, the host of EconTalk, Ellis talks through the founding years of [...]
≡ Category: History, Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
Amazingly today marks the 29th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder in New York City. Below, you can listen to what NYC residents heard on the radio that night. The sound file was originally posted by WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. WFMU is also the force behind the The Free Music Archive, which offers up over 10,000 [...]
≡ Category: Google, History | ≅ 2 Comments
On Friday, I mentioned that you can now visit the Roman ruins at Pompeii, Stonehenge and Versailles via Google Street View. What I didn’t realize is that this looks to be part of a larger initiative, a larger attempt to provide digital tours of important world heritage sites. According to this UNESCO announcement, 19 historical [...]
≡ Category: Google, History | ≅ Leave a Comment
The story of Pompeii is well known. Back in 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted and covered the neighboring Roman city with 60 feet of ash over the course of two days. The city was wiped out and then entombed for centuries, until archaeologists started unearthing the ruins in the 18th and 19th centuries, offering the [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Leave a Comment
20 years ago, the dominoes fell in Eastern Europe. Not long after the Wall fell in Berlin, a non-violent revolution got underway in Czechoslovakia. The Velvet Revolution took just a matter of six weeks (November 17 – December 29, 1989) to unfold. It was fast and bloodless, and it put on the world stage Václav [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Leave a Comment
When I traveled to East Berlin in 1988, my first time as a youngster, I read reports of a split between the hardline East German regime and the opening Soviet government. But nobody really paid much attention to that news. Less than a year later, the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall would be gone, [...]
≡ Category: History, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Excellent find by Stephen Grant… You can now experience the battle lines of World War I in Second Life, thanks to The First World War Poetry Digital Archive and the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University. WWI shocked the Western world with its landscape-changing warfare and high tech carnage. Remembrances of “The Great War” live on [...]
≡ Category: Art, History | ≅ 5 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 [...]
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