The Graduate came out in 1967 and astounded audiences with its now famous storyline. The young college graduate Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) finds himself seduced by Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), a family friend, only to then fall in love with her daughter, Elaine. Pretty shocking material for many in 1967.

A financial and critical success, The Graduate made Dustin Hoffman a star, and the celebrity-style interviews soon followed. Above, we have Hoffman getting interviewed from the comfort of his own bed in 1968. The topics: Sex, his sex life, women’s role in society and their sexuality.

Dustin Hoffman Talks Sex from the Comfort of His Own Bed (1968) is a post from: Open Culture

It’s more than a theme park. It’s an iconic American institution, a symbol of an imagined Golden Age in American history, and a site of many good childhood memories. We’re talking about Disneyland. Construction began in July 1954 in rural Anaheim, California, and the park opened but a year later in July 1955. And, thanks to this newly-cleaned up piece of footage, you can see Walt’s “magical park” just a short two years later. The babies in the strollers are likely grandparents today. But the park still looks much the same. Disney History Institute offers more commentary on the clip here.

Related Content:

Walt Disney Presents the Super Cartoon Camera

How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made

Disney’s Oscar-Winning Adventures in Music

Donald Duck Wants You to Pay Your Taxes (1943)

Disneyland 1957: A Little Stroll Down Memory Lane is a post from: Open Culture

Otto von Bismarck (1815 – 1898) – he was a towering 19th century political figure, the Iron Chancellor who unified Germany under Prussia’s leadership, and the man who invented Realpolitik. And now, thanks to Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder, you can hear the voice of this distant historical figure. The recently-discovered recording was made back in 1889, when Edison’s assistant, Theo Wangemann, headed to Europe to attend the World’s Fair in Paris, then traveled to Bismarck’s castle in Friedrichsruh (near Hamburg). Bismarck’s wife urged the Chancellor to make the recording, and he went along with it, recording lines from the songs In Good Old Colony Times and Gaudeamus igitur; the poem Als Kaiser Rotbart lobesam; and France’s national anthem, the Marseillaise. (The last pick was kind of odd.) It concludes with the Chancellor offering some words to his son Herbert.

You can listen to the audio above or here (be sure to crank up the volume!) and read the full transcript below the jump. Also don’t miss some vintage recordings of other 19th century legends: William Gladstone, Walt Whitman, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Plus find European history courses in our big collection of Free Courses Online.

In good old colony times,
When we lived under the King,
Three roguish chaps fell into mishaps
Because they could not sing.

Als Kaiser Rotbart lobesam
Zum heil’gen Land gezogen kam,
Da mußt er mit dem frommen Heer
Durch ein Gebirge wüst und leer.

Gaudeamus igitur,
juvenes dum sumus.
Post jucundam juventutem,
post molestam senectutem
nos habebit humus.

Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L’étendard sanglant est levé.

Treibe alles in Maßen und Sittlichkeit, namentlich das Arbeiten, dann aber auch das Essen, und im Übrigen gerade auch das Trinken.
Rat eines Vaters an seinen Sohn.

When good Emperor Redbeard
Was journeying to the Holy Land,
He had to go with his pious army
Through mountains desolate and empty.

Let us rejoice, therefore,
While we are young.
After a pleasant youth
After a troubling old age
The earth will have us.

Arise, children of the Fatherland,
The day of glory has arrived! Against us of tyranny
The bloody banner is raised.

Do everything in moderation and morality, namely work, but then also eating, and apart from that especially drinking.
Advice of a father to his son.

Thomas Edison’s 1889 Recording of Otto von Bismarck‎ Discovered is a post from: Open Culture

Give John Green 40 weeks, and Green will give you a playful and highly visual crash course in world history, taking you from the beginning of human civilization 15,000 years ago through to our modern age. If you’re not familiar with him, Green is a bestselling author of several young adult books (Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns). He’s also part of the popular vlogbrothers and an active Twitter user with more than 1.1 million followers — that’s about 22 times what we have, to put things in perspective.

The series starts with The Agricultural Revolution (above) and the Indus Valley Civilization (below). New video installments will be released throughout the year here. And more university-level history courses can be found in our big collection of 400 Free Courses Online.

A Crash Course in World History is a post from: Open Culture

Before pixels there were silver halide crystals, and before memory cards, film. Little yellow boxes cluttered the lives of photographers everywhere, and the Eastman Kodak Company was virtually synonymous with photography.

Things have really changed. With the recent news that Kodak is teetering on the brink of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, many are feeling nostalgia for those little yellow boxes and the rolls of silver gelatin film inside. To indulge this nostalgia–and perhaps learn something new about an old technology–we offer a fascinating 1958 documentary from Kodak entitled How Film is Made.

The documentary is in Dutch, but members of the Analog Photography Users Group launched a project to create English subtitles. You can read more about the project on Dutch member Marco Boeringa’s website. And you can watch the 18-minute film starting above and concluding below.

How Film Was Made: A Kodak Nostalgia Moment is a post from: Open Culture

With the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the emotional whiplash that followed, the monotheistic religions of the West took a more stridently political turn. It was in this context that Jonathan Miller, the British theatre and opera director, felt compelled to create a three-part documentary tracing the history of religious skepticism and disbelief.

Broadcast by the BBC in 2004 under the title, Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, the series wasn’t broadcast by PBS in America until 2007, and only after “Atheism” had been removed from the title and the word “rough” changed to “brief.”

“I’m rather reluctant to call myself an atheist,” Miller says at the outset. “It’s only in the light of such current controversies with regard to belief that I’ve found myself willing to explicitly articulate my disbelief.”

Miller goes on to guide the viewer through the historic evolution of religious doubt, from the skepticism of Greek and Roman philosophers to the Deism of Enlightenment intellectuals and the emergence of explicit atheism in the writings of the 18th century French aristocrat Paul-Henri Thiry, the Baron d’Holbach, who wrote in his Système de la Nature:

If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them; and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests.

Miller also talks with a number of well-known contemporary atheists, including playwright Arthur Miller, physicist Steven Weinberg and philosopher Colin McGinn. Episode One: Shadows of Doubt appears above, in its entirety, with the other two episodes below. Each segment is one hour long.

Episode Two: Noughts and Crosses:

Episode Three: The Final Hour:

Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, with Jonathan Miller is a post from: Open Culture

What better way to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Today, the King Center has made available online 200,000 papers belonging to the civil rights leader — the first step to bringing more than one million documents to the web. The documents give you a good glimpse of Dr. King’s role as a scholar, father, pastor and catalyst for change. And, among the papers, you will find “speeches, telegrams, scribbled notes, patient admonitions and urgent pleas.” Notable documents worth visiting include King’s 1964 Nobel Prize Acceptance Lecture, his Eulogy for the Four Girls Murdered in Birmingham (1963), a draft of his world-changing “I Have a Dream” speech, and much more.

Underwritten by JPMorgan Chase, the archive lets you navigate through documents by theme and by type of document. Or you can simply use a dedicated search engine. Once you find a document of interest, you can zoom into the content. But, I am not seeing a way to scroll up and down the enlarged pages — something that seriously limits your ability to read any given text. If I’m missing something please let me know in the comments below …

Related Content:

MLK’s Soaring “I Have a Dream” Speech, 1963

MLK’s Haunting “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” Speech, 1968

200,000 Martin Luther King Papers Go Online is a post from: Open Culture

When you write history, you’re always confronted with the question: what facts and events will make it into your historical account, and which ones will be left out? When it comes to this viral video produced by Donolinio Studio, what makes the cut? Europe. America. Men. And a long list of downers: war, depravation, natural disaster, a-bombs, social crisis, financial crisis, genocide and assassination, all set to a dramatic soundtrack by Hans Zimmer. What gets left out? Anything that seemingly makes life worth living and, with some minor exceptions, human achievement. And, yes, Africa and Latin America too — except for the first World Cup tournament played in Uruguay. (Note: we’re pretty sure that English isn’t the first language of the filmmakers. Hence the spelling errors in the captions.)

Speaking of human achievement and historical omissions, we’d like to pay tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. on his birthday by highlighting two of MLK’s memorable speeches — his soaring “I Have a Dream” speech presented in August 1963, and then fast forward to his prescient “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, delivered just the day before he was assassinated in April 1968.

To dig deeper into the past, don’t miss the history courses (42 in total) in our collection of 400 Free Courses Online.

100 Years in 10 Minutes: A Quick Video History of the Past Century is a post from: Open Culture

Arriving in a new town, Houdini would claim the ability to escape from any handcuffs provided by the local police. His easy escapes provided excellent publicity for his shows. Houdini offered $100 to anyone who provided handcuffs from which he could not escape, but he never had to pay. Through his increasingly complex escapes and his shrewd use of publicity, Houdini became a headliner on the vaudeville circuit, playing in cities across the country. Not satisfied with that low level of fame, however, Houdini decided to gamble by taking his act to Europe.

When he returned from Europe, Houdini performed increasingly high-profile stunts — e.g., freeing himself from chains after jumping into Boston’s Charles River, escaping from a strait jacket while hanging upside down in Times Square, breaking out of a prison cell that held the assassin of President James Garfield. Today, we have Houdini performing a more straightforward escape — from a simple chair and rope. Below, in an image appearing in Ladies’ Home Journal (1918), Houdini tells you a little about how he made his great rope escape. He offers more details here. The video above was shot circa 1920.

Harry Houdini’s Great Rope Escape is a post from: Open Culture

This fall, the world’s population reached seven billion. A sobering thought. How did we get to this point? Producer Adam Cole and photographer Maggie Starbard of National Public Radio have put the world’s accelerating population growth in perspective in a two-and-a-half minute video, above.

In those two and a half minutes, 638 babies will be born worldwide, according to statistics from the United States Census Bureau, and 265 people will die. That’s a net gain of 373 people, just while you watch the film. The biggest growth, according to NPR,  is happening in sub-Saharan Africa, where access to family planning is low and infant mortality rates are high.

It may seem counter-intuitive that population growth rates are high where infant survival rates are low, but as Swedish global health expert Hans Rosling put it during a recent TED talk, “Only by child survival can we control population growth.” Because population growth and infant mortality rates are both correlated to poverty rates, he argues, eliminating poverty is the key to achieving a sustainable world population. You can learn more in our November 1 feature,  “Hans Rosling Uses IKEA Props to Explain World of 7 Billion People.”

Crowded House: How the World’s Population Grew to 7 Billion People is a post from: Open Culture