For many life­long learn­ers, The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny is a bless­ing. Since 1990, the com­pa­ny has record­ed uni­ver­si­ty cours­es taught by lead­ing pro­fes­sors and made them avail­able to con­sumers. The cours­es, which tend to be bread-and-but­ter in a good way, range in price depend­ing on the media for­mat you choose. If you buy cours­es on sale (they always run sales), and if you buy the cheap­er MP3 ver­sions (as opposed to the more expen­sive DVDs and audio CDs), you can get a lot of val­ue for your mon­ey. For exam­ple, 24 excel­lent lec­tures on Ancient Greece will run you $34.95, which is not too shab­by.

Now how does all of this tie into what we do here at Open Cul­ture? Here’s how: The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny has post­ed a free 45-minute lec­ture on Mar­tin Luther King, “Stride Toward Free­dom,” which is part of a larg­er course called “Free­dom: Phi­los­o­phy of Lib­er­a­tion.” You can access the lec­ture in dif­fer­ent audio for­mats here, and you’ll get a sense of what The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny is all about.

Caveat: The free offer­ing was sup­posed to have expired on Feb­ru­ary 28. So it may go away soon.

We love find­ing these vin­tage media gems. Last week, we served up Orson Welles’ famous radio broad­cast from 1938. This week, we’ve got anoth­er one — Mal­colm X speak­ing at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty in 1964.In this clas­sic speech, 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 attained by “what­ev­er means nec­es­sary,” includ­ing force, if the gov­ern­ment won’t guar­an­tee it, and that “intel­li­gent­ly direct­ed extrem­ism” will achieve lib­er­ty far more effec­tive­ly than paci­fist strate­gies. (He’s clear­ly allud­ing to Mar­tin Luther King.) You can lis­ten to the speech in its entire­ty here (Real Audio), some­thing that is well worth doing. But we’d also encour­age you to watch (see below) the dra­mat­ic clos­ing min­utes and pay some atten­tion to the nice rhetor­i­cal slide, to how we get from Ham­let’s doubts (“To be or not to be”) to tak­ing up arms:

“I read once, pass­ing­ly, about a man named Shake­speare. I only read about him pass­ing­ly, but I remem­ber one thing he wrote that kind of moved me. He put it in the mouth of Ham­let, I think, it was, who said, ‘To be or not to be.’ He was in doubt about something—whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suf­fer the slings and arrows of out­ra­geous fortune—moderation—or to take up arms against a sea of trou­bles and by oppos­ing end them. And I go for that. If you take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in pow­er to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be wait­ing a long time. And in my opin­ion, the young gen­er­a­tion of whites, blacks, browns, what­ev­er else there is, you’re liv­ing at a time of extrem­ism, a time of rev­o­lu­tion, a time when there’s got to be a change. Peo­ple in pow­er have mis­used it, and now there has to be a change and a bet­ter world has to be built, and the only way it’s going to be built—is with extreme meth­ods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone—I don’t care what col­or you are—as long as you want to change this mis­er­able con­di­tion that exists on this earth.”

Open Source, a radio pro­gram host­ed by Christo­pher Lydon, recent­ly pulled off some­thing rather unusu­al. The broad­cast (iTunes — mp3) made it abun­dant­ly clear why an Ancient Greek text, Thucy­dides’ His­to­ry of the Pelo­pon­nesian War, remains fas­ci­nat­ing and high­ly rel­e­vant to mod­ern day read­ers. Writ­ten 2400+ years ago, Thucy­dides has some­thing impor­tant to offer his­to­ry and mil­i­tary buffs alike, and also those who want to delve into the com­pli­cat­ed human psy­che. For his­to­ri­ans, Thucy­dides’ work gives us the first mod­ern his­to­ry — the first his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive that looked to ren­der the past in an ana­lyt­i­cal, empir­i­cal and objec­tive way (a depar­ture from the more lit­er­ary, myth-based his­to­ries that came before it). For mil­i­tary thinkers, includ­ing stu­dents at West Point, the work holds such appeal because it recounts the epic, 27-year war (431–404 BC) between the two great­est Greek pow­ers — on the one side, Athens, a demo­c­ra­t­ic but increas­ing­ly impe­ri­al­ist pow­er, and, on the oth­er side, Spar­ta, a harsh oli­garchic pow­er that held no par­tic­u­lar impe­r­i­al aspi­ra­tions. Thucy­dides, an Athen­ian gen­er­al, gives you the blow-by-blow account of a land­mark his­tor­i­cal war. But he also gives you more. What par­tic­u­lar­ly engages read­ers, both past and present, are Thucy­dides’ philo­soph­i­cal insights into human nature — into how our pas­sions and fears, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing times of war, can counter-pro­duc­tive­ly under­mine our civil­i­ty and human­i­ty. This applies to lead­ers and cit­i­zens of Athens, who over­reached and even­tu­al­ly lost their war. Yet it also poten­tial­ly applies to mod­ern Amer­i­ca because it is Thucy­dides’ assump­tion that human nature remains fun­da­men­tal­ly the same across time and place. And, in that sense, there is a cau­tion­ary tale for all of us in this sem­i­nal Greek work.