Videos and Recorded Programs

Internationally renowned botanist David Lee, emeritus professor at Florida International University, discusses blue pigments in plants and why they are so rare. Lee is the author of Nature's Fabric: Leaves in Science and Culture.

Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History and Director of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University, tells of her adventures with the Making and Knowing Project in hands-on history and in the experimental history of art and science in this Dibner Lecture.

What's a schrank and why do we have one? Elee Wood, Fielding Curator/Educator of Early American Art explains.

Alexander Ji, Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories, leads a short tour of the early history of our Universe, offering intriguing glimpses of an epoch known as Cosmic Dawn, when the first stars and galaxies were born.

Acclaimed historian Louis Warren, professor of U.S. Western History at the University of California, Davis, explores how Californians remade American ideas of property and power between 1848 and the present in this Avery Lecture.

Join authors Bryan Mealer and Joshua Wheeler in a discussion about hardscrabble times, places, and people in Texas and New Mexico.

Karen Lawrence, president of The Huntington and a James Joyce scholar, delivers the annual Founder's Day Lecture on the subject of Joyce's novel Ulysses.

Shigehisa Kuriyama, professor of cultural history at Harvard University, discusses the Inshoku yōjō kagami (Rules of Dietary Life), a Japanese woodblock print produced around 1850.

Author Icy Smith and illustrator Gayle Garner Roski discuss their book Mei Ling in China City, based on a true story set in Los Angeles during World War II.

This symposium investigates the history of garden plant domestication in China, focusing on such topics as horticultural techniques, the origins and distribution of important species, and the knowledge gained from literary records to DNA analysis.

William Deverell, professor of history at USC, explores the regional dimensions of American entrepreneurialism; what special features or challenges found in the American West helped drive entrepreneurs and stimulate original thinking, and how and why did the West inhibit breakthroughs or pioneer

Fara Dabhoiwala, professor of history at Princeton University, explores why speech, before the 18th century, was continually monitored and policed in every sphere of life across the Western world; no one believed speech should be free. This program is a Crotty Lecture.