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Showing programs 1 to 10 of 120
March 28, 2024

Surprisingly, the last battle of the American Revolutionary War wasn’t fought at Saratoga or Yorktown or anywhere in the emergent United States. It took place on the other side of the globe, as British and French naval forces met at Cuddalore on the Bay of Bengal off the coast of modern-day India. Historian Richard Bell explores the causes, course, and consequences of this climactic encounter to examine India’s connection to the American Revolutionary War.


April 2, 2024

More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s reputation as the prophet of self-reliance has obscured a complicated figure—one who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. Emersonian lecturer, editor, and translator James Marcus pieces together a new portrait of Emerson’s life that reveals an eerily modern persona of rebel, lover, friend, husband, and father.


April 3, 2024

Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the most significant women artists of the Baroque period, worked against all odds at a time when art was dominated by men, becoming the first woman to be accepted by the Academy of the Arts in Florence. Art historian Joseph Paul Cassar surveys her works—notable for dramatic paintings that portray strong biblical heroines—and discusses her training in the workshop of her father. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)


April 4, 2024

The earliest printed images of birds were created using woodcuts, and these were followed by engraved and etched copper plates, which could reproduce finer details. Lithography, used by John James Audubon, was not in wide use until the 19th century. Biologist Kay Etheridge discusses natural history images that combine art and science in ways that have furthered our knowledge of birds.


April 4, 2024

With climate change seemingly spiraling out of control, it’s easy to become consumed by anxiety when contemplating the future of our planet. Drawing on her book Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, Hannah Ritchie, deputy editor and lead researcher of the online scientific publication Our World in Data, challenges this prevailing narrative. She examines how optimism and lifestyle changes can augment the development of sustainable solutions that preserve nature as well as our own well-being—countering despair with the beginning of a better future.


April 4, 2024

The American musical has a rich and expansive history reaching back to the 1800s. Musical theater artist and historian Ben West details and dissects the evolution of this uniquely American art form, including its maturation in the middle of the 20th century; its often overlooked Black and female artists; and its outside influences such as minstrelsy, vaudeville, nightclubs, and burlesque.


April 5, 2024

For a brief, dazzling moment, Ravenna was an unlikely refuge for a world drifting apart. As the capital of the Western Roman Empire in its last days, then of the occidental provinces of the Byzantine Empire, it offered a refuge of luxury and splendor, a return to antique civilization rising above the relentless waves of Barbarians. Art historian Elaine Ruffolo leads an exploration of Ravenna's extraordinary early Christian-era structures and what they reveal of artistic and religious relationships and contacts at an important period of European cultural history. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)


April 7, 2024

The most daring development in modern art in the first half of the 20th century was the step into abstraction—which elicited both excitement and anxiety. Painters looked to new sources for the kind of structure that observation once provided: from music to the logic of geometry, scientific developments to the forces of emotion and spirituality. Art historian David Gariff discusses the complex relationship between art and spirituality through works of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and their European counterparts Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)


April 8, 2024

A December 16, 1944, surprise attack by German troops on Allied forces in Belgium’s Ardennes region sparked an American counteroffensive called the Battle of the Bulge. Five weeks of combat over snow-covered ground in freezing temperatures forced German troops to withdraw, with the Allies claiming victory. Military historian Mitch Yockelson shares the history of the battle and its significance as a turning point of World War II.


April 8, 2024

Why did jazz take hold of the City of Light and shine a beacon across Europe? Drawing on rare film clips, photographs, and original recordings, John Edward Hasse, curator emeritus of American Music at the National Museum of American History, assembles an all-star cast­—from Josephine Baker to Louis Mitchell and his Jazz Kings, Duke Ellington to Django Reinhart­—to provide insight into how the quintessentially American art form captured the fancy of dancers, musicians, and audiences here more than in any other non-Anglophone country.