Videos and Recorded Programs

Li Wei Yang, curator of the Pacific Rim Collection at The Huntington, retraces the history of Chinatown in Los Angeles using old Chinese Restaurant menus from the You Chung Hong Family Collection.

Historian Victoria Johnson discusses the life of David Hosack, the attending physician at the Hamilton-Burr duel and founder of the nation's first public botanical garden, today the site of Rockefeller Center. Johnson is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated biography of Hosack, American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic.

The Browns of California: A Conversation with Governor Jerry Brown and Miriam Pawel, moderated by William Deverell.

This interdisciplinary conference illuminates the movement of writers, artists, scientists, and cultural goods between Paris and London during the fourteen months of peace ushered in by the Treaty of Amiens, from March 1802 through May 1803–the first break in hostilities after a decade of Revolutionary warfare.

Peter Moore, writer and lecturer at the University of Oxford, takes us back to the mid-18th century to the story of how a humble coal collier from a small port in northern England came to define an entire age.

Andrea Wulf, the New York Times bestselling author, discusses her new illustrated book, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt—her second work about the intrepid explorer and naturalist.

Allison L. Strom, Carnegie Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories, shows how astronomers are now using the world's largest telescopes to determine the chemical DNA of even very distant galaxies, and how this information is answering key questions about how galaxies like our own formed and evolved.

Sean Bradley, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, explores the history and development of an early text on emergency Chinese medicine, the Zhouhou beiji fang 肘後備急方 (Emergency Medicines to Keep on Hand), by the 4th-century alchemist and scholar, Ge Hong 葛洪.

The use and abuse of stereotypes is not limited to present-day politics. In this conference, experts in British and American history examine stereotypes related to such vital issues as race, religion, gender, nationality, and occupation. The program explores how stereotyping then, as now, persisted across different spheres of life; how individuals and groups responded; and with what consequences.

Sue Fawn Chung, professor emerita at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, presents facts and fictions about late 19th-century Chinese railroad workers, introducing newly published work on the subject: The Chinese and the Iron Road.

Larry Nittler, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science, discusses how he uses microscopic analyses to understand what "presolar" stellar fossils - tiny grains of dust in meteorites - tell us about the evolution and inner workings of stars and the chemical history of the matter that became the sun and planets.

One of the most iconic paintings in British and American history, The Blue Boy, made around 1770 by English painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), is undergoing its first major conservation treatment since its acquisition in 1921.