Videos and Recorded Programs

Amy Stanley, professor of history at Northwestern University, introduces the vibrant social and cultural life of early nineteenth-century Japan through the story of an irrepressible woman named Tsuneno, who defied convention to make a life for herself in the big city of Edo (now Tokyo) in the decades before the...

Namwali Serpell, professor of literature at Harvard, author of The Old Drift, and recent recipient of the Arthur C. Clarke award for the best science fiction novel published in the UK discusses the origins of Afrofuturism. This is the Ridge Lecture for Literature.

Stephanie Jones-Rogers, associate professor of history at University of California, Berkeley, draws upon the testimony of formerly enslaved individuals, the correspondence and account books of slave traders, and a wide range of other material (including travel writing, newspapers and business directories) to show...

This conference explores the transmutation, preservation, and loss of paper as a cycle of archiving and forgetting that defined early modern artistic practice, economic transaction, and political statecraft. Speakers map paper's various guises, its ability to retain meanings associated with its material origins as...

Discover the eerier side of The Huntington in a virtual event where curators and botanists share rarely seen objects and otherworldly stories from deep inside the collections. Enter a mysterious world of ghoulish characters, bizarre plants, and devilish elixirs and treats you can make at home.

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For this presentation, James Folsom, the Marge and Sherm Telleen/Marion and Earle Jorgensen Director of the Botanical Gardens, recounts the physical and intellectual origins of Liu Fang Yuan, reminding us of the many people, ideas, and activities that brought this garden and endeavor to its current state. To...

In this webinar, Huntington Curator of Rare Books Stephen Tabor explains how printing technology developed from the hand-press period to the early 20th century, shows how to spot different typesettings and impressions, and explores how basic bibliographical terms have been used variously by book historians,...

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one of the nation's premier authorities on the Founding era, discusses how Americans today deal with problematic historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, in the inaugural lecture for the...

Huntington curators share stories about some of the Library's most remarkable and surprising acquisitions. This program is presented by Rare Books LA.

Dr. Sowande' Mustakeem, Associate Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, reconstructs the significance of water and power in how slavery is remembered, exploring the roles of bondpeople, sailors, and slave ship surgeons during the centuries of racial...

Tang Qingnian 唐慶年, the 2019 Cheng Family Visiting Artist at The Huntington, screens the video artwork that has been the focus of his yearlong residency. A conversation with the artist follows a virtual screening of his new video. A new musical work composed by pipa virtuoso Wu Man 吳蠻 and shakuhachi artist Kojiro...

Phillip E. Bloom, June and Simon K.C. Li Curator of the Chinese Garden and Director of the Center for East Asian Garden Studies, examines a selection of gardens from Song-dynasty (960–1279) China that explicitly thematized both the sensual and intellectual pleasures of gardening. The talk argues that close...