Videos and Recorded Programs

Joyce Chaplin, James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University, revisits The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which was one of Henry Huntington’s most prized manuscript acquisitions. Franklin tells a tantalizingly open-ended story about his life because the manuscript was left unfinished.

Bill Esparza, author of “L.A. Mexicano: Recipes, People & Places,” and Elisa Callow, author of “The Urban Forager: Culinary Exploring & Eating on L.A.’s Eastside,” join award-winning journalist and L.A. chronicler Val Zavala in a Q&A about L.A. food culture. 

For one hundred years The Huntington has been spreading knowledge like pollen, helping scholarship bloom into exhibitions and publications. Sometimes the right pollen is hard to get though, that’s why it’s good to have friends who can help.

James Brayton Hall, president of the Garden Conservancy, examines what America’s gardens say about our culture and how new approaches pioneered by the Conservancy are helping to protect and document these landscapes for the future. Several examples of West Coast gardens are highlighted, including remarkable successes—such as the gardens surrounding the former prison on Alcatraz Island—and one near failure.

Henry Huntington acquired one of the rarest books in the history of English literature: the so-called “bad quarto” of Hamlet. Zachary Lesser, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses how this book’s discovery in 1823 transformed our ideas about Hamlet, how it made its way to The Huntington, and what can we learn through this book’s history about modern libraries.

This interdisciplinary conference explored the subterranean world of Elizabethan Catholic print and scribal culture, set against the backdrop of press censorship, illicit printing, book smuggling, subversive scribal publication, and the uses of Catholic writing by government agents. The study of book circulation illuminated the nature and significance of the persecuted religious minority that was, by the end of the 16th century, no longer supposed to...

Dennis Kruska, a noted authority on the Yosemite Valley, discusses the literature that enticed sightseers to experience the Yosemite’s scenic wonders following the first tourist party to the valley in 1855. The literary lure on tourism has worked so well, says Kruska, that today Yosemite is painfully loved to death.

Dympna Callaghan, William L. Safire Professor of Modern Letters at Syracuse University, considers Shakespeare’s complaints about the limitations on what he could say and how he could say it.