Videos and Recorded Programs

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.