Videos and Recorded Programs

Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History and Director of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University, tells of her adventures with the Making and Knowing Project in hands-on history and in the experimental history of art and science in this Dibner Lecture.

What’s a schrank and why do we have one? Elee Wood, Fielding Curator/Educator of Early American Art explains.

Alexander Ji, Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories, leads a short tour of the early history of our Universe, offering intriguing glimpses of an epoch known as Cosmic Dawn, when the first stars and galaxies were born.

Acclaimed historian Louis Warren, professor of U.S. Western History at the University of California, Davis, explores how Californians remade American ideas of property and power between 1848 and the present in this Avery Lecture.

Join authors Bryan Mealer and Joshua Wheeler in a discussion about hardscrabble times, places, and people in Texas and New Mexico.

Karen Lawrence, president of The Huntington and a James Joyce scholar, delivers the annual Founder’s Day Lecture on the subject of Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Lawrence’s lecture examines what makes Joyce one of the greatest writers, and how he created one of the most original novels by stealing from everybody else.

Shigehisa Kuriyama, professor of cultural history at Harvard University, discusses the Inshoku yōjō kagami (Rules of Dietary Life), a Japanese woodblock print produced around 1850. The image appears to whimsically depict the traditional East Asian view of the body, but it in fact reflects the transformative impact of Western medicine and the rise of the money economy.

Author Icy Smith and illustrator Gayle Garner Roski discuss their book Mei Ling in China City, based on a true story set in Los Angeles during World War II. The story revolves around the friendship between a Chinese American girl named Mei Ling Lee and her Japanese American friend, Yayeko Akiyama, who was interned with her family in the Manzanar War Relocation Center.