Videos and Recorded Programs

Glenn Webb, professor emeritus at Pepperdine University, discusses the globalization of the Japanese tea ceremony in the decades following World War II. Webb’s lecture inaugurates the Dr. Genshitsu Sen Lecture Series, which focuses on Japanese tea culture.

Chinese theater-maker Stan Lai (Lai Sheng-chuan 賴聲川) discusses the origins and evolution of Nightwalk in the Chinese Garden, his new, site-specific production for The Huntington. The play is the culmination of Lai’s residency at The Huntington as the 2018 Cheng Family Visiting Artist and is developed and produced by the CalArts Center for New Performance.

The Civil War witnessed a number of critical turning points. Major battles, the Emancipation Proclamation, the election of 1864, and the New York City draft riots represent the kinds of military, political, and social events that could signal a profound shift in the conflict’s direction or momentum. Speakers address the range, and potential for disagreement, inherent in any search for historical turning points.

Daniel Lewis, the Dibner Senior Curator of the History of Science at The Huntington, discusses his new book about the birds of Hawaii. Belonging on an Island: Birds, Extinction, and Evolution in Hawai’i takes readers on a thousand-year journey as it explores the state’s magnificent birds, touching on topics ranging from the concept of belonging to the work of pioneering bird conservationists.

When German brewing magnate Adolphus Busch purchased a mansion on Pasadena’s “Millionaires’ Row” in 1904, he quickly bought up some 60 additional acres stretching down to the bottom of Arroyo Seco and developed it into a lushly landscaped parl. Busch Gardens, which opened to the public in 1906, featured terraced hillsides, waterfalls and ponds, and “fairy scenes” drawn from tales of the Brothers Grimm. Local...

Alexandra Walsham, professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge, explores how the English Reformation was remembered, forgotten, contested, and reinvented between 1530 and 1700 and discusses the enduring legacies that these processes have left in more recent cultural memory.

Maria Drout, Hubble, Carnegie-Dunlap Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories, discusses how a recent discovery of a “kilonova” associated with the cataclysmic merger of two neutron stars has filled in one of the final pieces of the elemental puzzle: the origin of many of the heaviest elements in the universe.

Author Susan Whitfield (Silk, Slaves and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road) is joined by renowned theater director Peter Sellars for a fascinating conversation about the diversity of peoples and cultures that traveled the ancient trade routes of Afro-Eurasia.