Videos and Recorded Programs

This interdisciplinary conference takes the recent popularity of the historical novel as a starting point to explore the relationship between history and fiction. The plenary speaker, Booker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel (“Wolf Hall”), will appear in conversation with Mary Robertson, former Huntington chief curator of British historical manuscripts.

The Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell was described by an eminent historian as “not biographable.” Novelist Hilary Mantel describes her 10-year effort to pin her compelling and elusive subject to the page.

David Mas Masumoto, organic farmer and acclaimed author of Epitaph for a Peach and Harvest Son, is joined by his wife, Marcy Masumoto, for a lively talk about life on their Central California farm. Through stories that offer a personal perspective on growing organic crops, the Masumotos share their reflections on the vision required of artisan farmers in today’s food world.

Johanna Teske, Carnegie Origins Postdoctoral Fellow, will highlight new discoveries about exoplanets including how their composition is “inherited” from their host star.

“The sun is but a morning star.” Walden’s famous last line points eastward to the sunrise; but Henry David Thoreau also wrote of the west, the sunset, and day’s end. To mark Thoreau’s bicentennial year, this conference poses the question: How can we read Thoreau from the sundown side, the far west of his imagination?

Andrew Wetzel discusses how theoretical astrophysics is now revealing how galaxies are formed, using the world’s most powerful supercomputers to simulate this complex process.

John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and the Ritchie Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington, presents an account of Potosí, the great South American silver mine and boomtown that galvanized imperial Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries, fueled the rise of capitalism, destroyed native peoples and cultures en masse, and changed history—for good or ill?

The Huntington has the only known recording of Joseph H. Hazelton’s eyewitness account of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Aric Allen documents the story of this strange artifact.