Videos and Recorded Programs

In 1941, the Limited Editions Book Club approached Edward Weston to collaborate on a deluxe edition of Walt Whitman’s poetry collection, “Leaves of Grass.” Weston accepted the assignment and set out on a cross-country trip that yielded a group of images that mark the culmination of an extraordinarily creative period in his career.

Experts in the literature, history, geography, and archaeology of 16th- and 17th-century Britain examine four key geographic sites—body, house, neighborhood, and region—to illuminate the important spatial structures and concepts that define the early modern engagement with the world.

Jonathan and Karin Fielding talk about what they collect and why and their interest in the pieces with respect to how they were made and how they were used. Their focus: American ingenuity manifested in American art made for utilitarian purposes by craftspeople in rural New England from the 18th through 19th centuries.

June Li, curator emerita of the Chinese Garden at The Huntington, will look at some of the functions of printed images in China from the late 16th through the 19th centuries, using examples from the exhibition “Gardens, Art, and Commerce in Chinese Woodblock Prints.”

Novelist Edmund White (A Boy’s Own Story) discusses the lasting impression that Christopher Isherwood’s groundbreaking novel “A Single Man” had on him as a young author assembling his gay identity in the pre-Stonewall era.

Steven Hahn, professor of history at New York University and the Rogers Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington, considers what the history of the United States would look like, especially for the 19th century, if we travel east and west from the middle of the country and north from Mexico and the Caribbean.

Landscape architect Edmund Hollander, author of “The Good Garden,” discusses how the design process for a residential landscape is informed by the interaction of natural site ecology, architectural ecology, and human ecology.

To mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the landmark folio “The Works of Ben Jonson,” experts in the field explore the English dramatist’s impact in his own time and his reputation down to the present.