Videos and Recorded Programs

Discover the eerier side of The Huntington in a virtual event where curators and botanists share rarely seen objects and otherworldly stories from deep inside the collections. Enter a mysterious world of ghoulish characters, bizarre plants, and devilish elixirs and treats you can make at home.

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For this presentation, James Folsom, the Marge and Sherm Telleen/Marion and Earle Jorgensen Director of the Botanical Gardens, recounts the physical and intellectual origins of Liu Fang Yuan, reminding us of the many people, ideas, and activities that brought this garden and endeavor to its current state. To...

In this webinar, Huntington Curator of Rare Books Stephen Tabor explains how printing technology developed from the hand-press period to the early 20th century, shows how to spot different typesettings and impressions, and explores how basic bibliographical terms have been used variously by book historians,...

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one of the nation's premier authorities on the Founding era, discusses how Americans today deal with problematic historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, in the inaugural lecture for the...

Huntington curators share stories about some of the Library's most remarkable and surprising acquisitions. This program is presented by Rare Books LA.

Dr. Sowande' Mustakeem, Associate Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, reconstructs the significance of water and power in how slavery is remembered, exploring the roles of bondpeople, sailors, and slave ship surgeons during the centuries of racial...

Tang Qingnian 唐慶年, the 2019 Cheng Family Visiting Artist at The Huntington, screens the video artwork that has been the focus of his yearlong residency. A conversation with the artist follows a virtual screening of his new video. A new musical work composed by pipa virtuoso Wu Man 吳蠻 and shakuhachi artist Kojiro...

Phillip E. Bloom, June and Simon K.C. Li Curator of the Chinese Garden and Director of the Center for East Asian Garden Studies, examines a selection of gardens from Song-dynasty (960–1279) China that explicitly thematized both the sensual and intellectual pleasures of gardening. The talk argues that close...

Robert Bonner, professor of history at Dartmouth College, probes the deep history of the images, words, and ships that cast odium on the slaveholders' rebellion of the 1860s. This lecture is a Rogers Distinguished Fellow's Lecture in Nineteenth-Century American History.

The Caribbean played a central role in the global transformations that began in the fifteenth century. This conference explores the regional, Atlantic, and World approaches to the Caribbean, and what they each mean for thinking about the transformations within and beyond the Caribbean between ca. 1500 and 1800....

The 37th Annual Succulent Plants Symposium was presented by Huntington staff via Zoom. During the program, four brief presentations by Gardens staff provided updates about the Desert Garden Collections, discussed recent construction in the garden, and took a look at ongoing efforts to document and archive the...

One of the most famous works at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough, has been restored and reinstalled in the Thornton Portrait Gallery. This major conservation undertaking involved high-tech data gathering and analysis as well as more than 500...