Videos and Recorded Programs

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.

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 hours of expert conservation work to remove old overpaint and varnish, repair structural materials, and inpaint areas of...

In the summer of 1999, The Huntington was the focus of world-wide attention when it exhibited the first Amorphophallus titanum ever to bloom in California. That first bloom started our cultivation of this strange plant. We now have over forty mature “Corpse Flowers” and this is their story.

Two remarkable—and remarkably different—manuscripts from the Library’s collections are the focus of this presentation and conversation with Li Wei Yang, Curator of Pacific Rim Collections, and Vanessa Wilkie, William A. Moffett Curator of Medieval Manuscripts and British History. Yang explores the dramatic encounters referenced in a recently acquired set of Japanese manuscript scrolls documenting Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s maritime incursion into Japan in 1853 and...

Writer Lynell George discusses her forthcoming book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, and her experience in The Huntington archives, in conversation with William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute for California and the West and professor of history at USC, and Karla Nielsen, curator of literary collections at The Huntington. George is a Los Angeles-based journalist...

Three panelists follow one of The Huntington’s most studied manuscripts as it travels from curator to conservator to digitization team, who all work together to transform a 16th-century manuscript into a 21st-century digital tool. The lavishly illuminated manuscript was created by William Bowyer, Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London in 1567 for Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and has been among the...

As part of our Centennial Celebration, we have commissioned a temporary art installation by Los Angeles-based artist Lita Albuquerque. Installed near the southern entrance to the Japanese Garden, Albuquerque’s Red Earth features an approximately six-by-four-foot rock slab marked with bright red pigment and surrounded by bamboo stalks affixed with copper-colored bands. The work contrasts dramatically with the cool greens of the shady bamboo grove and...

Christopher Clark, professor of history at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, explores how conflicts in agriculture over possession of land and slavery in 19th-century United States shaped the nation.