Watch, Read, Listen

Sue Fawn Chung, professor emerita at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, presents facts and fictions about late 19th-century Chinese railroad workers, introducing newly published work on the subject: The Chinese and the Iron Road.

Larry Nittler, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science, discusses how he uses microscopic analyses to understand what “presolar” stellar fossils - tiny grains of dust in meteorites - tell us about the evolution and inner workings of stars and the chemical history of the matter that became the sun and planets.

One of the most iconic paintings in British and American history, The Blue Boy, made around 1770 by English painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), is undergoing its first major conservation treatment since its acquisition in 1921.

Catherine Hess, chief curator of European art, explains how the work of these two British artists resonates across centuries.

H.R. Woudhuysen, rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, talks about the market for old books and manuscripts in England in the time of the Tudors and Stuarts in this Zeidberg Lecture.