Introduction to Poetry Audio

Our greatest public orator, Abraham Lincoln’s speeches still stir the heart of any American who encounters them.

Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547), one of his biographers wrote, “changed the heart, mind, and face of Britain more than anything between the coming of the Normans and the coming of the factory.”

We call it the "Golden Age"—the period during the 5th century B.C. when the Greek city-state of Athens experienced a cultural flowering of extraordinary power and importance for Western culture.

This series of lectures examines a crucial period in the history of the ancient world, the age ushered in by the extraordinary conquests of Alexander the Great.

From 1861 to 1865, slavery ended and a loose-knit republic became a unified, continent-spanning power. The price in human lives was greater than that for all other American wars combined.

The United States is often thought of as a "young" nation. But in fact, it is the oldest continuing democracy in the world.

What defines an American? Is it the love of liberty, the pursuit of justice, the urge to invent, the desire for wealth, the drive to explore, the quest for spiritual values?

Americans pride themselves on being doers rather than thinkers.

This course explores the particularly rich history of religion in the U.S.

The revolution that created the U.S. was only one of many "American revolutions." From 1776 to 1825, wars for independence erupted throughout the Americas—from Boston to Buenos Aires—creating 19 new nations.

Starting with the period from the late Bronze Age, c. 1500 B.C.E., these lectures proceed chronologically and concentrate on the 200-year interval from 600 to 400 B.C.E.

Modern science, representative democracy, and a wave of wars were caused by a revolution of the intellect that seized Europe between 1600 and 1800.

This course is a narrative and analysis of Churchill’s life and achievements. It makes the case that Churchill was, indeed, the greatest leader of the 20th century.

Between 1492 and 1700 the Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French carved out major colonial empires in the New World from Canada to Argentina.

This is a very unusual course in American History from pre-colonial times until the Gold Rush of 1849.

We often call them the "Dark Ages," the era which spanned the decline and fall of Rome’s western empire and lingered for centuries...

This course looks at the Enlightenment through the eyes of its greatest writers as the source of our modern sense of "self."

The Crusades have been hailed as the driving force that brought Western Europe out of the Middle Ages—and condemned as the beginning of European imperialism in the Muslim Near East. But how are they best understood?

Three lifetimes ago, Europe was a farming society ruled by families of monarchs...

This course tells the history of Europe from the aristocratic early 18th century to the outbreak of the First World War through the lives of the colorful personalities who traversed its landscape.

This course on 19th-century European thought and culture is presented in three major sections...

This course examines major intellectual themes and debates in 20th-century European culture.

This course is an introduction to Greek history through the lives of the great individuals who made that history.

A succession of remarkable individuals—statesmen, thinkers, warriors, and writers—shaped the history of the Roman Empire and, by extension, our own history and culture.

From its humble beginnings in the great river valleys of Iraq and Egypt to the dawn of the modern world, this course traces the essential nature, evolution, and perceptions of Western civilization.