United States Free Audio & Video

Now, in The Great Tours: Washington DC, The Great Courses partners once again with the Smithsonian, the nation’s premier repository of U.S. history and world culture, to bring you a deep and multi-faceted look at this amazing city.

In American Notes, Rudyard Kipling, the Nobel Prize-winning author of the Jungle Book, visits the USA. As the travel-diary of an Anglo-Indian Imperialist visiting the USA, these American Notes offer an interesting view of America in the 1880s.

New York City, growing from the small Dutch commercial settlement of New Amsterdam early in the seventeenth century into a bustling multi-cultural city of more than 8 million and metropolis of more than 18 million by the twentieth century, is a place with many stories.

The journal of nature-lover John Muir who spent the summer of 1869 walking California's Sierra Nevada range. From French Bar to Mono Lake and the Yosemite Valley, Muir was awestruck by everything he saw.

John Muir’s adventure guide for the Yosemite Valley.

Next to de Alexis de Tocquville's almost contemporary Democracy in America, Frances Trollope's work may be the most famous (or at least notorious) dissection of manners and morals of the United States.

As one of America's most popular destinations, Yellowstone National Park has attracted millions of visitors. Here you will see all the sights: geysers, lakes, waterfalls, lightning storms and hot springs including Old Faithful!

In 1879 John Muir went to Alaska for the first time. Its stupendous living glaciers aroused his unbounded interest, for they enabled him to verify his theories of glacial action.

Mr. Kuralt talked about his new book, Charles Kuralt's America, published by Putnam Publishing Group.

John Muir (1838-1914) was one of the first modern preservationists. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, and wildlife, especially in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, were read by millions and are still popular today.