The Lincoln Lawyer
At the recent conference “Civil War Lives,” historian Ronald C. White Jr. described Abraham Lincoln’s unique diary and the impact of his legal training on his presidency. You can download the talk from iTunes U.
A Flowering of Cultures
Opera director Peter Sellars and internationally renowned performer Hua Wenyi—a master of Kun opera—took the stage here recently for a conversation and performance that celebrated the cross-pollination of ideas across centuries, cultures, and generations.
Terra Cognita
This Sunday, American History TV (C-SPAN 3) will broadcast “The Presidency: Thomas Jefferson and Alternatives to Slavery,” a program that picks up where Laura Voisin George left off in her Huntington Frontiers article last spring about an archaeological excavation in Virginia.
Carmageddon, the Prequel
Historian Matthew Roth might be inclined to say that the so-called Carmageddon will go down as a mere SigAlert in the long, complicated history of L.A.’s freeway system. You can download his lecture “Concrete Utopia: Roads and Freeways in Los Angeles” and listen to it in your car this weekend.
Getting the Bugs Out
NPR’s Joe Palca will be giving a lecture at The Huntington Thursday, May 12, at 7:30 p.m. to introduce his book, “Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us.” With humor and plenty of hard data, he’ll talk about why fingernails on a chalk board make us cringe and why that guy on the cell phone drives us crazy.
Will Shakespeare, Mr. Congeniality
“Revisiting the Regency: England, 1811–1820” opens Saturday, April 23, which happens to be William Shakespeare’s birthday. While the Regency era took place 200 years after Shakespeare’s death, it nonetheless felt the great playwright’s genius.
In Good Company
Monday was President’s Day all over again. Pulitzer Prizes in history and biography went to books about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Many Huntington scholars have been past winners and finalists for the award.
“Several Lives in One”
Blight is an engaging and eloquent speaker on all topics related to the Civil War. His focus tonight will be Frederick Douglass; in April 2009, he delivered a talk called “Lincoln and the American South” as part of the conference titled “A Lincoln for the Twenty-First Century.”
Bukowski on iTunes
Sara S. “Sue” Hodson, literary manuscripts curator at The Huntington, discusses the unordinary life of one of the most original voices in 20th-century American literature in nine short audio clips, available on iTunes U.
