Thursday, March 2, 2017

Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack with Steve Twomey, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.

This illustrated lecture provides a fascinating look at the twelve days leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—the warnings, clues, and missteps.

Monday, March 6, 2017

Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to de Blasio with Thomas J. Main, Professor at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New York.

This illustrated lecture tells the remarkable story of how America’s largest city has struggled for more than thirty years to meet the crisis of modern homelessness through the landmark development, since the initiation of the Callahan v Carey litigation in 1979, of a municipal shelter system based on a court-enforced right to shelter.

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, America’s Maverick Publisher and the Battle against Censorship with Michael Rosenthal, former Roberta and William Campbell Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

As the head of Grove Press, Barney Rosset liberated American culture from the constraints of Puritanism. This illustrated lecture explores how Grove's landmark legal victories freed publishers to print what they wanted, and traces Grove's central role in the countercultural ferment of the sixties and early seventies.

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums with Samuel J. Redman, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

In 1864 a U.S. army doctor dug up the remains of a Dakota man who had been killed in Minnesota. Carefully recording his observations, he sent the skeleton to a museum in Washington, DC, that was collecting human remains for research. In the “bone rooms” of this museum and others like it, a scientific revolution was unfolding that would change our understanding of the human body, race, and prehistory. This illustrated lecture unearths the story of how human remains became highly sought-after artifacts for both scientific research and public display.

Monday, March 13, 2017

Ten Restaurants That Changed America with Paul Freedman, history professor at Yale University, author, and editor.

This illustrated lecture offers a daring and original history of dining out in America as told through ten legendary restaurants.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language with Esther Schor, professor of English at Princeton University, and Sam Green, documentary filmmaker and director of The Universal Language.

In this illustrated lecture and film screening, writer Esther Schor and director Sam Green trace the life of the invented language Esperanto. The lecture will be followed by a screening of the documentary The Universal Language (30 minutes) and a Q&A with the presenters.

Monday, March 20, 2017

How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood with Peter Moskowitz, freelance journalist and graduate of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

This lecture uncovers the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York.

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Toxic Inequality: How America’s Wealth Gap Destroys Mobility, Deepens the Racial Divide, and Threatens Our Future with Thomas M. Shapiro, professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Brandeis University.

This lecture reveals how forces of wealth disparity and racial inequality trap families in place.

Monday, March 27, 2017

Feeding Gotham: The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, 1790–1860 with Gergely Baics, assistant professor of history and urban studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.

This illustrated lecture explores how America’s first metropolis grappled with the challenge of provisioning its inhabitants.

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

"Sharing Jokes across Cultures: Problems and Possibilities" with Carol C. Gould, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Political Science, City University of New York and author of Interactive Democracy: The Social Roots of Global Justice.

Drawing on the author's recent book as well as current events, this illustrated lecture analyzes several examples of jokes—American, Jewish, Irish, Egyptian, Eastern European, etc.—and some hard cases of offensive jokes and cartoons that have provoked visceral reactions from various cultural communities. It also considers the uses of humor for enhancing cross-cultural understanding in contemporary social and political life.

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

No Friends but the Mountains: Dispatches from the World's Violent Highlands with Judith Matloff, who teaches conflict reporting at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

In this illustrated lecture, a veteran war correspondent describes her journeys to remote mountain communities across the globe—from Albania and Chechnya to Nepal and Colombia—to investigate why so many conflicts occur at great heights.

Thursday, March 30, 2017

City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York with Tyler Anbinder, a professor of history and former chair of the History Department at George Washington University.

This illustrated lecture provides a vivid sense of what New York looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and felt like over the centuries of its development and maturation into the city we know today.