Reading Homer as an anthropologist

What happens when you stop thinking of the Iliad as a work of fiction but instead see it as a primary text to help explain an ancient society?
That’s what archaeologist Tara Carter does in lecture 21 and lecture 22 of her great UC San Diego course Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization (feed).
She presents the [...]

Unwanted side effects of democracy

Maybe it’s the legacy of the Cold War — all of those years of being the bastion of freedom and democracy — but somehow Americans got in the habit of viewing democracy as something completely good, something that everyone in his or her right mind must want, like a chocolate sundae with no calories.
But democracy, [...]

The Cold War is history

Many conditions were necessary for the end of the Cold War to happen as it did.
In an academic conference, entitled The Cold War is History (iTunes, website), Stanford historian James Sheehan reminds us that even when the Berlin wall fell, reunification of Germany was not a done deal. In fact, there were two enormously important [...]

Today’s Financial Crisis in a Historical Mirror

Economist and blogger extraordinaire Brad DeLong takes a whirlwind tour of economic history in his recent talk, Today’s Financial Crisis in a Historical Mirror (weblink).
First comes the tale of the Panic of 1825. As DeLong tells it, this was the first time a central bank (Bank of England) intervened to avert a financial crisis by [...]

We think what we speak

Each language has a toolkit to help us learn what to pay attention to.
So argues Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky during this episode of the Stanford University radio show Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature) (website, iTunes).
Boroditsky studies how the languages we use influence the way we think. And she’s come up with some startling [...]

Doubt and the New Testament

Yale University religion professor Dale Martin has some words of warning for the students in his course Introduction to New Testament History and Literature (website, iTunes):
“De omnibus dubitandum.”
Say it loud, he tells his students. Say it with feeling. “Say it tonight, before you go to sleep. Say it in the morning, when you [...]

Why we stopped foraging and started farming

The invention of agriculture was probably the most important change in human history but scholars argue about why it happened, and propose three main conflicting theories.
These theories, and the difficulties in domesticating plants and animals are the subjects of lectures 14 and 15 in UCSD anthropologist Tara Carter’s great course, Prehistory and the Birth of [...]

Why Americans hate government

When Ronald Reagan said in 1981 “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he was tapping into a long history of American suspicion of government.
UCLA political science professor Brian Walker has a theory about where that suspicion came from. He lays out his ideas in the Oct. 10 lecture (download [...]

Music at McGill U

Do you want to hear great musicians and musicologists talk about the music they love? Check out Music (website, iTunes), a video podcast from Montreal’s McGill University.
Unlike a lot of academic podcasts, these videos have great production values: beautiful camera-work and high fidelity sound. You can listen to members of McGill’s faculty and [...]

Two great new anthropology classes

MMW1 Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization (feed), Tara Carter, UC San Diego.
UCSD is presenting three different versions of this course, but Carter’s is my hands-down favorite. She relates the story of hominid evolution and the birth of social organization with infectious enthusiasm. So far the course has brought us up to the [...]