Ayn Rand: goddess of the market

She was born Alisa Rosenbaum, the eldest daughter in a haute-bourgeois Russian Jewish family that was ruined by the 1918 revolution. When she came to the United States in 1926, she reinvented herself as Ayn Rand, charismatic philosopher and novelist who inspired a generation of rebels and free-market theorists.
Historian Jennifer Burns, author of the new [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

How the Biblical texts became Holy Scripture

After reading Bible scholar James Kugel’s great book, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now I was thrilled to find his lecture Can The Torah Make Its Peace With Modern Biblical Scholarship? (website). Kugel was formally a star lecturer at Harvard where his courses were routinely packed, and he now [...]

The truth about the Roman gladiator

Are you fascinated by gladiator, that killer-for-hire who entertained thousands back in ancient Rome’s heyday?
Whether you love them or loathe them, you’ll enjoy Pennsylvania State University historian Garrett Fagan’s talk Myths and Realities about the Roman Gladiator (iTunes).
With his Irish brogue and mordant sense of humor, Fagan separates the historical facts from the fanciful fictions [...]

The Middle East as a game of “Risk”

Want to think about the Middle East in a whole new way? Check out The War in Gaza and Southern Israel: Ramifications for Israel, the Palestinians and the Middle East (website, iTunes), a lecture by Tel Aviv University historian Asher Susser, given at UCLA in February 2009 in the wake of the Gaza war.
Susser describes [...]

Abraham’s hometown and other archaeological tales

Here’s a heads up for all you archaeology groupies: the archaeology museum at the University of Pennsylvania has an excellent lecture series on iTunes U, Great Sites of the Ancient World (iTunes).
Leading off the series, archaeologist and curator Richard Zettler tells the fascinating tale of Ur of the Chaldees (iTunes), the hometown of the biblical [...]