Mount Auburn Cemetery president William Clendaniel reviews the 175-year history of Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery, the nation's first landscaped cemetery and a National Historic Landmark. This lecture includes visual aids.

The lecture's audio may be downloaded as an mp3.

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"Most discussions of the Vietnam War consider whether or not President John F. Kennedy could or would have withdrawn U.S. troops from the country, thus avoiding a long and bloody conflict. In this lecture, John Prados, a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., argues that America's path to Vietnam was set long before Kennedy took office. Near the end of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt allowed the French to maintain a foothold in Indochina (as Vietnam and its neighbors were then known). By the 1950s, when France began to cast its battle with Vietnamese nationalists as a fight against communism, the United States was already, irrevocably drawn in."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"The Cold War was more than the product of post-World War II tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, argues John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University. Rather, it was the product of events extending all the way back to the 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that Russia and the United States would become the world's foremost powers. In this lecture, delivered at the Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminar 'The Cold War,' Gaddis examines U.S.-Soviet relations from the nineteenth century through the end of World War II, tracing the myriad causes of the Cold War."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"Bureaucrats, University of Colorado professor of history Patricia Limerick argues, are often the most overlooked (at best) or reviled (at worst) of government officials, but they wield tremendous powers that shape Americans' daily lives. Nowhere is this more true than in the bureaucracy of the U.S. Department of the Interior. A wide-ranging agency charged with both protecting land and promoting its use, the Department of the Interior implements federal law over millions of acres of land and mediates the claims of environmental, mining, foresting, farming, and ranching interests, among others. Bureaucracies like the Department of the Interior may be boring, Limerick argues, but historians cannot ignore their impact on the development of the American West."

NAACP Chairman of the Board Julian Bond talks about the views of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his emphasis on improving conditions for the working class as a whole. Bond criticizes current abuses and denials of civil rights and quality-of-life issues, and considers the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court cases on affirmative action.

Former Secretary of State and MIT alum George Shultz speaks on his acceptance of the Robert A. Muh Award. He reflects on his time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his views on the current state of world affairs and U.S. foreign policy.

Professor Paul L. Penfield, Jr., follows the history and development of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since the department's founding in 1913. He discusses the contributions of the program to science and technology at large and the possible development of the program in future.

Professor, geologist, and former astronaut on the Apollo mission Harrison H. Schmitt talks about his experiences as a member of the Apollo mission to the moon, and also discusses the possibilities of mining the moon in future for the energy source helium-3. His presentation includes film footage of the Apollo mission.