Professor Mary Frances Berry reviews the life of Callie House, an ex-slave and civil rights activist in the late 1800s and early 1900s who started the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, which sought African-American pensions based on those offered Union soldiers. Berry presents House as a forerunner of figures such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Her presentation includes a question-and-answer session.

Audio and video options are available.

Professors Wlliam M. Newman and Wilfred E. Holton look at how environmental crises and urban crowding led to the massive project for filling Boston's Back Bay tidal marsh in the 19th century. The presentation includes slides.

The lecture audio can be downloaded separately.

Filmmaker Austin Hoyt answers questions on his new documentary, American Experience: Victory in the Pacific, which examines the final year of World War II in the Pacific, including the rationale for using the atomic bomb, and features firsthand recollections of both American and Japanese civilians and soldiers. The presentation includes a collage of audio and visual clips from the film.

Audio and video options are available.

A panel discusses the history of Chinese immigration and Chinese Americans and their experiences in Boston from the 1800s onwards.

Professor Anouar Majid covers the history of U.S./Islam cultural conflict, very generally. His presentation is followed by a question-and-answer session.

Professor Seth Jacobs traces his research into the history of the Vietnam War and the discoveries that he incorporated into his book America's Miracle Man in Viet Nam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and US Intervention in Southeast Asia. Jacobs argues that a midcentury religious revival in America, as well as policymakers' racist perceptions of Asians, led the United States to support the disastrous, autocratic Diem regime in South Vietnam, when other candidates for U.S. support existed.

Professor and author Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham discusses the creation of the book African American Lives, coedited with Henry Louis Gaters, Jr. The book covers the lives of over 600 notable African Americans, from earliest colonial times to the present day. Higginbotham examines the impact of these individuals on history, the challenges presented in choosing individuals for coverage, and the research required to compile the book.

Audio and video options are available.

Author John Hanson Mitchell outlines his discovery of 2,000 antique glass plate negatives by a previously unknown 19th-century African-American landscape photographer, Robert Alexander Gilbert. Mitchell presents slides of Gilbert's work, and discusses what is known of Gilbert's life.

Writer Carol Bundy talks about the life of her great-great-great uncle, Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., a Boston abolitionist and industrialist eventually killed in the Civil War. The presentation includes slides.

Audio and video options are available.

Scholar Ellen Smith traces the history of Jewish immigrants and the Jewish community in Boston from the colonial era in the 1700s to the present day.