Professor and author Michael Oren looks at the history of relations between the U.S. and the Middle East, beginning in 1785 with the Barbary Wars and continuing to the present day.
The lecture audio is also available as a mp3 file.
Joseph Cirincione, Senior Vice President of the Center for American Progress, discusses the history and future of nuclear weapons, looking particularly at nuclear weapons production in Iran.
Author Jacqueline Tobin reexamines the history of the Underground Railroad, looking at the extension of the Railroad into Canada and the escape of fugitive slaves into Canada. She also examines the life of ex-slaves as free people in Canada.
Video and audio versions are available.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon John Kelly speaks on the historical background that has led to and grounds the current situations in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon and the U.S.'s involvement in the Middle East. He looks at what possible courses the U.S. could take now.
Audio and video options are available.
Professor David Wilson introduces the life and times of Thomas D'Arcy McGee (1826-1868), an Irish-Canadian journalist, poet, politician, and critic of Irish republicanism. McGee lived in the United States from 1842 to 1845 and from 1848 to 1857.
Director of the Center for Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, Gary Okihiro, delivers the keynote speech for the opening ceremonies of Boston College's Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month. He discusses the difficulty of establishing an identity as an Asian-Pacific American and the history of Asian-Pacific Americans and Asian immigration to the U.S.
Scholar Jeffrey Matthews explores the life of Alanson B. Houghton, American industrialist, politician, and diplomat (to Germany, 1922-1925, and to Great Britain, 1925-1929). Houghton uses this exploration to examine U.S. foreign policy between World War I and World War II, citing Houghton's criticism of policy under Presidents Harding and Coolidge.
Audio and video options are available.
According to the Apple Learning Interchange site, "The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum and the National Park Service present a sobering visit to the Manzanar War Relocation Center. This National Historic Site provides a compelling classroom to relive the experience of Japanese Americans held captive during World War II, as well as the plight of countless nationalities who face discrimination and intolerance still today. This is a tale of the indomitable Issei and Nisei generations. Watchers can learn through the emotional memories of survivors, and the invincible cheers of detainees at baseball games that still echo across the desert valley.
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."