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.
Scholar Nancy Seasholes looks at the history of land creation in Boston over its 375-year history. She focuses on the Central Waterfront area. Her presentation includes slides.
An mp3 of the lecture audio can be downloaded.
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.
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.
Professors Seth Jacobs and Franziska Seraphim lecture on America's strategy in the Pacific during World War II, and how Americans perceived the Japanese enemy. They discusses America's war crimes against the Japanese, anti-Japanese propaganda, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Author Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Sea of Glory, describes the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842, in which six ships of explorers and scientists, commanded by Charles Wilkes, set out to explore the Pacific Ocean and eventually discovered Antarctica. Philbrick also covers the story of the whaling ship Essex's shipwreck and related shipwrecks, to lead into the story of the Exploring Expedition
Harvard Professor of Surgery Kevin R. Loughlin reviews the medical histories of presidents from George Washington to the present day. Loughlin focuses on "secret" medical problems hidden from the public and on causes of death.
Historian Sheldon M. Stern, author of Averting the Final Failure, discusses the secret Executive Committee meetings among President Kennedy and his most trusted advisors during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His presentation includes video footage of Kennedy.
Mayor of Hiroshima Tadatoshi Akiba describes the effects of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on the city and on the lives of the survivors, and calls for nuclear disarmament.