one monkey typing

Cycles of American Political Thought from TTC

Very good audit of the range and cycles of thought in American politics from the puritans & Locke through the welfare state right up to Reaganism.

The Life and Works of Mark Twain

Good, short lecture series, 24 x 30 minutes. He covered a lot of ways to read most of Twain's work, while also pointing out "while it's valid to read this this way or that way, it's doubtful that Twain meant it like that."

Also covered Clemens' life, especially as it lead and affected his work. And a lot of rare material (unpublished stuff) was talked about.

The lecturer is one of the leading Twain scholars. Definitely worth the time.

World War I, the Great War (TTC, Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius)

I should say that I'm really pretty bad with history, I don't think I paid any attention to it in school, but I now find it interesting and I'm trying to catch up.

Absolutely excellent coverage of this war. I think it's a shame that WWI is so overlooked these days, but that's understandable given the wealth of information and combatants from WWII that were around when documentary making took off. Also I think that though the US was involved and their support was crucial, it was much less of America's war than WWII was, so I'm sure that has something to do with the lack of coverage.

WWI is essential knowledge to understand the entire world of the 20th century, and particularly war and combat. It was really when industrialized death came about, and saw the first significant use of a lot of technologies of war - poison gas, machine guns, trench warfare, air war, submarines, etc. It's possibly also the ugliest and most horrific war that's ever been fought, as all these wonderful new killing technologies were available but nobody knew what to do with or about them.

As an aside, I also learned something about those ancestors from Alsace-Lorraine alternated between being born in "France" and then "Germany" and then "France" again through the 19th and 20th centuries.

36 x 30 minute lectures.

A Brief History of the World by Prof Peter N. Stearns (TTC)

A brief (36 x 30 minute) lecture series covering world history as now generally covered.

Science in the 20th Century - A Social-Intellectual Survey
Fairly interesting survey of how all sciences (from physics through sociology) changed in the last century.
33 lectures I think. The lecturer talked pretty slowly so I was happy to be able to speed up the MP3 player a bit.