Résultats Éditeur "The Great Courses" dans Europe

The Vikings evoke striking images of horned helmets, battle axes, and merciless coastal raids. Remembered for their shocking brutality and impressive naval prowess, these marauding pirates from the North have inspired poetry, fantasy novels, plays, symphonies, and even comic book heroes over the last 12 centuries. But do any of these enduring tropes reflect reality? Who were the Vikings really? What do we know about the period that bears their name? Explore these questions and more in The Viking Age, a 12-lecture course that corrects the record on a transformative period in world history.

The Middle Ages harshly tested every aspect of human perseverance, imagination, and survival. Living conditions were squalid for almost everyone except the ruling elite, and most of the riches of Western culture were preserved in monasteries and on other continents. And into this setting came widespread famines, prolonged wars, and plagues that marked Europe's late medieval period as one of the most harrowing in recorded history.

Sex. The word makes some people giggle or blush, while others may draw back in discomfort. So, why do we find it so difficult to talk openly about sex? Much of our reticence in discussing and acknowledging the realities of sex comes, at least in part, from a unique time and place: medieval Europe. In the 12 episodes of Sex in the Middle Ages, Professor Jennifer McNabb and a panel of experts in medieval history and literature will take you back to the period between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Renaissance to explore the ideals and realities of sex and sexuality.

Western civilization is closely associated with reason and science, and with exceptional accomplishments in art, architecture, music, and literature.Yet it has also been characterized by widespread belief in the supernatural and the irrational - with mystics who have visions of the divine and entire movements of people who wait in fervent anticipation of the apocalypse.

Ask anyone about the significance of the year 1492, and you're almost certain to hear something about Christopher Columbus and the discovery of the New World. But there is also a perspective on 1492 far different than the one most of us know-one that is more complete and complex. A 1492 when there was no country called Spain and no language called Spanish.

In The Great Tours: Greece and Turkey, from Athens to Istanbul, award-winning Professor John R. Hale of the University of Louisville is your guide to the fabulous civilizations of the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Ottomans, and to the natural wonders and idyllic landscapes that surround them. These 24 richly enjoyable lectures give you the chance to experience these important sites and cultures through the eyes of an expert archaeologist and scholar, whose knowledge and depth of insight go far beyond any ordinary travel narrative.

It still takes a major effort of historical imagination to enter the minds of those who lived during the Reformation Era; who were willing to suffer martyrdom or martyr others for what we would regard as minor doctrinal differences. These 36 lectures are designed to take you inside the minds of those who supported the Reformation and those who resisted it.

Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire painted a portrait of the Roman Empire in a long, debilitating slide to oblivion, but now historians have reevaluated this picture to create a radically different understanding of the period now known as "late antiquity." Far from being a period of decline and fall, late antiquity marked one of history's great turning points.

Beginning in the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution began to erode the position of authority. As a result, new philosophers began constructing a universal rationality independent of faith. This schism fundamentally changed the course of Western civilization, and it has had consequences that remain with us to this day. This 36-lecture journey will help you understand exactly what the debate has been and will continue to be about.

From the Oval Office to the streets of Moscow, world leaders and ordinary citizens alike share interest and concerns about Russia. Can democracy survive there? What does the future hold for the once expansive and still powerful Russian nation? Is Soviet Communism truly dead? These are the kinds of questions diplomats struggle with every day.

Only three lifetimes ago, Europe was a farming society ruled by families of monarchs. But with two seismic tremors - capitalism and democracy - Europe's economic and royal foundations were shattered forever and modern European history began.In this series of 48 fascinating lectures, Professor Childers makes the history of Europe from the 1750s to the present - events both horrible and magnificent - as immediate as today's headlines, employing the historian's craft and a storyteller's skill to find the causes of what otherwise could seem to be the march of folly.

For much of the past five centuries, the history of the European continent has been a history of chaos, its civilization thrown into turmoil by ferocious wars or bitter religious conflicts - sometimes in combination - that have made and remade borders, created and eliminated entire nations, and left a legacy that is still influencing our world.This 36-lecture series from an award-winning teacher and honored scholar pursues an explanation for this chaos that goes beyond the obvious ones of political ambition, religious intolerance, the pursuit of state power, or the fear of another state's aspirations.

In The Black Death: New Lessons from Recent Research, celebrated medievalist Dorsey Armstrong shares the fascinating new story of this old pandemic—revealed by dedicated researchers working with 21st-century technologies and a knowledge of language and history that now provide input from all geographic areas of the medieval world. In seven engaging lectures, Professor Armstrong corrects explanations of the pandemic that are now known to be inaccurate and offers a more robust description of plague biology than has ever been known.

In the 19th century, Europe was the crucible for most of the ideas, institutions, and "isms" that now shape the life of our entire planet-nationalism, capitalism, democracy, socialism, feminism, and the list goes on and on. But where did these ideas come from? Over the course of 24 sweeping lectures, Professor Kramer invites you to view intellectual history as a series of overlapping, interconnected dialogues....

Many political and cultural events sent shock waves through the Irish world in the 19th and early 20th centuries as Ireland gradually shook off the shackles of British rule. Alongside a long and painful political process arose one of the greatest flourishings of literature in modern times - a spirited discourse among those who sought to shape their nation's future, finding the significance of their bloody present intimately entwined with their legendary past.

This series of 24 fascinating lectures draws on the latest modern scholarship to explore the lives of four medieval women who still shimmer in the modern imagination: Heloise, the abbess and mistress of Abelard; the prophet Hildegard of Bingen; Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine; and Joan of Arc. These lectures exemplify today's golden age of medieval scholarship, in which the role women played in medieval life is being clarified for the first time.

As the Black Death swept across Europe, killing up to a half of the population in certain areas, a young Geoffrey Chaucer came of age in England. While he and his family avoided the worst of the disease, all were shaped by its presence and impact on the British island. With expert Simon Doubleday, professor of history at Hofstra University, in After the Plague, examine medieval literature like The Canterbury Tales for firsthand accounts from minority voices not typically heard from in the period.

Know thy enemy. That's what the wisdom of history teaches us. And Adolf Hitler was surely the greatest enemy ever faced by modern civilization. Over half a century later, the horror, fascination, and questions still linger: How could a man like Hitler and a movement like Nazism come to power in 20th-century Germany – an industrially developed country with a highly educated population? How were the Nazis able to establish the foundations of a totalitarian regime in such a short time and hurl all of Europe – and the world – into a devastating war that would consume so many millions of lives? Professor Childers has designed this gripping 12-lecture course to shed light on these and other questions that have plagued generations.

Roughly 2,500 years ago, the Athenian people established a radical democracy in which power derived from the votes of everyday citizens. At a time when local governments ranged from oligarchy to tyranny, the elite classes of Athens gradually ceded power to the inexperienced masses, whose votes served as referendums for everything from taxation to war to welfare. The sequence of events that led to this development is astonishing, and the society that flourished under Athenian democracy is one of the greatest - even if greatly flawed - achievements in world history.

As a sequel to European Thought and Culture in the 19th Century, Professor Kramer tackles the major intellectual themes and debates that decisively shaped 20th-century European culture. These 24 lectures cover an amazingly wide range of thinkers and writers, the key historical circumstances and challenges they faced, and the fascinating and subtle ways in which their works relate to one another and to the larger story of modern European culture.