Instruction begins on Monday. hm 1/4/13

In 2008, an unusual 17th-century Chinese wall map of East Asia surfaced in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, bearing almost no resemblance to any previous Chinese map. Were it not for its perfect provenance, it might have been dismissed as a fake. But it wasn't: it was simply drawn according to a completely different cartographic […]

On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation became law. Conceived as a pragmatic measure to hasten the end of a bloody civil war, the Proclamation declared millions of slaves to be “forever free.” Americans naturally identify this momentous event with Abraham Lincoln, who became widely known as “The Great Emancipator.” While Lincoln undoubtedly played a […]

In his new book, The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and mega-best-selling author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, takes us on a mesmerizing journey into our rapidly vanishing past. Drawing on his fieldwork in New Guinea as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian and other cultures, Diamond explores how traditional […]