Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
This course addresses some of the eternal questions that man has grappled with since the beginning of time. What is good? What is bad? Why is justice important? Why is it better to be good and just than it is to be bad and unjust? Most human beings have the faculty to discern between right and wrong, good and bad behavior, and to make judgments over what is just and what is unjust. But why are ethics important to us? This course looks at our history...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Shakespeare invented characters in a new kind of way. He not only gave them personality and depth, he gave them life. Not a life that went simply from point to point, but one that developed rather than unfolded. In so doing, Shakespeare created characters with whom everyone can identify, whether the characters were kings and queens or fools and merchants. Renowned Shakespearian scholar Professor Harold Bloom presents Shakespeare's seven major tragedies...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
In Classical Mythology: The Greeks, widely published Professor Peter Meineck examines in thrilling detail the far-reaching influence of Greek myths on Western thought and literature. The nature of myth and its importance to ancient Greece in terms of storytelling, music, poetry, religion, cults, rituals, theatre, and literature are viewed through works ranging from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey to the writings of Sophocles and Aeschylus. Through the study...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
The 20th-century American Presidency is something of a mystery. Some Presidents performed exceptionally well in office, displaying strong leadership and winning the respect of the American people as well as the rest of the world. Others fell short of expectations and are remembered at best as marginal chief executives. What was it that allowed some to rise to greatness while others failed? What elusive mix of character traits, circumstance, and determination...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
For six months, the world's major leaders-including Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States, David Lloyd George, prime minister of Great Britain, and Georges Clemenceau, prime minister of France-met to discuss the peace settlements which were to end World War I. The Peace Conference dealt with, among other things, winding up the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, punishing Germany, creating Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Iraq, setting up...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
This course is not designed as a chronological survey of musical history and its many stylistic periods or moments, nor an exploration of the lives and output of individual composers. Instead, these lectures focus on the development of listening skills. Through this course you will develop new levels of aural awareness that will allow you to better appreciate the richness, complexity and excitement at the heart of all great concert music. Music is...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The Great War" as it was known at the time was also said to be the "war to end all wars." It seized all of Europe and much of the rest of the world in its grip of death and destruction. The first truly modern war, it changed how war-and peace-would be conducted throughout the remainder of the twentieth century and even to the present. The Great War was a time of "firsts" and opened the door to the modern era. Almost all the major developed countries...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
The history of Western civilization can be divided neatly into pre-Darwinian and post-Darwinian periods. Darwin's 1859 treatise, On the Origin of Species, was not the first work to propose that organisms had descended from other, earlier organisms, and the mechanism of evolution it proposed remained controversial for years. Nevertheless, no biologist after 1859 could ignore Darwin's theories, and few areas of thought and culture remained immune to...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Rome grew from a tiny community of small hill villages near the River Tiber in central Italy to one of the most powerful empires the world has seen. The Romans themselves believed that their great city was founded in the middle of the eighth century BCE. By the middle of the second century CE, Rome had a population of 1.5 million; Alexandria, in Egypt, 500,000; and Londinium, in Briton, 30,000. Not counting locally recruited forces, this vast empire...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
The plays of one ancient city 2,500 years ago by just four playwrights have had a profound effect on the development of all subsequent Western drama, not only on the theatrical stage, but on opera, film, television, stand-up comedy, and dance-in fact, most, if not all, of the live arts owe a debt to the theatre of ancient Greece and the city of Athens. This course will examine the social, historical, and political context of ancient Greek drama and...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Winston Churchill was seen even in his own lifetime as a historic figure, one of the great men of world history, commemorated all across the world (but especially among the English-speaking peoples) in statues, memorials, streets and schools named after him, and in a plethora of stamps, medals, plates, and other such memorabilia. By his own effort and willpower, Churchill inspired the West in the fights against Fascism and Communism in the 1940s,...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
While most courses focus on the entire sweep of the conflict, this course presents an in-depth examination of the waning days of the great struggle. We'll examine the dramatic events leading up to April 1865 and ponder some of the unthinkable alternatives that, had they materialized, would have surely prevented the formation of the country we know today.
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this course, Walt Whitman and the Birth of Modern American Poetry, we'll explore how Walt Whitman broke with the tyranny of European literary forms to establish a broad, new voice for American poetry. By throwing aside the stolid conventions and clichEd meters of old Europe, Walt Whitman produced a vital, compelling form of verse, one expressive of the nature of his new world and its undiscovered countries, both physical and spiritual, intimate...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
For over 400 years, crusaders ("those signed by the cross"), out of Christian zeal, a declared love for their fellow man, and, in many cases, a simple desire for fortune, glory, and heavenly reward, marched to the Holy Land to battle both a real and perceived threat to their way of life and their religious beliefs. The story of the many crusades are filled with an unremitting passion to keep or return the home of Christianity to Christians. It is...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
A study of the life of Benjamin Franklin and his influence on both American and world history. From his early days as a printer's apprentice to very nearly his last days, Benjamin Franklin's thirst for knowledge and his desire to share what he knew brought him into the forefront of a changing world.
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Islam and Christianity share both remarkable similarities and remarkable differences. In the grand scheme, both are relatively recent religions, with Christianity taking hold in Northern Europe at about the same time that Islam took hold in the Persian world (although Christianity appeared on the scene six centuries before Islam). Through the years, Islam and Christianity and the civilizations they created have influenced each other to greater and...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
This course examines the foundations of Western Civilization in antiquity. Shutt looks at the culture of the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, as well as how these cultures interacted with each other. He pays most of his attention to events taking place and ideas coming to birth in the Mediterranean basin, the fundamental homeland, or cultural hearth of Western Civilization from about 1200 BCE, before the Common Era, to about 600 CE: that is to...
Didn't find it?
Didn't find it in the Minuteman Library Network? Request it from other Massachusetts library systems.
Can't find what you are looking for? Recommend it to your local library as a future purchase. Suggest a Purchase