History Lessons in NYC, New York

Dinosaurs! Science! Adventure! Break out your pith helmet as we embark upon a brazen expedition through the halls of New York City's world-famous American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Join your maverick tour guide as we deftly navigate this massive 27-building, 1.6 million square foot landmark cultural institution. Learn the science...

History Happy Hour!  Raise your glass to the past, and come discover the odd and fascinating things people thought and did in the Middle Ages and beyond.  Professor of History will offer a short presentation, and then open the floor to animated conversation over drinks!  No previous knowledge required.  Each week something...

With its earliest history seated in the ancient practice of Alchemy, the art of Distillation was created by those same early chemists trying to turn lead into gold. Though they did not succeed in creating that precious metal, they did succeed in transforming grain into spirit, and those after them turned that spirit into something magical.  ...

A survey of the causes of, and cultural and artistic reactions to, the pandemic that struck the world in the 14th century: the Black Death. We'll provide context and comparison for our current experience of COVID-19. The course will showcase art and contemporary documents that help communicate the thoughts and practices of medieval people who endured...

This blended class meets online for some sessions and on NYBG grounds for others. Registered students will receive login instructions and a syllabus with specifics.  With its wide variety of habitats and its position on the Atlantic Flyway, NYC is a bird-lover's paradise. Over 300 distinct resident or migratory species live here or pass through,...

Compared over the course of her life to Marlene Dietrich, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, a sphinx, a she-wolf, a “foreigner on earth,” and a hurricane, the Jewish Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector moved in mystery. The author of nine novels and a large body of short stories, journalism, and children’s...

Politics 101 is a deep dive into the hidden mechanisms that drive politics and political decision making in the United States. The systems and procedures of power in our democracy are often obscured from the view of the very people it’s meant to serve. This workshop addresses several key topics which are ignored by political science classes, the...

Does history have a direction, a purpose, or an end goal? Can we deduce general historical patterns from studying the past? Is it naïve to hope and work for a better future? From the Enlightenment to the twenty-first century, liberal, Marxist, positivist, and post-structuralist thinkers have offered radically different responses to these fundamental...

Narratives that circulate among the general population are potentially contagious and can be epidemic, just as disease viruses are.  The general public does not talk about pure economic theory much, but some rudimentary theories that guide their economic decisions are spread by their connection with viral human-interest narratives. With modern...

The Protestant Reformation: Theology, History, and Modernity In 1517, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther nailed a set of 95 Theses protesting the corruption of the Catholic Church to the door of his local church in Wittenberg, Germany, starting the Protestant Reformation that would radically transform the religious and political landscape of Europe....

The Mahabharata is one of the great literary works of South Asian history. It narrates an epic story: the introduction to our supposed age, the Kali Yuga—one of downfall and decline, but also eventual rebirth. Preeminently a dialogic work, the Mahabharata remembers a past that requires constant re-narration, simultaneously...

In the early 20th century, a new generation of thinkers came to believe that European philosophy had reached a dead end. Reacting to what they held was the obfuscatory language and non-sensical direction of post-Kantian philosophy, Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore set out to revolutionize philosophy through a fundamental rethinking...

Flying University is a re-education in hidden histories.    This talk series is named after the underground university in Russian-occupied Poland that taught subjects banned by the state-run schools. This rebel organization also educated women, who were barred from attending the official university, including Marie Curie. In that spirit,...

The Emergence of Sexuality: Foucault, Sexual Identities, and the Modern Self In his groundbreaking study, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, philosopher and historian Michel Foucault provocatively argued that the thing we call sexuality, the supposed essence of our sexual core, our desires, our selves, is in fact “a name that can be given...