Lecture Date: January 16, 2014 John Wilkes Booth’s father and two brothers were legendary actors of their day, celebrated throughout the nation. He entered the family business, becoming a special favorite of theater audiences in the South. Blessed with extraordinary looks and an athlete’s grace, his romantic legend rivaled his professional reputation. With the catastrophe […]
Lecture Date: April 22, 2014 Charles Lindbergh was known as a daring aviator, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and controversial isolationist during World War II. His wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was a best-selling author. In her memoir, Under a Wing, the Lindbergh’s youngest daughter, Reeve, provides a candid look at her legendary family including the impact […]
Lecture Date: April 17, 2014 Simon Bolivar, known as the liberator of South America, is the greatest figure in Latin American history. Bolivar freed six countries from Spanish rule, traveling more than 75,000 miles on horseback from the Amazon Jungles to the Andes Mountains to do so. His life is the stuff of Hollywood […]
Lecture Date: April 15, 2014 He is the most infamous and influential political writer of all time. His name has become synonymous with cynical scheming and the selfish pursuit of power. Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine diplomat and civil servant, is the father of political science. The Prince, his most notorious work, is a primer […]
Lecture Date: April 10, 2014 To revolutionaries he was a proletarian rebel. To idealists, he was a liberator who abolished slavery. To moviegoers and television viewers he was a sword-and-sandal icon. Marx and Lenin both praised Spartacus and he was a major figure in Soviet ideology. US President Ronald Reagan considered him a freedom […]
Lecture Date: April 8, 2014 William Shakespeare is the best known writer in the world, and the one about whom we know least of what we really want to know. His achievements are easier to feel than to describe, and his life and works often seem to bear little relation to each other. This […]
Lecture Date: April 1, 2014 Henry VIII was King of England from 1491, when he succeeded his father, Henry VII, until his death in 1547. The second monarch in the Tudor line, he is among the best-known of all English rulers. Much of the popular interest in Henry derives from his succession of six […]
Lecture Date: March 27, 2014 America at the beginning of the 20th century was dominated by the rise of business titans who accumulated unprecedented wealth. Admired by some for their successful methods and vilified by others for their apparent rapaciousness (“robber barons”), few were more famous (or notorious, in the minds of many) than […]
Lecture Date: March 18, 2014 One of the twentieth century’s most iconic literary geniuses, and his insane, disruptive wife—the woman who married him for his fame and fortune, then became the architect of his ruin. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were two young, intense, intelligent, creative, energetic, often naïve people whose strengths warred—daily, almost—with their […]
Lecture Date: March 13, 2014 The topic will delve into a top-secret world where young women and men lived and worked surrounded by spies and secrecy, forbidden to speak of their work, even to each other, as the United States worked to face the challenges of World War II and the Manhattan Project raced […]
Lecture Date: March 11, 2014 A video recording of this lecture is not available. No one predicted success for Henry Ward Beecher at his birth in 1813. The boisterous son of the last great Puritan minister, he seemed destined to be overshadowed by his brilliant siblings – especially his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of […]
Lecture Date: February 27, 2014 Augustus (63 B.C.-14 A.D.) was born Gaius Octavius (later Octavian) into a wealthy plebeian family and was adopted posthumously by his uncle Gaius Julius Caesar following Caesar’s assassination. After a series of civil wars Octavian managed to consolidate his power and, while claiming to restore the old Roman Republic, […]
Lecture Date: February 25, 2014 In the early years of the twentieth century, Mata Hari was known as the most desirable woman in Europe, an artistic and utterly novel dancer who brought sacred temple dances from Asia to the European public. She was the woman every man wanted on his arm — glamorous, beautiful, […]
Lecture Date: February 20, 2014 Jim Thorpe (1887-1953) was the greatest multi-sport athlete the world has ever seen – and likely to remain so as sports since his heyday have been marked by an irreversible movement to specialize. One of the best collegiate football players when the sport was in its infancy, twice an […]
Lecture Date: February 11, 2014 Although the word “feud” instantly brings to almost any American mind the Hatfields and McCoys, few people actually know much about the legendary blood feud. Dean King has pursued the subject in great detail and at personal peril, having been shot at in the wilds of Appalachia in the […]
Lecture Date: February 6, 2014 A video recording on this lecture is not available. Few, if any, musical performers have had a more pervasive or profound impact on American culture during the past five decades than singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, whose work has ranged across multiple genres: folk, rock-and-roll, blues, country, and gospel. Through songs such […]
Lecture Date: February 4, 2014 It might well be argued that Martin Luther King, Jr., was the most instrumental figure for change in twentieth-century America—certainly among those who were not elected officials (e.g., Franklin D. Roosevelt). His career from his leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 until his assassination in 1968 at […]
Lecture Date: January 28, 2014 A video recording of this lecture is not available. To see Brian Jay Jones’ 2018 return appearance to Great Lives to speak on Jim Henson, click here. Jim Henson’s bearded image was recognized around the world, but until the publication of Brian Jay Jones’s biography, most people knew him […]