Catalog Search Results
Series
Pub. Date
2001
Description
These twenty-four lectures offer an introduction to the history, literature, and religion of ancient Israel and early Judaism as it is presented in the collection of texts called the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, and the Tanakh. Attention is given not only to the content of the biblical books but also to the debates over their meaning and the critical methods through which they have been interpreted.
Author
Series
Pub. Date
p2005
Description
Byzantium is too-often considered merely the "Eastern rump" of the old Roman Empire, a curious and even unsettling mix of the classical and medieval. Yet it was, according to Professor Harl, "without a doubt the greatest state in Christendom through much of the Middle Ages," and well worth our attention as a way to widen our perspective on everything from the decline of imperial Rome to the rise of the Renaissance. In a series of 24 tellingly detailed...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2002
Description
Who are we? It's a question humankind has been asking about itself for a long time. But when we consider ourselves not as static beings fixed in time, but as ever-changing creatures, our viewpoint of human history becomes much more captivating. The question is no longer "Who are we?" but "What have we become? And what are we becoming? "What makes this new viewpoint possible is the evolutionary perspective offered by biological anthropology, through...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
p2002
Description
Professor Marshall C. Eakin of Vanderbilt University delivers twenty-four lectures examining both the unity and diversity in the early history of the Americas. He discusses how Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas in 1492 created a collision between three distinct peoples and cultures, European, African, and Native-American, and gave birth to the distinctive identity of the Americas today.
Author
Series
Pub. Date
p2002
Description
Johannes Brahms was a man of contrasts. His serious Teutonic music was balanced by joyful dance music. His miserliness with himself by exceeding generosity with family and associates. His kindness to working people with a biting, malicious wit reserved for those he encountered in artistic and aristocratic circles. He was not an easy man to know, destroying a good deal of his own work and almost all of his lifetime's correspondence, in later years...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
p2002
Description
More than anyone before him - more than Beethoven, Byron, even the preternatural Paganini - it was Franz Liszt who created one of the most enduring archetypes of the Romantic era: that of the artist, "who walks with God and brings down fire from heaven in order to kindle the hearts of humankind." An innovative composer both for his own instrument and on an orchestral scale, Liszt was without a doubt the greatest pianist of his time and perhaps the...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
p2002
Description
In all the annals of Western music, there has never been a couple like the Schumanns: he a pioneering critic and composer (the only ever to achieve greatness as both), she one of the leading concert pianists of Europe, as well as a composer of no small talent herself. This series of eight lectures by an award-winning composer and acclaimed teacher includes excerpts of works by both of the Schumanns as part of an introduction to an extraordinary couple...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
c2002
Description
Witness the "works and wonders" of the ancient world through the eyes of its first great historian in this sparkling series of 24 lectures from a much-honored teacher and classical scholar. Herodotus (c. 484-420 B.C.E.) was a Greek who was born in what is now the modern Turkish resort town of Bodrum and who died, so tradition says, in the south of Italy. In between, his tirelessly inquiring mind took him from one corner of the known world to another....
Author
Series
Pub. Date
p2002
Description
Samuel Clemens, the man known to history as Mark Twain, was more than one of America's greatest writers. He was our first true celebrity, one of the most photographed faces of the 19th and 20th centuries. This series of 24 lectures by an acclaimed teacher and scholar explores Twain's dual identities - as one of our classical authors and as an almost mythical presence in our nation's cultural life. The lectures are a gateway to both appreciating Twain's...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
c2002
Description
"Lost Christianities is a course that considers the varieties of belief and practice in the early days of Christianity, before the church had decided what was theologically acceptable and determined which books should be included in its canon of Scripture" --p. 1 (guidebook).
Author
Series
The Great Courses volume Great world religions
Pub. Date
©2003
Description
Provides an overview of Buddhism and describes how Buddhism challenges some of the most important Western ideas about God, human life, and the self. Covers the Buddha's life and the development of Buddhism, explains his teachings, or Dharma, and explores the lives of well-known Buddhists such as the Dalai Lama.
Author
Series
Pub. Date
p2003
Description
Provides an overview of Christianity, the world's largest religion, and discusses why, in addition to being vast and popular, it is also extremely complex and often highly contradictory. Explains why the central figures, elements, and creeds of Christianity are hard to fathom yet give Christianity its distinctive character. Covers topics such as Christianity's birth and expansion across the Mediterranean world, the development of its doctrine, its...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
[2003]
Description
Clear introductions to essential principles of physics support these lectures, including density, quantum theory, gravity, and the General Theory of Relativity. Also includes forays into disciplines such as chemistry and biology as needed to explain events in astronomy.