Video: For 97% of recorded history, the world economy remained in a largely stationary state—until the Industrial Revolution, which brought significant economic growth. Is that growth sustainable?
Video: Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Taylor Branch explored how the citizens’ movement around Dr. King is a patriotic model for the future, not the past, promising once again to overcome gridlock and other intractable barriers along with race.
Amherst College psychology professor Catherine Sanderson examines the factors that lead most of us to stay silent in the face of bad behavior, and how this tendency to stay silent allows such acts to continue.
Andrew Ingall, creator of the project “Warlé, Yesterday, and Today,” presents a slide talk and storytelling exercise inspired by the lives and legacy of Warren Kronemeyer and Leon Ingall, a Vermont couple who were entrepreneurs and civic leaders in Townshend, VT during the 1980 and 1990s. Leon was a refugee twice: first fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1918 and then again from the Nazis in the late 1930s.
Katherine Paterson, the author of “Bridge to Terabithia,” “The Great Gilly Hopkins” and other beloved books, joins Vermont Humanities Executive Director Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup to talk about her trips to Cuba and her 2017 Young Adult novel, “My Brigadista Year.“
NPR national correspondent Eric Westervelt describes how mega fires, excessive heat and widening drought all underscore how climate change is fueling the routinization of extreme weather, with consequences for all of us.
Video: As immigrants, Jewish men from the middle of the nineteenth century into the twentieth sought to make a living and establish new homes in America by means of an old and familiar Jewish occupation. By doing so they learned much about America and Americans learned about them.
In response to the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery, Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor from Middlebury College created a musical composition. This video features selections from that recording as Dr. Taylor discusses his journey towards using music as an avenue for advocacy and activism.
Video: Heather Cox Richardson explores how the economic and political crises of the 1850s, 1890s, and 1920s each created a backlash that inspired Americans to reclaim government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Video: The debate about future U.S. economic growth has been framed as a conflict between techno-optimists and techno-pessimists. But there are other powerful forces in addition to the pace of innovation that are pushing downward on economic growth.
Puerto Rican climate justice leader Elizabeth Yeampierre has helped pass climate legislation at all levels, including New York’s progressive Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. In this talk she describes how intergenerational BIPOC activists are changing the landscape of national climate priorities by speaking up for themselves and their neighborhoods.
How did we go from journalism as a trusted form of information to an era of “fake news” and “alternative facts”? Presidential historian Harold Holzer examines the tension between chief executives and their chief critics, from George Washington to the present.