History

Refridgerator Mothers

Refrigerator Mothers paints an intimate portrait of an entire generation of mothers, already laden with the challenge of raising profoundly disordered children, who lived for years under the dehumanizing shadow of professionally promoted “mother blame.” Once isolated and unheard, these mothers have emerged with strong, resilient voices to share the details of their personal journeys. Through their poignant stories, Refrigerator Mothers puts a human face on what can happen when authority goes unquestioned and humanity is removed from the search for scientific answers.

The Victorians: Empire and Race

Via Gresham College, a series of lectures on the Victorian era by Professor Richard J Evans FBA. This episode deals with Empire and Race.

CBC: To Sell A War

To Sell A War is a documentary of the CBC programme The Fifth Estate. It exposes the Citizens for a Free Kuwait campaign as public relations spin to gain public opinion support for the Gulf War, and it reveals that Nurse Nayirah was in fact Nijirah al-Sabah, the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S. Saud Nasir Al-Sabah, coached by Hill & Knowlton to forge her infamous, widely reported, and repeated, testimony about Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators.

The Tenth Level: A Milgram Movie

Via Advances in the History of Psychology, a 70s TV movie curiosity called The Tenth Level, starring William Shatner, that fictionalizes the (in)famous Milgram experiment. It’s bad, yet interesting.

Richard Feynman: The Character of Physical Law

The Character of Physical Law are a series of seven lectures by physicist Richard Feynman concerning the nature of the laws of physics. The talks were delivered by Feynman in 1964 at Cornell University, as part of the Messenger Lectures series.

BBC: Dangerous Knowledge

In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

Niall Ferguson: Civilization: Is The West History?

A 6-part documentary series in which Niall Ferguson asks why it was that Western civilization, from inauspicious roots in the 15th century, came to dominate the rest of the world; and if the West is about to be overtaken by the rest.

BBC: The Story of Science – Who Are We?

Michael Mosley takes an informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society’s historical path. We now know that the brain – the organ that more than any other makes us human – is one of the wonders of the universe, and yet until the 17th century it was barely studied.