The Great Courses (Firm)

This lecture covers the wealth of knowledge about the Moon, a heavily cratered world with extensive lava-filled basins on the Earth-facing side and yet few such features on the far side—which is not perpetually dark.

Explore the ways in which our own culture—pop and otherwise—takes inspiration from medieval ideas about sex and relationships, even as we wrestle with some of the darker elements of their legacy.

Earth is one of the four innermost, or terrestrial, planets; the others are Mercury, Venus, and Mars. All are relatively small, rocky, and dense. This lecture examines Earth's structure, properties, and the forces that affect it.

As it gradually uses up the hydrogen in its core, fusing it to helium, the Sun will expand to form a red giant star. Through a series of relatively nonviolent eruptions, it will expel its outer layers of gas, producing a beautiful, glowing nebula around the dying core.

Dig into issues of status and gender as you consider forbidden liaisons and sexual violence. Look at divides of class, gender, and religion and consider how power dynamics complicated everything.

Many stars are members of binary systems, in which two stars orbit a common center of mass. Our best estimates of how much mass stars have come from observations of binaries. We find that massive stars have far shorter lives than low-mass stars.

Many of Dickens's protagonists are children. See how centering his novels on such vulnerable young characters allows him to engage his readers, sway their emotions, and add force to his critiques.

If a quantum fluctuation gave rise to our Universe, must ours be the only one? Are others possible, perhaps even with different rules? This lecture examines reasons for suspecting the existence of other universes, though we do not know how to test for their presence.

Henriette Davidis wrote the most popular German cookbook of the 19th century, Praktisches Kochbuch (Practical Cookbook). For the first time in history, with urbanization and the birth of a working class, she knew German women might not have learned to cook before marriage, so she wrote this book for them. Follow her recipes for a delicious red cabbage, sauerbrauten, and bread dumplings.

In the last millennium, the pace of change accelerated sharply and decisively. Since then, humankind has experienced a number of astonishing changes.