Summary: During Europe’s Middle Ages, mathematics flourished primarily on other shores. This program follows Professor Marcus du Sautoy as he discusses mathematical achievements of Asia, the Islamic world, and early-Renaissance Europe. Topics include China’s invention of a decimal place number system and the development of an early version of sudoku; India’s contribution to trigonometry and creation of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: In 1532, 168 Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru. They were exhausted, outnumbered, and terrified, and ahead of them were camped 80,000 Incan troops. And yet within just 24 hours, more than 7,000 Inca warriors were slaughtered, the Incan emperor languished in chains, and the victorious Europeans began what would become a brutal reign that would leave its marks throughout the Americas. This...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: In 1908, Albert Kahn and his chauffeur embarked on a global trek to observe and absorb other cultures-an early "prototype" of the many photography missions Kahn would fund over the years. This program illustrates that formative round-the-world trip as well as the 1913 journey undertaken by photographer Stephane Passet to China, Mongolia, and India. Viewers will encounter startling images of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: As they built an unsurpassed visual archive of world culture, Albert Kahn and his photographers turned their attention to widely divergent locations. This program follows the maritime odyssey of Lucien Le Saint, circa 1922, as he captured on film the daily lives of Newfoundland cod fishermen, as well as expeditions into northwestern Africa. Images from Morocco and Tunisia focus on occupying...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program studies European exploration and conquest, beginning in the late Middle Ages and leading up to the emergence of the major colonial powers. Byzantium's fall in 1453 sets the narrative stage for Henry the Navigator's massive initiative to find new trade routes into Asia. Henry's nautical school at Sagres is described in detail, along with the voyages of Columbus, Gil Eannes, Vasco da...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Unlike the primarily east-to-west conquest of the Americas, European incursions into sub-Saharan Africa proceeded south-to-north-an approach, climatically speaking, that did not favor the invaders. Cattle and crops failed to thrive, and indigenous diseases decimated the newcomers, yet still that vast region was subdued. How? This program tells a story of colonization and exploitation that shows...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: In addition to documenting the Great War itself, Albert Kahn's team of photographers recorded the impact of the conflict on French civilian life. This program examines offerings from Kahn's Archive of the Planet, exploring both the propaganda value and the genuine emotional power in images of the war-torn French populace. French and Belgian refugees, ruined churches, and farms tended by women...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Poverty, emigration, declining birth rates, and ethnic divisions weakened many European countries as the 20th century began. From France to the Balkans, leaders prescribed nationalism and military buildup as the only solutions. This program studies the continent's march to war as depicted in the photographic record commissioned by French banker Albert Kahn. Early color images and film footage...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: With Black Thursday, and the collapse of the stock market, America heads into the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt builds a New Deal, while, overseas, Adolf Hitler rises to power and invades Poland. Responding to Pearl Harbor, the worst attack in American history to that time, FDR guides the nation through World War II.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2002
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Summary: Nikita Khrushchev, born of peasant parents, ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist while preaching peaceful co-existence. Fidel Castro led the Cuban Revolution, and then became Prime Minister of Cuba, then President of the Council of Ministers. This episode of A&E Classroom examines how these two men joined forces and how their tenuous alliance was tested by the Cuban missile crisis.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: A cornerstone of the United Nations, the Security Council takes on some of the organization's most difficult duties. This program highlights the Council's role in preventing conflicts, resolving disputes, and occasionally initiating military action against an aggressor. Beginning in the era of the original "P-5" membership-the U.S., the U.S.S.R., China, France, and Great Britain-the video...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: While their armed forces clashed in the Pacific, both the U.S. and Imperial Japanese governments engaged in a different kind of battle on the home front: a struggle for the hearts and minds of their civilian populations. Jointly produced by American and Japanese filmmakers, this program examines the propaganda of the World War II era films, newsreels, and posters that used hyperbole,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: Although the term "genocide" was coined by humanitarian Rafael Lemkin in reference to the Turkish expulsion and slaughter of Armenians in the early 20th century, the phenomenon is as old as civilization. In this program, a variety of experts analyze Biblical accounts and some of the earliest documented examples of genocide, as in the Athenian siege of Milos in 416 BC, to explore the psychology...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: After the atrocities of World War II, the cry of conscience was "never again!" As this program demonstrates, that bitterly learned injunction went unheeded throughout much of the world. The chronicle of genocide continues with a look at Mao's purges in China, Cambodia under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, the Arab/Israeli conflict, border wars in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and killing in Central America....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Galileo's recantation in 1633 opened a gap between Christianity and science, a separation that widened as the first great age of European exploration came to a close. This program studies the second great age ushered in during the latter half of the 18th century amidst a thickening web of French and British colonialism-an age in which maps and charts facilitated political and economic...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: In Papua New Guinea, a local man asked Jared Diamond a question that penetrates to the very heart of the issue of global inequality: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [material goods], but we black people had little cargo of our own?" In this program, Diamond traces the trail of history and proposes that a society's potential for advanced development lies not in race or...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: For centuries, Western society drew sustenance from Newtonian physics, classical economics, and other orderly systems of thought. But today's intellectual climate offers no such comforts, focusing instead on concepts like tipping points and global volatility. What created such a stark transformation? This program explores the history of chaos theory, shedding light on mathematical,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: From 1914 through much of the 1920s, Albert Kahn's photographic team was hard at work in Asia, amassing culturally and historically vital images for the Archive of the Planet. This program recounts journeys through Indochina and greater Asia in which the Kahn team opened up a world most Europeans had never dreamed of. Viewers discover Vietnam through its beggars, Tet celebrants, and elegantly...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Using sophisticated animation and expertise from modern scholars and archivists, this program reconstructs European voyages of discovery that took place in the 15th through 18th centuries and profiles the visionaries who led them. Viewers are introduced to Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian merchant who gave his name to the New World; Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese admiral who found the passage...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: A peace-loving man with a decidedly global perspective, Albert Kahn spent most of his life and wealth trying to expand Western understanding of other cultures-largely through film and photography. This program delves into Kahn's origins and formative years and the launch of his Archive of the Planet project. Topics include Kahn's Jewish ancestry and Alsacian upbringing; his early success in...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: As a movement, socialism thrived in Europe-but America was its cradle. This program explores the origins of socialist principles and how they evolved into military revolution in Russia and political strife in the United States. Recounting Robert Owen's New Harmony experiment, the program details the intellectualization of socialism by Marx, Engels, and Bernstein, followed by the rise of Lenin...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: No sooner had Europe declared an end to its Great War than the seeds of new conflict were sewn-in the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. With typical global awareness, photography patron and archivist Albert Kahn chose to document the historic changes occurring in the colonial Middle East. This program traces his team's expeditions into Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine as Western powers...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Did the Soviet Union collapse under external pressure or its own weight? What enabled free market forces to assert themselves in China? Is socialism dead, or has it simply evolved? This program addresses these and other questions, focusing on the political, cultural, and economic factors behind the fall of the iron curtain regimes. Outlining the Cultural Revolution and its consequences, the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: Versailles, 1919: French banker Albert Kahn and his camera team are among the few photographers allowed inside the Hall of Mirrors for the treaty signing-an example of Kahn's uncanny talent for documenting change. This program focuses on Kahn's pictorial record of the war's aftermath and the challenges of securing a true peace across Europe. Zeppelin-borne aerial footage conveys the scope of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009