John Green Bot wrote his first novel! Today, in our first ever Lab we’re going to program a neural network to recognize handwritten letters to convert the first part of John Green Bot’s novel into typed text. To do this we’re going to...

Until roughly 1100, there were relatively few places of knowledge-making. Monasteries and abbeys had special rooms called scriptoria where monks copied manuscripts by hand. But the biggest places where knowledge was made were the Gothic...

Before the Hayes Code was enacted, movies were a lot more brazen than we sometimes tend to think. Director/Producer Lois Weber spent much of her career making movies that challenged audiences. Her film, "Where Are My Children" is no...

This week Craig talks about police searches and seizures. Now, the fourth amendment says that you have the right to be protected against "unreasonable searches and seizures" but what exactly does this mean? Well, it's complicated. The...

Entrepreneurs do have to wear a lot of hats, but we need to understand where we fall short and where other people or products could help get the job done. We can’t be an expert in everything or have time to do everything. But some people...

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. It has no atmosphere and is, as such, covered in craters. It's also incredibly hot but, surprisingly, has water ice hiding beneath its surface.

Today, Craig is going to finish up our discussion of the First Amendment with freedom of the press. Like an individual's right to free speech, the press has a right, and arguably responsibility, to tell the public what the government is...

Clint Smith teaches you about one of the most famous writers, orators, and advocates of the 19th century, Frederick Douglass. Douglass was born in slavery, escaped to the North, and became one of the most influential people of his time....

This week on CC Theater, Mike Rugnetta teaches you about the greatest playwright of Renaissance France, Moliere. We'l talk a bit about early French theater design, and the kingly love of theater that Louis the XIII and XIV shared, and...

In which Mike Rugnetta continues to teach you about tricksters. In this episode, we're talking about tricksters as culture heroes. Basically, a culture hero is someone whose creativity adds to their mythological culture. We'll learn how...

In this episode of Crash Course Chemistry, Hank discusses what Molecules actually look like and why, some quantum-mechanical three dimensional wave functions are explored, he touches on hybridization, and delves into sigma and pi bonds....

In this episode, Hank talks about how nutty our world is via Buffers! He defines buffers and their compositions, talks about carbonate buffering systems in nature, acid rain, pH of buffers, and titration. Plus, a really cool experiment...

Now that we’ve talked a little bit about how sociology works, it’s time to start exploring some of the ideas of the discipline’s founders. First up: Émile Durkheim. We’ll explain the concept of social facts and how Durkheim framed...

Today we're going to talk about LARPs or live action role-playing games. Larping tends to conjure up the image of a bunch of nerds hitting each other with foam weapons but it's much more than that. LARPs merge performance, community, and...

In which John Green previews the new Crash Course on Navigating Digital Information! We've partnered with MediaWise, The Poynter Institute, and The Stanford History Education Group to teach a course in hands-on skills to evaluate the...

In the aftermath of a 8 – 20 solar mass star’s demise we find a weird little object known as a neutron star. Neutrons stars are incredibly dense, spin rapidly, and have very strong magnetic fields. Some of them we see as pulsars,...

Why do people do bad things? Is it because of the situation or who they are at their core? In this week's episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank works to shed a little light on the ideas of Situation vs. Personality. Oh, and we'll have...

Beginning April 13th, join Craig Benzine (the internet's WheezyWaiter) for 16 weeks of Film History right here on Crash Course. He'll look at the history of one of our most powerful mediums. Film has the ability to communicate with...

The Romans developed a lot of infrastructure like roads and aqueducts to both help their cities flourish and to... you know... be better at war. But the interesting thing about Roman Engineering is how it was almost all focused on Techne...

So by the mid-90s the video game industry was once again booming and this attracted the attention of the Japanese electronics giant Sony. In 1994, Sony introduced their Playstation console which successfully coupled cutting edge...

You might think a self regulating factory sounds pretty unbelievable, but that’s pretty much exactly how our bodies work! Our bodies are full of regulatory mechanisms that keep all the organic molecules we need to live in balance. In...

Clint Smith teaches you about Maria Stewart, a Black woman who lived in the 19th century, and was a pioneering abolitionist, writer, and orator. When studying history, we often focus on the big picture and world-changing events. Today...

Today we're going to talk about Symbolic AI - also known as "good old-fashioned AI". Symbolic AI is really different from the modern neural networks we've discussed so far, instead, it represents problems using symbols and then uses...

At the turn of the 18th century, audience were ready to go over the top, and get some really, really dramatic theater in their lives. Like, a dog dueling a man type of dramatic. In London, only two theaters were licensed, but...