Columbian Contexts

Imagine what it was like to be a slave in the United States in 1845. Eighth graders are given an opportunity to experience life from the point of view of Frederick Douglass as they read and discuss an annotated passage from Narrative of...

Women in modern society are as close to equal rights as they have ever been, thanks to the efforts of early feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft. Her 1792 work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, advocated for the equal education of...

How quickly can an economy recover from a shock? John Maynard Keynes challenges the classical economist view of a self-correcting economy with his 1936 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. A short view features the...

Which is worse: imprisoning someone for committing a crime, or intimidating someone into following the law? A short video introduces the main ideas of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, including his perceptions of the dangers...

Is the modern American identity an outgrowth of European civilization, or is it a unique result of westward expansion? Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History raises an important question about the...

Learning the meaning of a new word is different than knowing its definition. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations discusses the importance of context in understanding a word's meaning, as well as the fluidity of language...

What is right isn't always lawful — and what is lawful isn't always right. Such is the argument of Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, which contends that it is the duty of the citizen to disobey the authority of the government...

Is God is dead? Is there no absolute truth? Do different societies have different concepts of good and evil? Introduce the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche with a short video analysis of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.

How can a society abide by moral philosophy if they don't know the moral code that they should follow? Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is the subject of a short analysis video that examines his theory of the transition of moral...

View this presentation to take a look into the life and death of Captain James Cook. The video also includes an overview of imperialism, colonization of Australia and New Zealand, and the ritual structure of early Hawaiian culture.