Showing results by author "The Great Courses" in All Categories

In The Genius of Michelangelo, internationally recognized Michelangelo expert and award-winning Professor of Art History William E. Wallace gives you a comprehensive perspective on one of history's greatest artists, unavailable in any other course. Drawing on a vast command of artistic knowledge and period detail, these 36 intellectually rewarding and dazzling lectures explore the relationship between truth and legend to reveal a groundbreaking new picture of Michelangelo as an artist, a businessman, an aristocrat, and a genius.

In these 24 lectures, The Great Courses teams up with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, to take you behind the scenes of the animal world. Dr. Moore has crafted a wonderful introduction to zoology that brings you up close and personal with a breathtaking variety of animal species through the eyes of a trained zoologist.

In this gallery of extraordinary minds, you’ll encounter the leading lights of a world-shaping era, including figures such as Maimonides, Hildegard of Bingen, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, and Francesco Petrarch. Professor Armstrong goes to great lengths to bring these historic figures to life, revealing both the great intellectual contributions and the personal strivings, challenges, and triumphs of some of history’s most remarkable human beings.

Behavioral economics is the study of decision making, and of the related themes of valuation, exchange, and interpersonal interactions. Using methods from psychology, sociology, neurology, and economics, behavioral economics sheds light one of the most fundamental activities of human life: the decision process. In 24 insightful lectures, you'll learn how behavioral economists look at decision making and explore a set of key principles that offer deep insight into how we evaluate information and integrate different factors to make decisions.

Creation stories, found within many ancient cultures, are traditional accounts of the origins of the universe, the earth, and humanity. Often embodied as epic poetry, and told through the acts of divine beings, creation stories illuminate the values, beliefs, and creeds of the earliest civilizations. As such, these stories show us how early cultures made sense of the human condition, in theological, philosophical, and political terms. These 12 dynamic and thought-provoking lectures offer you a penetrating look at the origin stories of the great civilizations of the Mediterranean.

The form of research-based meditation known as Integrative Restoration (or iRest®) has helped special operations troops improve their resiliency, executives manage stress, cancer patients cope with pain, and trauma survivors experience safety and healing. Now, bring the practice right into your life and home in these 24 classes.

Modern history is filled with terrible crimes, baffling hoaxes, and seedy scandals. The infamous Jack the Ripper slayings. The alleged survival of Anastasia Romanov, the youngest daughter of the murdered Tsar. Seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong's public fall from grace. The Chicago Tylenol poisonings and the copycat crimes that followed.

No understanding of human life, individual or collective, could be complete without factoring in the role and contribution of these history-shaping teachers. Now, this 36-lecture series takes you deep into the life stories and legacies of these four iconic figures, revealing the core teachings, and thoughts of each, and shedding light on the historical processes that underlie their phenomenal, enduring impact.

Shedding light on what creative people do, and how they do it, neuroscientists are mapping the regions of the brain that come into play during creative work, showing that creativity is a skill and something that all of us can cultivate. In these 24 compelling lectures, Professor Viskontas takes you on a deep dive into the human creative faculty. Through the many areas of knowledge within the course, Creativity and Your Brain offers empowering and inspiring guidelines for developing your own creativity.

In Communism in Decline: From Sputnik to Gorbachev, Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius reveals the internal and external forces that ripped apart the grand communist experiment. What were the mistakes made by the Soviet leaders who believed too deeply in their own propaganda? And why were they not able to see the many ironies in their own poor decisions? In 12 fascinating lectures, you will learn how the Soviet Union went from winning the space race against the United States in 1957 to Gorbachev’s resignation and the dissolution of the great experiment in 1991.

Discover an essential handbook for strategies, concepts, and insights into the dynamics of transformational leadership in these 24 lectures, which take you on an in-depth examination of the leadership behaviors and capabilities essential to creating positive change in teams and organizations. Filled with case studies and lessons from leaders in business, politics, sports, and the military, as well as a range of specific skills and strategies you can put to use in your own career, this lecture series is an authoritative guide to successful leadership.

Recent years have seen the introduction of concepts from the new and exciting field of complexity science that have captivated the attention of economists, sociologists, engineers, businesspeople, and many others. These include tipping points, the wisdom of crowds, six degrees of separation (or Kevin Bacon), and emergence. Complexity science can shed light on why businesses or economies succeed and fail, how epidemics spread and can be stopped, and what causes ecological systems to rebalance themselves after a disaster.

Often, much of what is misunderstood about Islam is the result of a lack of information - and some dangerous and prolific myths. To combat these myths and better understand the complex Islamic tradition, Dr. Martyn Oliver, a senior professorial lecturer at American University, presents 12 in-depth lectures to provide you with a multifaceted approach to Muhammad, Islam, and the revelation known today as the Qur'an.

How did a young tradesman in early 18th-century Philadelphia with no money, no connections, and no formal education end up as a leading scientist, an inventor, a master diplomat - and even a Founding Father of the United States of America? He used the same resource we have inside ourselves: a capacity for self-improvement.

No era is more pertinent to understanding how present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh evolved than the nearly 200 years of British rule. This colonial period was a time of deep change and transformation - for India and for the world. These 24 engrossing lectures offer you new perspectives on the history of European imperialism, on world economic history, on the features of British colonialism, and on the rich cultures of the Indian subcontinent.

For millennia, philosophers and scientists have been trying to unlock the secrets of the mind with only limited success—until now. Today, with modern technologies including the best in neuroscience, medical imaging, and recent advances in artificial intelligence, we are making more progress than ever before. In Introduction to Cognitive Science, Professor Thad A. Polk takes you on a fascinating tour of the latest discoveries in the relatively new field of cognitive science. In 24 exciting lectures, Professor Polk shares dozens of the most challenging questions in cognitive science today.

These 12 illuminating lectures paint a rich and detailed portrait of the life, works, and ideas of this remarkable figure, whose own search for God has profoundly shaped all of Western Christianity. You'll learn what Augustine taught and why he taught it – and how those teachings and doctrines helped shape the Roman Catholic Church. These lectures are rewarding even if you have no background at all in classical philosophy or Christian theology.

Delve into the exciting field of “epistemology”, the philosophical term for our inquiry into knowledge: what it is, the ways we acquire it, and how we justify our beliefs as knowledge. Taught by acclaimed Professor Joseph H. Shieber of Lafayette College, these 24 mind-bending lectures take you from ancient philosophers to contemporary neurobiologists, and from wide-ranging social networks to the deepest recesses of your own brain.

Few events have captivated students of American history like the Civil War. Its most striking personalities seem somehow outsized, magnified beyond the ability of books or even legend to contain them. And few among those personalities have ever held our attention like General Robert Edward Lee.

Over the last four centuries, a small group of thinkers attempted to answer a series of remarkably challenging questions: In a world having a history of untold suffering-especially, it seemed, for Jews-was the existence of an all-powerful and comforting God still tenable? What were the purpose and meaning of Jewish practices and customs? Could Jews still justify the notion of a chosen people in a social climate in which Jewish integration and full participation with the rest of humanity had become the norm?