Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
Africans have been present in England for more than two thousand years, but we rarely see them or hear about them. And often their existence is dismissed as a figment of 'political correctness' or 'wokism.' This lecture will critically assess the myth of England's story as a 'sacred white space' and examine the evidence for diversity in medieval and early modern history. Africans are integral to English history and forgetting this diminishes Englishness, by preventing us from understanding ourselves.
The Malian city of Timbuktu is one of the world's oldest seats of learning and has an intellectual legacy of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, coming from three great West African desert empires. These manuscripts offer a unique window into their history. This lecture will look at how their study can be used to advance our knowledge of the intellectual history of the premodern world.
London in the 1950s and 60s was a crucible in which West Indian writers, artists, thinkers and scholars imagined new futures for the Caribbean, Britain and the world.
This lecture examines the centuries long presence of the African diaspora as an integral part of Britain’s history since Roman times. Unfortunately, this history is still too often ignored, its promotion limited only to October.
Eve was the original Evil Woman. She was tempted by Satan, introducing sin into the world. In turn, she seduced Adam, bringing the wrath of the Creator upon humanity for all eternity.
The lecture will show how Prohibition animated combatants on both sides, generating two Americas that were barely comprehensible to each other, and how the truce declared during depression and war would not last.
The 2020 Annual Lord Mayor’s Gresham event will explore the value of culture for The City of London. The City of London is not only a great place to do business but also has a rich and vibrant cultural offer making it a great place to live, learn, work and visit.