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.
On the 200th anniversary of George IV's accession to the throne, this lecture considers whether or not he had any real impact on the fast-industrialising world around him, and the turbulent political times he lived through.
Sydney’s botanic garden, founded in the early nineteenth century, was expected to ship new plants 'home' to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from where they could be transplanted to other colonial gardens, to see if they could become valuable new crops to enrich the British Empire.
In this talk we use mathematics to look at these flaws and answer associated questions (eg. voting trends and gerrymandering). For a bit of light relief we will see how the same principles work in the Eurovision Song Contest.
The 2014 scandal over Rachel Dolezal’s lying about being of African-American heritage reignited debates about the politics of hair. It has been followed by numerous books with titles such as Don’t Touch My Hair!
This lecture will begin with Bacon’s imagined garden, then consider the long-term promise of the experimental or scientific garden, which would eventually lead to today’s biotechnologies.
Sir Richard Evans, one of the world's foremost authorities on modern German history, asks why the Republic failed in its attempt to make Germany democratic, and what lessons can be learned for the future of democracy in the 21st century.
Government officials in the UK and the USA have struggled to find effective ways to regulate political spending on the internet. The question of appropriate regulation is challenging - both in practice and principle.