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.
The lecture discusses their identities, motives and impact, and the forgotten fact that their failure ended British revolutionary fantasies for a century.
Europe’s Wars of Religion were fought against entire populations, and were punctuated by events remembered as atrocities: such as the siege of Leiden in 1573-4 or, most notoriously, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacres in France in 1572.
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.
Medieval England was proudly Catholic and ostentatiously loyal to Rome. But from the late sixteenth century until recent times – and even now – anti-Catholic prejudice has been a cornerstone of English and British identity.
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 survey this ‘black legend’ and ask what made it so enduring – and why some parts of the story, such as the Inquisition’s genocidal campaign against Spanish Jews, received so much less attention than others.
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