This week, we're headed back to England to learn about Sentimental Comedies. They weren't that funny, but they were definitely sentimental. The people of England were shaking off the Restoration hangover, and bawdy plays no longer had a place. In fact, there wasn't a place for much of any drama, as only two theaters were licensed to present plays. Rules and regulations everywhere, y'all.

The English Civil War. We'll talk about England after Elizabeth, in which things didn't go that smoothly. We'll talk about James I, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Charles II, and James II, all of whom ruled England, (and tried to rule all of Britain and Ireland) with varying degrees of success.
Sources

The Renaissance came to England late, thanks to a Hundred Years War that ran long and lasted 116 years, and then a civil war to decide who would be the royal family. BUT after all that, with the Tudors (relatively) securely installed on the throne, there was a flowering of humanism, science, and culture. Theater was a big part of it. Today, we're talking about the London theater scene and the playwrights that set the stage...ahem...for the main man of English Theater, William Shakespeare.

This week on Crash Course Theater, Shakespeare is dead. Long live Shakespeare. Well, long live English theater, anyway. Actually, it's about to get banned. Anyway, we're discussing where English theater went post-1616. We'll talk about Ben Jonson, revenge tragedies, and court masques.

Last time we learned about the Enlightenment, and the philosophers and thinkers whose ideas would shape governance for hundred of years. This week, we're learning how monarchs across Europe were influenced by those ideas. Adoption of Enlightenment ideas across Europe was...uneven, to say the least. In this episode you'll learn about Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Maria Theresa of the Habsburg Dynasty, and Joseph II, her successor. We'll also get into the impact the Enlightenment had on a series of Louis in France.

You may know that cows produce methane, which is a big concern when it comes to global heating, but did you know that organic chemistry provides a potential solution to this problem? Feeding cows small amounts of red seaweed can greatly reduce methane emissions, in part due to organic chemicals called enols! In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll learn all about enols and enolates, their reactivity, and reactions we can do with them including halogenation and alkylation.

Energy is like the bestest best friend ever and yet, most of the time we take it for granted. Hank feels bad for our friend and wants us to learn more about it so that we can understand what it's trying to tell us - like that any bond between two atoms contains energy. How much energy? That's not the simplest question to answer, but today Hank will answer it (kinda), by teaching us about a nifty little thing called enthalpy.

If you are paying attention to this episode you'll learn what the state function is, and how it varies from a path-dependent function; why enthalpy change is different from heat; that bonds are energy and to form and break them they release and absorb heat to and from their environment. You'll get the quickest introduction to calorimetry ever (more on that in upcoming episodes) and learn the power of Hess's Law and how to use Germain Hess's concept of the standard enthalpy of formation to calculate exactly how much heat is produced by any chemical reaction.

Chapters:
State Function
Path-Dependent Function
Enthalpy
Bonds are Energy
Colorimetry
Hess' Law
Standard Enthalpy of Formation

Life is chaos and the universe tends toward disorder. But why? If you think about it, there are only a few ways for things to be arranged in an organized manner, but there are nearly infinite other ways for those same things to be arranged. Simple rules of probability dictate that it's much more likely for stuff to be in one of the many disorganized states than in one of the few organized states. This tendency is so unavoidable that it's known as the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Obviously, disorder is a pretty big deal in the universe and that makes it a pretty big deal in chemistry - it's such a big deal that scientists have a special name for it: entropy. In chemistry, entropy is the measure of molecular randomness or disorder. For the next thirteen minutes, Hank hopes you will embrace the chaos as he teaches you about entropy.

Chapters:
Second Law of Thermodynamics
Entropy
DEMONSTRATION!
BA(OH)2•8H2O+NH4Ci
J.W. Gibbs & Gibbs Free Energy

So, if economics is about choices and how we use our resources, econ probably has a lot to say about the environment, right? Right! In simple terms, pollution is just a market failure. The market is producing more pollution than society wants. This week, Adriene and Jacob focus on the environment, and how economics can be used to control and reduce pollution and emissions. You'll learn about supply and demand, incentives, and how government intervention influences the environment.

This week, we're continuing our discussion of heroes by talking about Gilgamesh, star of one of the earliest written hero stories, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh was a terrible ancient king who left his kingdom seeking adventure, and eventually on the prowl for immortality. Along the way, he checks pretty much all the boxes on the checklist of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey.

Today, Craig is going to talk about the most important part of the Constitution - the Fourteenth Amendment. In particular, we're going to discuss the "equal protection" clause and how it relates to our civil rights. So we've spent the last few episodes talking about civil liberties , or our protections from the government, but civil rights are different as they involve how some groups of citizens are able to treat other groups (usually minorities) under existing laws. We'll talk about the process the Supreme Court follows in equal protection cases, called strict scrutiny, and look at one landmark case, Brown v Board of Education, and explain its role in starting the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

In this episode of Crash Course Chemistry, Hank goes over the ideas of keeping your life balance... well, your chemical life. Equilibrium is all about balance and today Hank discusses Chemical Equilibrium, Concentration, Temperature, and Pressure. Also, he'll chat about Le Chatalier's Principle and Fritz Haber.

In which Hank shows you that, while it may seem like the Universe is messing with us, equilibrium isn't a cosmic trick. Here, he shows you how to calculate equilibrium constant & conditions of reactions and use RICE tables all with some very easy, not-so-scary math.

Chapters:
Calculating an Equilibrium Constant
Calculating Conditions of Reactions
RICE Tables
Quadratic Equations

After Darwin blew the doors off the scientific community, a lot of people did some weird and unscientific stuff with his ideas. Francis Galton and a few others decided natural selection could be used to make the human race "better" and came up with Eugenics.

Hank tells us about the city of Eukaryopolis - the animal cell that is responsible for all the cool things that happen in our bodies.

Chapters:
1) Robert Hooke
2) Cilia/Flagella
3) Cell Membrane
4) Cytoplasm/Cytoskeleton/Centrosomes
5) Endoplasmic Reticulum
6) Ribosomes
7) Golgi Apparatus
8) Lysosomes
9) Nucleus
10) Mitochondria

In which John looks at what it even means to live in a global age, as we've been talking about Europe's role in the gobal community for 47 episodes now. But, pedantry aside, the world is more connected than ever, and that has had effects in Europe. Today we'll investigate how trade, communications, and disease have changed the continent.

Today we’re going to focus on how to tell good evidence from bad evidence and maybe importantly, how to identify “Fine, but that doesn’t actually prove your point” evidence - the stuff that the Internet is built on.

With the amount of fake and doctored photos and videos out there, how can we know what to trust? Most of us are used to thinking that "seeing is believing" but as technology makes it easier and easier to spread unreliable content online it's more important than ever for us to read laterally, check for context, and always fact check suspicious content - even if it looks real.

Here it is, folks: the end. In our final episode of Crash Course Astronomy, Phil gives the course a sendoff with a look at some of his favorite topics and the big questions that Astronomy allows us to ask.

Chapters:
Introduction: Are We Alone in the Universe?
The Search for Earth-like Exoplanets
Is There Alien Life in the Universe?
SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Let's Explore the Universe!
Review

Hank gets real with us in a discussion of evolution - it's a thing, not a debate. Gene distribution changes over time, across successive generations, to give rise to diversity at every level of biological organization.

Chapters:
1) The Theory of Evolution
2) Fossils
3) Homologous Structures
4) Biogeography
5) Direct Observation