So we've been talking about civil rights for the last few episodes now, and we're finally going to wrap this discussion up with the rather controversial topic of affirmative action. We'll explain what exactly affirmative action is, who it is for, and why it still exists. Now, affirmative action is a pretty problematic concept. So we'll get into the court's rationalization for it in the 70s as well as its fall from favor in more recent years. Now, people tend to have pretty strong, and varying opinions, about this stuff - so we'll start talking about how these opinions are informed next week when we start our discussion on politics.

The purpose of this course is to examine the African American experience in the United States from 1863 to the present. Prominent themes include the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction; African Americans' urbanization experiences; the development of the modern civil rights movement and its aftermath; and the thought and leadership of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. WARNING: Some of the lectures in this course contain graphic content and/or adult language that some users may find disturbing.

So, today we’re talking about African Pantheons. Now, you might say, that’s ridiculous. Africa isn’t a single place with a single pantheon, and we’d be fools to try and cover all that in an eleven minute video. You’d be right. Instead we’re going to focus on Yoruba religion from west Africa, and the Orishas that populate Yoruba stories. The many, many Orishas cover all aspects of life, and can be pretty specialized. We’re going to focus on a dozen or so.

So, you did it! You're done and now you need to look beyond college. What's next? How do you know what's next? Do you want to go to grad school? To work? In this episode, Erica talks about how to think about what comes after college.

Chapters:
- Introduction
- Planning Your Transition
- Managing Priorities
- Conclusion

Review

People are getting older – not just in the individual sense, but the human population itself. Today we’re going to explore those shifting patterns and their implications. We’ll go over the biological, psychological, and cultural aspects of aging, including some of the particular challenges that older individuals face.

The thing about European History is that it tends to leak out of Europe. Europeans haven't been great at staying put in Europe. As human beings do, the people of Europe were very busy traveling around to trade, to spread religion, and in a lot of cases to try and conquer other people. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans developed a bunch of tools and techniques that would allow them to travel around the world, in numbers and force heretofore unseen on the planet. And a lot of the results weren't great for the people who already lived in the places Europeans were "visiting."

In which John Green teaches you about the presidency of Andrew Jackson So how did a president with astoundingly bad fiscal policies end up on the $20 bill? That's a question we can't answer, but we can tell you how Jackson got to be president, and how he changed the country when he got the job. Jackson's election was more democratic than any previous presidential election. More people were able to vote, and they picked a doozie. Jackson was a well-known war hero, and he was elected over his longtime political enemy, John Quincy Adams. Once Jackson was in office, he did more to expand executive power than any of the previous occupants of the White House. He used armed troops to collect taxes, refused to enforce legislation and supreme court legislation, and hired and fired his staff based on support in elections. He was also the first president to regularly wield the presidential veto as a political tool. Was he a good president? Watch this video and draw your own conclusions.

Chapters:
Introduction: the Age of Jackson
Democracy in the United States
Economics during the Era of Good Feelings
The Monroe Doctrine
John Quincy Adams
The Missouri Compromise
Martin Van Buren, "The Little Magician", and other Presidential Nicknames
Andrew Jackson's Presidential Campaign
The Democratic Party
The Whig Party
Jackson's Tariffs
The Indian Removal Act & The Trail of Tears
American Banking Under Jackson
Mystery Document
Jackson Ends the Second U.S. Bank
Inflation and the Panic of 1837
Legacy of the Age of Jackson
Credits

In our final episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank discusses the ideas of Aggression and Altruism. These two things are difficult to understand and explain so sit tight and get ready to run the gauntlet of human emotions.

Chapters:
Introduction: Robber's Cave Experiment
Conflict vs. Cooperation
Aggression
Genetic, Neurological, & Biochemical Reasons for Aggression
Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis
Altruism
Bystander Effect
Why do we help others?
Social Exchange Theory & the Norm of Reciprocity
Social Responsibility Norm
Conflict & Self-Interest
Review & Credits
Credits

In this video from Nature, geological detectives use ancient diamonds to learn more about Earth's inner layers.

On November 26, 2020, trade unions in India reported that over 250 MILLION people took part in a strike. What could prompt such massive protest? Farming. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at GMOs, which are organisms whose DNA has been modified in a laboratory, and examine the impact of one GMO in particular, Bt Cotton, in the agrarian crisis in India.

In which John Green investigates the dawn of human civilization. John looks into how people gave up hunting and gathering to become agriculturalists, and how that change has influenced the world we live in today. Also, there are some jokes about cheeseburgers.

Chapters:
About the Test
The Journey of a Double Cheeseburger
Early Humans: Hunting and Foraging
Advantages & Disadvantages of Agriculture
An Open Letter to Elephants
Why did the Agricultural Revolution Happen?
Credits

All art is political in the sense that all art takes place in the public arena and engages with an already existing ideology. Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, offers an important contemporary example. The news that Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been detained by authorities has prompted significant concern. Ai Weiwei has ben arrested by the Chinese authorities.

Jason Allen offers a comparative discussion of two important Caribbean poets and playwrights, Aime Cesaire and Derek Walcott, to emphasize the impact of Caribbean literature upon the postcolonial world. By using biographical and historical detail to support his analysis of some of Cesaire and Walcott's key texts, Allen offers insight into what it means to be a Caribbean writer - looking back to a colonial past, and forward to a global future. This audio recording is part the Interviews on Great Writers series presented by Oxford University Podcasts.

Like the Industrial or the Einsteinian Revolution, the Space Race is a trope, or way of organizing historical events into a story that makes sense. In this story, the two great powers that emerged after World War Two—the United States and Soviet Union—competed to send communications satellites, dogs, and people into outer space…

Today we’re going to take a step back from programming and discuss the person who formulated many of the theoretical concepts that underlie modern computation - the father of computer science himself: Alan Turing. Now normally we try to avoid “Great Man" history in Crash Course because truthfully all milestones in humanity are much more complex than just an individual or through a single lens - but for Turing we are going to make an exception. From his theoretical Turing Machine and work on the Bombe to break Nazi Enigma codes during World War II, to his contributions in the field of Artificial Intelligence (before it was even called that), Alan Turing helped inspire the first generation of computer scientists - despite a life tragically cut short.

This video from First Alaskans Institute spotlights the Alaska Native community of St. Paul and its hands-on commitment to care for the land and animals on which it depends.

In this video adapted from Storyknife Productions, Alaska Native pilots share how they use traditional knowledge to read the landscape and predict the weather.

In this video adapted from Alaska Sea Grant, discover why multiple tsunamis resulted from the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964.

In this art history video discussion Beth Harris and Steven Zucker look at Albrecht Durer's "Self-Portrait, 1500." (Alte Pinakothek, Munich).

In fantasy stories, charlatans in fancy robes promise to turn lead into gold. But real alchemists weren’t just mystical misers. They were skilled experimentalists, backed by theories of matter.
And they played a huge role in the development of knowledge about one of our fundamental questions: “what is stuff?”