The Great Courses

Education can be enriching and transformative. It can also be downright excruciating—even demoralizing. When it comes to learning, why are some of us lovers and some of us haters? Welcome to the world of educational psychology....

Grammar! For many of us, the word triggers memories of finger-wagging schoolteachers, and of wrestling with the ambiguous and complicated rules of using formal language....

Words. We use them all the time, every day, mostly without giving them much thought at all. We take for granted that they’re here at our disposal whenever we need them. But if you’ve ever wished you could communicate more effectively, words are the place to start....

One of the greatest scientific feats of our era is the astonishing progress made in understanding biology-a progress to which the period we are living in right now has contributed the most....

Even after deciphering its hieroglyphs, and marveling at its scarabs, mummies, obelisks, and sphinxes, Egyptian civilization remains one of history's most mysterious....

In an exciting partnership with the Smithsonian, The Great Courses presents these 24 lectures that offer an unforgettable tour of Japanese life and culture....

The power of an effective speech is undeniable. It has the capacity to engage, inform, motivate, and create change in an audience - and in the world....

In the six lectures of Early American Sex Scandals, Dr. Cassandra Good of Marymount University will take you on a revealing journey through some of the most influential and notorious scandals of America’s first century.

Learn how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today....

Humans have been on a remarkable journey these past 300,000 years. We started in Africa and slowly spread across the globe—crossing land bridges, sailing into the unknown, and eventually building cities and civilizations. While our primate cousins stayed where they evolved, we moved.

In the nine lectures of Slow Down: How Doing Nothing Makes Us Better Humans, Constance Kassor, of Lawrence University in Wisconsin, shows you how to do what so many of us desperately need: Take a step back, reassess your priorities, and take some time for yourself.

What is our species' greatest invention? Medicine, computers, space travel? Not even close. The innovation that underlies each of our past achievements and those we still aspire to is language....

Since Shakespeare's time, no period has produced more brilliant and various theatrical dramas in Great Britain than in the past 100 years....

On April 30, 1975, the Communist capture of the city of Saigon brought an end to more than 20 years of war in Vietnam. The end of the war reunified a divided nation—and changed the course of global politics, military strategy, and international relations for decades to come.

You will meet some of the key figures of Hawaiian history from the 19th and 20th centuries, a tumultuous period in Hawaii’s transformation from a secluded group of independent islands to the 50th US state and a bustling tourist destination.

In the six lectures of Margaret Atwood: A Modern Myth-Maker, Dr. Jennifer Cognard-Black will take you on a thorough exploration of Atwood’s most celebrated novel to examine the many ways this book has transcended its dystopian roots to become something more than a tale of, “What if?”

From evoking a scene to charting a plot to revising your drafts, Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques offers a master class in storytelling....

Noted Japan expert Professor Mark J. Ravina of the University of Texas at Austin covers the politics, economics, and culture of the island nation since World War II - a conflict that saw the end of Japan’s dream of regional conquest, which Professor Ravina calls Empire 1.0....

These lectures are your opportunity to see our nation's best-selling books as more than just popular forms of entertainment....

Though unappreciated in his own time, Johann Sebastian Bach has ascended to Olympian heights, the verdict of contemporary audiences long since overruled by succeeding generations of music lovers....