Alcademics

A thing I do for edu-tainment is watch the Great Courses series on various (mostly historical) subjects. It’s like going to college forever, which is what I would do if I could afford it. 

You remember the Great Courses, of course! They were advertised in SkyMall. If I remember correctly they were first advertised on videocassette, then later on DVD, and now on streaming. 

The courses are college-level studies taught by university professors on a range of topics, but I mostly watch the history ones. The courses are mostly 24 half-hour long lectures, but some are 36 or even 48 lectures like the one on Western Civilization I watched during the pandemic. 

If you buy them they’re pretty expensive but you can watch many of them for free via your library. Via the San Francisco Public Library I can watch them for free via Hoopla or Kanopy. 

I’ve now watched at least 22 series, which is a lot of hours. The first one I ever watched - and one of the best - is "The Black Death: The World's Most Devastating Plague.” 

Last weekend I watched another one I thought was pretty great: "History's Greatest Voyages of Exploration.” It includes not only the typical ones - Magellan, Vasco da Gama, etc. but some lesser-known ones by women. It also includes stories of some of the non-Europeans who accompanied the famous explorers, like an enslaved person who was actually the first person to circumnavigate the globe (because he was from a more eastern country than the captain he was traveling with). 

Anyway, just wanted to put in another plug for watching these. They’re what I do on days I’m cleaning my apartment, meal prep, busy work, etc. I feel like a smarter person for it.