What happens when history narratives are produced not for library bookshelves but for a mass audience? Does popularisation of history automatically mean dumbing down? Who are the people who make history for the public sphere, and what are their motivations and priorities? The Public & Popular History seminar series brings them together, film makers, journalists, professional historians and museum curators. Through talks, multi-media presentations, panel discussions, and debates the seminar explores the practices and characteristics of public and popular history in the contemporary world.

Public and Popular History

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History

history and conspiracy

Panel discussion with

Jane Ellison (Commissioning Editor, Radio 4, BBC),

Matthew Cock (Head of Web, British Museum),

Bill Thompson (Technology writer and Head of Partnership Development, BBC Archive Development) 

History on the Internet

Talk by Patrick Russell (Senior Curator, British Film Institute)

The Elephant Will Never Forget? Film archiving, archaeology and historiography

Panel discussion with Tim Boon (Chief Curator, Science Museum, London),

John Lynch (CEO of TV production company Words Make Pictures Ltd, former Head of Science at BBC Television 2001-2010; & Chairman of World Congress of Science and Factual Producers),

Simon Schaffer (Professor in History & Philosophy of Science, Cambridge)

Presenting The History Of Science & Technology

Panel discussion with Chris Skidmore (MP, Cons) & Gregg McClymont (MP, Lab)

The Uses of History in Politics

Talk by Charles Cecil MBE, video game designer (Broken Sword series) & Director of Revolution Software, at the Public and Popular History Seminar.

Charles Cecil, video game industry legend and creator of the Broken Sword series discusses the uses of historical narratives in video games, and the link to different media like film. In fact, the video game industry has been a bigger industry than film for some years now, and millions of users have their most intensive encounters with representations of the past in front of a computer screen. Just what this means when historical narratives have to be moulded to fit the entertainment objectives of the video game producer is the subject of this multi-media talk by one of the most successful designers in the industry.

Moulding history for a video game story

Sal Khan talks about the digital education revolution and how Khan Academy is spreading around the world. Part 2 of 2.

Sal Khan: The Education Revolution

Sal Khan talks about the digital education revolution and how Khan Academy is spreading around the world. Part 1 of 2.

Sal Khan: The Rise of Khan Academy

Three War Stories by David Mamet on Audible:
http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Three-War-Stories-Audiobook/B00HDT5WGI?source_code=SCLGB909ZWS122613

Get this audiobook free when you try Audible:
http://www.audible.com/offers/30free?asin=B00HDT5WGI&source_code=SCLGB909ZWS122613

Summary:

Spanning centuries and continents, Mamet uses war and its players to explore, among other themes, redemption and forgiveness as they unfold in the context of conflict in the form of three novellas.

In The Redwing, the first of the three novellas, a 19th-century Secret Service naval officer turned prisoner, then novelist, and finally memoirist recounts his own transformations during the course of his service and imprisonment.

The protagonist in Notes on Plain Warfare examines religion through the prism of the American Indian wars. Finally, The Handle and the Hold is a vivid, dialogue-driven tale of two ex-military men who steal a plane in the month before the Israeli War of Independence.

Finely wrought, Mamet eloquently depicts the psychological brutality conflict raises in the landscape of the mind.


Buy on Audible

Three War Stories by David Mamet, Narrated by Jim Frangione

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, talks about what excites him - and scares him - about today’s technology.

Steve Wozniak and the (Sometimes Scary) Future of Technology

What if the gap between the haves and have-nots opens up earlier in life than we ever expected? Dr. Jack Shonkoff says a child's success in school depends on her earliest stages of development. 

The New Science Behind Early Education

In his first seminar of the series, Professor Kennel gives a brief history of the development of climate research; discuss the relationship between atmospheric abundance of CO2 and global temperature over time, and the fundamental truths about the long-term future.

CSaP's inaugural Visiting Research Fellow Professor Charlie F Kennel will deliver a series of seminars on adaptation to climate change, hosted by Christ's College Cambridge.

Professor Kennel is Vice-Chancellor and Director emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Christ’s College. He spent the 2014 Lent term as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge.

What can we expect from the climate and what might we do?

Incredible production value on this podcast! We talk about what makes a book valuable, why your mom is using Instagram, and more.

The Business Builder's Show Interview with Gary Vaynerchuk

How do conspiracies happen, how can historians use them to understand more about the past, and where do they begin and cease to be relevant to the study of history? Such questions were the starting point for this panel debate, in which Professor Christopher Andrew and Dr Stephen Dorril examine cases from Stalinist Russia, Harold Wilson’s government in the 1960s, and Northern Ireland in the 1970s, to name but a few. - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/history-and-conspiracy#sthash.UnAMoebB.dpuf

History and conspiracy

The spread of an infection is an ecological event, with the infected hosts acting like prey and the infectious agents like predators – albeit rather tiny ones. This metaphor can help us understand the spread of emerging infections, the control of existing infections and the spread of infections inside individual people. Using examples from infectious diseases that pose problems right now this lecture will illustrate how taking an ecological view of plagues helps us to understand them and, sometimes, control them.

Biography

Professor Angela McLean FRS studied mathematics at Oxford but soon after decided to become a biologist. After a brief spell in the City she joined the Mathematical Biology Group at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill then returned to Oxford as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. In 1994 she went on secondment to the Institut Pasteur in Paris to work on the population dynamics of murine lymphocytes in the immunology department there. In 1998 she became Head of Mathematical Biology at the BBSRC ’s Institute for Animal Health. Since 2008 she has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College in Oxford. She was elected to the Royal Society in 2009, and was awarded the Royal Society’s Gabor Medal in 2011.

The Nature of Plagues

In his talk, Professor Kennel will discuss the reasons why we may not be able to avoid 2C warming by 2050, and adaptive management strategy.

This term, CSaP's inaugural Visiting Research Fellow Professor Charlie F Kennel will deliver a series of seminars on adaptation to climate change, hosted by Christ's College Cambridge.

Professor Kennel is Vice-Chancellor and Director emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Christ’s College. He will be spending the next three months as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy.

Why and how we will have to adapt?

Technological conspiracies are good conspiracies - at least from the perspective of their proponents. Understanding their dynamics, especially within the context of liberalism, may help shed light upon an apparent puzzle of twenty-first century living: why, when individual privacy is being systematically undermined by both governments and corporations, so few people seem to care. The answer, I suggest, has much to do with rapidly changing conceptions of self and society, but also a prior, fundamental commitment to imagining both self and society as quantifiable and controllable. Leading liberal theorists today tend to see the digital challenge to privacy as undermining one of the core commitments of liberalism. However, I wish to suggest that our current predicament is the result of liberalism's internal logic , a political theory that formally eschews conspiracy thinking in favour of science and modernity, yet one that manages to employ theories of good conspiracy, nonetheless. Technological conspiracies are the fulfilment of a modern, liberal dream, bringing together political power and technology so that citizens are fully known to their governments and corporations such that older concerns with privacy simply become irrelevant.

A public lecture by Professor Lawrence Quill (San Jose). 

Technological Conspiracies

Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, will speak about ‘Holocaust Denial: A Flat Earth Theory or a Clear and Present Danger?’

Holocaust denial, the attempt to deny that the Third Reich engaged in the annihilation of approximately six million Jews, has been depicted as a serious threat to historical truth. Others have dismissed it as the equivalent of the theory that the earth is flat, i.e. absurd, illogical, and unworthy of serious consideration. In this presentation Professor Lipstadt will explore these two contradictory perspectives on Holocaust denial. In addition, she will explore the difference between “hardcore” or traditional Holocaust denial and the more recent phenomenon of “soft core” denial. 