24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture Course No. 8296 Taught by Philip Daileader, The College of William and Mary, Ph.D., Harvard University Were the two centuries from c. 1300 to c. 1500—an age that has come to be known as the Late Middle Ages—an era of calamity or an era of rebirth? Should we look on this time as still clearly medieval or as one in which humanity took its first decisive steps into modernity? Was it a period as distant from us as it appears, or was it closer than we suspect? Students of history are still trying, even after so many centuries, to reach anything approaching a consensus on the answers to these questions.
In The Story of England Michael Wood tells the extraordinary story of one English community over fifteen centuries, from the moment that the Roman Emperor Honorius sent his famous letter in 410 advising the English to look to their own defences to the village as it is today.
The village of Kibworth in Leicestershire lies at the very centre of England. It has a church, some pubs, the Grand Union Canal, a First World War Memorial - and many centuries of recorded history. In the thirteenth century the village was bought by William de Merton, who later founded Merton College, Oxford, with the result that documents covering 750 years of village history are lodged at the college.
Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Western Music in Context)
Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries explores the sense of possibility unleashed by the era's destabilizing military conflicts, social upheavals, and technological advances. Auner shows how the multiplicity of musical styles has called into question traditional assumptions about compositional practice, the boundaries of music and noise, and the relationship among composer, performer, and listener. He also shows how composers and their works have played important roles in defining ideas of nation, race, and gender, and thus in shaping the modern world for better and worse.