Click on the links below to view lectures delivered by noted American historians on a variety of topics.

• Dr. Gordon Wood (Brown University) -- "The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin," a lecture presented for the Gilder Lehrman Institute. Benjamin Franklin is one of the best known Founding Fathers, yet he spent fewer years of his life in the country he helped to found than Washington or Jefferson. A self-made man who made a fortune as a printer, he became a cosmopolitan anglophile, scientist, and consummate eighteenth-century gentleman.
• Dr. David Blight (Yale University) -- Civil War & Reconstruction era course offered online through Yale University. This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. Four broad themes are closely examined: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction.
• Dr. James McPherson (Princeton University)