Videos and Recorded Programs

Researcher T.J. Stiles describes the last year of Custer’s life through the eyes of teenager Bertie Swett. Swett came to know Custer and his wife Libbie at Fort Abraham Lincoln and in Manhattan while America approached a historic turning point. Swett bared witness to the notorious soldier’s life as he pushed his career and fortune to the brink of disaster.

Sachiko Kusukawa, professor of the history of science at the University of Cambridge, explores the many ways images served early modern science, from anatomical atlases and botanical illustrations to telescopic and microscopic observations.

Edmund Russell, professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University and the Dibner Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington, discusses the motives, construction, and consequences of the completion of transcontinental telegraph in 1861.

Eugene Wang, professor of art history at Harvard University, discusses the Qianlong Garden in the northeast corner of the Forbidden City. Built in the 1770s, the whole garden space can be seen as a five-act play.

James Walvin, professor emeritus at the University of York and the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington, discusses the widespread global ramifications of African slavery that transformed the cultural habits of millions of people.

Wallace Stevens is regarded as one of the great American poets, yet he was also an inimitable letter writer. Leading international experts make the first concerted effort to study Stevens’ letters as a major part of the poet’s literary heritage.

Organized around themes defined by the verbs “Fight,” “Return,” “Map,” “Move,” and “Build,” the exhibition “Nineteen Nineteen” showcases items that embody an era in flux. Rare books, posters, letters, photographs, diaries, paintings, sculpture, and ephemera will be on view. Highlights include representative items from 1919, such as a 37-foot map of a Pacific Electric (Red Car) route in Los Angeles, astronomical photographs of the moon...

Award-winning author Susan Straight is joined by novelist Lisa See for a conversation about Straight’s powerful new memoir, In the Country of Women, which traces the lives of six generations of immigrant and multiracial women in her extended family. The program is presented by the Huntington–USC Institute on California and the West. Book signing follows the program.