Annenberg Learner (Firm)
Language
English
Description
How has slavery shaped the American literary imagination and American identity? This program turns to the classic slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass and the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe. What rhetorical strategies do their works use to construct an authentic and authoritative American self?
Language
English
Description
Metals allow the transfer of electrons through a process called oxidation-reduction, or "redox," when one species gains electrons while another loses them. Chemists use electron transfers to power the batteries in our flashlights, phones, or cars. In biochemistry trace metals, such as cobalt in Vitamin B12, often drive essential chemical reactions for human health. Redox reactions also occur without metals, as in lightening hair color.
Language
English
Description
The International Ladies Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) strike in the early 1900s was inspired by poor working conditions and low wages. In 1984, Congress bailed out the Chrysler Auto company after Chairman Lee Iaccoca and Douglas Fraser, chief of the United Auto Workers, came to an agreement. Why does Walmart choose low prices over high wages, and how do they get away with it? These stories show how labor unions and corporate managers battle to affect...
Language
English
Description
Tools of quantum mechanics are opening new possibilities for controlling and manipulating light. Paul Kwiat is creating photons "to order" by carefully manipulating their quantum properties. In 2001, Lene Vestergaard Hau stopped a pulse of light in a cloud of atoms and then released it, along with the information it contained. Explore not only how light interacts with matter at the quantum level, but also learn more about the concepts of entanglement...
Language
English
Description
The nation's cycles of economic booms and busts were considered intrinsically capitalistic by Joseph Schumpeter who called them "methodic economic growth," and by Karl Marx who lambasted capitalism as inherently flawed. John Maynard Keynes held that recessions depended on the balance of aggregate demand and aggregate supply. Economist Hyman Minsky provided a promising explanation for the Great Recession of the 21st Century with his theory that the...
Language
English
Description
The first known human story is that of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. Images of artifacts from ancient Iraq mix with beautiful illustrations, dance, and costume to tell of the relations between gods and mortals, the search for friendship, love, and immortality. Featured cast members include Assyriologist Ben Foster, comic book illustrator Jim Starlin, and poet and playwright Yusef Komunyakaa.
Language
English
Description
Professor Brinkley continues his story of twentieth century presidents with a profile of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Brinkley paints a picture of America during the Depression and chronicles some of Roosevelt's programmatic and personal efforts to help the country through its worst economic crisis. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt is at FDR's side and, in many respects, ahead of him as the decade unfolds.
Language
English
Description
This program examines the search for balance between the original Constitution and the need to interpret and adjust it to meet the needs of changing times. It explains the original Jeffersonian-Madisonian debate, the concept of checks and balances, and the stringent procedures for amending the Constitution.
10) Boxplots
Language
English
Description
Using the example of hot dog calorie counts, boxplots help us to visualize the five-number summary and make comparisons between different types of frankfurters.
Language
English
Description
Examines the concept of readiness for learning and illustrates how developmental pathways, including physical, cognitive, and linguistic, all play a part in students' learning. Featured are a first-grade teacher, a seventh- and eighth-grade science teacher, and a senior physics teacher, with expert commentary from University of California at Santa Cruz professor Roland Tharp and Yale University professor James P. Comer.
Language
English
Description
Steel and stockyards are featured in this program as the mighty engine of industrialism thunders forward at the end of the nineteenth century. Professor Miller continues the story of the American Industrial Revolution in New York and Chicago, looking at the lives of Andrew Carnegie, Gustavus Swift, and the countless workers in the packinghouse and on the factory floor.
Language
English
Description
Reductionism is an effective tool in physics, but many real-world challenges resist this approach. Large scale behavior emerges in ways that are difficult to predict from the behavior of individual components. When the computational requirements are too massive or the theories that govern the component parts are inadequate, many complex systems have yielded to the physics of emergence, which seeks organizing principles at the system level.
Language
English
Description
Music can inspire religious devotion, prepare individuals for war, motivate work, enrich play, and stimulate the passions. The musical healing ceremonies of the Kung people in Namibia and Botswana, Epirote music in traditional Greek weddings, and modern rock, gospel, and folk musics all reveal music's power to transform lives.
15) Social Realism
Language
English
Description
This program presents the authors of the American Gilded Age, such as Edith Wharton, and juxtaposes them with social realists like Anzia Yezierska. These writers expose the double world that made up turn-of-the-century New York: that of the elite and that of the poorest of the poor. Which of these realities is the more truly American?
16) Atoms and Light
Language
English
Description
Identification of electrons, protons, and neutrons led to a modern subatomic theory. The study of atomic spectra-the light given off by atoms at definite wavelengths-led to the Bohr atomic model, where electrons at distinct energy levels move between these levels by absorbing and emitting discrete quanta of energy. The measurement of atomic spectra has applications in astrophysics as well as forensic chemistry.
Language
English
Description
As the American character begins to take shape in the early seventeenth century, English settlements develop in New England and Virginia. Their personalities are dramatically different. Professor Miller explores the origins of values, cultures, and economies that have collided in the North and South throughout the American story.
18) Reconstruction
Language
English
Description
Professor Miller begins the program by evoking in word and picture the battlefield after the battle of Gettysburg. With the assassination of President Lincoln, one sad chapter of American history comes to a close. In the fatigue and cynicism of the Civil War's aftermath, Reconstructionism becomes a promise unfulfilled.
19) Masculine Heroes
Language
English
Description
In 1898, Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier as the defining feature of American culture, but American authors had uncovered its significance much earlier. This program turns to three key writers of the early national period, James Fenimore Cooper, John Rollin Ridge, and Walt Whitman, and examines the influential visions of American manhood offered by each author.
Language
English
Description
We all require food, air, and water to survive - which are contaminated to some extent by man-made pollutants. Two studies, one in a rural western mining town and another in a dense urban population, reveal how these exposures impact health, and what can be done to reduce the risks.