A’Lelia Bundles, Emmy-winning NBC news producer and journalist shares stories from her best-selling book about her great-great grandmother, Madame C.J. Walker, one of the first black women entrepreneurs of the 20th century.
The child of former slaves, Walker rose from uneducated field hand to internationally successful business woman, political activist and philanthropist by creating a line of hair products for black women.
What is the legacy of Madame C.J. Walker?
A’Lelia Bundles is at work on her fifth book–The Joy Goddess of Harlem–a biography of her great-grandmother’s international travels, philanthropy, parties and friendships with some of the most famous musicians, writers, and artists of the 1920s. On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker was named the 2001 best book on black women’s history by the Association of Black Women Historians.
Recorded 2002 at the National History Museum, Lexington, MA
As the latest Covid variants continue to reveal themselves, COVID-19 has proved to be the biggest global public health and economic challenge in history. Although it has posed the same threat across the globe, countries have responded very differently and some are faring better than others.
Peter Baldwin, Professor of Comparative History at UCLA, has written books on a variety of topics including 19th century European public health policies and the global response to AIDS.
In his latest book is “FIGHTING THE FIRST WAVE: How the Coronavirus was tackled differently across the globe”, Baldwin shows that how nations responded depended above all on the political tools available – how firmly could the authorities order citizens’ lives and how willingly would they be obeyed?
Professor Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health where he is a faculty member at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics joins conversation.
In Asia, nations quarantined the infected and their contacts. In the Americas and Europe they shut down their economies, hoping to squelch the virus’s spread. In some countries, like England, there were fines for disobeying lockdown limits. Others, above all Sweden, responded with a light touch, putting their faith in social consensus over coercion. Some countries have now changed strategy due to recent surges in the Delta variant in Australia, Canada, Europe and elsewhere.
This forum is part of our TRANSFORMATIONS series, which has been examining the various ways in which the pandemic has acted as an agent of change. We are grateful for the generous support of the City of Cambridge
Cambridge Forum provides free and open discussions about the pertinent issues and ideas confronting us, in the world today.
Afro-American scholar and philosopher K. Anthony Appiah considers the idea of a community founded on the principles of inclusion, hope, and mutual respect, a community that transcends the polarizing rhetoric of racism.Ā
Can America ever become such a beloved community as Martin Luther King Jr. imagined it, a society free of prejudice where racial differences would be erased and forgotten?
K. Anthony AppiahĀ is a philosopher,Ā cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and AfricanĀ intellectual history. Appiah currently holds an appointment at theĀ NYU Department of PhilosophyĀ andĀ NYU’sSchool of Law.
Drawing on a broad range of disciplines, including history, literature, and philosophyāas well as the author’s own experience of life on three continentsāCosmopolitanismĀ is a moral manifesto for a planet we share with more than six billion strangers.
Race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality: they clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. But to what extent do āidentitiesā constrain our freedom, our ability to make an individual life, and to what extent do they enable our individuality?
The pandemic was a lethal litmus test for relationships of all kinds. A motley assortment of people found themselves locked down together. Some saw the deaths of family or friends. Others were deprived of seeing neighbors, co-workers, school friends or they lost the support of community groups like choirs. As we emerge from the Covid cocoon, a significant number of relationships have cemented or ended but several million Americans have also acquired pets.
Recorded 6/8/2020
What relationships did you acquire or lose in the past year? Has your emotional life shifted irrevocably? Will things return to pre-pandemic conditions or are these new work/life changes here to stay? Join our discussion and tell us about your experiences over the past year ā for better or worse?
Rich Slatcher is Professor of Psychology at the University of Georgia. His research and teaching focusses on understanding the effects of peopleās close relationships on their health and well-being. He currently oversees the Love in the Time of COVID project to examine the global effects of the pandemic on peopleās social relationships.
Mark Cushing is a lawyer and author of Pet Nation, an inside look at how over the past 20 years, pets have become treasured members of the American family.
Has America’s love affair with pets resulted in a cultural transformation?
This forum is part of our TRANSFORMATIONS series, which has been examining the various ways in which the pandemic has acted as an agent of change. We are grateful for the generous support of the City of Cambridge
Cambridge Forum provides free and open discussions about the pertinent issues and ideas confronting us, in the world today.
Many of the problems we face in the world today ā the global pandemic, the economic crisis, political violence of the kind that rocked the US Capitol in January ā are the result of our severe information disorder. How do we create a universe of truthful and verifiable information, available to everyone?
We are swimming in a sea of lies, but what can we do about it? MIT Open Learningās Peter Kaufman has some suggestions. For starters, it might be time to think anew about our rights to knowledge, our approach to the public sphere, and our concept of information and the public good.
In his book, The New Enlightenment And The Fight To Free Knowledge, Kaufman fills us in on the history of knowledge and the price that was exacted to disseminate it.
What can we do to counter the powerful forces that have purposely crippled our efforts to share knowledge widely and freely?
Recorded April 27, 2021
Peter Kaufman is a writer, teacher, and documentary producer who works at MIT Open Learning.
He’s joined by Casey Davis-Kaufman (no relation), Associate Director of GBH Archives and Project Manager for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
This program is the third in our TRANSFORMATIONS series, which has been examining the various ways in which the pandemic has acted as an agent of change. Schools and libraries have been closed for a year, has this made a big difference to your life and the lives of your children; do you feel deprived?
The Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown created a slew of emotional challenges for everyone, from toddlers to seniors. Now that our social skills have atrophied, how will be retrain ourselves to interact with each other again?
MIT Professor Sherry Turkle helps us understand how we might rejuvenate our senses and flex our empathy muscles once again. In her new memoir, The Empathy Diaries Turkle discusses her family, her upbringing and intellectual development to explain how these elements shaped her lifeās work. Turkle explores a counterintuitive pattern observed across many decades devoted to keeping people connected: that empathy and connection can arrive when we feel the most alone and unfamiliar. So, there is hope in sight.
Dr. Todd Essig is a psychoanalyst with a private practice in NYC. Known internationally for workshops on the possibilities and limitations of teletherapies, he is also Co-Chair of the American Psychoanalytic Associationās Covid-19 Response Team.
Hear a powerful call to action for achieving equality in leadership from Julie Gillard, former Prime Minister of Australia (2010 – 2013) as she reflects on her new book Women and Leadership.
Women make up fewer than ten per cent of national leaders worldwide, and behind this eye-opening statistic lies a pattern of unequal access to power. Through conversations with some of the world’s most powerful and interesting women–including Jacinda Ardern, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Christine Lagarde, Michelle Bachelet, and Theresa May–Women and Leadership explores gender bias and asks why there aren’t more women in leadership roles.
It’s time to trade in shortsightedness for long-term thinking. That’s according to author and philosopher Roman Krznaric, who writes about the power of ideas to change society in his new book The Good Ancestor.
Recorded January 6, 2021
Krznaric outlines practical ways we can retrain our brains to think of the long view, including what he calls “Deep-Time Humility” (recognizing our lives as a cosmic eyeblink) and “Cathedral Thinking” (starting projects that will take more than one lifetime to complete). His aim is to widen our focus, to inspire more ātime rebelsā like Greta Thunbergāto shift our allegiance from this generation to all humanityāin short, to save our planet and our future.
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If we are born to walk and run, why do most of us take it easy whenever possible? And how do we make sense of all the conflicting, confusing, anxiety-provoking information about rest, physical activity and exercise?
Professor Daniel Lieberman, Human Evolutionary Biologist at Harvard University has written a new book entitled EXERCISED: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding.
The notion of exercise is modern, weird and unpleasant, so the best way to do more is to find something you enjoy.
WADE DAVIS recently attracted global attention with his opinion piece in Rolling Stone magazine raising this question: Does Covid-19 signal the end of the American era? Why did he ask this disturbingly profound question and why has it struck a chord around the world?
Wade Davis is an internationally acclaimed anthropologist, who currently holds the Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk, at the University of British Columbia. He holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University.