Demographic History
sort by: Relevancy | Title | Rating try advanced search for more options
-
This lecture deals with Paradise IV, VI and X. At the beginning of Paradise IV, the pilgrim raises two questions to which the remainder of the canto is devoted. The first concerns Piccarda (Paradise III) who was constrained to break her religious vows. The second concerns the arrangement of the souls within the stars. The common thread that emerges from Beatrice's reply is the relationship between intellect and will. Just as Piccarda's...more
-
In this lecture, Professor Mazzotta examines Paradise XVIII-XIX and XXI-XXII. In Paradise XVIII, Dante enters the Heaven of Jupiter, where the souls of righteous rulers assume the form of an eagle, the emblem of the Roman Empire. The Eagle's outcry against the wickedness of Christian kings leads Dante to probe the boundaries of divine justice by looking beyond the confines of Christian Europe. By contrasting the political with the moral...more
-
A perennial favorite is the idea of time travel. What would happen if we could go back in time and alter the future a la “Back to the Future”? The great narrative of the history of life has a complexity rife with subplots and twists, many of which we will never uncover. Yet somehow the story of life on Earth began with a prebiotic ooze and ended with the awe-inspiring diversity of life we see today – including us. But like any story,...more
-
Anand Chandrasekaran, Producer of Tapestries of Hope, tells the tale of a small soap maker who realized that the gum they were giving away as a promotional item began to outshine their core product. The company had to make a bold decision to focus on what's selling, rather than what they deemed their core competency, and the rest is entrepreneurial history. Chandrasekaran's lesson is that we should keep ourselves receptive to new ideas...more
-
Neeleman talks about how JetBlue has been able to succeed in a really bad industry. The airline industry has lost more money than it has ever made. In the beginning of human transportation, be it steam ship lines or railroads, there are very few companies who have survived. It has never been good business to move people. It was with that backdrop that Neeleman decided that he wanted to start an airline.
-
Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard (1999-2005), talks about the importance of being able to distill enormous amounts of information. She explains how her experience in taking courses in Medieval History has helped her look at information selectively, a skill she has successfully applied in her corporate life.
-
The history of life and evolution has been characterized by several key events. These events can be grouped as new hierarchal levels of selection coming into play, as biological units coming together in symbiosis and specialization, or in a number of other ways. Other important events are situations of conflict resolution or information transmission, from the genetic to the cultural level.
-
The advertiser doesn't care what media property they're buying online; they simply want to reach their demographic. Yahoo! President Sue Decker explains how the company did not make the most of its competitive advantage to bring the customer to the right ads and how they were late to measure their advertising's effectiveness. Decker further explains how the company is changing its capabilities today, and improving its speed of delivering...more
-
This lecture focuses on the cantos of Cacciaguida (Paradise XV-XVII). The pilgrim's encounter with his great-great grandfather brings to the fore the relationship between history, self and exile. Through his ancestor's mythology of their native Florence, Dante is shown to move from one historiographic mode to another, from the grandeur of epic to the localism of medieval chronicles. Underlying both is the understanding of history in terms...more
-
-
-
Having dealt with the role of violence and the Supreme Court in bringing about the end of Reconstruction in his last lecture, Professor Blight now turns to the role of national electoral politics, focusing in particular on the off-year Congressional election of 1874 and the Presidential election of 1876. 1874 saw the return of the Democrats to majority status in the Senate and the House of Representatives, as voters sick of corruption and...more
