Art & Art History Classes

Follow the Forth Bridge from the Tay disaster and cantilever design to caisson foundations, thermal movement, and the corrosion-control work that keeps a historic railway running.

You are being told you cannot do astronomy without a great telescope. Chambers’s answer is a painter at an attic window, with two and a half inches of glass.

You are in a one-room Kansas house. The grass is gray, the paint has blistered off, Aunt Em's cheeks are gray, and the only thing that is not gray is a little black dog named Toto, who has just bolted under the bed as the cyclone-cellar tra

Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. It is July 1805, in a Petersburg drawing-room, and the war has already arrived as talk.

Chase’s first sentence does not ask how you feel. It says every art, science, action, and moral choice aims at some good — and then asks what a life is for.

Read Antoine Henri Jomini's The Art of War as a study of political purpose, decisive points, movement, supply, and the limits of military formulas.

Follow Charles Oman from Adrianople to Marignano and learn why cavalry, fortresses, formations, and institutions matter together.

Nietzsche’s 1887 polemic traces good and evil, guilt and debt, and the ascetic ideal — a genealogy of moral words, not a museum of timeless virtues.

Easter 1884, in Leamington. Patients keep asking a Midland bone-setter for a pamphlet they can hand to relatives: if the doctors call you a quack, why does the arm move again?

Follow Dorian Gray from a wish for ageless beauty to a portrait that records what charm and privilege try to hide, while Wilde’s revisions expose the pressures around art, desire, and reputation.

A spacious drawing-room, a glass door, autumn trees, and several exits: Ibsen gives Hedda a beautiful room that already feels managed by someone else. After her honeymoon, her small acts of control—curtains, a maid’s hat, the story of the j

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road. You are inside a child's ear before you are inside a novel. The father tells that story through a glass; the boy is baby tuckoo; the wet bed is firs

The winning drawing had no buildable roof on it, and the state started pouring concrete anyway. What followed was six years of failed geometries, one sphere, 30,000 hand-written equations, 1,056,006 tiles — and an architect who walked out i

A bumblebee in a museum drawer carries a label with a place, a date and the name of the man who caught it. Every claim on it is small enough to check. The sentence that arrives after your own bad afternoon carries none of those things.

Landing ropes hit the wet field at Lakehurst. Four minutes later the stern glowed. Follow the doped skin, the hydrogen leak, and the tests that separate a dramatic paint theory from the fire that actually ran.

A meteorite has no single birthday. Follow one from the museum tray to the mass spectrometer: the mineral that keeps the count, the straight line that tests it, and the five rocks that gave Clair Patterson the age of the Earth in 1956.

Two West Point engineers translate a Swiss general in 1862. You learn why a decisive point is not the middle of the field, and why a plan that cannot feed an army is only a drawing.

An All Souls fellow wins the 1884 Lothian Prize by hanging a thousand years on one thread: heavy cavalry rises at Adrianople and falls at Marignano. You learn what Oman can still show you, and where his century shows.

Follow liquid spidroin through glands and spinnerets, then see how molecular structure, drawing, and web design make silk strong, tough, and light.

Follow the Empire State Building from skyline competition and Art Deco setbacks through steel, elevators, logistics, workers, and the 410-day construction campaign.

"Sun Tzu's The Art of War — summary",accepted

Ice grows from vapor in cold clouds, hex lattices sculpt flakes, and storms supply the lift.

What happens in Wilde's only novel, who is in it, the argument about art and appearances underneath it, and the truth about the scandal and the 1895 trials.

Wilde's only novel: the wish and the hidden portrait, Sibyl Vane and Basil Hallward, the argument about art behind it, the 1890 censorship, and its use at the 1895 trials.

Paleoart — the reconstruction of extinct life — looks like fantasy but is one of the most disciplined kinds of drawing there is. Every stroke has to be defended: from the bones, from the closest livin

Chess is designed twice over: the pieces you hold and the moves you play are both works of design, and both are governed by the same quiet principle — clarity through economy, stripping away everythin

Turn your questions into answers! Learn to watch the world carefully and record what you find with tally marks, tidy tables, and labelled drawings — just like a real scientist.

You have a brilliant idea for something to build — but right now it's stuck inside your head where nobody else can see it. This course shows you how to let it out: by making a sketch, a drawing, or a

A conclusion is not just a guess — it's an answer you can back up with what you actually saw. This course teaches young scientists to turn a wonder into a question they can check, to trust evidence ov

Long ago in Greece there were two famous cities that could not have been more different. Athens loved ideas — talking, voting, art, and plays. Sparta loved strength — its people trained to be the toug

Aliens? Slaves? Weigh the real evidence from Giza — the workers' town, their bakeries and bones, their painted gang names, and a 4,500-year-old logbook — and learn to explain who actually built the py

One river built a civilization that lasted 3,000 years. Follow the Nile to see how a single river set Egypt's map, its calendar, its strict rules of art, its towering tombs, and its trade in gold, ced

Buildings are the biggest artifacts we make, and every era is legible in them. Learn to read the great styles — Greek orders, Gothic light, Renaissance revival, the glass box and the sculptural icon —

From a flickering fairground novelty in 1895 to the defining art of the twentieth century. Following one argument — that film is the art form technology keeps reinventing, and each reinvention (sound,

Part guided tour of the Louvre, British Museum, Met, Uffizi and Vatican, part honest look at what museums are for, how they got their collections, the repatriation debate over objects like the Parthen

Three thousand years of Western art as one argument: a picture is a technology a society builds to see what it most needs to see. From Egyptian tombs to the Sistine ceiling, you'll learn why styles ch

Four centuries of art breaking its own rules, told as one argument: the slow dismantling of the Renaissance's fixed-viewpoint 'window.' From Caravaggio's spotlight to Cubism and pure abstraction, you'

Stand in front of the picture you came to see. Seventeen seconds is the usual stop. This is the method for the next eight minutes.

A group of rejected painters who changed what painting is for. Meet Monet, Degas, Renoir, Morisot and their circle; learn what was genuinely radical about painting light instead of objects, why the Sa

The most portable and least forgiving paint, made approachable. Learn to collaborate with water and gravity: work light-to-dark, save your whites, control washes and wet-in-wet, and treat watercolor's

Beautiful writing is slow, deliberate, and learnable. Master the distinction most people miss — calligraphy is writing (the tool makes the line) while lettering is drawing letters — then the tools, th

Four thousand years of dynasties, inventions, and reinventions in one sweep. You'll follow China from the Shang to the People's Republic through its art and artifacts, and come away with a working map

From rice kingdoms to the world's third-largest economy, with two centuries of self-imposed isolation in between. You'll follow Japan through its art, prints, and photographs, and understand the samur

Move into inference: drawing conclusions from samples. You'll build confidence intervals, run hypothesis tests, and read regression output critically.

Understand how ice shaped the landscapes half the world lives on. You'll learn how glaciers form and flow, how ice ages come and go, and how to spot glacial fingerprints — from the Great Lakes to Yose

Discover how heat and the hammer shape iron and steel. You'll understand the forge, the anvil, and the fundamental moves of drawing, bending, and forge-welding metal.

Every material on Earth performs about a hundred times below what its own chemistry promises. Bonding sets a ceiling you can't change; defects decide what you actually get — and the art is knowing whi

Learn to read and sketch the technical drawings that build everything. You'll interpret views, dimensions, and tolerances and understand a real set of plans — as a contract with a stranger, where ever

From lemonade to maps to mixing paint, ratios show how amounts go together. Learn to read a ratio, scale it up fairly, and solve real-world problems.

Learn to read and draw life cycle diagrams, using arrows and circles to show how living things grow and repeat.

Good math helpers have a whole toolbox — counters, a number line, fingers, drawings, and their own brain! Learn to pick the best tool for each kind of problem.

Everything is made of tiny particles! Learn to draw and read the diagrams that show how particles are arranged in solids, liquids, and gases.

Use a protractor to measure and draw angles, and name acute, right and obtuse angles.

Name flat 2D shapes and solid 3D shapes, count faces, edges and vertices, and fold nets into solids.

Learn the scientist's secret code for forces: arrows that show both the direction a force acts and, by their length, how strong it is.

Scientists everywhere draw circuits the same way, using simple symbols. Learn to read circuit diagrams, follow the current through a series circuit, and draw your own neat diagrams.

Draw neat 2D shapes with straight sides, then build 3D models from nets, straws, and clay to see how solids fit together!

Nobody ever photographed a living dinosaur. Discover how scientists and artists rebuild them from bones — even their colors.

Meet the scientists who dig up the past. Follow a fossil from a dusty hillside all the way to a museum lab.

Show adding and taking away with cubes, counters, and drawings, so the math in your head matches something you can actually see.

Solve story problems like 'six apples, two get eaten — how many are left?' using counters, drawings, and missing-number thinking, all the way up to 20.

Use blocks, drawings, and place value to add and subtract three-digit numbers, jump by hundreds in your head, and get lightning-fast with facts up to 20.

Explore illuminated manuscripts, Gothic cathedrals with stained glass and flying buttresses, and the Bayeux Tapestry — and see how medieval art showed off faith and power.

Show adding and taking away with cubes, counters, and drawings, so the math in your head matches something you can actually see.

Solve story problems like 'six apples, two get eaten — how many are left?' using counters, drawings, and missing-number thinking, all the way up to 20.

Meet the gods with animal heads, climb the social pyramid from farmer to pharaoh, and see how tomb paintings and artifacts reveal how Egyptians really lived.

How a music born in New Orleans became America's great original art form, from Louis Armstrong to Miles Davis.

How the Sun paints the polar sky green and red — the documented physics of the aurora, from solar wind to glowing oxygen.

How a mocked band of outsiders — armed with a new insult, paint in tubes, and eight scrappy exhibitions — overturned official art and taught the world to see light, told through the paintings themselves.

How a broken-in cavalryman's 42-foot ring became the circus — and how the art survived its own excesses to reinvent itself.

The failures, the letters, and the color explosion behind the ten years that made Vincent van Gogh — told through the paintings themselves.

How a trick of the eye became an art form — from spinning zoetropes and hand-drawn dinosaurs to Disney's gambles, anime's parallel world, and Pixar's bet on computers.

The notebooks, the paintings, the machines — the documented man behind the myth.

Grab a pencil and discover the big secret of drawing: everything you see is made of circles, squares, and triangles — and you already know how to draw those!

Learn the core skills of drawing — confident lines, simple forms, light and shadow, perspective, proportion, and composition — using the same deliberate practice methods found in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and Albrecht Dürer's studies.

A fast pass through the ancient Chinese classic that treats war as a discipline of foresight, deception, and winning before the fight begins.

Sun Tzu's strategies, Warring States origins, and modern applications

A guided 2-hour journey through Plato’s Republic — justice, the soul, the ideal city, philosopher-kings, and the Allegory of the Cave — told with real, public-domain art.

Persuade, connect, and calm the nerves using Aristotle's playbook.

How ancient rhetoric still wins arguments, votes, and hearts today.

Five centuries of Western art, from Renaissance light to Pop Art irony.

Argue with logic, evidence, and confidence, not just volume.

From the Renaissance to Pop Art: the movements that changed how we see.

How a rebirth of art and ideas launched the modern European mind.

Europe's rebirth of classical learning, art, and science, from 14th-century Florence to 17th-century discovery.

Masterpieces of Art — told through real, archival public-domain images.