The Great Courses

What is our species' greatest invention? Medicine, computers, space travel? Not even close. The innovation that underlies each of our past achievements and those we still aspire to is language....

Grammar! For many of us, the word triggers memories of finger-wagging schoolteachers, and of wrestling with the ambiguous and complicated rules of using formal language....

Learn how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today....

In an exciting partnership with the Smithsonian, The Great Courses presents these 24 lectures that offer an unforgettable tour of Japanese life and culture....

Education can be enriching and transformative. It can also be downright excruciating—even demoralizing. When it comes to learning, why are some of us lovers and some of us haters? Welcome to the world of educational psychology....

Even after deciphering its hieroglyphs, and marveling at its scarabs, mummies, obelisks, and sphinxes, Egyptian civilization remains one of history's most mysterious....

Homer’s Odyssey has become a foundational text of the Western literary canon. At first, its focus on the heroic journey of Odysseus appears to fit the mold of other ancient Greek e….

In the six lectures of How to Bring Your Creative Ideas to Life, Dr. Sharon Kim will dig into how creativity emerges and evolves, how individuals generate and refine ideas, and what it takes to bring yours to life.

The power of an effective speech is undeniable. It has the capacity to engage, inform, motivate, and create change in an audience - and in the world....

Words. We use them all the time, every day, mostly without giving them much thought at all. We take for granted that they’re here at our disposal whenever we need them. But if you’ve ever wished you could communicate more effectively, words are the place to start....

England: From the Fall of Rome to the Norman Conquest takes you through the mists of time to the rugged landscape of the British Isles. Over the course of 24 sweeping lectures, Professor Jennifer Paxton of The Catholic University of America surveys the forging of a great nation....

One of the greatest scientific feats of our era is the astonishing progress made in understanding biology-a progress to which the period we are living in right now has contributed the most....

Western philosophy is a vast intellectual tradition, the product of thousands of years of revolutionary thought. But to understand the Western intellectual tradition is to get only half the story....

These 24 lectures bring to life the insights of thinkers and artists who have grappled with these questions of valuation for thousands of years....

During the 229-year period from 1485 to 1714, England transformed itself from a minor feudal state into what has been called "the first modern society"....

The story of Italian art is one of the greatest in human history: a golden thread that begins in ancient Rome, weaves through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and continues to shape the way we understand beauty, faith, and the world today.

This course offers an overview of the English language that is literary, historical, cultural, political, and scientific in its scope....

In The Great Courses’ The Story of the Mediterranean World, you’ll relive the fabulous history of a critical crossroads of human civilization.

Whether you’re looking for proof of alien life or seeking the meaning of life here on Earth, you’ll find that the domain of philosophy and the realm of the weird converge in surprising ways via the six lectures of From Aliens to Bigfoot: A Philosopher’s Guide to the Strange.

Despite our best efforts, we're all vulnerable to believing things without using logic or having proper evidence....