Watch, Read, Listen

“The sun is but a morning star.” Walden’s famous last line points eastward to the sunrise; but Henry David Thoreau also wrote of the west, the sunset, and day’s end. To mark Thoreau’s bicentennial year, this conference poses the question: How can we read Thoreau from the sundown side, the far west of his imagination?

Andrew Wetzel discusses how theoretical astrophysics is now revealing how galaxies are formed, using the world’s most powerful supercomputers to simulate this complex process.

John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and the Ritchie Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington, presents an account of Potosí, the great South American silver mine and boomtown that galvanized imperial Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries, fueled the rise of capitalism, destroyed native peoples and cultures en masse, and changed history—for good or ill?

The Huntington has the only known recording of Joseph H. Hazelton’s eyewitness account of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Aric Allen documents the story of this strange artifact.