Researcher T.J. Stiles describes the last year of Custer's life through the eyes of teenager Bertie Swett. Swett came to know Custer and his wife Libbie at Fort Abraham Lincoln and in Manhattan while America approached a historic turning point. Swett bared witness to the notorious soldier's life as he pushed his career and fortune to the brink of disaster.

Sachiko Kusukawa, professor of the history of science at the University of Cambridge, explores the many ways images served early modern science, from anatomical atlases and botanical illustrations to telescopic and microscopic observations.

Edmund Russell, professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University and the Dibner Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington, discusses the motives, construction, and consequences of the completion of transcontinental telegraph in 1861.

Eugene Wang, professor of art history at Harvard University, discusses the Qianlong Garden in the northeast corner of the Forbidden City. Built in the 1770s, the whole garden space can be seen as a five-act play.

James Walvin, professor emeritus at the University of York and the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington, discusses the widespread global ramifications of African slavery that transformed the cultural habits of millions of people.

Award-winning author Susan Straight is joined by novelist Lisa See for a conversation about Straight's powerful new memoir, In the Country of Women, which traces the lives of six generations of immigrant and multiracial women in her extended family.

Steven Usselman, historian and author, traces how the invention of the deep well centrifugal pump triggered a cascade of change that reshaped the Golden State.

Barbara Lamprecht, an architectural historian, explores Richard Neutra's unique contribution to architecture: designing environments that fused buildings and settings to create "habitats."

Historian Victoria Johnson discusses the life of David Hosack, the attending physician at the Hamilton-Burr duel and founder of the nation's first public botanical garden, today the site of Rockefeller Center.

Peter Moore, writer and lecturer at the University of Oxford, discusses an 18th-century coal collier from a small port in northern England came to define an entire age.

Andrea Wulf, the New York Times bestselling author, discusses her new illustrated book "The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt"—her second work about the intrepid explorer and naturalist.

Allison L. Strom, Carnegie Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories, shows how astronomers use the world's largest telescopes to determine the chemical DNA of even very distant galaxies.

Sean Bradley, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, explores the history and development of an early text on emergency Chinese medicine, the Zhouhou beiji fang 肘後備急方 (Emergency Medicines to Keep on Hand), by the 4th-century alchemist and scholar, Ge Hong 葛洪.

Larry Nittler, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science, discusses his use of microscopic analyses to understand what tiny grains of dust in meteorites can tell us about the evolution of stars and the matter that became the sun and planets.

H.R. Woudhuysen, rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, talks about the market for old books and manuscripts in England in the time of the Tudors and Stuarts in this Zeidberg Lecture.

Rosalie McGurk, fellow in instrumentation at Carnegie Observatories, discusses the latest technological advances to build a new, custom-designed instrument for Carnegie Observatories' Magellan Telescopes that can peer into the Universe with extreme detail.

Sujit Sivasundaram, director of the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge, discusses the historic gardens that existed in Sri Lanka before the arrival of the British and the changes they faced during the colonial period.

C. Pierce Salguero, associate professor of Asian history and religious studies at Penn State Abington, provides an introduction to the principles of Sino-Buddhist medicine, the product of centuries of cross-cultural exchange between medieval India and China.

Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History and Director of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University, discusses her work with the Making and Knowing Project.

Alexander Ji, Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories, leads a short tour of the early history of our Universe, offering intriguing glimpses of an epoch known as Cosmic Dawn, when the first stars and galaxies were born.

Louis Warren, professor of U.S. Western History at the University of California, Davis, explores how Californians remade American ideas of property and power between 1848 and the present.

Authors Bryan Mealer and Joshua Wheeler discuss hardscrabble times, places, and people in Texas and New Mexico.

Karen Lawrence, president of The Huntington and a James Joyce scholar, delivers the annual Founder's Day Lecture on how Joyce wrote "Ulysses" by stealing from everybody else.

Shigehisa Kuriyama, professor of cultural history at Harvard University, discusses the Inshoku yōjō kagami (Rules of Dietary Life), a Japanese woodblock print produced around 1850.

Author Icy Smith and illustrator Gayle Garner Roski discuss their book Mei Ling in China City, based on a true story set in Los Angeles during World War II.