Delves into the seldom-seen world of Black Santas in America, presenting a narrative that is as heartwarming as it is eye-opening. At the heart of this documentary is the exploration of the complex duality these Santas experience – the joy and magic they bring to families during the holiday season, contrasted sharply with the racism they face in their roles. Through a series of intimate interviews and candid moments, the film paints a vivid picture...

What unique circumstance - unknown before or since in human history - made the Greek Dark Ages so "dark"? And how do we "do" the history of a time and place that is so obscured from our view? Surprisingly, we know a good deal.

Lurching from crisis to crisis, the Athenians accidentally created one of the world's most freewheeling democracies - at least for adult male citizens - even as they were building an empire. How did the whole thing work, and what finally brought it down?

Why couldn't thinkers as brilliant as Plato and Aristotle conceive of a non-imaginary alternative to the polis, and why does the career of one of Aristotle's students mean that in the end, such a shortcoming may not have mattered anyway?

Spartan society was harsh and peculiar, yet many observers at the time and since have found "the Spartan way" strangely compelling. After all, they won the war against Athens, and their victory moved Plato to re-imagine Athenian society in "The Republic". What were the main features of this system, and why did the Spartans embrace it?

The goal of this lecture is to explain why Raphael's famous painting, "The School of Athens," has Plato pointing up and Aristotle pointing down, and why both are defending and extending the work of Socrates.

This lecture is about the foundations on which Roman history rests, including the geography of Italy and the two centuries or so of monarchical rule - ending, tradition says, in 509 B.C. - that the republic overthrew.

What does it mean to speak of the "constitution" of the Roman republic? What are the essential offices, procedures, and ideals involved, and how did the whole thing really work?

By the time the republic found that it didn't merely possess but was an empire, Roman rule extended from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia, and from the North Sea to the Sahara Desert. How and why did this happen?

To understand how culturally creative and important the principate was, you need only reflect that what today strikes the popular imagination as quintessentially "Roman" is a product of this period (republican Rome was a city of wood).