In which John Green teaches you about the Wild, Wild, West, which as it turns out, wasn't as wild as it seemed in the movies. When we think of the western expansion of the United States in the 19th century, we're conditioned to imagine...

Hank interviews Administrator Gina McCarthy of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. They discuss getting people to care about climate change, the EPA's goals going into the United Nations Climate Change Conference, and the...

In which John Green investigates war, and what exactly it may or may not be good for. Was war a result of human beings organizing into larger and more complex agricultural social orders, or did war maybe create agriculture and...

After a terminal cancer diagnosis upended 12 years of remission, all Elaine Fong's mother wanted was a peaceful end of life. What she received instead became a fight for the right to decide when. Fong shares the heart-rending journey to...

In which John Green teaches you about the election of 1860. As you may remember from last week, things were not great at this time in US history. The tensions between the North and South were rising, ultimately due to the single issue of...

Today we're going to talk about gambling. Now, gambling is interesting because it could be argued that gambling doesn't even have anything to do with games. It's usually about making money after all - which makes it much closer to work....

In the early 20th century, the US had expanded from coast to coast, but many cities in the southwest still lacked reliable water sources. The Colorado River's erratic flow and frequent floods made it unreliable for agriculture, and the...

It often seems like federal-level politicians care more about creating gridlock than solving the world's problems. So who's actually getting bold things done? City mayors. So, political theorist Benjamin Barber suggests: Let's give them...

In which John Green teaches you about the Bronze Age civilization in what we today call the middle east, and how the vast, interconnected civilization that encompassed Egypt, The Levant, and Mesopotamia came to an end. What's that you...

In 1903, US President Theodore Roosevelt took a camping trip in California's Yosemite Valley with conservationist John Muir. Roosevelt famously loved the outdoors, but Muir had invited him for more than just camping: Yosemite was in...

So, what happens to normal stuff (like water) when it goes to not so normal places? What happens if you take a glass of water to the top of Mt. Everest? Or Space? In this episode of Crash Course Kids, Sabrina shows us how matter is...

Historian and diplomat Joseph Nye gives us the 30,000-foot view of the shifts in power between China and the US, and the global implications as economic, political and "soft" power shifts and moves around the globe.

This week Craig Benzine talks about the importance of elections. But he isn’t going to focus on presidential elections, but instead those of the strongest part of our government: congressional elections. Craig will talk about the...

Today we’re going to talk about the forces that affect a country’s stability. We’ll take a closer look at Costa Rica, Venezuela, Cuba, and Brazil and examine how the cohesiveness of these Latin American countries varies dramatically even...

Quick, think of three words to describe yourself. TIME'S UP! What did you think of? Chances are you thought of descriptive words that we call Properties. In this episode of Crash Course Kids, Sabrina talks about how properties help us...

Kicking off the TED2013 conference, Jennifer Granholm asks a very American question with worldwide implications: How do we make more jobs? Her big idea: Invest in new alternative energy sources. And her big challenge: Can it be done with...

Ever heard of Oobleck? How about Non-Newtonian fluids? Well, today Sabrina is going to show us that things can sometimes behave like a solid, and sometimes like a liquid depending on how much force is applied to them. In this episode of...

In which Hank and John Green teach you about humanity conquering the Earth. Or at least moving from Africa into the rest of the Earth. As human beings spread out across the world and populations grew, humanity reached a critical mass of...

Articles I-III of the United States Constitution allow for three separate branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial), along with a system of checks and balances should any branch get too powerful. Belinda Stutzman...

What was the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics given for? Capturing a single photon of light!

If you don't have any idea what antimatter is, you don't have to feel bad - the brightest minds in the world have only recently begun to understand what it is and how it works. Hank gives us the run down on what we know about antimatter,...

Racism morphs, spreading and hiding behind numerous half-truths and full-blown falsities about where it lives and who embodies it. In this actionable talk, political scientist Candis Watts Smith debunks three widely accepted myths about...

How does a laser really work? It's Bose - Einstein statistics! (photons are bosons)

Seventy thousand years ago, our human ancestors were insignificant animals, just minding their own business in a corner of Africa with all the other animals. But now, few would disagree that humans dominate planet Earth; we've spread to...