Crash Course
Freud, Jung, Luke Skywalker, and the Psychology of Myth: Crash Course World Mythology #40
In which Mike Rugnetta teaches you about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and how a lot of their work was influenced by myth and mythology. While Freud and Jung aren't quite as revered as they once were, they were undoubtedly a huge...
Crash Course
Crash Course World Mythology Preview
Crash Course Mythology with Mike Rugnetta is here, and we have the preview video to prove it. We'll be uploading Friday afternoons to fulfill all your hunger for foundational cultural stories and whatnot.
Crash Course
The Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Theater #41
In the 1920s, there was a blossoming of all kinds of art made by African Americans in the New York neighborhood Harlem. Let's call it a renaissance. While all the arts were having a great run, some extremely interesting things were...
Crash Course
The Birth of Off Broadway: Crash Course Theater #47
By the middle of the 20th century, the epicenter of American theater, the Broadway theater district in New York, was getting to be a pretty staid and commercial place. There was a lot of money to be made from prestige plays and dancing...
Crash Course
Synge, Wilde, Shaw, and the Irish Renaissance: Crash Course Theater #36
The Irish Renaissance in the early 20th century included a wealth of new plays written both in Ireland, and by Irish ex-patriots elsewhere. W.B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and J.M. Synge were creating a new national theater of Ireland...
Crash Course
Symbolism, Realism, and a Nordic Playwright Grudge Match: Crash Course Theater #33
It's a Scandinavian grudge match on Crash Course Theater. We're looking at a couple of the key movements in European theater that deeply influenced the modern theater of today. We'll take a close look at two of the most radical and...
Crash Course
Realism Gets Even More Real: Crash Course Theater #32
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, theater was evolving rapidly in Europe. Impresarios like Georg II, Duke of the Duchy of Saxe Meinengen (in what is now Germany), were pushing theater troupes to new heights of realism. New...
Crash Course
Poor Unfortunate Theater: Crash Course Theater #48
Poor Theater and Theater of the Oppressed were two sort of concurrent movements that shared some of the same aims. Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theater eschewed the use of lighting, props, costumes, makeup, and many of the other trappings of...
Crash Course
Into Africa and Wole Soyinka: Crash Course Theater #49
It's difficult to talk about African theater thanks to colonialism. Pre-colonial Africa was home to many spoken languages, and not nearly as many written languages. The chain of oral tradition was broken by colonial policies, and so many...
Crash Course
Futurism and Constructivism: Crash Course Theater #39
It's time to go Back...to the Future. By which I mean, we're going back into the past to talk about Futurism. Which seems like it would be cool, but it was started by this terrible guy Martinetti, who also wrote the Italian Fascist...
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Federal Theatre and Group Theater: Crash Course Theater #42
The 1930s in the United States were pretty bad for employment in all industries, and the theater was no exception. As part of Roosevelt's New Deal, the Works Progress Administration created a division called the Federal Theatre Project....
Crash Course
Dada, Surrealism, and Symbolism: Crash Course Theater #37
Watch. Dime. Develop. Powder. Pantry. Dirt. That's right, it's time for a dip into the random, because we're talking about the Dada theater that grew out of Symbolism, and the Surrealist theater that followed Dada. You'll learn about...
Crash Course
Broadway Book Musicals: Crash Course Theater #50
This is it! We're going out with a singing, dancing look at the Broadway Book Musical. Oklahoma! On the Town! Annie Get Your Gun! Also, just Annie! Today you'll learn about the development of the Broadway Book Musical in the late 19th...
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Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theater: Crash Course Theater #44
Are you ready to learn something about the world? Then you're ready for Bertolt Brecht, and his ideas about Epic Theater. Brecht wanted to lean into the idea of theater as a tool to upset and educate the world about stuff like the...
Crash Course
Little Theater and American Avant Garde: Crash Course Theater #40
In the early 20th century United States, big melodramatic productions were on Broadway, and everywhere across the country. Which inevitably led to an Avant-Garde backlash. An interesting part of the backlash was Little Theater, a...
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Expressionist Theater: Crash Course Theater #38
Join us here, in the darkness. Our theater journey takes us into the heart of expressionism today, as playwrights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries explored the limits of human beings' tolerance for a mechanized, industrial...
Crash Course
Crash Course Theater and Drama Preview!
We're back! This year Mike Rugnetta is teaching you about theater and drama. Are you in drama club? Want to know about the history of theater? Maybe learn some theater history? Have a lot of fun? This is the series for you! Over the next...
Crash Course
Chekhov and the Moscow Art Theater: Crash Course Theater #34
Get ready for Russian modernism. Mike is teaching you about the playwrighting of Catherine the Great, Anton Chekhov's plays, the Moscow Art Theater, and the acting theories of Stanislavski. It's all very real, and very modern. From a...
Crash Course
Broadway, Seriously: Crash Course Theater #46
We're going to Broadway, everybody, and it's not going to be that fun. In fact, it's going to be a very serious experience with lots of powerful social commentary and indictments of life in America in the 1950s. So be prepared to look at...
Crash Course
Beckett, Ionesco, and the Theater of the Absurd: Crash Course Theater #45
Get ready to get weird. Mike Rugnetta teaches you about the Theater of the Absurd, a 1950s theatrical reaction to the dire world events of the 1940s. You'll learn about Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and the theatrical...
Crash Course
Antonin Artaud and the Theater of Cruelty: Crash Course Theater #43
I don't mean it mean, but today we're going to be cruel. It's the fun-loving Theater of Cruelty, which was pioneered by the genius Antonin Artaud in France during the inter-war period in twentieth century. The Theater of Cruelty was...
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Commerce, Agriculture, and Slavery: Crash Course European History
We've been talking a lot about kings, and queens, and wars, and religious upheaval for most of this series, but let's take a moment to zoom out, and look at the ways that individuals' lives were changing in the time span we've covered so...
Crash Course
Political Thought in the Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Black American History
When we think about the Harlem Renaissance, the arts come immediately to mind. But new political theories were also blossoming during this time. We'v talked about Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, but today we'll get into some...
Crash Course
Crash Course European History Preview
John Green is teaching history again. This time, we're looking at the history of Europe in 50 episodes. We'll start at the tail end of the so called Middle Ages, and look at how Europe's place in the world has developed and changed in...