Get the History of the World in 46 Lectures: A Free Online Course from Columbia University

When you dive into our col­lec­tion of 1,700 Free Online Cours­es, you can begin an intel­lec­tu­al jour­ney that can last for many months, if not years. The col­lec­tion lets you drop into the class­room of lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties (like Stan­ford, Har­vard, MIT and Oxford) and essen­tial­ly audit their cours­es for free. You get to be a fly on the wall and soak up what­ev­er knowl­edge you want. All you need is an inter­net con­nec­tion and some free time on your hands.

Today, we’re fea­tur­ing two class­es taught by Pro­fes­sor Richard Bul­li­et at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, which will teach you the his­to­ry of the world in 46 lec­tures. The first course, His­to­ry of the World to 1500 CE (avail­able on YouTube and iTunes Video) takes you from pre­his­toric times to 1500, the cusp of ear­ly moder­ni­ty. The ori­gins of agri­cul­ture; the Greek, Roman and Per­sian empires; the rise of Islam and Chris­t­ian medieval king­doms; trans­for­ma­tions in Asia; and the Mar­itime rev­o­lu­tion — they’re all cov­ered here.

In the sec­ond course, His­to­ry of the World Since 1500 CE (find on YouTube), Bul­li­et focus­es on the rise of colo­nial­ism in the Amer­i­c­as and India; his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ments in Chi­na, Japan and Korea; the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion; the Ottoman Empire; the emer­gence of Social Dar­win­ism; and var­i­ous key moments in 20th cen­tu­ry his­to­ry.

Bul­li­et helped write the pop­u­lar text­book The Earth and its Peo­ples: A Glob­al His­to­ry, and it serves as the main text­book for the course. Above, we’re start­ing you off with Lec­ture 2, which moves from the Ori­gins of Agri­cul­ture to the First Riv­er — Val­ley Civ­i­liza­tions, cir­ca 8000–1500 B.C.E. The first lec­ture deals with method­olog­i­cal issues that under­pin the course.

Once you get the big pic­ture with Pro­fes­sor Bul­li­et, you can find more class­es in our list of Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es, a part of our ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Big His­to­ry: David Chris­t­ian Cov­ers 13.7 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry in 18 Min­utes

A Crash Course in World His­to­ry

The Com­plete His­to­ry of the World (and Human Cre­ativ­i­ty) in 100 Objects

The Pod­cast His­to­ry of Our World Will Take You From Cre­ation Myths to (Even­tu­al­ly) the Present Day

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Carnegie Hall MOOC Will Teach You How to Listen to Orchestras (Free)

In advance of its May 2013 con­cert series, Carnegie Hall has cre­at­ed a Mas­sive Open Online Course (MOOC) that will teach stu­dents how to lis­ten to orches­tras. The course, S4MU — short for Spring 4 Music Uni­ver­si­ty — is premised on the idea that “lis­ten­ing is an art itself,” and that you won’t over­come a tin ear by study­ing music the­o­ry alone. Start­ing on April 1, the four-week course will be taught by Bal­ti­more Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra con­duc­tor Marin Alsop; Art­sJour­nal edi­tor Dou­glas McLen­nan (seen above); com­pos­er Jen­nifer Hig­don; vocal­ist Storm Large; and con­duc­tor Leonard Slatkin. Like all oth­er MOOCs, the course is free. You can reserve your spot in the class right here.

Spring 4 Music Uni­ver­si­ty has been added to our com­plete list of MOOCs, where you will find 45 cours­es start­ing in April.

Thanks goes to Max­ine for the heads up on this new offer­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Bernstein’s Mas­ter­ful Lec­tures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Record­ed in 1973)

85,000 Clas­si­cal Music Scores (and Free MP3s) on the Web

Bob­by McFer­rin Shows the Pow­er of the Pen­ta­ton­ic Scale

Yale’s Open Course “Lis­ten­ing to Music”

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Creative Commons Announces “School of Open” with Courses to Focus on Digital Openness

Just in time to cel­e­brate Open Edu­ca­tion Week, here comes a new ini­tia­tive, the School of Open, a learn­ing envi­ron­ment focused on increas­ing our under­stand­ing of “open­ness” and the ben­e­fits it brings to cre­ativ­i­ty and edu­ca­tion in the dig­i­tal age.

Devel­oped by the col­lab­o­ra­tive edu­ca­tion plat­form Peer to Peer Uni­ver­si­ty (P2PU) with orga­ni­za­tion­al sup­port from Cre­ative Com­mons, the School of Open aims to spread under­stand­ing of the pow­er of this brave new world through free online class­es.

We hear about it all the time: Uni­ver­sal access to research, edu­ca­tion and culture—all good things, with­out a doubt—made pos­si­ble by things like open source soft­ware, open edu­ca­tion­al resources and the like.

But what are these var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties and what do they mean? How can we all learn more and get involved?

School of Open has rolled the con­ver­sa­tion back to square one so that under­stand­ing the basics is easy. Through a list of new cours­es cre­at­ed by users and experts, peo­ple can learn more about what “open­ness” means and how to apply it. There are stand-alone cours­es on copy­right, writ­ing for Wikipedia, the col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment of open sci­ence, and the process behind mak­ing open video.

These free cours­es start March 18 (sign up by click­ing the “start course” but­ton by Sun­day, March 17):

These free cours­es are open for you to take at any time:

The approach at P2PU encour­ages peo­ple to work togeth­er, assess one another’s work, and pro­vide con­struc­tive feed­back. It’s a great place to learn how to design your own course, because the design process is bro­ken down step-by-step, and course con­tent is vet­ted by users and P2PU staff. The tuto­r­i­al shows you how the process works.

P2PU is also a place to learn more about what is open con­tent and what is not. Par­tic­i­pants in the ongo­ing course Open Detec­tive learn to iden­ti­fy open source media and then demon­strate mas­tery by mak­ing some­thing of their own using only open con­tent. What if you’re real­ly, real­ly proud of the resource you cre­ate in Open Detec­tive? Take it to the next lev­el and get a Cre­ative Com­mons license to make your work avail­able with­out giv­ing up full copy­right. You guessed it, there’s a course for that too.

Open Edu­ca­tion Week is in full swing (through Mon­day the 18th). There’s a full sched­ule of webi­na­rs to check out, includ­ing dis­cus­sions about the impli­ca­tions of open access for polit­i­cal struc­tures like the World Bank, and the impact of open, glob­al teach­ing in Syr­ia.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Total Noob to Learn­ing Online? P2PU’s Peer-to-Peer Cours­es Hold Your Hand

700 Free Online Cours­es

A Meta List of MOOCs

What Entered the Pub­lic Domain in 2013? Zip, Nada, Zilch!

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her web­site at .

A Master List of 700 Free Courses From Great Universities

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Dur­ing recent months, we’ve been busy enhanc­ing what’s now a list of 700 Free Online Cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties. Here’s the low­down: This mas­ter list lets you down­load free cours­es from schools like Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Har­vard and UC Berke­ley. Gen­er­al­ly, the cours­es can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or uni­ver­si­ty web sites. Right now you’ll find 85 cours­es in Phi­los­o­phy60 in His­to­ry80 in Com­put­er Sci­ence35 in Physics, and that’s just begin­ning to scratch the sur­face. Most of the cours­es were recent­ly pro­duced. But, in some cas­es, we’ve lay­ered in lec­ture series by famous intel­lec­tu­als record­ed years ago. You can lis­ten to these lec­tures when­ev­er you want, and pret­ty much wher­ev­er you want. Here are some high­lights from the com­plete list.

  • African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle – YouTube – iTunes – Clay Car­son, Stan­ford
  • Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing for Begin­ners - iTunes Video — iTunes Audio — Web Video & Audio — Mar­i­anne Tal­bot, Oxford
  • Grow­ing Up in the Uni­verse – YouTube – Richard Dawkins, Oxford
  • Human Behav­ioral Biol­o­gy – iTunes Video – YouTube – Robert Sapol­sky, Stan­ford
  • Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment (Hebrew Bible) – Down­load Course – Chris­tine Hayes, Yale.
  • Heidegger’s Being & Time – iTunes — Hubert Drey­fus, UC Berke­ley
  • Har­vard’s Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Sci­ence – YouTube — iTunes — Course Page – David Malan, Har­vard
  • Invi­ta­tion to World Lit­er­a­ture – Web Site — David Dam­rosch, Har­vard
  • iPhone Appli­ca­tion Devel­op­ment in iO6 — Video iTunes — Paul Hegar­ty, Stan­ford
  • Jus­tice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? – YouTube — iTunes Video — Web Site — Michael Sandel, Har­vard
  • Niet­zsche, Beyond Good and Evil - Web Site — Leo Strauss, Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go
  • Phi­los­o­phy of Lan­guage – iTunes – John Sear­le, UC Berke­ley
  • Physics for Future Pres­i­dents – YouTube – Richard Muller, UC Berke­ley
  • Quan­tum Elec­tro­dy­nam­ics – Web Site - Richard Feyn­man, Pre­sent­ed at Uni­ver­si­ty of Auck­land
  • Sci­ence, Mag­ic and Reli­gion iTunes Video — YouTube – Courte­nay Raiai, UCLA
  • The Amer­i­can Nov­el Since 1945 – YouTube – iTunes Audio – iTunes Video — Down­load Course – Amy Hunger­ford, Yale
  • The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law (1964)YouTube — Richard Feyn­man, Cor­nell
  • The Art of Liv­ing – Web Site – Team taught, Stan­ford
  • World War and Soci­ety in the 20th Cen­tu­ry: World War II — Mul­ti­ple For­mats — Charles S. Maier, Har­vard

Again, the com­plete list of Free Online Cours­es is here. And, in the mean­time, if you’re look­ing for a good list of MOOCs, we’ve got you cov­ered there too. 80 new MOOCs, many offer­ing cer­tifi­cates, will get start­ed in the next 60 days.

Find us on Face­bookTwit­ter and Google Plus and we’ll make it easy to share intel­li­gent media with your friends! 

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Learn to Code with Harvard’s Intro to Computer Science Course And Other Free Tech Classes

I’ll con­fess, when it comes to com­put­ers, I’m pret­ty much strict­ly a user. And these days, with the poten­tial free­dom and cre­ative­ly afford­ed by open access soft­ware, the end­less hacks for vir­tu­al­ly every­thing, and the avail­abil­i­ty of free online com­put­er class­es, that seems like kind of a lame admis­sion. So I’m tempt­ed to rec­ti­fy my pro­gram­ming igno­rance by push­ing through what promis­es to be a rig­or­ous intro to com­put­er sci­ence, CS50, Harvard’s intro­duc­to­ry course for both majors and non-majors alike. The course offers a broad knowl­edge base to build on, as you can see from the descrip­tion below:

Top­ics include abstrac­tion, algo­rithms, encap­su­la­tion, data struc­tures, data­bas­es, mem­o­ry man­age­ment, secu­ri­ty, soft­ware devel­op­ment, vir­tu­al­iza­tion, and web­sites. Lan­guages include C, PHP, and JavaScript plus SQL, CSS, and HTML. Prob­lem sets inspired by real-world domains of biol­o­gy, cryp­tog­ra­phy, finance, foren­sics, and gam­ing. Designed for con­cen­tra­tors and non-con­cen­tra­tors alike, with or with­out pri­or pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence.

Har­vard has made this course avail­able free to anyone—via YouTubeiTunes, and the course page—with a series of lec­tures filmed dur­ing the Fall 2011 semes­ter. The class is led by David J. Malan, an enthu­si­as­tic young pro­fes­sor and Senior Lec­tur­er on Com­put­er Sci­ence at Har­vard, and him­self a prod­uct of Harvard’s Com­put­er Sci­ence pro­gram. Pro­fes­sor Malan has also offered Harvard’s CS50 as a MOOC through edX. In the intro­duc­to­ry lec­ture to CS50 (above), Malan promis­es that “this is one of those rare cours­es that actu­al­ly squeezes your brain so much and your sched­ule so much that by the end of the semes­ter you actu­al­ly feel smarter.”

Pro­fes­sor Malan has become some­thing of a hot shot at Har­vard. His mission—to make com­put­er sci­ence more acces­si­ble and far less daunt­ing. He’s done this in part by gen­er­ous­ly mak­ing sev­er­al of his cours­es avail­able free online to non-Har­vard stu­dents. In addi­tion to CS50, Malan offers the fol­low­ing cours­es for those who want to pur­sue pro­gram­ming or web design fur­ther:

And if you still need some sell­ing on the val­ues and virtues of com­put­er sci­ence, watch Malan below deliv­er an inspir­ing talk called “And the Geek Shall Inher­it the Earth” at Har­vard Thinks Big 2010 (Harvard’s ver­sion of TED Talks).

We’ve added Har­vard’s CS50 to the Com­put­er Sci­ence sec­tion of our list of 750 Free Online Cours­es and our list of 150 Free Busi­ness Cours­es.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Com­put­er Sci­ence: Free Cours­es

Codecademy’s Free Cours­es Democ­ra­tize Com­put­er Pro­gram­ming

Learn to Build iPhone & iPad Apps with Stanford’s Free Course, Cod­ing Togeth­er

Josh Jones is a writer, edi­tor, and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

Start Your Startup with Free Stanford Courses and Lectures

Last spring, Ken Aulet­ta wrote a pro­file of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty in the pages of The New York­er, which start­ed with the ques­tion: “There are no walls between Stan­ford and Sil­i­con Val­ley. Should there be?” It’s per­haps an unavoid­able ques­tion when you con­sid­er a star­tling fact cit­ed by the arti­cle. Accord­ing the uni­ver­si­ty itself, five thou­sand com­pa­nies “trace their ori­gins to Stan­ford ideas or to Stan­ford fac­ul­ty and stu­dents.” The list includes tech giants like Google, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Cis­co Sys­tems, Sun Microsys­tems, eBay, Net­flix, Elec­tron­ic Arts, Intu­it, Sil­i­con Graph­ics, LinkedIn, and E*Trade. And stay tuned, there’s more to come.

Stan­ford is one of Amer­i­ca’s lead­ing incu­ba­tors, and the rear­ing of young entre­pre­neurs does­n’t take place by mere osmo­sis. No, Stan­ford stu­dents can take cours­es focused on entre­pre­neur­ship, which give them access to sea­soned entre­pre­neurs and financiers. If you head over to eCorner, short for Entre­pre­neur­ship Cor­ner (WebiTunesYouTube), you can watch “2000 free videos and pod­casts fea­tur­ing entre­pre­neur­ship and inno­va­tion thought lead­ers” who have paid vis­its to Stan­ford. Per­haps you’ll rec­og­nize a few of the names: Mark Zucker­bergLar­ry PageMaris­sa May­er? Reid Hoff­man (above)?

Or, if you go to YouTube and iTunes, you’ll gain access to entire cours­es ded­i­cat­ed to teach­ing stu­dents the mod­ern art of start­ing star­tups. Two cours­es (both housed in our col­lec­tion of 650 Free Online Cours­es and our col­lec­tion of 150 Free Online Busi­ness Cours­es) war­rant your atten­tion. First, Chuck Eesley’s course, Tech­nol­o­gy Entre­pre­neur­ship (YouTube — iTunes Video) intro­duces stu­dents to “the process used by tech­nol­o­gy entre­pre­neurs to start com­pa­nies. It involves tak­ing a tech­nol­o­gy idea and find­ing a high-poten­tial com­mer­cial oppor­tu­ni­ty, gath­er­ing resources such as tal­ent and cap­i­tal, fig­ur­ing out how to sell and mar­ket the idea, and man­ag­ing rapid growth.” The course fea­tures 28 video lec­tures in total.

Once you have a broad overview, you can dial into an impor­tant part of get­ting a new ven­ture going — rais­ing cap­i­tal. Hence the course Entre­pre­neur­ship Through the Lens of Ven­ture Cap­i­tal (iTunes Video — YouTube), a course cur­rent­ly tak­ing place at Stan­ford that “explores how suc­cess­ful star­tups nav­i­gate fund­ing, man­ag­ing, and scal­ing their new enter­prise.” It fea­tures guest speak­ers from the VC world that fuels Sil­i­con Val­ley.

It goes with­out say­ing that Stan­ford offers many world-class cours­es across oth­er dis­ci­plines, from phi­los­o­phy and physics to his­to­ry and lit­er­a­ture. You can find 68 cours­es from Stan­ford in our ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ford Launch­es iPhone/iPad App Course on iTune­sU

Biol­o­gy That Makes Us Tick: Free Stan­ford Course by Robert Sapol­sky

The Stan­ford Mini Med School: A Free Course Now Online

The Art of Liv­ing: A Free Stan­ford Course Explores Time­less Ques­tions

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Download Eight Free Lectures on The Hobbit by “The Tolkien Professor,” Corey Olsen

The name Corey Olsen may already be famil­iar to some readers—or at least those read­ers who ven­er­ate the lit­er­ary accom­plish­ments of one J.R.R. Tolkien. And if you don’t know Olsen by his real name, you may know him as “The Tolkien Pro­fes­sor,” his inter­net moniker since 2009, when Olsen, an Eng­lish Pro­fes­sor at Wash­ing­ton Col­lege and life­long stu­dent of Tolkien’s writ­ing, decid­ed to share his own schol­ar­ly work with a pub­lic “eager to be includ­ed in thought­ful, lit­er­ary con­ver­sa­tion” about The Hob­bit and The Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy.

For the past four years, Olsen has pub­lished specif­i­cal­ly online lec­tures about Tolkien’s work, as well as record­ings of his Wash­ing­ton Col­lege sem­i­nars on Tolkien’s fic­tion and aca­d­e­m­ic work. He has most recent­ly found­ed Signum Uni­ver­si­ty, an online, non-prof­it Lib­er­al Arts col­lege that aims to open the expe­ri­ence of high-qual­i­ty high­er ed to every­one, regard­less of their means or their loca­tion. Signum has, in turn, spawned the Myth­gard Insti­tute, which seems (as the name implies) more exclu­sive­ly focused on the fan­ta­sy and sci­ence fic­tion gen­res that are Olsen’s méti­er. (There are also col­lege prep options in Signum and Myth­gard Acad­e­mies).

So, Pro­fes­sor Olsen is busy, and he’s hap­py to be shar­ing his wealth of Tolkien knowl­edge with a very recep­tive pub­lic. His most recent course, an eight-part lec­ture series on The Hob­bit, is now avail­able on his site. (iTunes U also has it as of Jan­u­ary 31st. Watch the pro­mo for the course above. We also have the class list­ed in our col­lec­tion of 650 Free Cours­es Online.) The course comes via the Myth­gard Insti­tute and begins at the begin­ning in a lec­ture enti­tled “Took & Bag­gins” focused on The Hob­bit’s first chap­ter, “An Unex­pect­ed Par­ty.” Record­ed before the release of Peter Jackson’s first install­ment of his tril­o­gy of Hob­bit films, the lec­ture starts with Olsen’s spec­u­la­tions about what those films might look like. He says:

From the begin­ning, I have thought this was a mis­take… a big mis­take to go back­wards. It seems to me that an audi­ence famil­iar with the epic grandeur of Peter Jackson’s tril­o­gy is going to bring expec­ta­tions to a new Tolkien movie that’s going to set a Hob­bit film up for one of two very like­ly fail­ures. Either the movie is going to try tell Bilbo’s sto­ry in the mode and reg­is­ter of the Lord of the Rings, and there­fore strip the sto­ry of the light-heart­ed­ness and whim­si­cal­i­ty that makes it so delight­ful, or it’s going to try to be true to the tone and spir­it of the book, and will there­fore seem kind of sil­ly and child­ish to an audi­ence hop­ing for a suc­ces­sor to Peter Jackson’s films.

This is a very can­ny pre­dic­tion, and such can­ni­ness dis­tin­guish­es Olsen’s approach to every­thing Tolkien. He is attuned not only to all of the schol­ar­ly minu­ti­ae that dis­tin­guish­es aca­d­e­m­ic Tolkien stud­ies, but he is also well-aware of issues of audi­ence recep­tion and the ever-evolv­ing role of Tolkien’s work in pop­u­lar cul­ture. As his first lec­ture con­tin­ues, Pro­fes­sor Olsen makes it quite clear that The Hob­bit was delib­er­ate­ly writ­ten as a children’s sto­ry, and the suc­ces­sive books were meant to be as well. The Lord of the Rings books became more adult, dark­er and more fraught with heavy the­o­log­i­cal and myth­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance, as Tolkien com­posed them. This hap­pened in part because Tolkien was writ­ing with his own chil­dren in mind as his read­ers, and as he wrote, his kids grew up.

Tolkien, Olsen points out, was by train­ing a philologist—a schol­ar who spe­cial­izes in the study of languages—so he thought about not only what words mean, but where they come from and when. As such, he intend­ed The Hob­bit to pos­sess a “lin­guis­tic play­ful­ness,” mix­ing ancient and mod­ern words and usages, mak­ing up words a la Lewis Car­roll, to cre­ate a light­heart­ed and com­ic atmos­phere from the begin­ning of the nov­el. Olsen pro­vides us with sev­er­al exam­ples of this method in his first lec­ture. Over­all, his analy­sis is a thor­ough eval­u­a­tion of the nov­el in the terms of its lan­guage, its com­po­si­tion, its many lay­ers of genre and style—drawing from Tolkien’s explic­it­ly artic­u­lat­ed the­o­ries of narrative—and its his­tor­i­cal and lit­er­ary allu­sions. All pre­sent­ed in a very enthu­si­as­tic and acces­si­ble style that is aimed at every adult read­er and lover of Tolkien, not just fel­low schol­ars, who tend to speak a spe­cial­ized lan­guage that excludes near­ly every­one out­side their nar­row coterie.

In the video above—a TED talk Olsen deliv­ered at TEDx Chester Riv­er—he dis­cuss­es how the world of acad­eme, that spe­cial­ized world that excludes almost every­one, had become a sti­fling and rather mean­ing­less place for him when he decid­ed to become the online Tolkien Pro­fes­sor.  Olsen had what he calls an exis­ten­tial cri­sis about acad­e­mia and schol­ar­ly publishing—What’s the point?, he thought. Who’s going to read it? Since most peo­ple can’t access schol­ar­ly pub­li­ca­tions even if they want­ed to, and since he was writ­ing on Tolkien, one of the world’s most pop­u­lar authors, he felt dou­bly irrel­e­vant as a clois­tered aca­d­e­m­ic, since Tolkien fans are every­where. Then he dis­cov­ered some­thing every­body else already knew about the internet—it’s an ide­al medi­um for pub­lish­ing and dis­sem­i­nat­ing any kind of infor­ma­tion, and it’s crowd­ed with peo­ple des­per­ate to learn about and dis­cuss the lib­er­al arts. As more and more aca­d­e­mics dis­cov­er this as well, more also cure their exis­ten­tial malaise by open­ing up their work to every­one online, becom­ing resources, not gate­keep­ers, for knowl­edge.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to J.R.R. Tolkien Read a Lengthy Excerpt from The Hob­bit (1952)

Lis­ten to J.R.R. Tolkien Read Poems from The Fel­low­ship of the Ring, in Elvish and Eng­lish (1952)

Fan­tas­tic BBC Footage of J.R.R. Tolkien in 1968

Free Audio: Down­load the Com­plete Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia by C.S. Lewis

Josh Jones is a writer, edi­tor, and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

James Taylor Teaches You to Play “Carolina in My Mind,” “Fire and Rain” & Other Classics on the Guitar

Some days you’d think that Salman Khan was the only per­son who had the bright idea of putting tuto­ri­als on YouTube. But, if you’re an ama­teur gui­tarist, you know bet­ter. You know that gui­tarists have been post­ing free lessons on YouTube since Day 1, teach­ing new­bies how to buy an acoustic gui­tartune it by earstrum it, and play chord pro­gres­sions. And, what’s more, you can find clips that will read­i­ly teach you how to play your favorite tunes, whether it’s Bob Dylan’s Love Minus Zero/No Lim­it or Led Zep­pelin’s Kash­mir.

Think you just hit pay dirt? Well, it gets even bet­ter.

You can take lessons straight from James Tay­lor, the singer-song­writer him­self. On his YouTube chan­nel/web site, Tay­lor demon­strates how to file your nails, tune your gui­tar, and then start play­ing his clas­sic songs. Fire and Rain? JT has that cov­ered. Car­oli­na in My Mind? That too. And also Enough To Be On Your WaySec­ond Wheel, Lit­tle Wheel, and Coun­try Road. Stick around for a while and you might get “Some­thing in the Way She Moves” next.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Tay­lor Per­forms Live in 1970, Thanks to a Lit­tle Help from His Friends, The Bea­t­les

Jim­my Page Tells the Sto­ry of “Kash­mir”

A Young Eric Clap­ton Demon­strates the Ele­ments of His Sound

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