The Renaissance came to England late, thanks to a Hundred Years War that ran long and lasted 116 years, and then a civil war to decide who would be the royal family. BUT after all that, with the Tudors (relatively) securely installed on the throne, there was a flowering of humanism, science, and culture. Theater was a big part of it. Today, we're talking about the London theater scene and the playwrights that set the stage...ahem...for the main man of English Theater, William Shakespeare.

This week on Crash Course Theater, Shakespeare is dead. Long live Shakespeare. Well, long live English theater, anyway. Actually, it's about to get banned. Anyway, we're discussing where English theater went post-1616. We'll talk about Ben Jonson, revenge tragedies, and court masques.

After Darwin blew the doors off the scientific community, a lot of people did some weird and unscientific stuff with his ideas. Francis Galton and a few others decided natural selection could be used to make the human race "better" and came up with Eugenics.

Hank tells us about the city of Eukaryopolis - the animal cell that is responsible for all the cool things that happen in our bodies.

Hank gets real with us in a discussion of evolution - it's a thing, not a debate. Gene distribution changes over time, across successive generations, to give rise to diversity at every level of biological organization.

Hank introduces us to the relatively new field of evolutionary developmental biology, which compares the developmental processes of different organisms to determine their ancestral relationship, and to discover how those processes evolved. Also fruit flies with eyes on their legs and chickens with teeth!

Hank takes us on the fascinating journey through our excretory system to learn how our kidneys make pee.

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 world. Spoiler alert: those playwrights didn't think humans fared very well in the industrialized world. They EXPRESSED that concern about modernity through some pretty dark plays, with pretty dark sets, and pretty dark content.

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. The agency created theater companies across the country to put actors and crew back to work in the theater industry. The shows were free, and thanks to forward thinking administrators, a lot of them were pretty interesting. You'll also learn about the Group Theatre today. They're the super-influential troupe, with the totally lame name.

Today we’re going to look at how our computers read and interpret computer files. We’ll talk about how some popular file formats like txt, wave, and bitmap are encoded and decoded giving us pretty pictures and lifelike recordings from just strings of 1’s and 0’s, and we’ll discuss how our computers are able to keep all this data organized and readily accessible to users. You’ll notice in this episode that we’re starting to talk more about computer users, not programmers, foreshadowing where the series will be going in a few episodes.

So we ended last episode with programming at the hardware level with things like plugboards and huge panels of switches, but what was really needed was a more versatile way to program computers - software! For much of this series we’ve been talking about machine code, or the 1’s and 0’s our computers read to perform operations, but giving our computers instructions in 1’s and 0’s is incredibly inefficient, and a “higher-level” language was needed. This led to the development of assembly code and assemblers that allow us to use operands and mnemonics to more easily write programs, but assembly language is still tied to underlying hardware. So by 1952 Navy officer Grace Hopper had helped created the first high-level programming language A-0 and compiler to translate that code to our machines. This would eventually lead to IBM’s Fortran and then a golden age of computing languages over the coming decades. Most importantly, these new languages utilized new abstractions to make programming easier and more powerful giving more and more people the ability to create new and amazing things.

In today’s episode we’ll explore thermodynamics and some of the ways it shows up in our daily lives. We’ll learn the zeroth law of thermodynamics, what it means to reach a thermal equilibrium, and define the first law of thermodynamics. We’ll also explore how stationary, adiabatic, and isochoric processes can make our lives as engineers a little easier.

Today we're going to wrap up our discussion of General Linear Models (or GLMs) by taking a closer looking at two final common models: ANCOVA (Analysis of Covariance) and RMA (Repeated Measures ANOVA). We'll show you how additional variables, known has covariates can be used to reduce error, and show you how to tell if there's a difference between 2 or more groups or conditions. Between Regression, ANOVA, ANCOVA, and RMA you should have the tools necessary to better analyze both categorical and continuous data.

As engineer, sometimes lives will be in your hands, so this week we’re exploring safety and its impact on engineering. We’ll discuss the difference between occupational safety and public safety and how to analyze and review a process for any potential dangers with things like HAZOP. We’ll learn the dangers of having too *many* alarms and look at how important it is to adopt a good mindset of safety culture.

Today we’ll dive further into fluid flow and how we can use equipment to apply our skills. We explain Bernoulli’s Principle and the relationship between speed and pressure in certain flowing fluids. We’ll also discuss how to apply the principle with Bernoulli’s Equation and try to use it in real-world examples.

Historians love to debate each other. So some of them pointed out that the first half of this revolution looks a lot different from the second. Let's chat about industry, cars, and Henry Ford.

Today we are exploring the world of formal organizations. We’ll go back to the historical process of rationalization and its impact on organizations in the form of bureaucracy and then discuss how organizations change in response to their organizational environment. We will also go over the negative consequences of rationalization in organizations.

In which John Green examines the French Revolution, and gets into how and why it differed from the American Revolution. Was it the serial authoritarian regimes? The guillotine? The Reign of Terror? All of this and more contributed to the French Revolution not being quite as revolutionary as it could have been. France endured multiple constitutions, the heads of heads of state literally rolled, and then they ended up with a megalomaniacal little emperor by the name of Napoleon. But how did all of this change the world, and how did it lead to other, more successful revolutions around the world? Watch this video and find out. Spoiler alert: Marie Antoinette never said, "Let them eat cake." Sorry.

Death is what fungi are all about. By feasting on the deceased remains of almost all organisms on the planet, converting the organic matter back into soil from which new life will spring, they perform perhaps the most vital function in the global food web. Fungi, which thrive on death, make all life possible.

We’ve seen and discussed the ways in which the rapid pace of technological change has affected the media literacy landscape, and it’s clear that change isn’t slowing down. How will those changes affect the future of media literacy? How can we make the skills we’ve discussed over this course transferable to future media & technology?