Professor Kleiner explores the civic, commercial, and religious buildings of Pompeii, an overview made possible only because of an historical happenstance–the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, which buried the city at the height of its development. While the lecture features the resort town’s public architecture–its forum, basilica, temples, amphitheater, theater, and bath complexes–Professor Kleiner also describes such fixtures of daily life as a bakery and a fast food restaurant.

This lecture examines Book Four’s depiction of Adam and Eve and the sexual politics of life in Eden. Seventeenth-century political theory, particularly the work of Thomas Hobbes, is considered with a focus on then-contemporary theories of the structure and government of the first human societies. Critical perspectives on what have variously been proposed as sexist and feminist elements of Milton’s Eden are surveyed. Milton’s struggle with the problem of depicting an unfallen world to a fallen audience is closely detailed.

Professor Kleiner introduces the wide variety of Roman buildings covered in the course and links them with the theme of Roman urbanism. The lecture ranges from early Roman stone construction to such masterpieces of Roman concrete architecture as the Colosseum and Pantheon. Traveling from Rome and Pompeii across the vast Roman Empire, Professor Kleiner stops in such locales as North Africa and Jordan to explore the plans of cities and their individual edifices: temples, basilicas, theaters, amphitheaters, bath complexes, and tombs.

The student protests of May 1968 in France were linked to international protests against the American war in Vietnam and other political and social consequences of the Cold War. In many respects, the terrible condition of many schools in France that led students to revolt remains a problem. Recent attempts to impose American-style reforms on the university system have met with protests that echo some of the demands made in ‘68; although, other conditions for revolution seem as though they may never again be realized in the same way.

France’s colonial territories were of very high importance after the embarrassment of occupation during World War II. Algeria, in particular, was a complicated case because it involved large numbers of French settlers, the pieds-noirs. Despite international support for Algerian independence, right-wing factions in the military and among the colonizers remained committed to staying the course. After Charles de Gaulle presided over French withdrawal, the cause of thepieds-noirs has remained divisive in French political life, particularly on the right.