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Authors Bryan Mealer and Joshua Wheeler discuss hardscrabble times, places, and people in Texas and New Mexico.

Karen Lawrence, president of The Huntington and a James Joyce scholar, delivers the annual Founder's Day Lecture on how Joyce wrote "Ulysses" by stealing from everybody else.

Shigehisa Kuriyama, professor of cultural history at Harvard University, discusses the Inshoku yōjō kagami (Rules of Dietary Life), a Japanese woodblock print produced around 1850.

Author Icy Smith and illustrator Gayle Garner Roski discuss their book Mei Ling in China City, based on a true story set in Los Angeles during World War II.

William Deverell, professor of history at USC, explores the regional dimensions of American entrepreneurialism, asking what special features or challenges found in the American West helped drive entrepreneurs and stimulate original thinking?

Fara Dabhoiwala, professor of history at Princeton University, explores why speech, before the 18th century, was continually monitored and policed in every sphere of life across the Western world.

Susan Burns, professor of history at the University of Chicago, explores the incorporation of saffron into Japanese pharmacology, a complex process that involved the rise of natural science and a "productive confusion" that linked saffron with other botanicals.

Chris Woods, award-winning horticulturist, describes the most arresting features in public parks, botanic gardens, and private estates in locations ranging from New Delhi and Dubai to Chile and Australia from his book GardenLust. Throughout, he reveals the fascinating people, plants, and stories that make these gardens so lust-worthy.

Mary Sarah Bilder, Founders Professor at Boston College Law School, discusses the responses of George Washington and Benjamin Rush to Eliza Harriot O'Connor's remarkable university lectures in 1787 and their implications for female political status under the Constitution. O'Connor was the first American female lecturer and principal of a female academy. This program is a Nevins Lecture.

Naomi Tadmor, professor of history at the University of Lancaster and the Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington, discusses the sophisticated system of social welfare developed in 17th- and 18th-century England aimed to assist the poor and its impact on local government and the lives of families and communities.