GeoCurrents has been on a long summer hiatus as I have reconsidered my plans for the site. As I have retired from academia, one of my main goals is to convert my old lecture courses into publicly accessible YouTube lecture series. To do so, I have revived an all-but-forgotten GeoCurrents YouTube channel. This channel had contained only three videos, all on Indo-European linguistics, which date back more than a decade.
I am currently recording and posting on this channel a series of lectures on the historical geography of natural psychoactive substances. These lectures were originally delivered in a course of the same name that I taught in Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program (adult education) in the spring of 2024. I had originally hoped to redeliver these lectures before a live Zoom audience so that I could include post-lecture discussions and question-and-answer sessions, which always is for me the highlight of the experience. Unfortunately, doing so proved to be too difficult.
The original Continuing Studies course on psychoactive substances entailed 10 lectures, each of which was 1.5 hours long, followed by a half-hour discussion. As these presentations were rather long, I have divided them into at least two parts. Sometimes this entails two-part lectures on the same substance, such as “Tobacco Part 1,” and “Tobacco Part Two,” and in others it required separating two different drugs that were initially shoehorned into a single lecture.
At any rate, I have now posted 13 of these lectures, with more to come. The first is a general introduction to the subject, which can be viewed here. The other posted lectures are: Alcohol Part 1, Alcohol Part 2, Coffee, Tea, Tobacco Part I, Tobacco Part 2, Betel (Areca), Coca & Cocaine, Khat, Kava, Opium Part 1, and Opium Part 2. I will write brief summary essays on each of these lectures and post them on GeoCurrents over the next few weeks.
Additional drug lectures will also be recorded and posted on YouTube over the same period. These include cannabis (marijuana), which will be divided into at least two videos, hallucinogens of the Eastern Hemisphere (2 lectures), and hallucinogens of the Western Hemisphere (2 lectures). A concluding lecture will touch on a few additional natural psychoactive substances, such as blue lotus, and will draw out conclusions from the entire series.
Later this fall, I will be teaching a course in Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program on the Historical Geography of U.S. Presidential Elections. GeoCurrents will at this time be publishing weekly essays on the topic, designed to complement the lectures. After this course has been completed in early December, the lectures will be redelivered and posted on the GeoCurrents YouTube page. In winter I will teach a Continuing Studies class on global demography (“Population Explosion of Birth Dearth”), which also be converted to a YouTube lecture series.