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  • What Are The Great Courses?
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Designed to meet the powerful demand for lifelong learning, The Great Courses is an intellectual engaging series of video and audio courses led by the world's best professors and experts in diverse fields such as philosophy, history, literature, science, and the arts. The Great Courses currently maintains a catalog of more than 350 courses delivered by great teachers from universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, and more.

We work closely with our customers and professors to create every single Great Course. Here's how we do it:

  • Customers Choose the Professor:We begin with the most engaging professors—the top 1% as determined by The Great Courses and its customers. In the end, only 1 in 5,000 professors meets the standards set by our customers, who vote on all professors we retain.
  • Customers Choose the Course: We interview thousands of customers to find out what courses they want and how they want them made.
  • Professors Carefully Craft the Course: Months of preparation ensure that a course will satisfy our customers. Long before a word is spoken on stage, our professor outlines and prepares each lecture and writes the extensive Course Guidebook.
  • We Record the Course: Working in our in-house recording studios, we record the video of each lecture on high-definition-quality equipment and media, or record the audio of each lecture on the latest CD-quality equipment and media. We then devote weeks to include dynamic visual elements into the video lectures and to professionally master the sound for the audio lectures.

Our Sales

There's always a sale at The Great Courses. We call it The Great Deal, and here's how it works:

  • Every single one of our more than 300 courses goes on sale at least once a year!
  • You enjoy savings as high as 70% off the full list price!

Why do we do this?

The answer is simple. By producing large quantities of only the sale courses, we keep our costs down and pass the savings on to you. This approach also enables us to fill your order immediately—99% of all orders ship within 24 hours.

When on sale, our typical course on CD is $54.95 for 12 CDs, or 12 hours of content. That's only $4.58 per CD. Compare $4.58 to what you pay elsewhere for a CD—$20? More? In any format, our courses costs much less than most audiobooks, DVDs, or CDs.

Our Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee

Every single Great Course you order comes with a Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee.

If a course is ever less than completely satisfying, you may exchange it for another or we will refund your money promptly. If a disc ever breaks, warps, or gets damaged, we'll replace it as long as the course is in print. Absolutely free.

Most publishers don't guarantee your satisfaction with their books or recordings, but we do. Why? Because we want you to be our customer for a lifetime of learning.

This guarantee, which we've honored every day since we were established in 1990, not only protects your investment in learning, it also compels us to produce only great courses—and nothing less.

Here's what one of our customers has to say about our Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee:

"To understand how powerful [The Great Course's Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee] is, keep in mind what this company sells. These aren't little audio tapes with 30 minutes of fluff, they're HUGE, in-depth, taped lectures from some of the best minds in the country.

"When I saw the guarantee, I was sold. Where's my credit card?

"But there's another reason for the guarantee—ethics. Thomas Rollins, [founder] of [The Great Courses], said his company values clients so much, he simply doesn't want them to have any product they don't absolutely love. In our lively phone conversation, he said, 'We call our lectures The Great Courses and if we don't deliver great courses, we don't deserve the money.'

"Wow! Most people think of customer loyalty as customers being loyal to a business. But how about a business being loyal to customers?"

—Dean Rieck, Direct Marketing magazine

"A dream come true for the lifelong learner. ... The Great Courses series features a semester's or more worth of lectures in hundreds of disciplines by some of the country's leading scholars."

—Video Librarian


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Best Selling Professors Lectures - Professors

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  • Professor Robert Greenberg

    Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco Performances

    Topics: Fine Arts & Music

    Most popular course:

    How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition

    View all 28 courses

  • Professor Alex Filippenko

    Ph.D., California Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Understanding the Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy, 2nd Edition

    View all 5 courses

  • Professor Timothy Taylor

    M.Econ., Stanford University, Macalester College

    Topics: Business & Economics, History

    Most popular course:

    Economics, 3rd Edition

    View all 6 courses

  • Professor Elizabeth Vandiver

    Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin, Whitman College

    Topics: Literature & English Language, History

    Most popular course:

    Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd Edition

    View all 9 courses

  • Professor Bob Brier

    Ph.D., The University of North Carolina, Long Island University

    Topics: History

    Most popular course:

    History of Ancient Egypt

    View all 3 courses

  • Professor Gary W. Gallagher

    Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia

    Topics: History

    Most popular course:

    History of the United States, 2nd Edition

    View all 5 courses

  • Professor Philip Daileader

    Ph.D., Harvard University, The College of William and Mary

    Topics: History

    Most popular course:

    Early Middle Ages

    View all 4 courses

  • Professor Mark Whittle

    Ph.D., University of Cambridge , University of Virginia

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Cosmology: The History and Nature of Our Universe

    View all 1 courses

  • Professor Steven Pollock

    Ph.D., Stanford University, University of Colorado at Boulder

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Particle Physics for Non-Physicists: A Tour of the Microcosmos

    View all 4 courses

  • Professor Robert Bucholz

    D.Phil., Oxford University, Loyola University Chicago

    Topics: History

    Most popular course:

    Foundations of Western Civilization II: A History of the Modern Western World

    View all 5 courses

  • Professor John McWhorter

    Ph.D., Stanford University, Manhattan Institute

    Topics: Literature & English Language

    Most popular course:

    Story of Human Language

    View all 5 courses

  • Professor Scott P. Stevens

    Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University, James Madison University

    Topics: Business & Economics, Science & Mathematics, Professional

    Most popular course:

    Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business, and Beyond

    View all 2 courses

  • Professor Thomas Childers

    Ph.D., Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania

    Topics: History

    Most popular course:

    History of Hitler’s Empire, 2nd Edition

    View all 4 courses

  • Professor Seth Lerer

    Ph.D., University of Chicago, University of California, San Diego

    Topics: Literature & English Language, History

    Most popular course:

    History of the English Language, 2nd Edition

    View all 4 courses

  • Professor Robert Sapolsky

    Ph.D., Rockefeller University, Stanford University

    Topics: Science & Mathematics, Better Living

    Most popular course:

    Stress and Your Body

    View all 6 courses

  • Professor Bart D. Ehrman

    M.Div., Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

    Topics: Religion & Theology, History

    Most popular course:

    New Testament

    View all 8 courses

  • Professor Kenneth W. Harl

    Ph.D., Yale University, Tulane University

    Topics: History

    Most popular course:

    Fall of the Pagans and the Origins of Medieval Christianity

    View all 10 courses

  • Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

    Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, University of Tennessee

    Topics: History

    Most popular course:

    Turning Points in Modern History

    View all 7 courses

  • Professor Stephen Nowicki

    Ph.D., Cornell University, Duke University

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Biology: The Science of Life

    View all 3 courses

  • Professor Arthur T. Benjamin

    Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, Harvey Mudd College

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Secrets of Mental Math

    View all 6 courses

  • Professor David Christian

    D. Phil., Oxford University, Macquarie University

    Topics: Science & Mathematics, History

    Most popular course:

    Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity

    View all 1 courses

  • Professor Steven Strogatz

    Ph.D., Harvard University, Cornell University

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Chaos

    View all 1 courses

  • Professor Jerry Z. Muller

    Ph.D., Columbia University, The Catholic University of America

    Topics: Business & Economics, Philosophy & Intellectual History

    Most popular course:

    Thinking about Capitalism

    View all 2 courses

  • Professor Michael A. Roberto

    D.B.A., Harvard Business School, Bryant University

    Topics: Business & Economics

    Most popular course:

    Art of Critical Decision Making

    View all 3 courses

  • Professor Jeanette Norden

    Ph.D., Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Understanding the Brain

    View all 1 courses

  • Professor Richard Wolfson

    Ph.D., Dartmouth College, Middlebury College

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Physics and Our Universe: How It All Works

    View all 6 courses

  • Professor Robert M. Hazen

    Ph.D., Harvard University, George Mason University

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Joy of Science

    View all 3 courses

  • Professor Jeremy McInerney

    Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania

    Topics: History

    Most popular course:

    Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age

    View all 4 courses

  • Professor Mark W. Muesse

    Ph.D., Harvard University, Rhodes College

    Topics: Religion & Theology

    Most popular course:

    Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation

    View all 9 courses

  • Professor Bill Messenger

    M.A., Johns Hopkins University, The Peabody Institute

    Topics: Fine Arts & Music

    Most popular course:

    Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion

    View all 2 courses

  • Professor Sean Carroll

    Ph.D., Harvard University, California Institute of Technology

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time

    View all 4 courses

  • Professor Thomas Williams

    Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, University of South Florida

    Topics: Philosophy & Intellectual History, Religion & Theology

    Most popular course:

    Reason & Faith: Philosophy in the Middle Ages

    View all 1 courses

  • Professor David Sadava

    Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, City of Hope Medical Center, Claremont Colleges

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    What Science Knows about Cancer

    View all 1 courses

  • Professor Jennifer Simonetti-Bryan

    Master of Wine and Certified Specialist of Spirits, Institute of Masters of Wine

    Topics: Better Living

    Most popular course:

    The Everyday Guide to Wine

    View all 6 courses

  • Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson

    Ph.D., Columbia University, Hayden Planetarium

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries

    View all 3 courses

  • Professor Harold J. Tobin

    Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz, University of Wisconsin–Madison

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Oceanography: Exploring Earth's Final Wilderness

    View all 2 courses

  • Professor Gregory S. Aldrete

    Ph.D., University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin—Green Bay

    Topics: History

    Most popular course:

    History of the Ancient World: A Global Perspective

    View all 3 courses

  • Professor Jeffrey C. Grossman

    Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Understanding the Science for Tomorrow: Myth and Reality

    View all 3 courses

  • Professor Monisha Pasupathi

    Ph.D., Stanford University, University of Utah

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    How We Learn

    View all 2 courses

  • Professor Michael K. Salemi

    Ph.D., University of Minnesota–Minneapolis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

    Topics: Business & Economics

    Most popular course:

    Money and Banking: What Everyone Should Know

    View all 2 courses

  • Professor Connel Fullenkamp

    Ph.D. Harvard University, Duke University

    Topics: Business & Economics

    Most popular course:

    Understanding Investments

    View all 3 courses

  • Professor George R. Bent

    Ph.D.Stanford University, Washington and Lee University

    Topics: Fine Arts & Music

    Most popular course:

    Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian High Renaissance

    View all 3 courses

  • Professor Mark Leary

    Ph.D. University of Florida, Duke University

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behavior

    View all 3 courses

  • Professor Tilar J. Mazzeo

    University of Washington, Ph.D, Colby College

    Topics: Literature & English Language

    Most popular course:

    Writing Creative Nonfiction

    View all 3 courses

  • Professor Dean Hodgkin

    University of Portsmouth, B.Sc, University of Portsmouth

    Topics: Better Living

    Most popular course:

    Physiology and Fitness

    View all 1 courses

  • Professor John E. Finn

    Ph.D., Princeton University, Wesleyan University

    Topics: History

    Most popular course:

    The First Amendment and You: What Everyone Should Know

    View all 2 courses

  • Professor John Hawks

    Ph.D., University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin–Madison

    Topics: Science & Mathematics

    Most popular course:

    Major Transitions in Evolution

    View all 4 courses

  • Professor Michael Geisen

    M.A., Southern Oregon University, National Teacher of the Year

    Topics: High School

    Most popular course:

    How to Become a SuperStar Student, 2nd Edition

    View all 2 courses

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