This week on C-SPAN's Lectures and History podcast, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, Professor Ryan Anderson, explores the rise of bohemian culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a movement defined by its rejection of conventional social norms and its deep embrace of the arts.

Centered in places like Paris's Montmartreux district,

bohemian communities became havens for artists, writers, and thinkers

who celebrated creativity, communal living, and anti-establishment ideals.

Among the iconic figures of this era are painter Henry de Toulouse Latrek and a young Vincent van Gogh, who helped shape the bohemian spirit.

And a note to our listeners. With the academic year now wrapped, lectures and history will pause new episodes until September.

Over the summer, we'll revisit some of our most interesting past lectures and other history-related content.

This episode was taped in April of 2024.

More in a moment.

As promised today, we're going to talk about Bohemian culture at the turn of the 20th century.

And I tried to set up last week some ideas that we're going to play with today,

that being

that there's this sort of high culture that is established in the late 19th century to offset

against a low popular culture that emerges, and that a cultural elite came to define themselves

as a sort of like standard for behavior. And what we're talking about today are people who rejected that standard of behavior,

because they saw the high culture of the cultural elite as something that would prevent the United States

from making any sort of cultural progress moving forward. So in a lot of ways, the Bohemians were talking about any sort of cultural progress moving forward.

So in a lot of ways, the Bohemians were talking about

are sort of alternatives, right?

They're alternative people.

The bohemian culture is a sort of counterculture of sorts.

People who believed they were partaking of something

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