Thursday, January 21, 2010

France since 1871 - Yale lecture podcast

France since 1871 (feed) is history lecture series that has been available for quite some time as a podcast. I knew it was there, but I was not particularly drawn to a modern history of France in particular, more to a more general European perspective. This we got at Yale from the same professor, John Merriman, as you may have seen in earlier reviews (see below). And now that I got acquainted with the lecturer, I decided to give the other course a try.

I have followed by around one third of the course and it sure worth a recommendation. For one who has followed the more general course with Merriman, there is much familiar talk to be encountered, yet the professor has more time to dwell on it. It needs also to be pointed out that this first part of the course is thematic. Merriman takes up a number of issues and treats them freely around 1871, taking us back, frequently as early as the French Revolution and painting the picture until the very beginning of the twentieth century.

Looking at the subjects of the rest of the lectures I expect that a little bit of this thematic approach will remain, but largely it will make place for the chronology. Merriman will carry us from the build-up of the First World War until France by the end of the twentieth century. This looks like a fine addition to the wide menu of podcasts in European history.

More John Merriman:
History of India or Europe?,
Industrial revolutions,
History of Europe.

Benefitting from the labels (and search) on the blog

This blog contains over 1500 posts, 90% are podcast reviews or lists of podcasts that you would want to check out. The question is: how can you find what you are looking for? I try to help you by adding links to relevant other posts whenever I publish a new one. I also add labels, which link up to sets of posts in the same category (or of the same language). But there are more options.

In addition you can use the search engine that sits on top of this page. It allows you to "google" through my pages on any keyword or combination of key words.

While looking at the labels on a specific post, you may feel limited to that particular subject. What about other general areas? Look down in the left margin of the blog and find a complete list of labels on the blog. The number between brackets indicate how many posts there are labelled with this category. Here are a few labels you might be interested in:

Ancient History - there are so many history posts, but here is an option to narrow down. I intend to make more of these, just like I intend to add these as directories to the big, big history podcast directory.

Berkeley, UCSD, Yale - Great suppliers of collections of podcasts.

deutsch, Nederlands, עברית - other languages you may want to check out

economics, philosophy, psychology, science - podcasts in the various disciplines

uchannel, New Books In History, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History - great podcasts that I regularly review