Women and Freud

History 5 has long finished, but I am still lagging behind, but also still intent on reviewing the cycle two lectures at a time. The next two are moving us thematically into the end of the 19th century. About women (video, audio) and about Freud (video, audio).

Professor Anderson ventures into making a joke. "I apologize for always talking about sex so much. I know it is nothing you are interested in, but in any case [...] it would be an appropriate introduction to Freud." The shackles of Victorian society has everything to do with these two lectures. The prudery was both a cage, as well as a protection for women. Prudery, especially in England, was imposed, not only on women, but also on men. It allowed women to gain some development and this pathed the way to emancipation.

At the same time, these shackles turned our attention to the suppressed instincts and Freud is presented as the necessary, if not logical proponent of the thought train triggered by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. I wonder if you could add to that pessimism some more of the tormented thinkers and artists, Kierkegaard for example. I am not sure it Anderson intended not to make a very explicit link from romanticism to the late century pessimism, but I saw it clearly. The real shock of the lecture are the grim experiments Freud and a nose doctor engage in on one of his patients.

More History 5:
Romanticism and Bismarck,
Capitalism and Socialism,
Enlightenment and French Revolution,
Absolutism and Science,
Witches, plague, war and Hobbes.

The State in The International System

Stanford's podcast The History of the International system (feed) has come to its conclusion. The lecturer, professor James Sheehan, spends a large part of his last lecture pondering what power could compete with the supremacy of the United States in the international system. Undoubtedly that is a very compelling question, but it is also a rather speculative one and there is another subject that had me thrilled even more.

The central agent within the International System, as Sheehan has painted it over the 28 lectures (earlier I wrote there would be 29, but I counted the mid term exam as a lecture - my bad), is the state. The international system is a community of national states, some more powerful and large, some puny and unimportant, but each a legitimate player. This we can see until today in an organization such as the UN. Its members are states and only states are its members. The uneven distribution of power among its players has always put this system under pressure, but the state as such is problematic, so Sheehan shows.

One problem is that of failed states. States that do not control their territory, are not representing their populace neither effectively, nor in a legitimate way. Furthermore, there are more players that influence the system: international organizations, non-governmental organizations and multinational business. On a deeper level, the state has always been a fiction, an imagined community. Many states are not nation-states, never have been and nobody really wants to reorder the nations into states or states into nations.

The thought occurred to me, that the whole idea of assuming the sovereign (the state) as the sole player internationally has been a stretch and become more so under modern circumstances. It is a presumption of isolation; the national sphere isolated from the international. The citizen of a state is only related to his own sovereign and not beyond. Other sovereigns are related to the sovereigns, but not to each others subjects. That seems workable as a fiction and has conceptually organized our idea of the international system well so far, but effectively this has never completely been true and with subjects of human rights, intellectual property, economy, ecology and more, we even accept and applaud non-sovereigns to act within the international system. Maybe the idea of states is going to go away.

Previous reviews:
A century of geopolitics,
History of the International System.

More geopolitics:
Nuts and bolts of empire,
Global Geopolitics - Martin Lewis,
A listener's guide to Geography of World Cultures,
Geography of World Cultures by Martin W. Lewis,
The End of Hegemony.

Report a podcast

This blog is about the podcasts I have found and mostly about those I like. I review those podcasts, trying to give you some kind of an impression on what to expect. My hope is, you will find this blog to be a source for finding new podcasts to listen to. My main area of interest is history and this spills over into geography, social sciences, language, science, philosophy and religion.

There are, however, so many more valuable podcasts to be found and likely to be overlooked by me, either because I missed out on a major source of podcasts or because I dismissed it out of hand. I am the first to admit some really great podcasts that deserve to be mentioned here will not be reviewed and that is a pity. Whenever readers alert me to a podcast, I always take a second look and some listening time.

Let me know which podcast you want me to pay attention to and provided I can give some words of appraisal about them, they will certainly make it to the blog. You can communicate your podcast tips by leaving a comment anywhere in the blog or send me a mail, Anne Frid de Vries (in one word) AT yahoo DOT co DOT uk.

I am looking forward to your input.

See also the podcast directories:

• History Podcasts
• Psychology Podcasts
• Writing and Language Podcasts
• Science Podcasts
• Religion and Spirituality Podcasts
• Arts and Culture Podcasts
• News & Politics Podcasts
• Geography Podcasts
• Philosophy and Thought Podcasts
• Dutch Podcasts - Podcasts in het Nederlands

Or the long, long list of podcasts reviewed.

Library of Nineveh

The library of Nineveh may have been larger than the great library of Alexandria, but it was destroyed in 612 BCE by the Medes and lay covered under the ruins, until it was finally discovered in the 1849 by an English adventurer, Layard. BBC's In Our Time discussed this find in last week's program. In this blog we have touched upon it on the side.

Professor Patrick Hunt, from various podcast at Stanford (a.o. Hannibal), wrote a book Ten Discoveries that Rewrote History in which the story of Layard's find is recounted. Until then, we knew very little about ancient Mesopotamia, and its script, the cuneiform, had not been deciphered yet. The library supplied such a large amount of new material that that could finally be established and then we proceeded to uncovering the roots of civilization, among others many stories known from the Bible.

In Our Time's panel also addresses these subjects and clarifies them as elegant and deep as usual. A peculiar fact is noted both by Hunt as well as In Our Time is that we have to be thankful the Medes destroyed the Library. The other enemy, the Babylonians would surely have looted the place, but the illiterate Medes were content merely to set it on fire. The fire destroyed a large portion of the contents, but not the clay tablets. In stead they were baked and thus preserved for many centuries, so that Layard could find them.

More Patrick Hunt:
Hannibal in the end,
Ten discoveries that rewrote history,
Patrick Hunt on Hannibal (and more),
Hannibal Barca on the couch,
Where did Hannibal cross the Alps?.

More In Our Time:
General review of In Our Time,
The Brain: A History,
Yeats, Enclosures and Materialism,
King Lear,
Ada Lovelace.

Nuts and bolts of empire

In many of the history podcasts, recently as well as over all time, a lot of attention is paid to empires, without digging too much into what constitutes an empire or rather what allows an authority to govern a wide stretched territory spanning many lands, religions and cultures, whether it is the British Empire, the Roman, Persian, Chinese or other. At the London School of Economics Professor Paul Kennedy held a lecture which addressed this technical issue. The lecture was podcast both by LSE as well as UChannel. Appropriately it got the title Nuts and bolts of empire.

All great empires have required a sophisticated logistical system, and a secure communications system to sustain themselves. In a world of endless challenges imperial ambitions soon collapse. This lecture will examine the hard, infrastructural underpinnings of the Roman, Spanish and British Empires, and reflect on how the USA compares in this regard.

Kennedy emphasizes tow aspects of empire, one is efficient infrastructure, the other healthy finances and proper auditing of the such. Empires cannot live without an efficient structure of transport and communications, lest the rulers can't know what goes on and properly, coherently respond. However, such large-scale structure is a costly enterprise and therefore the empire needs to make sure at all time it can sustain it in the long run. Kennedy argues that most empires fall under the weight of their expenses and the question whether the US should be regarded as an empire is evaded but nevertheless a warning is implied towards the current delicate finances of the state.

More LSE:
Islam and Europe - LSE podcast review,
Beyond the genome.

More UChannel:
Islam meets Europe,
The rise and demise of Palestine,
Alan Johnston,
Nuclear Terrorism,
Attack Iran (or not).

Scopes Trial

Berkeley's History 7b (US History : from civil war to present) deals somewhere halfway the lecture series with the Scopes Trial - a trial in Dayton Tennessee where it was attempted to keep a biology textbook out of the curriculum for it taught evolution. The trial took place in 1925, but has some significant differences and nuances from the discourse in the US today.

DIY scholar, a fellow blog containing many splendid podcast reviews comparable to Anne is a Man!, spent also a post on The Scopes Trial. It seems, for Americans the Scopes Trial is much more known than for a European such as myself. Consequently one very important nuance easily got lost and was dug up, not only in Berkeley's lecture, but also in a podcast by UCSD (the one DIY reviews). If one was intuitively tempted to side with the evolutionists in the trial and would condemn keeping the biology book from the curriculum, out of hand, you may be surprised.

One of the criticisms on the book is that it propagates eugenics. From the concepts of evolution, the leap is made to breeding and the suggestion inserted to apply to people as well. DIY gives a quote from the text book that is also read in Berkeley's lecture:

Parasitism and its Cost to Society. — Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

The Remedy. — If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country.

The jump from evolution to Eugenics (or Social Darwinism for that matter) is neither necessary nor self-evident, but historically has been easily made and it serves well to be aware of it. A very worthy podcast therefore.

More American History:
History Podcast month - wrap up,
American History before 1870,
The American Constitution's British roots - BTHP,
US History - from Civil War to Present.