Heads-up for 20 November 2010

New Books In History by Marshall Poe
Kyra Hicks, “This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilt and Other Pieces”
There was a freed slave named Harriet Powers who made really beautiful, highly literate, and deeply religious quilts. In the world of quilting (which is much bigger than you think), she’s a bit like Vermeer: not many pieces, but all highly valued. And like Vermeer, she’s interesting because we don’t know a lot about her. In This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilt and Other Pieces (2010), Kyra Hicks does her best to fill in the many blanks. The book is a combination detective story, journey of discovery, and guide to further research. Hicks, a master quilter herself, doggedly pursues every lead she can find regarding the mysterious Powers, and they take her to some very unexpected places (for example, Keokuk, Iowa). The picture of Powers that emerges from This I Accomplish is that of a skilled, religiously-inspired artist, confident and proud of her work, moving through a long-forgotten world of African American quilters.
(review, feed)

Philosopher's Zone
The Mystery of Hegel
His thought was hugely influential and hugely difficult. The philosopher Bertrand Russell once described him as the single most difficult philosopher to understand. He was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Though he enjoyed relative fame during his lifetime, in the decades after his death in 1831, according to one writer, Hegel´s ideas were treated with "a mixture of contempt, horror and indifference." But something happened during the 20th century that brought Hegel back into sight for philosophers and thinkers. This week on The Philosopher´s Zone find out what that was.
(review, feed)

The State We're In
Stealing children
A father hatches a plan for his son to escape from Japan after his ex-wife took him there illegally. A detective specializing in snatchbacks tells how he returns children to their custodial parents from other countries. And a young black woman raised by a white family in the Netherlands talks about meeting her birth mother in Ghana for the first time.
(review, feed)

Veertien Achttien
Franz Joseph en de ogen van de waarzegster (zondag 19 november 1916)
'Mij blijft niets bespaard', verzucht keizer Franz Joseph van Oostenrijk-Hongarije na de moordaanslag op zijn vrouw Elisabeth, die hem postuum als Sissi naar de kroon zal blijven steken. Al eerder ook van zijn zoon beroofd, krijgt de stokoude vorst in 1914 het lot van de wereld toegespeeld.
(review, feed)

Diarmaid MacCulloch in podcast

As usual it was a great pleasure to listen to BBC's In Our Time. The latest issue contained a discussion of Foxe's Book of Martyrs which was published at the height of the stormy Reformation in England in 1563 and was frequently republished afterward. Foxe's historic work gave the new Protestant Churches a legitimacy by making a connection between Christian martyrs through the ages. (feed)

One of the guests at the BBC was historian Diarmaid MacCulloch whose voice I recognized from a lecture I fondly remember at the LSE about the pasts and futures of Christianity. Here he showed the enormous varieties of Christianity through the ages and in all corners of the world. It made me search for his name in iTunes.

My search brought me to the 24th episode of the podcast Some Books Considered (feed). Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch spoke with podcast host Dan Skinner about his book Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. MacCulloch chose the title to indicate that the history prior to Christianity is important to understand the context of the of religion’s birth and also to indicate that it still has a long history yet to unfold. The book has been described as the first truly global history that examines the great ideas and personalities of Christianity. MacCulloch also examined how Christianity is currently being expressed in different cultures around the world.

Heads-up for 19 November 2010

History 5 (Berkeley) by Thomas Laqueur
Lecture 24: The Russian Revolution this is the title but the real subject is: The Great War: Its Causes, Course, and Consequences
How an assassination in Sarajevo came to embroil all of Europe. A war of stalemate and stagnation. A war resulting in revolutions and a radically changed power balance and world map.
(review, feed)

Being also known as Speaking of Faith
Translating the Dalai Lama
Geshe Thupten Jinpa, a Buddhist scholar and former monk, is the Dalai Lama's chief English translator. He shares the intricacies of Tibetan Buddhism that can't be conveyed in public teachings, and what happens when this ancient tradition meets modern science and modern lives.
(review, feed)

London School of Economics: Public lectures and events
Impunity in Cambodia
Senior leaders of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime of Democratic Kampuchea are now on trial in Cambodia for the crimes committed between 1975 and 1979 when two million people are estimated to have died. Will these trials help to break the impunity that has characterised Cambodia's recent history and which continues today? Brad Adams is executive director of Human Rights Watch's Asia Division and is a general expert on Asia. Simon Taylor is one of three co-founder/directors of Global Witness, a London and Washington DC based NGO which investigates and campaigns to prevent natural resource-related conflict and corruption and associated environmental and human rights abuses. Margo Picken has worked in the field of human rights for much of her professional career. Most recently, she worked for the United Nations as director of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia from 2001 to 2007.
(review, feed)

Something other than the show notes promise - History 5

I was wrong. On Wednesday I wrote a heads-up pointing to the Berkeley lecture series History 5, and followed the lecture notes and title which suggested the just published lecture was about the Great War. It was not. It was about the Russian revolution. Today you will find a lecture published titled the Russian Revolution and this is the one about the First World War. (feed)

The cause is quite simple. For the Russian revolution Professor Laqueur wanted to conduct a conversation with a guest lecturer who was available on Monday and so he simple switched the Monday and the Thursday lecture. Yet, the show notes went out according to the original plan. And here is my pitfall when I write the heads-up: I actually rely on those show notes.

I would want to encourage everybody to take on both lectures, or better even, listen to the whole course. In my opinion this is the best modern history course on podcast available.

More History 5:
5 Podcasts I listened to when I was away from the blog,
Berkeley History 5 by Thomas Laqueur 2010,
History 5 by Laqueur in previous years,
History 5 by Carla Hesse,
History 5 by Margaret Anderson.

Heads-up for 18 November 2010

In Our Time (BBC)
Foxe's Book of Martyrs 18th Nov 2010
Melvyn Bragg discusses one of the most important books of the Reformation, Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs' that recounts the horrific deaths of hundreds of martyrs put to death in the reign of Mary I. Melvyn is joined by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University; Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London; and Elizabeth Evenden, Lecturer in Book History at Brunel University.
(review, feed)

Forum Network
Paul Auster: Sunset Park
Writer Paul Auster reads from his newest book, Sunset Park, which follows the hopes and fears of a cast of unforgettable characters brought together by the mysterious Miles Heller during the dark months of the 2008 economic collapse: An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out worker in southern Florida obsessively photographing thousands of abandoned objects left behind by the evicted families; a group of young people squatting in an apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn; The Hospital for Broken Things, which specializes in repairing the artifacts of a vanished world; William Wyler?s 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives; a celebrated actress preparing to return to Broadway; an independent publisher desperately trying to save his business and his marriage; these are just some of the elements Auster weaves together in this novel about contemporary America and its ghosts.
(review, feed)

Thinking Allowed (BBC)
AK-47
Laurie Taylor talks to Professor Philip Smith about his new research looking at public incivility and examines the impact of the AK-47 (the Kalashnikov rifle) with former US Marine and writer C.J Chivers and military historian Richard Holmes
(review, feed)

Three issues of Philosophy Bites

In recent weeks the eminent podcast Philosophy Bites has released three excellent new issues, which I recommend one by one. (feed)

Inequality. Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds spoke with Alex Voorhoeve about inequality. Our main stream line of thought seems to sort of imply that inequality is bad, but is it really so? And if yes, why? Voorhoeve gives very insightful answers to the question and shows how inequality eventually disrupts human interaction.

Moral Responsibility. Gideon Rosen is a skeptic on the subject of moral responsibility. We normally assume people are morally responsible for their actions and the only exceptions we might accept are extreme cases of ignorance about facts or moral incapacity such as mental disease. Rosen shows another set of possible exceptions and this allows for a huge close on th range of responsibility - yet he does not rule it out completely.

What is philosophy? This sort of seems to be the question for this podcast to start with, yet the question has not been asked until this bonus episode, or more accurately: the answers have not been compiled until this episode. What does it mean? Are Warburton and Edmonds making some kind of inventory? Is this the beginning of a hiatus? In any case, listen and find how many of the philosophers explode in embarrassed laughter as they have to answer the question.

More Philosophy Bites:
Morality,
The genocide and the trial,
Dirty Hands,
Understanding decisions,
Nietzsche repossessed.