Happy Purim

This weekend we have been going about the neighborhood to celebrate Purim. The weather was hot, a sweltering hot befitting summer. In other years we were fighting cold and the occasional shower, but Purim is late this year.

The Celtic Myth Podshow #3

Bres the Beautiful figures in the third edition of the Celtic Myth Podshow. Unfortunately I cannot link to their site right now, as maintenance is being done. However, the show is still available through iTunes.

The tale of Bres the Beautiful is the third tale in the series that will deliver the whole Irish mythological cycle. After the gods and wars tales we have had so far, the story of Bres will touch upon another motif in story telling, the 'Vatersucher'. Why do I know this only in German? My Babylon dictionary couldn't hep me out here. Literally this is a fatherseeker. Bres doesn't know who his father is and at some point he is forced to find this out. And this may not be the kind of thing he wants to know. As goes with Vatersuchers until recent times. I was thinking of the character Johnny in a Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.

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An additional thought on myths. It was a remark made on another podcast. In Our Time spoke of the Greek Myths and from that issue I took the understanding that myths were man's way of getting a grip on life, the world, the universe and so on. A thought experiment that doesn't draw explicit boundaries to divide science from metaphysics, philosophy from belief, history from fiction and religion from fantasy. A holistic, heuristic tool.

Previously on the Celtic Myth Podshow:
Let Battle Commence! - Celtic Myth Podshow #2,
The Celtic Myth Podshow - first review

Planned podcast reviews on "Anne is a man!"

I have listened to a number of podcasts and begun to write the next review, but I have not yet decided in which order to publish them. It depends on a couple of factors, among others when I will get ready to finish the reviews. But here is a list of what you can expect in the coming days:

History 5: enlightenment and French revolution
OVT: Nog is Polen niet verloren
Getting Published with the Writing Show
American History before 1870
King Lear (On BBC and Berkeley)
Shrink Rap Radio
Philosophy Bites

In New podcasts on trial we have March as a history podcast month with a wide range of candidates:
History of the international system
Redborne History Podcast
Teaching American History Podcast
History 2311
Your History Podcast
We the people stories

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Hank's History Hour

"Hi, I’m Hank Nelson, and I love history." This is how an American high school kid introduces you to himself and his podcast - Hank's History Hour. He guides the listener through the course material of AP European History. He tells what the student must know (or so he thinks), what questions to expect, what the hurdles in reading and studying the book are and so on. In short this should be an effective study guide, from an excellent student, for all those peers who need to pass the exam as well. One must assume no school kid will do this kind of thing unless he really, really loves the subject, will pass the test with straight A's and is by all means the most ideal student of history in general and this course in particular.

AP, so I learn on the net, stands for Advanced Placement, hence, this is the top level in secondary school. As an absolute outsider, I can not begin to fathom whether this podcast is in any way helpful to the struggling peers of Hank Nelson. I assume it is and tentatively I would recommend the podcast to them. But first of all I would like to recommend the podcast to everybody involved in History education, in the US and elsewhere.

Assuming this course is the top of the line and this student is as good as they get and what he is able to tell represents the highest the textbook and the course can pass on to the students - you professional listeners are in for a shock. And you may not even be expecting too much. But here are a couple of points that made me cringe dearly during the couple of hours I compelled myself to listen.

For one, Hank is consistently apologetic as to how boring the course is. He complains about certain chapters they are boring, certain subjects to be dull and is openly (and understandably) annoyed by the politically correct, but seemingly unrelated themes that are interjected in the course such as the position of women in renaissance Europe and the question whether William Shakespeare actually wrote the works of Shakespeare. So this is the state of the course: it managed to bore even the best motivated student and failed to bring coherence into the material.

Another element that made me gasp was the presented picture of European History. It is incoherent, it lacks both facts and understanding. Where there are facts they are unrelated and where there is some attempt to analysis and explanation, the construction is filled with crude, incredible and dumb stereotypes. 'if you wanna know why the age of exploration occurred, well it was all because of religion. Ferdinand and Isabelle, you know, wanted to convert everybody in Africa and Asia to catholicism.' 'What really did the Indians in, was disease. You know, before the Spanish came, they had no disease apart from syphilis.'

I could go on and maybe my standards are just too high. But I fear that if this incomprehensible, unhistorical and frankly, Hank is so right, utterly boring hotchpotch is the best kind of history education the best secondary school students get, you teach nothing. And I can't blame anybody for hating History. Hank is all right. If he can stand all this junk, and still loves history, he has so much innate historic sense, he will find his way and improve his knowledge and insight all the time, but his schoolmates will have dropped out by now and form a generation without knowledge and without meaningful connection to the past.

Dan Carlin's view of Anne is a Man!

Here is a mail I received from podcaster Dan Carlin, who produces the podcasts Hardcore History and Common Sense.

Anne,

It is always a fine thing to get a positive review from you. You are, in my mind, the most elite of the podcast reviewers (and most especially in the History genre). Your reviewing style reminds me more of a film critic...you are NOT the general public reviewing a piece of art, you are on a different level. You absorb all the subtle little nuances in the podcast. Any little thing we do that we wonder: "Will the audience pick up on this?" you always notice.

We also use you as a sort of barometer for how we are doing. You see, by the time we release one of our history podcasts we have heard it so many times (during the editing process) that we lose all perspective of what it sounds like to the first-time listener. So, we are never sure if it is balanced enough, or entertaining enough, or educational enough, etc. when we actually release it. Then, no matter what, we get good and bad emails about it (on this Apache show certainly!). It becomes hard for us to get a good perspective on how good the podcast episode actually was.

Until we read your review.

We know that, whether the review is good or bad, you will at least understand what we were trying to do and can judge the work on THAT standard. We really respect that and use your reviews to get a feel for what sort of product we are leaving behind in "digital stone" (strange concept, eh? That these silly little shows we do will outlive us probably?). Thanks so much for that.

And keep up what you are doing. I see no reason why you can't be the THE podcast reviewer online. No one has really assumed that role, and no one, it seems to me, does it as well as you do (and believe me, I look!).

Take care and stay safe...

-Dan

More Dan Carlin:
Assyrians,
Depression,
Succession in Macedon,
The Plague,
Dan Carlin's common sense.

Thinking Outside the European Box

Virginia Tech started publishing a podcast series named Medieval & Renaissance Studies Events (Med-Ren Events). Currently there is one lecture recording in the feed, which is a lecture by history professor Joseph Miller, titled: "Medieval" & "Early Modern" Africa? Thinking Outside the European Box. I rushed to listen to this lecture on my quest to learn more about Africa.

See also:
Podcast Review: Africa Past and Present,
Africa - Stanford Travel,
Africa - Counsel for Foreign Relations.

Even though I learned little about Africa, the lecture was an elevating experience out of which I have taken a tremendous lesson and loads of food for thought. Professor Miller spends the first half of his lecture entirely to the subtitle of the lecture: Thinking outside the European box. He makes a very strong point against the 'European', more regular constructions of history which have three (as I can recount) major flaws.
1) It emphasizes continuities (such as civilizations or nations), whereas realities are those of constant change. For example, speaking of China as a supposed continuum of 3000 years is blissfully ignoring the profound differences between China today and the China of any previous era.
2) It projects development in History. Thus one takes a contemporary notion and reconstructs history, selecting whatever phenomena match the notion, completely stripping it of its context and thus of its original meaning. Eventually such history creates an anachronism.
3) It assumes some purpose-driven element, which he calls the teleological flaw. This approach assumes the rationality and utilitarian drive in historic events and developments, whereas the reality is that people are deeply irrational, strategies are misconceived and consequences are by and large inadvertent.

The relation with Africa is, so it seems, that this European construction of how the discipline history can be exercised, is that maybe for Europe in modern times, the fictitious assumptions can somewhat be maintained, but for Africa, they are so bluntly inapplicable, that it makes building history of Africa, along the traditional methodology near impossible. Consequently, traditional history largely ignores Africa.

As an alternative and coherent with his determination of how flawed main stream approach is, he proposes the following assumptions as starting points: History is a flow of constant change, where the agents of change are acting incrementally, irrationally, they are delusional (as to their efficacy) and the results are inadvertent. What man and what society does, in Miller's mind is to act as he acts and when circumstances change or when the perceived goal is not reached, is to increment, emphasize, increase whatever set of actions, whatever strategy was deemed applicable (at the expense of other such activities) assuming a certain result, but in almost all cases creating a whole different outcome.

He uses a charmingly recognizable example to show the increment as well as the illusion about efficacy as the inadvertent result. When you speak little French and attempt with all that you can master to buy a metro ticket in Paris, you will nevertheless fail. What ensues, is that you raise your voice and in a louder fashion, in probably even worse French repeat your effort, with obviously far from the intended effect.

The second half of the lecture embarks on a history of Africa, but it is at this point, the already poor audio quality deteriorates to a level where the lecture is barely audible and in spite of repeated efforts, I could not extract any real insight. A lecture of this outstanding quality, would have deserved better. Current state of technology and the amount of podcasting experience that is around in US academia (Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton to name but a few) also demanded a better result from Virginia Tech. So be it. We can only hope they will make amends immediately.