Anne is a Man! Over the weekend

Friday:
Biography Show - Helen of Troy
Podcast listening for beginners (3) - getting iTunes

Saturday and Sunday (some of the following):
American History - The Scopes Trial
Speaking of Faith - Karen Armstrong
LSE / UChannel - Nuts and Bolts of Empire
Hardcore History - Alcohol and Drugs inflicted history
History of the International System - The State, a problem

New Podcasts on trial:
UC San Diego: Religious and Legal foundations of American culture/history
Berkeley: American environmental and cultural history

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Islam and Europe - LSE podcast review

The London School of Economics (LSE) records its public lectures and events and publishes them as a podcast. Partly this podcast coincides with the acclaimed UChannel podcast - Princeton's conglomerate of this kind of recordings from various such institutions. However, not all LSE podcasts make it to UChannel. For example the one titled: A Counter-narrative: Islam and the first Europe. I must have missed that on UChannel, or maybe it was not accepted there. The audio quality is not up to standard, it must be said and that could be the reason. The content is not to be spurned though.

Speaker is Professor David Levering Lewis, who recently published the book God's Crucible; Islam and the Making of Europe (IHT review), and in his lecture he proposes to look at early European history in a way reverse to the ordinary. The ordinary is as it is taught widely and I remember vividly from my school days: Europe was threatened by the Muslims and managed to stop them at Poitiers in 732 (sometimes called the Battle of Tours). Such was in common thought the rescue of Europe and the basis for its successes afterwards.

Levering suggests that there was no Europe at the time. It was a backward area, rift with tribal warfare and by virtue of the feat at Poitiers remained to be so. He characterizes the sphere as:

an economically retarded, balkanized, and fratricidal Europe, which, by defining itself in opposition to Islam in al-Andalus, made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism, and perpetual war.

He argues that had the Andalusians conquered Europe, the renewed connection with the classics would have come centuries earlier, religious tolerance would have prevented the endless and bloody wars of the reformation and basically Europe could have flourished more and earlier than it did. He also points out that according to Muslim sources it was hardly European superiority that defeated the Muslims at Poitiers but rather the inner disunity among them. Of course history would be utterly different, but he has a point that one can hardly claim Poitiers to be solely a happy occasion that brought none but good.

Relevant posts:
Making of the Modern World - UCSD,
Islam meets Europe,
The Franks,
Thinking Outside the European Box,
The making of Europe in 1453.

Ruud Lubbers - Marathon Interview

In de podcast serie van VPRO's marathon interviews, kijk je in twee tijdperken. Enerzijds is er de recente serie (2006, 2007, 2008) die beschikbaar is en anderszijds zijn er archieven uit eind jaren tachtig, begin jaren negentig die geleidelijk ontsloten worden. Het interview dat Chris Kijne had met Ruud Lubbers was van eind 2007, maar het weerzien met Lubbers betekende voor mij toch vooral een herverkenning met de tijd van de kabinetten Lubbers - 1982 tot 1994.

Het weerzien (overdrachtelijk dan) met Lubbers was niet speciaal prettig. Kon ik hem vroeger niet zo waarderen, dat werd na drie uur interview op podcast niet anders, al stond ik er wel voor open. Er is iets in de rhetoriek van Lubbers dat hem onaantastbaar maakt. Ik heb wel vaker geschreven dat interviews met politici bij voorbaat tot mislukking gedoemd zijn omdat ze zich in een web van woorden spinnen om er zo voordelig mogelijk uit te komen. Al zou drie uur toch een hoop tijd moeten zijn. En Chris Kijne is niet de eerste de beste interviewer.

Er zou nog een reden kunnen zijn. Lubbers is nu 68. Ondanks de deconfiture bij de VN, zou je toch zeggen dat zijn politieke leven als een gesloten boek kan worden beschouwd en hij wat opener kan zijn in omzien - er zijn geen verkiezingen meer te winnen of te verliezen. Maar de Lubberstaal blijft fier overeind. Zelfs over de affaire bij de VN wordt gesproken en je kan er geen vat op krijgen. Goed, formeel staat hij in zijn recht, en misschien is er inderdaad niets gebeurd, maar er komt geen mens door. En is het ongemakkelijke kuchen omdat hij al drie uur aan het praten is, of zijn het freudiaanse afleidingen omdat er werkelijk een gevoelige snaar wordt geraakt? Kijne laat het liggen. Het blijft een goed interview, maar Lubbers blijft eveneens onaantastbaar, onaanraakbaar en daardoor steriel.

Meer Marathon Interviews:
Jan Leijten,
Bertus Hendriks,
Gerrit Wagner,
Rijk de Gooyer,
Hans Galjaard.

Gupta History - podcast review

As I have written before: history podcasts do not tend to pay much attention to non-western civilizations. And when it is done, I have seen attention to Islam, to China and occasionally to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. To the civilizations of India, there is hardly any attention. I know only of David Kalivas's World History, a podfaded podcast, who had two installments about the Indus Valley civilizations.

Now we have a new one, but yet again, it remains in a single installment. Matthew Herbst's series in the Making of the Modern World lectures from UC San Diego (MMW 3 - The Medieval Heritage) takes one lecture to acquaint us, a little bit with another Indian empire, that of the Guptas. Around the end of the Western Roman Empire, this dynasty ruled on the northern half of the India subcontinent.

It was a Hindu culture and the explanations about and quotes from Hinduism are what make Herbst's lecture especially worthwhile. We find that in many ways the Gupta's are different from other civilizations. Whether it is the polytheism of the Hindus, or something else, in India social order is less strict, less violent, more open to the other than elsewhere. It would beg for more attention, more depth, but Herbst has to move on. He has to fill the requirements of all of the medieval Heritage, but I sure hope to some day find a podcast entirely dedicated to India.

More MMW 3:
World history guided by the religions,
World history outside the European box,
Making of the Modern World - UCSD,
UC San Diego's podcast courses,
David Kalivas' World History Podcast.

The brain - In Our Time review

BBC's In Our Time paid attention to the history of the brain. This is not a biological or paleontological history of the brain, but rather a cultural history; a history of how we came to perceive the brain.

The ancient Greeks had their respect for the brain and some surmised the brain may be the center of all. But for western history Galen became dominant and he emphasized the heart. Hence, medical practices focused on the heart and the metaphors we used to address the soul, the center of human being, of thought and emotions we also pointed to the heart, as does much of our language still today.

Only in recent history, with the advance of medical technology, it came to be understood just how central the brain is.

Previously on In Our Time:
General review of In Our Time,
Yeats, Enclosures and Materialism,
King Lear,
Ada Lovelace,
The Social Contract,
Plate Tectonics.

Podcast listening for Beginners (2)

In the first post in this series, I gave the shortest way to listening to a podcast: clicking on it in the web and playing it in your browser/media player. This is fine, when you occasionally run into a piece of audio and can afford to listen right away. Sometimes, there is no option to do otherwise. The audio may be offered in what is called 'streaming', which means that listening on-line is the only possibility. This wouldn't be proper podcast, but it needs to be noted that sometimes podcasts turn to streams (like the old In Our Time editions), or streams may turn to podcasts later.

As long as audio is offered in the form of a playable file, apart from listening to it on-line, you can also proceed in downloading it. This means you copy the file to your computer and as of that moment you will be able to listen to it whenever you want, regardless of whether you have an internet connection at the time. In addition, once the file is stored on your computer (and you know where it is) you can also proceed to copy it to other places, especially to a portable MP3 player, allowing you to listen when and also where you want.

I would advise, as a first step, to be prepared. Make a designated folder on your computer where you will want to store your podcasts. It is not recommended to make that folder on your desktop, but rather anywhere else in the file system. Easily accessible on most computers is the folder for Documents and Settings, create a subfolder in here named, for example, podcasts. And you are on your way. (If you know how to do it, maybe place a shortcut to this folder on your desktop.)

Next, remember what I wrote in the previous instruction: follow the link I give in my review to the website of the podcaster and look for the button or link from where you can play the file. It is very likely, the site also gives a link for download, but even if not, notice as you hover your mouse pointer over that link or button, the bottom line of your browser screen shows the link underneath and this link ends with the extension .mp3 - this is the file. You can click to play - as you know.

Now, instead of a normal click, give a right click. In the menu box that opens you will have an option to 'Save target as...' or if you use FireFox 'Save link as ...'.

Choose that option and then you will be asked where you want to save the file and this is where you will point to the newly created podcasts folder. In case you haven't created it yet, you can do that from here. In case you do not know how to find, observe there are a number of icons on the left to help you choose a starting point. If you worked as described above, you should choose 'My Documents' and you will find the podcasts folder in there. Click that folder and the file will be saved in there.

Before saving you might want to consider changing the name of the file, but normally I wouldn't expect that to be necessary. So, click save and in a matter of minutes (maybe even seconds) the file will be downloaded to the designated folder. From that folder you can click the file and play it whenever you want. From that folder also you will be able to copy.

If you have an MP3 player, you can connect it to the computer and copy from the podcasts folder to the player. There are various ways to do that and the player or the computer may offer a user friendly interface for that, but basically, the player can be opened as a folder just the same and you could copy from one folder to another, either by drag and drop or copy and paste.

Previously:
Listening on line