Abraham Lincoln - history podcast review

While we are in the spirit of the elections, let's pause a bit with Abraham Lincoln, the president that is considered, widely, as the best ever. The Teaching Company recently served a biography podcast about the man. (feed)

There is more audio about Lincoln to be had at the Teaching Company, but that is premium. The podcast is the promotional material. And it is good stuff. What I found especially strong was the way it was made clear how Lincoln developed into the abolitionist politician we remember. It is shown with quotes and with a careful description of the political landscape and dynamics of the day.

The podcast is tangibly coming from a commercial audio production company. It is smooth, engaging, paced and so on. Everything you need, to be taken in. It makes the lecture very sleek in comparison with traditional college material. It is a bit too over the top for my minimal taste, whereas I think, most people will actually appreciate it a lot. By all means a strong podcast.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

More Teaching Company:
Da Vinci Code

More Lincoln:
American Civil Rights Movement,
Civil war to the present,
History Podcast Month.

Maximilian Von Spee - veertien achttien

Er is nogal eens gezegd, dat de Eerste Wereldoorlog een confrontatie was van mensen met een negentiende eeuwse mentaliteit en twintigste eeuws oorlogsvernuft. Ik heb het voor het eerst gehoord in een VPRO programma onder de titel Oorlog Was Voetbal, waarin een anecdote aan de orde komt van een Engelse compagnie die de slag aan de Somme, op 1 juli 1916, tegemoet gaat met een bal aan de voet.

De laatste aflevering van Veertien Achttien ademt ook die sfeer. Hoofdrolspeler Maximilian von Spee voert het commando over het twintigste eeuws oorlogsvernuft, in dit geval op zee. Hij doet dit echter met zijn negentiende eeuwse waarden, waarbij hij onder anderen de vijand waarschuwt voor hij aanvalt, opvarenden de kans geeft om zich in veiligheid te stellen en ook nadien probeert mensen te redden. Zo citeert Tom Tacken hem uit zijn logboek. Hoewel de Britten standvastig jacht op Von Spee en zijn vlootonderdeel maken en er uiteindelijk in slagen hem naar de zeebodem te jagen, blijft de oorlog op zee een kanttekening in deze oorlog.

De echte strijd speelt zich af op het vasteland van Europa en zoals wel vaker gememoreerd, is het meest in het oog springende aspect de loopgravenoorlog aan het Westelijk Front. Vorige week ging het daar weer over, toen ik schreef over de gevallen soldaten en een gedicht van E.A. Mackintosh citeerde. In voornoemd radioprogramma van de VPRO, uit 1987, wordt dit gedicht voorgedragen door Neville Grey. Ik heb van de VPRO toestemming gekregen om dat fragment op mijn blog te laten beluisteren.

In Memoriam, door Ewart Alan Mackintosh, 1916 - gelezen door Neville Grey:


Meer Veertien Achttien:
Khudadad Khan,
Käthe Kollwitz,
Sir Robert Borden,
Carol I,
Herbert Hoover.

The Word Nerds in debate

The most surprising tale in The Word Nerds about debate was what Barbara Shepherd told. When she wanted to be an actress, debating was part of her training. It was the part she hated, she just wanted to be on the stage and not in the debating competition.



There has already been several TWN issues about rhetoric, so the step to formal debating was not large. David Shepherd repeated the old tale about the Kennedy-Nixon debate. And this goes to show that your appearance is just as important as your debating qualities.



The radio listeners thought Nixon had won, the TV viewers pointed at Kennedy as the winner. It was just that Kennedy looked better. In the visualized age, that can be so much more important. It makes you think twice about podcasts. Yet, The Words Nerds as a podcast is splendid, even without the good looks.



Previous reviews of TWN on this blog:

Ambiguity and linguistic tics,

Syntax,

Prosody,

Rhetoric,

Silence and Speechlessness.

The schedule of the week

Here is a list of some of the posts you can expect in this coming week and a list of new and old podcasts that I will listen to and are likely to be reviewed as well.

-Teaching Company: Abraham Lincoln
How did Lincoln rise to politics? How did he mature to become the most important president the US have had?

-The Word Nerds: Debate
Is debating about proper argumentation? Is it about impressing the audience, with fallacies or without? Or is it about acting? Ask Dave and Barbara Shepherd.

-Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Carthage destroyed
Dan Carlin has reached the end of his triple series retelling the wars between the Romans and the Carthaginians. The heroes Hannibal and Scipio die the way heroes die and Carthage is cruelly destroyed at long last. The Punic nightmare, eventually turns into a Roman nightmare.

-Veertien Achttien: Maximilian von Spee
The elusive Germans at sea, villains and gentlemen, sometimes in the same person.

New podcasts that I picked up on are: Medicalhistory, Pods and Blogs (BBC) and Junggesellenblog

My listen list contains:
Namaste Stories
Shrink Rap Radio
The Word Nerds
Making history with Ran Levy - עושים היסטוריה
History 2311 (Temple College) - World history until 1600

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Simon Bolivar, and others - In Our Time review

Four episodes of In Our Time have been out since the last time I wrote about this excellent program and podcast by the BBC. Since only the latest episode is available for download (feed), for the preceding three, I can but refer you to the on-line streams.

The earliest of these three is about Kurt Gödel and his incompleteness theory in mathematics. Also for you non-mathematicians (like myself) this is a very worthy chapter. When mathematicians felt they had their world in the palm of their hands and were about to grasp its axioms completely, young Gödel, maintained that it is necessarily incomplete.

A similar turn in thinking is observed in the next issue, Vitalism, about the spark of life. When history had just turned us in to the fast moving lane towards mechanical thinking, people started looking for the magical component to life. Was it electricity, or what, that would definitively rescue man, animal, life, from being interpreted as a machine?

Needless to say, Dante's Inferno, is also a must listen to. As IOT must stand stil with all major milestones in our cultural heritage. And where can you get an accessible 40 minutes about this masterpiece?

This week's download is about Simon Bolivar and is as excellent as ever. Better even in some ways as somehow Bolivar presented the team to round some thoughts of within the span of one program. For me it also filled quite a gap in my knowledge. It goes to show, once again, how my perspective is so profoundly positioned in north-western Europe. South-America, as many other parts of the world, drop so frequently out of sight. I knew next to nothing about Bolivar. IOT set this straight.

More In Our Time:
The Translation Movement,
Miracles,
Tacitus,
John Donne (The Metaphysical Poets),
The Arab Conquests.

History 5 on industrialization

Berkeley's History 5 has been one of the first podcast lecture series I discovered back in the days before my blog and it was the first I would follow from beginning to end. I wouldn't have to follow it any more, if I didn't feel this was about the best podcast recommendation I can give to my readers. And so I keep listening, noticing the little differences and making sure it still is you way to go in history podcasts.

Also with the current lecturer, Professor Carla Hesse, History 5 remains the best podcast and the basic baggage I think a history podcast listener should take with him, or her for that matter. In comparison with previous lecturers (Anderson and Laqueur) Hesse goes much faster through the first part of the described era and so we wind up in the Enlightenment and French revolution before the mid-term. And right after the mid-term we have hit the Industrial Revolution.

In Anderson's lecture series, I also high-lighted the issue about this revolution and it is a thrilling comparison with Hesse's take. Both professors emphasize there is no industrialization out of the blue, but whereas Anderson puts the preceding agricultural revolution to the center, Hesse goes a step further.

Hesse's conclusion is, it is better to speak of industrialization and not of a revolution. She argues the process starts earlier and continues much longer. Industrialization also changes its pace and geographical focus throughout history and then the real question is why it happens at all. Here she seems in agreement with Anderson, that there is an important part to be played by the population boom and that that was made possible by more intensive agriculture. However, she doesn't show this as an explanation, but rather as a question, a profound question as opposed to the contemporary Malthus's doomsday scenario, which supposed population could not grow without hitting catastrophical starvation. Why didn't this happen? What made population grow in the first place, before developments in agriculture and industry supported it?

Ideas about global warming, disease immunity and social changes (earlier marriages, more kids) pass the stage. This is only one example of the fantastic quality of this series, year in year out, twice a year. It is only too bad the audio is sometimes really bad. Hesse apparently speaks with her hands and frequently knocks the microphone about, causing drastic changes in the sound levels.

See also:
History 5 by Carla Hesse,
Capitalism and Socialism,
Air pollution in London,
Industrialization in Germany,
Agricultural Revolution first.