BBC history magazine

Jim Mowatt of the history podcast Historyzine aproached me with a request to review the podcast of the BBC History Magazine. He was surprised to find I had not reviewed it before. The fact is however, I have, although it is a long time ago (2007). I couldn't keep up with the podcast, although that does not necessarily mean it is a bad podcast.

BBC History Magazine is a monthly that can be purchased in the UK and can be ordered all over the world. The podcast is a promotional effort to go along with each edition. Twice a month the podcast comes out and highlights several articles from the current magazine. Usually the author of the article is interviewed about the subject. Two subjects are covered in the episode of around half an hour. Enough to get a really nice expose of the subject at hand.

I can imagine why Jim keeps up with the podcast and I am sure you will find the occasional treasure along with the regularly interesting stuff. So, why then did I drop out of this podcast? One reason is that I do not particularly like jumping around history from subject to subject era to era perspective to perspective. With podcasts that do this, I like to pick and choose my items and leave the rest. Contrary to most other podcasts, BBC History Magazine delivers no information about the content with the podcast, not in the info and not in the description label. That is the second and effective reason. When I quickly have to decide which podcast to download, a nondescript title like BBC History Magazine April 2009 part 1 with no added description will make pass this one by.

I feel however I can recommend what I assume Jim does, pick up each issue and be treated with an endless stream of history varieties presented by a professional team interviewing the true specialists.

More BBC History Magazine:
December 2007,
November 2007.

More Historyzine:
The lines of Brabant,
Historyzine at its best,
The battle of Blenheim,
Reliving the War of Spanish Succession,
The year 1703.

Middle East challenges - UChannel Podcast

There is an infinite stream of podcasts paying attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict and plenty of good ons at that. (see my label Israel) Lecture series such as those that are compiled in the UChannel Podcast give you nearly every week a couple to choose from.

What is exceptionally good at these is that the experts are invited to speak and one is receiving a much better frame of reference than by merely reading the newspapers. One such expert is David Makovsky from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who lectured about Middle East Challenges to the Obama Administration. I can recommend this lecture for getting some insight in the political intricacies between Israel and the Palestinians.

I was surprised, for example, once again, to be presented with a representation of affairs in which Fatah and Egypt have been wanting Israel to be hard on Hamas in Gaza. Makovsky makes this case just as Asher Susser and Jacob Dayan on UCLA's Israel Studies podcast. I have made very skeptical remarks about this when I reviewed Dayan's lecture, but surely the political point is true: both Fatah and Mubarak's regime in Egypt are threatened by Hamas and are each incapable of doing much and therefore it is welcome to them if Israel does the dirty work.

More UChannel Podcast:
Good climate for everyone (global warming),
Robots and War,
Sudan and the fallacy of nationhood,
Against intervention,
Lakhdar Brahimi on Afghanistan and Iraq.

It was 20 years ago today - history podcast

It was 20 years ago today is a very personal history podcast by Jamie Lawson. She takes a date close to the publication of the podcast and then discusses what happened on that day, twenty years ago. Just like me, she is old enough to actively remember 1989 and so these episodes are also about her personal perception and memory of the discussed occurrence.

This works out usually very well, I guess, especially for those who also have a recollection of the event. Here issue about the elections in the Soviet Union in 1989, that saw Boris Yeltsin's star rise, really touched the right to one for me. The next issue on The Satanic Verses admittedly, did less so. Lawson was so set on expressing her indignation of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, that the history and the memory got lost in the moral of the show.

So it is always a gamble when you hook up to such a personal podcast. The chosen era is a very good one though. She started here podcast in 2006 and thus has made here way through 1986 to 1989 and if you think of it, there are so many great events to connect to, that there are many exciting podcasts to be found in the feed and fine podcasts to be made still.

Slave Culture - Gilder Lehrmann history podcast

The Gilder Lehrmann Institute for American History promotes the study and love of American History and among their activities are to have lectures and these are recored and published as podcast. The feed of the Gilder Lehrmann Podcast contains the ten last issues, seven of which are about Lincoln, but at the site, more audio can be had.

I was contacted by the institute to review their podcast and to begin I chose the first issue they put out as it was about Slavery. Since I have taken up listening to Forgotten Classics' rereading of Uncle Tom's Cabin, this looked like a pertinent subject.

The lecture is delivered by Philip D. Morgan who has done research into the culture of the slaves themselves. In comparison to Uncle Tom's Cabin, the picture is much more diverse and much less easy to digest. But then again, Stowe's novel was to drive home an ideological point. Morgan attempted to describe, in spite of the problem there are so little sources in which the slaves speaks themselves. Morgan's painted picture is eventually that of a paternalism that gave rise to just as much the justifications of slavery as well as a novel such as Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The Gilder Lehrmann podcast promises to be a good quality source for history lectures in the realm of American History.

Samuel Kassow and the Warsaw Ghetto history - NBIH review

The recently discovered podcast New Books in History (NBIH) is putting out new issues weekly. In the mean while I am trying to catch up with the backlog and as a consequence, I have still to cover all of its work. And I want to, as this is an outstanding new podcast on my horizon.

One of those podcasts from the backlog had host Marshall Poe interview the historian Samuel Kassow. Kassow wrote a book titled: Who will write our history. It puts a finger on a very ironic, almost too sad to contemplate point that the historiography of the holocaust is mostly based upon the sources provided by the perpetrators. The Germans kept good records and the Jews that were whisked away in the shoah hardly had the time to sit down and write their history.

Kassow wrote his book about an exception to this rule. Emanuel Ringelblum was a historian of the Warsaw Ghetto who set up a team of contemporary historians and they all made efforts to chronicle their fate as long as they could. Only when this became impossible, Ringelblum hid their archives and they were sent off to the destruction camps. Part of the archives have been discovered and Kassow's book is based upon this.

Marshall Poe's interview with Kassow spends a lot of time on setting the stage in order to have the clear frame of reference in which Ringelblum and his crew worked. Apart from being a fascinating interiew, this is also a great incentive to read the book.

More NBIH:
Ronald Reagan,
Prokofiev,
Evolution, genetics and history,
Kees Boterbloem about Jan Struys.

Sparkletack - history podcast review

Here is a charming history podcast that was recommended to me by Julie Davies of the Forgotten Classics podcast. The podcast is called Sparkletack and I have no idea what connection this makes to its subject: the history of San Francisco. (feed)

There is a shared characteristic with Forgotten Classics though, as far as I can say after two really nice episodes. Host Richard Miller, a graphic designer by trade, relates the history of San Francisco to us by reading from some of his source material. Thus we have been presented an impression of the Barbary Coast and of the Cocktail Route in San Francisco. The first was taken from accounts describing events in the nineteenth century and the second from a book written in the 1930s The Champaign Days of San Francisco.

Apart from giving an excellent reading, Miller knows to choose his text very well, so that you are immersed into the historic picture of San Francisco. No wonder he calls these podcasts 'time capsules'. Apart from time capsules there are also other type of episodes to be had from Sparkletack. It seems I have only begun to listen.