Travels Through Time. I was in the car driving down to Airey’s Inlet, listening to podcasts through Spotify and it just went from one episode to the next. So I heard Dr Diane Atkinson, who chose 1914 as her year to discuss, looking at The Suffragettes and their actions during this first year of the war. Her three scenes were a drawing room in the industrial city of Preston during January 1914, at Charing Cross Station at the same time, and then on 21 May 1914 at the gates of Buckingham Palace.
She was followed by Sir Michael Palin, no less, talking about HMS Erebus in From Pole to Pole. He cheated a bit by spanning seven years from 1841 to 1848. Still, I guess you don’t pull rank on Michael Palin.He started off in Hobart on 1st June 1841, at the Erebus and Terror Ball, where the best of Hobart Society were there to celebrate the two ships- the Erebus and the Terror. His second scene was the New Year celebrations in the Antarctic, but his final scene was 22 April 1848 off King William Island in the Arctic, where HMS Erebus and Terror were abandoned.
New Books in Latin American Studies Diana Arbaiza The Spirit of Hispanism: Commerce, Culture and Identity Across the Atlantic.1875-1936. In this podcast, she looks at the idea of the ‘Spanish world’ and how it was leveraged as a form of nostalgia for ‘lost glory’ even before Spain lost the Phillipines in 1898. She chose 1875 as her starting year because that was when the Bourbon Monarchy was restored in Spain, and closed off her narrative in 1936 with the Spanish Civil War. She argues that ‘hispanism’ has served different purposes in Spain (nationalism, commerce through the book industry) and that it gave support to the contested idea that the Spanish Empire was less materialistic than British and Dutch imperialism.
History Extra Podcast. I’d never really thought about Ethiopia as an alternative seat of Christendom (in fact, it had been since the 4th century) but in this episode Medieval Ethiopa’s Diplomatic Missions, Verena Krebs discusses the diplomats who were sent to Europe during the 15th and 16th century by the Ethiopian Christian leaders. It was relatively easy for Ethiopians to travel to Europe, compared with the difficulty of Western Europeans going the other way. Although it has often been supposed that the Ethiopian diplomats were seeking military assistance, she suggests instead that they sought religious artefacts (saints’ fingers etc.) out of a clear sense of confidence in their Christianity.
Earshot (ABC) ‘Trough Man’ was an almost mythical figure in the pre-AIDS Sydney gay scene. An afficionado of ‘water sports’, he could be found in the men’s toilets of Oxford Street bars, enjoying a long golden shower. In Searching for Trough Man, the interviewer decided to try to find him, some 30 years later.
Heather Cox Richardson I continue to listen to her Thursday history podcasts, which she is now presenting as ‘one-offs’ rather than following a theme. Her talk of 15 April Why the Civil War Still Matters marks the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination but it’s very much an encapsulation of her arguments over the last couple of years. She starts off by talking about her horror at seeing the Confederate flag in Congress during the January insurrection, and talks more personally about how reading the Civil War through a single Chicago newspaper gave her just a small taste of the shock that people felt when Lincoln was assassinated. She rounds it off by bringing it back to current events. This is a really good podcast- if you haven’t listened to her before, this is a really good place to start!
History of Latin America In The Conquest of Mexico Part 11, attention turns to Honduras. By this stage, Cortez and his men had stopped fighting the Aztecs and were just fighting other Spaniards with their eyes on treasure and loyalties to either Cortez or the guy back in Cuba (whose name I have forgotten).
Background Briefing (ABC). In recent years we have had both state and federal inquiries into institutional child sexual abuse. What makes The memo that erased a scandal particularly distressing is not only that the the man who is accused of causing so much misery is still alive, unable to be tried in court because of his dementia, but that it seems to have been covered up at the highest levels of the Victorian (Liberal) government in the 1960s. Sir John Dillon, Sir Henry Winneke and the Attorney-General Sir Arthur Rylah – they are all named, and are all dead.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 