The Thread. Actually, even though I heard this 3 part series on the Election Day Massacre on The Thread, it is actually part of the Flashback series. Episode 2 picks up with the white mob outside July Perry’s house in Ocoee, Florida, wanting to send a message that black people shouldn’t vote. There were gunshots exchanged- no-one really knows quite what went on- but two white men were killed, and this was why the massacre achieved national and international attention. Meanwhile, fifty car-loads of white men drove into Ocoee. Perry escaped, but was found in a cane field and later lynched. Norman was never found. Episode 3 looks at how the black population fled Ocoee in what can only be called ethnic cleansing, and did not return for about 50 years. They left their orange groves, which were sold off to white buyers with the stipulation that they could not be sold to blacks. This land was later taken over by Disney World and is worth a fortune. It is only really with the centenary that the story is being told, and a freeway was named after July Perry.
Latin American History Podcast And finally I come to the end of the Conquest of Mexico series. Episode 13 points out that even though the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Central America was complete, it was a very tenuous conquest, better seen as a series of islands of Spanish influence, rather than the takeover than the word ‘Conquest’ suggests. He follows through some of the descendants of Cortez and Moctezuma – in fact, the House of Grau-Moctezuma de Toleriu still exists in Spain today. Moctezuma’s daughter Isabel had quite a life, being married off six times, to 3 Aztec emperors and 3 Spaniards and also had an illegitimate daughter with Cortez himself.
99% Invisible I must admit that I hadn’t noticed it, but at many of the Black Lives Matter protests there have been Red Black and Green flags flying. Flag Days: the Red, the Black and the Green looks at the history of this flag, which was created by Marcus Garvie in 1918. The podcast talks about the clash of ideologies between W.E.B Du Bois and Garvie, who believed that people of African descent all over the world should reclaim Africa from colonialism and create a new society there. There’s also a coda to the podcast about the Juneteenth flag, which I hadn’t seen before. Really interesting.
The History Listen (ABC) There’s a series of programs called ‘An Object in Time’ presented by Sarah Percy from the University of Queensland (but obviously of North American background). In the episode An Object in Time: The Umbrella, she looks at the use of a poison-tipped umbrella to silence a Bulgarian dissident named Georgi Markov during the Cold War. Hmm. Things don’t change.
The Documentary (BBC) Continuing on with their series on Syria during the civil war and beyond Syria’s decade of conflict: The battered champions of Aleppo was recorded in 2016 when the narrator looked at a photo of a football (soccer) team from Mare’a, in Aleppo in the 1980s. During the 1980s Assad’s father was still in control, and your success in soccer depended on your connections with the government. By 2016, when this was recorded, Syria was plunged into civil war, and those boyhood friends were often on different sides. As with the other programs in this series, they then follow up again from 2016 to the present day. Many of the men had moved to other countries, and it really doesn’t sound all that much better yet.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 