Monthly Archives: July 2024

Dan Snow’s History Hit The Early Years of the British Empire Being brought up Australian, I tend to think of the British Empire as all that red on the maps of the world. But in its earliest days of empire, Britain (or rather, England) lagged behind the Spanish and Portuguese first of all, then the Dutch, then finally Britain at the rear. The episode features David Veevers, the author of The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire. At first, the British empire was the province of privateers, although there were connections with the crown as well. He emphasizes the fightback of the indigenous people, who kept the early colonists clinging to the coastline, unable to penetrate further and he reminds us that the East India Company was actually defeated. By the end of the 18th century, Britain had become better armed and was a stronger entity after the Act of Union. The accumulation of land was slow at first, but then continued apace.

The Rest is History: Luther: The Battle against Satan (Part 3) After questioning the idea that Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the cathedral, Tom and Dominic take up the story three years later, when he burns the Papal Bull in Wittenburg, precipitating a crisis. The Roman Church was asserting its authority, and Luther was defying the fundamental teaching of the church i.e. that sinners can pay for release from Purgatory. Moreover, the Ottomans were threatening Vienna at the same time. Printing had been around for 100 years, but Luther was a master of self-promotion and good at public events like book burning etc, which took place in the midst of parades of student floats and a carnivalesque atmosphere. The 95 theses were printed in German and Latin. The Holy Roman Empire was weak, with the aging Holy Roman Emperor expected to die soon, and the position of Luther’s protector Frederick of Saxony was very powerful because he would be electing the successor. Luther denied reason, philosophy and canon law- all the intellectual areas that the Church had branched into- and insisted that we go back to the Bible. Luther himself (did you know that his real name was Luder?) had his own ‘born again’ moment, and with all the bombast of the born-again, declared that others were not Christians because they had not done the personal work of believing. In October 1518 Luther was summoned to meet the Inquisitor Cardinal Thomas Cajetan in Augsberg. Ever the publicity hound, Luther walked there drawing crowds as he went. He and Cajetan had three meetings, but in the end Luther was released from his vows. Then followed a saturation-bombing of pamphlets written by Luther and on 3 January 1521 Luther was excommunicated by the new Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Mary Beard’s Being Roman (BBC) Episode 7: The Whistleblower takes us to Britain in 61CE and the repression of Boudicca’s revolt. Procurator (i.e. finance officer) Gaius Julius Classicianus is appalled by the harsh repression meted out by the local Governor. So he dobs on him, and advises the rebels to wait until a new Governor is sent out, and they might get bigger terms. Classicianus has a huge tomb in the British Museum

All in the Mind (ABC) How to Help a Conspiracy Theorist: An Ex-Believer and an Expert Weigh In. This episode has three participants: Jane, a mother who has lost her son to conspiracy theories; Professor Karen Douglas, a researcher who studies them; and Brent Lee from the Some Dare Call It Conspiracy podcast. Jane is walking on eggshells with her son, and Professor Douglas had some suggestions about meeting him on neutral ground and curtailing the conversation. Brent Lee was the most interesting, especially when he described how his beliefs were shaken. He had believed Pizzagate etc. as being a satanic child sacrifice conspiracy, but when Sandy Hook happened, he just couldn’t believe that the parents were crisis actors, and it didn’t fit in with his child sacrifice scenario. He described his conspiracy beliefs as being like Jenga blocks, where you could reject one or two elements, but eventually the whole thing came tumbling down. All three spoke about the importance of maintaining contact, no matter how difficult it is.

Some Dare Call It Conspiracy. After hearing All in the Mind, I hopped across here. As a historian myself, I was attracted to History is Written by the Whiners: Neil Oliver Dismantled What? Handsome young Scots historian Neil Oliver, striding across the heather, the wind in his hair. Oh dear. He seems to have gone “off”. I’m not even game to watch any of his YouTube videos lest the Algorithm Gods decide that I’m actually interested in what he’s saying. That said, I wasn’t particularly enamoured of the snide comments by the presenters of this podcast, Brent Lee and Neil Sanders. The name-calling and snarkiness seemed unnecessary.

New York Times Podcast I listened to this so long ago that it is now completely overtaken by events! Inside Trump’s Search for a Running Mate Trump takes up so much oxygen that we haven’t really heard about who is going to have as Vice President. Michael Bender, a political correspondent for The Times, explains that this time round, Trump demands absolute loyalty (which he feels he didn’t get from Mike Pence), doesn’t want anyone who is going to cause him any problems, and definitely doesn’t want anyone who is going to overshadow him. As far as Bender is concerned, the front runners are: 1. J. D. Vance (author of Hillbilly Elegy), who criticized Trump in 2016 but was his supporter by 2020 when he became a Senator. He’s a good media performer, but there’s a risk that he will be too good and overshadow Trump. 2. Marco Rubio. Even though Rubio was very critical of him during his first term, he has since become an important behind-the-scenes worker and a good attack dog. 3. Doug Burgum from North Dakota, another rich white man, who made his money through Microsoft. He’s in his mid-60s and a rather mediocre media performer, and very anti-abortion and conservative. Wait and I see, I guess.

History Extra: Breastfeeding in the Middle Ages features historian Hannah Skoda. She points out that in the Middle Ages, breastfeeding was more about loving relationships within the wider family, rather than between mother and child. Colostrum was seen as poisonous, and breast feeding only began three days after birth and tended to last for two years. It was done casually, and there was no routine. If milk was insufficient, there was pap (a mixture of grain and water), a wet nurse or milk sharing between close acquaintances. Wet nurses were often slave women – remember that there was slavery in Europe. Florence stands out as an example where at the Foundling Hospital, women fed the abandoned children – although there is some evidence that they were actually the mothers themselves who couldn’t afford to keep their children (a practice that the hospital frowned upon). It was believed that breast-feeding worked as a contraceptive, which was a problem for wealthy women and especially their husbands, who relied on her reproductive fecundity.

In Our Time (BBC) Julian the Apostate ruled between 361-363 (so only a short reign) after being proclaimed Caesar by his troops in Gaul. He was born in Constantinople and raised as a Christian after his uncle Constantine had converted to Christianity and introduced a policy of toleration of Christianity across the empire. Julian himself was attracted to Platonic philosophy and neo-Platinism which combined religious, philosophical and mythological strands and a leaning towards Greco-Roman polytheism. He was a bit of philosopher king himself, writing satires about the other Caesars, and writing a lot about himself. To bolster his legitimacy (he did, after all, challenge his cousin for the position of Emperor), he launched a series of battles in Persia, which backfired. His big mistake was not to have a succession plan when he died in battle. The three historians James Corke-Webster from Kings College London, Lea Niccolai from Cambridge and Shaun Tougher from Cardiff University note that, ironically, he united the squabbling Christians in opposition to him. It wasn’t so much that he persecuted Christians, as that he revoked the privileges that Constantine had given them. Paganism had continued throughout Constantine’s reign too, so it’s not black-and-white. Very much ripe for what-if history. (I’d forgotten that Julian was a theme in Julian Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch– my review here).

Three Million (BBC) The final episode 5.Ghosts looks at the legacy of the Bengal famine which, compared with the D-Day Landing celebrations, is decidedly low-key. Retired teacher Sailen Sarkar has been travelling throughout Bengal, interviewing the now very-old survivors, who mainly wondered why they hadn’t been asked about it before. As one of the historians who contributed to this series points out, what with the loss of Indian lives fighting for the Commonwealth, Partition and natural disasters, there was a series of mass death events in India. It was the Black Lives Matter protests in England that prompted a re-evaluation of colonial administration on the part of the British Empire, and there is now mention of the famine in a military museum in London. Doesn’t seem quite enough somehow.

Emperors of Rome Caillan Davenport features in this episode on CXI The Equestrian Order. The equites belonged to a class of Roman citizen dating back to the kingdom of Rome. The numbers of Senators was capped, so the equestrian order kept expanding. It was a conditional status- every five years at the census you had to prove that you still met the property requirement, and you could be removed for lapses in civic and moral virtue. The Equestrians portrayed themselves as being less corrupt than the Senators. The reign of Augustus was a turning point, when he gave the Equestrians a role in the civic celebrations. The number of Equestrians expanded from 5,000 to 20,000 under Augustus, and gradually a career structure emerged. Equestrians were permitted to wear a special ring, a tunic with a narrow stripe and could sit in the first 14 rows of the theatre. There was no specified meeting place for the Equestrians (unlike the Senators, who had the Senate) and so they expressed their feelings at the theatre. By the late 3rd century the role of Emperor had become open to those who were promoted through the army, and then under Constantius the number of senators was increased, thus decreasing the status of the Equestrians.

History Extra Death By Nostalgia: The curious history of a dangerous emotion This episode features Agnes Arnold-Forster, the author of Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion. She defines nostalgia as a bitter/sweet, wistful feeling about the past. At the end of the 17th century it was seen as a medical disease, related to place, and a form of pathological homesickness. People could die of nostalgia as they starved themselves to death, and mercenary soldiers, university students and domestic servants were particularly prone to it. In the early twentieth century psychoanalysts became interested, and it shifted from a medical to a psychological problem. Nostalgia is often characterized as being working-class, backward looking (e.g. Brexit, Trump) but the Left can be nostalgic too, especially the Soviet bloc countries and people who yearn after the NHS. However, now nostalgia can be seen as a form of therapy, to make people feel better.

Good grief- I am so behind in blogging this listening! However, I mainly do it for my own purposes, in keeping track of what I listened to and when, so I guess it doesn’t matter.

The Rest is History Episode 434 Luther: The Revolution Begins (Part 2) According to legend, one of the reasons that Luther became a monk was because of a thunderstorm. It must have been quite a storm, but perhaps another reason was to get away from his father’s ambitions that he become a lawyer. His father was not pleased, standing up to question during Luther’s induction as a monk “Was it the Devil that sent the thunderstorm?” In becoming an Augustinian monk, Luther was buying into the spiritual economy of the time i.e. getting a fast track to God. He studied theology at Wittenburg University, a university under the patronage of Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, one of the electors of the Holy Roman Emperor. Frederick wanted celebrity academics at his university, and Luther became a professor of the Bible. He ordered that a bible be printed for him without the glosses and footnotes, and began writing up theses rejecting Aristotelian philosophy and medieval theology that had dominated thinking, arguing that we should rely on The Bible Alone. Then a friar called Johann Tetzel rolled into Saxony, claiming to sell indulgences, which would allow sinful locals to shorten their stay in purgatory. This spurred Luther to have his 95 theses document printed (not nailed up onto the door) and the fight was on.

Rear Vision (ABC) Rear Vision recently had a 2 part series about the two-state solution which our Government, along with other Western governments, has been calling for more loudly since the invasion of Gaza in response to October 7. The first part The Middle East Conflict and the Two-state solution is a replay of a 2009 episode. Modern calls for a two-state solution began in 1917 where Balfour made a promise of ‘from the river to the sea’ to both Zionists and the Arabs. The Balfour Declaration was put directly into the British Mandate which gave civil and religious rights to “the others” – who just happened to be 90% of the population. There was an Arab uprising in 1936-9, leading to the Peel Commission, which recommended a two-state solution which was rejected by the Arabs – and then WW2 intervened. In 1947 Palestine was handed over to the UN, which gave more than 50% of the land to the Jews. The Declaration of Israel in 1948 led immediately to war, which eventuated with Jewish occupation of 78% of the land. The PLO was formed in 1964, and further wars in 1967 and 1973 saw the Israeli capture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Another uprising in the 1980s led to the realization that uprising did not mean sovereignty, and the Palestinians moved towards a two-state solution The 1993 Oslo Accord did not mention two states, and further uprisings between 2000 and 2005 marked the continuing distrust between the Palestinians and Israelis.

The second part The Two-State Solution: A Way Forward or More of the Same takes us up to 2024. Illegal settlements began in Palestinian territory in the early 1970s, as Israeli politics oscillated between Labor and Likud. Camp David came closest to a two-state solution, but all the politicians involved were lame-duck incumbents. A split opened up between the PLO and Hamas. Originally the presence of 100,000 illegal settlers was seen as the point of no return for a 2-state solution. There are now 750,000 settlers in the occupied territories and none of the big players are pushing for two states anymore: not the Republicans in US, not Hamas and not Likud. In 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza, but it never gave up control of border crossings or property rights.

Things Fell Apart (BBC) Season 2 Episode 8: Mikki’s Hero’s Journey focuses on Mikki Willis, an independent filmmaker who has been involved, to a lesser or major extent, in all the preceding episodes of this series. His brother had died of AIDS, and Mikki blamed AZT which was, at the time, a harsh but ultimately effective treatment. He was strongly influenced by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journal, not as a piece of analysis, but as a prescription for action. He set up his documentary company after 9/11 and at first became famous through a YouTube video praising his son for choosing a Little Mermaid doll with a credit note at the toy shop (he has since taken this video down). He interviewed Judy Mikovits as part of his Plandemic documentary, he was at the Capitol during the riots, and he particularly blames Dr Anthony Fauci (who had also been involved in AZT all those years ago.

In the finale How Things Fell Apart Bonus Episode, Jon Ronson chats with fellow podcaster Adam Buxton about the making of the podcast, and how to sensitively interview people whose views of reality clash completely with your own.

Emperors of Rome. Episode CX Anthology of Interest A triumvirate! Here Matt, Rhiannon and Caillan Davenport each have three minutes to talk about a topic of their own choice, three times over. So they discuss:

• The unfortunate demise of Cinna the poet
• Cicero’s reluctance to send panthers to those in need
• The sensitive subject of baldness
• PTSD bought on by the Carthaginian War
• Women donning a toga
• Claudius’ edicts and defending ‘stupidity’
• The last of the Ptolemys
• The hazard of regifting the world’s largest apple

I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist Episode 3: It’s the End of the World as We Know It Going back to the beginning with this podcast, Brian and Troy talk about the importance of ‘end-times’ talk in attracting them to fundamentalist pentacostalism. One of them (I’m not really clear who is who when I’m listening to this) was already primed for apocalyptic thinking because of dabbling in woo-woo thinking; the other one was already ensconced in the Assembly of God, where it was a mainstay. First there was the fear of nuclear holocaust, then when the Berlin Wall fell, it was fear of economic domination through the cashless society and the mark of The Beast as a computer chip or bar-code, and now it’s the prospect of a Muslim-Christian war. However, as they point out, the early Christians thought that they were living in the end-times too, and God didn’t turn up then either.

Being Roman (BBC) Episode 6: Love in the Borderlands Mary starts off this episode in Newcastle UK, close to Hadrian’s Wall, with a tombstone erected to Regina by her ex-owner and then husband Barates from Palmyra in Syria. Regina was a local Newcastle girl, and obviously there was slave-owning in Roman Britain although it is so late in the empire that she must have been sold into slavery rather than taken captive, as occurred earlier. When the Victorians uncovered the tombstone, they framed it as a love story where the local girl captured the heart of the foreigner, but we wonder just how much freedom Regina had. Mary finishes with a good reflection on the way that we read artefacts according to our own view of the world, but that this is not necessarily a fault- instead it’s a way of keeping questions alive in history.

The Daily The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System. Recorded on 15/5/24. I remember reading T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth years ago, where American society was drifting into neglect because no-one could afford insurance. I’m very much aware of how insurance is driving so much in society today: where you can build, what management policies a company has to cover their arse, the way that someone always has to be held liable. In this episode, they discuss the succession of weather ‘events’ (such dead language) that are making home insurance unsustainable when companies need to pay out more than they receive. Companies are starting to refuse to cover houses in certain areas, which has implications for future buyers who cannot get a mortgage on an uninsurable home, leading to a drop in home values. ‘The Government’ could step in (unlikely in America) but that just means that people would continue to build homes in areas prone to repeated disasters. At least after Black Saturday our government banned people building in certain areas. Interesting.

Three Million BBC Episode 4: The Tapes As part of the research for this project, a box of old cassette tapes was uncovered, recorded by Australian researcher Lance Brennan decades ago. Brennan interviewed colonial civil servants who were based in Bengal themselves, but answering to Whitehall and its demands. Britain’s attention was focussed on WW2 and they resisted declaring famine because it would divert resources from the war. Emergency food relief was provided, but ‘test work’ was required in exchange. Then, the British Govt said that it couldn’t spare the ships, and besides, other people were starving too. Even historian Max Hasting, a great fan of Churchill, admits that Churchill was racist, even by the standards of his time.