The Rest is History Episode 680 The Netherlands: The Revolt that made the Modern World This is Part 4 of their series on National Anthems and here they deal with the 15-verse National Anthem of the Netherlands. It was adopted in 1932 but it has the longest history of any of the national anthems. The tune came from 1568 and the lyrics from 1572 and rather amazingly, the first verse starts off, which is written in the voice of William of Nassau announcing that “To the king of Spain I’ve granted
A lifelong loyalty”. It was written at the start of the Dutch Revolt, where William was appointed Stadtholder by the Spanish Hapsburg king Phillip II but he turned against him in the face of increasing resentment of the influence of the Spanish crown. The first letters of the fifteen verses form an acrostic of William of Nassau’s name. He ended up being assassinated and is seen as the founding father of the Netherlands. This episode is really interesting- I knew nothing about it. Dutch Republican’s didn’t like it much because of the profession of loyalty in the first verse (which is pretty weird- your national song pledging loyalty to another country but during WW2 the Nazi’s really didn’t like the song, so it was taken up by and inspired the Dutch Resistance. It’s the oldest coherent song to become a national anthem.
In Our Time The Colombian Exchange I haven’t listened to In Our Time since Melvin Bragg retired, and I must say that the new host Misha Glenny sounds more with-it than poor old Melvin. This episode features Rebecca Earle Professor of History at the University of Warwick; John Lindo Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University and Mark Maslin Professor of Earth System Science at University College London. The “Colombian Exchange” refers to the exchange of cultures and biology across the Atlantic and Pacific after 1492. When Columbus reached the Bahamas, Europe had no potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers or, arguably, syphilis in its most virulent form; the Americas had no cattle, bananas, sugar cane or smallpox. One of the male historians (can’t remember which) challenged the whole concept of a “Colombian Exchange”, preferring the term “The Great Dying” which seems apt given that 90% of the American population in 1492 had died within ten years. In 1492, Europe, Asia and the Americans had similar sized populations. There was already TB and syphilis in the Americas, but different strains (the syphilis was transmitted by skin contact rather than sex). The death rate through smallpox, measles and influenza (as well as killings) led to the abandonment of farming, and the resulting reforestation did change the carbon dioxide levels and may have contributed to the Little Ice Age. The explorers left breeding pairs of sheep so that they would have a food source when they returned, and slavery was introduced because of the number of deaths as a result of contact. The importation of food into Europe led to great wealth, which in turn was put into science.
Short History Of… The Battle of Stalingrad Going back to February 2025 for this one, featuring Sir Antony Beevor, whose book on Stalingrad is on the shelf behind me, unread. Named for Stalin, Stalingrad was an urbanized and industrialized city, despite the starvation in the rest of Russia wrought by Stalin’s policies. When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in 1942, he assumed that the Russians and Ukrainians who had suffered so much under Stalin would embrace the Germans with open arms. Not so. When Hitler absolved the German army of any crimes that they might commit against the Soviet soldiers, it quickly became very brutal. His intention was to starve the citizens into submission, then enslave them. In 1942 German turned its attention to the oilfields in the Caucasus, Stalin ordered no retreat, on pain of death (indeed 13,000 Soviet soldiers were to be executed for desertion). Hitler changed course and ordered instead the capture of Stalingrad. Stalin refused to allow the citizens to evacuate, so that the soldiers could be provisioned. New conscripts sent to Stalingrad counted their life-span in hours. When the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, the German troops were encircled, and so you had both Germans and Soviet troops battling it out in the city, while there were still 10,000 citizens in Stalingrad at the end of the 6 month siege in February 1943. It was the psychological turning point of the war, but Hitler refused to admit defeat, and so the war dragged on for another two years.
