There are an increasing number of excellent and well-produced history podcasts around. There’s a separate list of these under the Resources tab on the menu, and it’ll get added to over time. But for now, I just wanted to highlight a couple that have caught my ear over the last few weeks.

First up are the podcasts from History Hit, the site started by Dan Snow. While to get access to all the features on the site you need to subscribe, the podcasts are free. There are four or five per week, and the coverage is very broad, perhaps with a bias to the UK, but plenty of world history coverage too. A recent one, for the UK, covered the recent discoveries at Stonehenge. At the beginning of July, a podcast looked at the 1918 Flu pandemic. The podcasts are nearly always with academics and authors who are experts in the subject. Recommended.

A second set of podcasts are from Malcolm Gladwell’s inevitably idiosyncratic series, Revisionist Histories. These are 30-40 minute pieces exploring so oddball corners of history. A recent episode was entitled The Bomber Mafia and describes how, on the eve of the Second World War, a band of visionaries at Maxwell Air Force Base tried to reimagine modern warfare. They failed. Part one on the extraordinary life of the Air Force General Curtis LeMay.

Jan Hugen van Linschoten is not a name that figures in cartography like Mercator or Fra Mauro, but in many ways he is just as important, if not more so, to the modern globalised world.

He travelled extensively along the East Indies’ regions under Portuguese influence and served as the archbishop’s secretary in Goa between 1583 and 1588. He is credited with publishing in Europe important classified information about Asian trade and navigation that was hidden by the Portuguese. In 1596 he published a book, Itinerario (later published as an English edition as Discours of Voyages into Ye East & West Indies) which graphically displayed for the first time in Europe detailed maps of voyages to the East Indies, particularly India. During his stay in Goa, abusing the trust put in him by his employer, Jan Huyghens meticulously copied the top-secret charts page-by-page. Even more crucially, Jan Huyghens provided nautical data like currents, deeps, islands and sandbanks, which was absolutely vital for safe navigation, along with coastal depictions to guide the way. The publication of the navigational routes enabled the passage to the East Indies to be opened to trading by the Dutch, French and the English. As a consequence, The Dutch East India Company and British East India Company would break the 16th-century monopoly enjoyed by the Portuguese on trade with the East Indies.

From Lapham’s Quarterly’s : World in Time Podcast.

Ian Mortimer on the changes that have occurred over the last millenium. How do you measure change? It is often said that the twentieth century saw more change than any other period. But today’s interest in modern technology obscures the massive changes the world has undergone over the past millennium. Lewis Lapham talks with Ian Mortimer, author of Millennium: From Religion to Revolution: How Civilization Has Changed Over a Thousand Years, about the history of change and why it matters.

One of a wonderful series of podcasts from a great little magazine. You can find the complete list of podcasts here. 80 or so, with writers of history.

In 1879, Thomas Edison (left) managed to produce the first usable incandescent electric light bulb. He did this on the back of patents he had purchased some years earlier from Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans, whose patent for the invention had been granted in 1875. What Edison managed to do was to create a filament that would burn for longer: 40 hours or so in its initial form. A year later he had a lightbulb that would last for 1200 hours. The growth in usage was initially slow, as with many such technologies: in 1885, around 300,000 light bulbs were in use, and by 1914, the US had around 85 million lamp sockets.

Today, October 6th is the day in 1927 that “The Jazz Singer” opened, with Al Jolson in the title role. The Jazz Singer wasn’t the first film with sound, but it was the first full-length film with synchronized dialogue, even if only a few minutes. But it changed not just Hollywood, but the whole entertainment business: as the actor leading in a stage production of The Jazz Singer said:

“A week or two after the Washington engagement the sound-and-picture version of The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson was sweeping the country, and I was swept out of business. I couldn’t compete with a picture theatre across the street showing the first great sound picture in the world…for fifty cents, while the price at my theatre was $3.00.”

That quote is from the Wikipedia article, which is pretty comprehensive in its detail and fully referenced.

I’ve just added Stan’s list from last Tuesday to the Books page. The aim is to share, but we can add links to the appropriate Amazon page if you want!

More books, please

The new U3A website will be ready in late October. In the meantime, we can use this site as a place to store resources, presentations and any other material we think wil, be useful. It will all be transferred to the new U3A website when it’s ready.

The first materials here will be links to backround topics on US history.

The format of the front page will be ‘blog’ posts  pointing to material stored elsewhere on the site, plus whatever notices Brenda and Stan want to put up.

Oh, and these pages will change a lot as tinkering takes place!