Well, it’s been a year since my last podcast and this podcast took a couple of months to edit. Bad turn around time all around. But I’m still here and still more or less at this! I will hopefully be doing more in the future, but might have to have another few months hiatus before I really get back to producing them. In the meantime, this is a lengthy podcast with a wide variety of thoughts about both past and present and nationalism and white supremacy. But it’s all inflected through the life of a German conductor named Wilhelm Furtwangler. Continue reading Wilhelm Furtwangler: Romanticism, Pure Music, and the Nazis→
I have finally done the thing – I’ve had a couple of people ask me about doing something on medievalism (Fantasy…Lord of the Rings…you know, your basic medieval themed pop culture production.) And in this case, we’re talking about Game of Thrones (yes, that’s Tyrion Lanniser eating Lamprey Pie over there). There are lots of blogs and podcasts dedicated to this sort of thing, so I’ve always hesitated, but I finally struck on a topic that didn’t seem well represented out there in the interwebs and I found a great accomplice to talk with me and make sure I (an admittedly weak fan of the show) didn’t make any really glaring mistakes. Continue reading Geography in Game of Thrones with Elly Truitt→
So as I say in the first two minutes of the podcast – I somehow
recorded and even edited this podcast back in June when England voted to leave the European Union and then I failed to post it. (And then I go on to say that I want to get through editing and posting fasted. Ha!) But anyway, the night of election 2016 here in the US seems like a plenty opportune time to post the same ideas since Trump’s campaign has often been compared to Brexit itself. Although as I write this it is not really yet clear if the surprise Brexit victory will repeat itself. Continue reading Brexit and Nationalism→
This month (bi-month? Something like that – I wish these happened
a little more frequently) I’m again talking with my friend, medievalist and journalist Clare Gillis. In part in response to the topic popping up in the newsfromtime to time, I figured we should have a conversation about Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace titled The Hedgehog and the Fox. Continue reading The Hedgehog and the Fox with Clare Gillis→
This month (bi-month? I’ve not been the most regular about getting something out even every other month!) I talk about one of my visits to the Cathedral archive in Spain. Archives form the core of most (though not all) historical work. Every major city or town has some form of archive with the documents and records produced in that place and for Europe, that means documents about the place often going back centuries.
I’ve been a bit delinquent with podcasts for a couple of months, but here, finally, is a new one. This one was inspired a few months back by the youtube comment stream (crazy but true!) on a John Oliver Last Week Tonight clip: the “How is this still a thing?” on Columbus Day. Don’t ask how I ended up reading that far into the comment stream…in general I’m a fan of John Oliver, but not an avid reader of youtube comments. Continue reading Islam, Pirenne, and Historiography with Clare Gillis→
This month I have another “live” cast recorded in the city of Valencia. Over the course of the podcast, I walk up the main bell tower of the Cathedral of Valencia to listen to the huge bell at the top, nicknamed the “micalet,” strike noon. Along the way, with a few other bells woven in for good measure, I talk about how large cast bells first came to be used in late Medieval Europe and what they symbolized for the Christians who rang them. Continue reading Medieval Bells in Valencia Spain→
As a follow-up to last month’s shot about violence, this month I have an interview with Abigail Agresta talking about a series of anti-Jewish riots that hit numerous cities in Spain in 1391, starting with Seville and spreading across most of Spain. We focused mostly on the interpretations of one of the worst riots in the city of Valencia. On the way, we talk quite a bit about how scholars think about anti-Jewish violence in the medieval period, what relationship that violence has to modern anti-semitism, and the changing character of Christianity’s relationship to Judaism. Continue reading Anti-Jewish Riots in Valencia, Spain, 1391 with Abigail Agresta→
This month on the History Cafe, we’re trying something new. This is a relatively short podcast (10 minutes) that asks a question with a handful of examples. It is in no way exhaustive, but hopefully sparks a fair amount of thought. It is also an example (to me, anyway) of how history often plays out in its roll as an explainer of the world today. The podcast is about historical violence – I ask the question: how do we argue that a certain ideology, religion, or group is violent? Continue reading History Cafe Shot — What do we mean by Violence in history?→
So as I say in the first two minutes of the podcast – I somehow
This month (bi-month? Something like that – I wish these happened
Metropolitan museum in New York. If you didn’t hear the first two, they are all separate topics. The first two cover the 
