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Eric Hobsbawm, 1917 – 2012: In Memoriam
Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Ralph Nader (55 min, 31 meg) Eric Hobsbawm: on the Age After Empire It’s a privilege at Eric Hobsbawm’s death this morning to share again the lively sound of...
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Pankaj Mishra: Briefing our “Foreign Policy” Debate
Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Pankaj Mishra(25 min, 15 meg) “What a disaster! What an affliction! What kind of a situation is this? …England has occupied Egypt, the Sudan, and the great...
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Roger Owen on the Arab Revolution: Year Two… of Ten
Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Roger Owen(25 min, 15 meg) Roger Owen is giving us a framework for our conversational plunge next month into North Africa and the “Arab Spring,” coming up on...
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Khaled Fahmy: a baseline “biography” of the revolution in Egypt
Click to listen to historian Khaled Fahmy in conversation with Chris Lydon on the “biography” of the revolution in Egypt. (63 min, 25 meg) Photo Credit: Mosa’ab Elshamy CAIRO — Khaled Fahmy came home...
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Gregory Buchakjian in Beirut: A Course of Catastrophe
Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Greg Buchakjian(45 min, 21 meg) Gregory Buchakjian looks at the Arab uprisings of the last two years and sees not an exception but an extension — at best a...
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Speaking of Pope Francis: What’s in a Name?
Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with James Carroll and Francis Clooney at the Harvard Divinity School (16 min, 14 meg) At the Harvard Divinity School, we’re listening in on the euphoria around...
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Where’s the Hodges – Carney Monument in Boston?
Please join the musical flashbacks and live radio gab on WGBH today: Thursday, May 2 at 1 p.m. on Boston Public Radio with Jim Braude and Margery Egan. Questions for listeners might start with: Did any...
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JFK & his Papa: David Nasaw’s light on The Patriarch
Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with David Nasaw, biographer of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (48 min, 40 meg) We recorded this conversation with...
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James Douglass: JFK and the Unspeakable. Part One.
James Douglass is bracing us to reimagine John F. Kennedy around the 50th anniversary of his “rendezvous with death.” He’s encouraging us to face what has seemed to me a central question — not so much...
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James Douglass: JFK and the Unspeakable, Part Two
James Douglass is laying out a version of John F. Kennedy’s assassination that is sickening, in every way outrageous, but not exactly unfamiliar. In JFK and the Unspeakable Douglass makes it the story...
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Graham Robb: Rescuing those Celts!
Graham Robb, stellar historian and writer, draws on the “archives of the bicycle,” much as Simon Schama says he draws on the “archives of the feet,” walking battlefields and inaugural parades. Graham...
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"This was the worst war ever" : Ken Burns
William James: the mind of Pragmatism …modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The...
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Juan Cole: from Bonaparte to Bush
Behind a facade of lawmaking and reasonableness visible in Bonaparte’s correspondence crouched the grim realities of corruption, power, and terror. When Bonaparte ordered General Menou to the key port...
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Philip Gura’s American Transcendentalism
Emersonians, awake! Evening Grosbeaks & American Dawn You regulars from the comment thread know who you are: mynocturama, peggysue, bobby, allison, nother and of course, potter, among the vast and...
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Backstage with Henry V
King Henry V: Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more… … when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise...
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Iraq in the Long View: Behnam Abu Al-Souf
Listen to the archeologist Behnam Abu Al-Souf long enough, and you’ll be hearing the Iraqi uncle you never knew you had. Dr. Ben as I call him is a great bear of muscular, hands-on scholarship. For...
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The Post-Imperial Historian: Eric Hobsbawm
An historian of ever widening scope, Eric Hobsbawm has been taking the long view for a very long time. His definition of the historian’s trade is: “how and why Homo sapiens got from the paleolithic to...
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Cuba for the Long Run (II): Adrian Lopez Denis
Adrian Lopez Denis finds it laughable that even the best of the Anglo-American media, The Economist and The New Yorker, made iconic covers of cigar smoke (and crushed cigar butts) when Fidel Castro...
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Cuba on our Minds (III): David Kaiser’s JFK
The journalist and diplomat William Attwood is the exceptional spirit in David Kaiser‘s new history of the JFK assassination, The Road to Dallas. Attwood leaps off the page as a man of imagination and...
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Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Nicholson Baker (53 minutes, 25 mb mp3) Nicholson Baker: history by hyperlink A wing commander in the [British] Royal Air Force [in Iraq], J. A. Chamier,...
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