Audibly Speaking: Listening to History

Here is my five-minute review on the remarkable, recent book by Philippe Sands on the intersection of four individual lives and the sweeping changes in international law brought about by World War II and the Holocaust, today in "Hijacking HIstory."

In the wake of the American Midterm elections in November 2018, "Hijacking History" looks at how the elections are likely to be viewed in the light of history.  In order to understand how, we have to see it in the context of the rules of the Constitutional process in America. What to outsiders may have seemed like a mixed verdict on the Trump administrations, looks very different when framed by th...

In this second of two episodes I conclude my recollections of my Fulbright semester in Halle an der Saale, Germany in 2007-2008.  What did Germans want to know most about Americans, and what do Americans need to know about Germans?  I discuss my talks before German audiences in Chemnitz, the former Karl Marx Stadt.  Interest in the American presidential election of 2008 was keen here, even though...

A trailer for my upcoming podcast series, "The Politics of Disbelief," about the American response ot the Holocaust, 1929-1945, coming in March.

Twitter Facebook In this edition of “Hijacking History,” the first of two episodes on the same topic, I look at the first half of my experience as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Germany during the autumn-winter semester, 2007-2008.  This podcast provides a Rashoman-like series of impressions that I drew from the experience.  Some of the things that I thought that I learned turned out to...

Twitter Facebook n this podcast I episode, I review Howard P. Willens’s 2013 book in the context of decades of conspiracy theorizing and what we thought we knew about the first official investigation of the assassination of John Kennedy, the Warren Commission.  While most people simultaneously somehow manage both to disbelieve the findings of the Commission’s Report and refuse to read it, Willens...

Hi, this is Rick Reiman, host of the podcast "History Revisited" In this episode, I review the Podcast series, "The Ratline," a program in the series "Intrigue" by BBC 4.  I do not here discuss the plot lines of the story for the most part. Instead I explore the implications for the effort to prevent the nightmares of the past from repeating themselves, when that effort requires an honest and fort...

Your Unit 5 Essay Assignment is explained in detail in the Assignment section of your GeorgiaVIEW course site.  In fact it is a most excellent--and necessary--description.  But, to maximize your chances for an "A" on this assignment, introduce a little "metacognition" to your preparation for this assignment.  Remember that metacognition is "thinking about thinking."  In this podcast episode, I wan...

Metacognitive Minutes is a part of my podcast, "History Revisited," which you can subscribe to on this site,  In today;s episode I explain how "thinking about thinking: (or "metacognition") is an excellent way to approach your New Deal assignment in HIST 2112, and not only do well on it, but know when you submit it that you ARE going to do well on it. Simply follow the advice in this podcast and t...

In this podcast episode, I walk students through the two assignments on the book by Rebecca Skloot. First I show how you use GALILEO to find a scholarly book review on the book, how to distinguish the review portion from the summary portion, and how to generate a correct citation using GALILEO's code generator.  You will need to provide all this information in Step 1, the Quiz.  Then I discuss Ste...

Twitter Facebook In this podcast episode, I discuss the themes of Bob Muldoon’s fine article about the cultural difficulties that confront “white collar” and “blue collar” men alike when they are forced to work together and evaluate their different skill sets.  Strange as it might seem, conflict can turn into convergence of interests, raising questions about whether t...

Host Dr. Rick Reiman, a professor of history, reprises his presentation for Constitution Day 2018, delivered on September 17, 2018. Dr. Reiman also interviews assistant professor of history Dr. Dana Caldemeyer, a specialist in nineteenth century US history about her thoughts about the 14th Amendment's role in her own research.

On September 5, 2018, an anonymous "senior official in the Trump administration" published an Op-Ed in the New York Times, raising a seeming unprecedented cry of alarm. He (or she) claimed to be trying to keep an unhinged president from going off the rails by working against the president when he threatened peace and democracy. What are the historical precedents for this sort of thing? This podcas...

In this first episode of the 2017 series, recorded in October 2017, we look at the shift from a future perspective on memory, and an amnesiac indifference to the late global conflict, in the first decades after World War II to the present "memory boom," when cultures can't seem to keep their eyes off the past. As the war recedes in time, it seems to come closer to our attention. What is going on?

My comments on "Between Remembering and Forgetting," a professional session on German history in which I recently participated.

In this podcast I summarize, to the best of my ability, the ideas of "Memory on the Move," written by Stef Craps, Lucy Bond and Pieter Vermeulen. The hope is to present the ideas in a way that is more comprehensible to the general reader and improve a state of affairs in which scholars speak only to other scholars, and leave the rest of the population as ignorant as the present state of global pol...

Prof. Aleida Assmann is one of the leading lights of international memory studies. Prof. Astrid Erll interviewed her in a video that can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/153089856. In this podcast I try to summarize Prof. Assmann's points in my own words, which may be helpful to those students familiar with a different vernacular or just beginning to familiarize themselves with memory studies. My...

Immigration in the late nineteenth century deserves attention on its own. It was a litmus test of how Americans viewed themselves, their society and the strength of that society or the direction that they wanted it to go in, curiously, the same as today.

In our last podcast, we looked at many specific problems besetting Americans in the Age of Excess. In this addendum to that podcast we look at the Age of Excess with a much broader view, seeing why it is such an exciting period and discussing the wonderful irony of it all that this is perhaps the period in American history least studied by scholars!

Hist 2112 students will find this five-minute podcast to be a useful guide to highlighting the most important slides in the PowerPoint on "The Age of Excess," and providing an overview of the Gilded Age at the end of the nineteenth century. Please post your thoughts here or on Twitter at @MemoryThruMedia.

This podcast provides a brief overview of one way of simplifying and approaching the complex subject of Reconstruction, This is meant to supplement my history course, HIST 2112. Photo by Carol Highsmith, in the public domain through the Library of Congress

In this podcast I review Philippe Sands's award-winning book in search of his family and the origins of crimes against humanity and genocide. An international lawyer, Sands writes of his discovery that the lawyers responsible for these two innovations in international law shared a common origin with his grandfather and grandmother in the region of Lvov in pre-World War II Poland. Searching for the...

In this episode I introduce this podcast series by reflecting on the Inaugural Conference on Memory Studies taking place in Amsterdam, December 3-5, 2016, the same weekend as the recording of this podcast. We look at how far Memory Studies has come and where it seems to be going, as well as directions and tangents many people would like to see it take. Disclaimer: I am merely commenting on the con...