Audibly Speaking: Listening to History

Twitter Facebook The story of American history, the “American Yawp,” begins with this chapter, Indigenous America , spanning 10,000 years of history. There is nothing quite like it in history, as you will hear when you listen to it. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook What a pleasure it was for me to interview Laura Malvoyante about her insights into society’s growing need for digital minimalism in the face of the addictiveness of tech. Technology is a voracious feeder on the limited and priceless commodity of time in our lives.  At the same time, sometimes the antidote to this invasion is technology itself, in the form of devices that ca...

Twitter Facebook Move over Charles Dickens!  Stand aside, Scrooge!  For a nineteenth century English Christmas tale without parallel, you cannot do better than Sherlock Holmes’s conveying of the Christmas message in his discover and commutation of a felony, all to save a soul in the season of forgiveness of this time of year. My narration of this tale is my Christmas present to all...

Twitter Facebook This opinion piece on Medicare Advantage concerns the “hard-sell” that private insurance companies make this time of year on behalf of “Medicare Advantage,” the private insurance alternative to Original Medicare.  I record this podcast episode to warn seniors to do their homework, and ask the question, why are insurance companies so anxious to sell their Me...

Twitter Facebook In our post-truth world, ignorance about Medicare has reached avalanche proportions.  The greatest and most secure health care system in the world is now suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the form of babbling malcontents whose ignorance of Medicare is only matched by their outrage at it.  Just go to Facebook or some other social media cesspool and...

Twitter Facebook Today, Sunday, November 10, 2023, I reflect on the events of Veterans Day Weekend 1963, when JFK and Oswald lived out their last Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, November 10-12, 1963. We review what we know of those fateful days. Next, I talk about the events of Wednesday, November 13 through Friday, November 22, 1963, to be published here on Audibly Speaking before Friday, November 22...

Twitter Facebook In this final episode about my opinions and experience with learning Medicare for retirement, I spread the word that many people are talking about:  Medicare Advantage plans and Part D Prescription Drug plans are undergoing big changes, premium hikes and in some cases disappearing acts during this Annual Election Period between October 15 and December 7. If you are on Medicare Adv...

Twitter Facebook In this third part of my series on what I have learned, or thought I have learned, about Medicare I talk about some myths I have discovered about Medicare Advantage and Part B.  While Medicare Advantage may be the right choice for some people, I cringe when I watch the commercials during this Annual Election Period and see the slick pitch that insurance companies make to see the c...

Twitter Facebook What in the world is Part D?  My personal experience learning what I appreciated to find out about Medicare Part D coverage is the subject of this this brief podcast episode. Disclaimer: These are my opinions and what my impressions were. This is no substitute or necessarily as accurate as your doing your own research on Medicare.  It is just an opinion piece on my reflections of...

Twitter Facebook Medicare is confusing– what an understatement. Two years out from retirement I decided to try to understand it, suspecting that it might take me that long.  I was not wrong!  Now that I am retired and am now on Medicare, I tell this slightly autobiographical tale of what I think I have learned about Medicare in hope that it will either be interesting to or helpful...

Twitter Facebook Listen to this audio version of my Youtube video explaining the “Single Bullet Theory” of the JFK assassination, and WHY IT IS TRUE.  Many conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination discredit themselves by disputing this thrice-confirmed theory first revealed by the Warren Commission in 1964. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook In many ways, I regard this as my best recording of a chapter from “The American Yawp” yet.  I have deleted nothing from the text edited by its editors, Joseph Locke and Ben Wright.  I have added passages of my own where I think additions were needed to clarify what the original authors were trying to say. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook Late in his authorial career, in the 1920s to be precise, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was then deeply immersed in beliefs of mysticism and seances, had occasion to pair his rational detective, Sherlock Holmes, with a case about vampires. Did Doyle change the hyper-rational Holmes to suit the author’s new beliefs? Listen and find out! Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook In the course that covers the first half of American History, the chapter on the Sectional Crisis of the Union, also sometimes called “The Impending Crisis,” leading to the American Civil War, is the penultimate such chapter.  Next to the magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the crisis written by the great historian David Potter, that one audio narrated by Er...

Twitter Facebook No ordeal in American history changed America so much or so enduringly as the American Civil War.  Listen as well as read of the odyssey and what it was all about, or just listen with this audio offering. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook Hector St. John de Crevecouer, a French immigrant to American wrote this classic essay, “What, Then, is this New Man, the American?” in 1782, as American Independence from Britain loomed.  Was he correct in his descriptions of Americans then?  Do his descriptions accurately describe Americans today?  How was he wrong then, if he was, and how do his descriptions fail to...

Twitter Facebook Join me, Dr. Rick Reiman, for my reading of the chapter on British North America, Chapter 3 to be precise, from The American Yawp, the celebrated Open Source textbook on the history of the United States and the lands that would become the American Nation. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook Here is my audio narration of “Colliding Cultures,” a history of European and English colonization of early colonial America, a clash of cultures indeed.  This is from the Open Source textbook, “The American Yawp,” free to anyone interested, as we all should be, in American history. Twitter Facebook

Twitter Facebook In this epic short story, Arthur Conan Doyle exceeds himself.  “The Naval Treaty” is the longest of all of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes short stories.  It contains allusions to his other stories and many humorous asides as well as quite larger-than-life characters, some almost Dickensian in their strangeness.  Holmes has to sift his clues and there are...

Twitter Facebook World War II was a change agent in history like no other.  It can best be understood in pieces, barely grasped as a whole.  In this audio narration of Chapter 24 of The American Yawp , a U.S. History Textbook available as a free, modifiable educational resource, I narrate the American history piece.  The chapter sets it within the context of all other pieces.  I am that rare narra...

Twitter Facebook History Speaks again!  My audio narration of “The Great Depression,” chapter twenty-three from the blockbuster Open Resource textbook,  The American Yawp , is now out. As an historian myself, I have  enhanced  this recording and narrative by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright with a few additions of my own, in keeping with the democratic principles of Open Educational...

Twitter Facebook Motive.  It is the thing that all juries want but do not need, in our system of justice, to determine guilt or innocence, The Warren Commission did not hazard a hypothesis on the question of Oswald’s motive, seen singularly.  But they did list a series of potential motives, seeded by his early life, and seen by his comments and those of others, that might have play...

Twitter Facebook This chapter may be seen as the Big Enchilada of the Report .  Did the Warren Commission provide a credible investigation of the possibility of conspiracy in the crime?  The staff wracked its collective brains to see where any possible conspiracy might have emerged given the facts in the case. It also tracked down leads offered by private citizens that seemed the least bit credibl...

Twitter Facebook Continuing our summary of The Warren Report investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we come to Chapter Five.  The whole tenor of the investigation changed with the subject of this chapter.  It concerned the events that led to the federalization of the investigation itself, the violation of Oswald’s civil liberties in the Dallas jail clima...

Twitter Facebook In Chapter Four we have an overview of the evidence against Oswald.  Here I summarize the chapter. Twitter Facebook