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, 2024.
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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 cash cow (for them) of MA. Here are the realities that I see from behind just some of the myths about both Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part B.
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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. I have also added passages that connect the era of “The New Nation” with the trials and tensions America is experiencing today. For example I connect the majesty of America’s example in displaying the peaceful transition of power in the “revolution of 1800” which saw the Democratic-Republican Party receive power in 1800 from the Federalist Party without violence, and the more than 200 years of like examples to follow, with the disgrace of January 6, 2021, when President Donald Trump despoiled this legacy and broke that legacy so important not only to the United States but the whole world. These allusions between past and present are mine, and they are also true.
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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 Eric Martin, this chapter from the Open Educational Source textbook, “The American Yawp,” narrated by me, Dr. Rick Reiman, surveys the crisis well in capturing succinctly its fateful highlights. Listen, learn and enjoy. An historian myself I have added a few sentences of my own to improve, I firmly believe, on the chapter’s effort to make the Sectional Crisis more understandable.
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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.
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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 characterize Americans today, if indeed they do?
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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.
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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.
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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 narrator who is also an historian. I have taken the opportunity to make a few important corrections to the text, where I have perceived errors, and have added to it where I see important omissions. I, too, offer the text free to my listeners, in the spirit of educating my fellow citizens and improving their lives. If you enjoy this recording, please let me know by emailing me a sentence or two to this effect at rreiman33@gmail.com. I can track clicks and downloads but this is my only way of determining if anyone is actually listening. Happy listening to all.
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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 Resources (OER), which this document is. My contributions to this document, freely distributed as all OER are, are dedicated to the preservation of democracy in these United States, a dedication here that is mine and mine alone, not to be confused with the purposes of the authors of this textbook. My hope and my contributions to this recording, including my edits and narration, represent a plea that all listeners vote for the Democratic nominee for President this November, to save our splendid Democracy. America… to thee, I sing.
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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 climaxing in the assassination of Oswald himself by Jack Ruby during the transfer of Oswald from one jail to another. The events of this chapter transformed the assassination from something seemingly weird to something seemingly unbelievable. In this summary, host Rick Reiman discusses the oddities of a criminal justice cast of characters in Dallas more concerned with reputation and appearance than the requirements of law and truth. Chapter Five reminds us that the assassination and Dallas’s part in it were shaped by the realities of time and place, a very different time and place than any we are familiar with today.
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Today, Audibly Speaking reviews the magisterial book by famed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. We revisit the things that make it unique and utterly unanswerable as a riposte to the crazy conspiracy theories that still pollute the writings about the 35th US President.
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In this sidebar episode tracing the movements of Lee Harvey Oswald and we step back from the forest to examine the trees of the story. In this politically portentous year of 2024, learn what the conspiracy nonsense can do to help us save American democracy. And begin to learn why the strengths of the Warren Commission and its Warren Report far out weigh the particular weaknesses examined in a previous episode on Audibly Speaking.
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Why did Lee Harvey Oswald go east from his boarding house in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, only to go west before his fatal encounter with Police Officer J.D. Tippit on November 22, 1963? The only possible answer was that his plans must have changed, along with his destination, at least temporarily. Ironically, however, his confrontation with Tippit, murderous though it was, may not have changed his destination at all, because he continued his journey west in its wake. An advertisement in the Dallas Morning News, never examined until now, may explain this mystery, as I explain in this episode.
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We have now arrived at the critical moments. What happened as the assassination occurred and what do we know of Oswald’s behavior during these most important of minutes? It turns out we know a great deal–so much in fact that we can even infer what was going on in Oswald’s mind on a minute by minute basis. In this episode, we also speculate about the most mysterious of all questions. Where was Oswald going when he left his boarding house after the assassination? Here we engage in informed speculation, with an emphasis on the word “informed.”
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How to help students understand the overwhelming evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald (and Oswald alone)? Given the power of the evidence, no help ought be needed! Perhaps a concise run-through will do the trick? Or a solemn and stately documentary? In a time when facts alone hold no sway, what is an historian to do? The answer is to marshal the evidence one more time, always one more time, until the bell, at long last, rings. Even though it has been clanging now for more than sixty years, let up look at a day in the life of Oswald, the last day before the assassination, as the camera of evidence before him and before us, followed his every step, and recorded everything we need to know to state the obvious: that Oswald did it, and that he was a man utterly without help along the way. This is a change of pace in our JFK series, a look directly at only one thing, the evidence against Oswald.
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What was Lee Harvey Oswald up to in New Orleans between his failed assassination attempt against Retired General Edwin Walker in April 1963 and his trip to Mexico City in late September in pursuit of a visa to Communist Cuba? What was the mix of motives that drove Oswald in these critical months prior to November 1963, when the president of the United States unexpectedly came into his sights. Listen to this podcast episode for some insights into these questions.
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In this final part of the three-part podcast series, we look at Oswald’s interior concerns in the days and hours before 12:30 pm CST on November 22, 1963. In so doing we elucidate the most elusive of questions, the question of motive.
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In this three-part series, we go into the mind of the assassin and try to understand Oswald’s motives. This helps us understand why conspiracy thinking about the assassination makes no sense. If you believe that Oswald lacked motive, ability or opportunity to shoot JFK, a conspiracy seems to be a necessary alternative. In fact none of these three things were lacking in 1963. There was no need for conspiracy. Oswald, however unbalanced, was actually quite smart. His plans for greatness, deluded as they were, come down to two. Colored by the Cold War and the politics of a performative president, they gave him motives and opportunities galore to assassinate JFK. The conspiracy shysters don’t tell you about these realities and the politicians and explainers in the 1960s also did not want to talk about the geopolitics of the era, factors that make the mysteries of the assassination disappear, manufactured as they were by storytellers who only wanted to tell part of the story.
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This is your host, historian Rick Reiman. Go to my YouTube Channel, “JFK Demystified,” to view the first episode of a series of short videos called “On Background: Seeking the Hidden JFK Assassination.” The series is on the evidence that is hiding in plain sight, namely the factors that block our view from the evidence that makes the assassination a simple thing to understand. We look at the confusion regarding standards of evidence and proof, the con-men- conspiracy theories that lead people astray, the historical context that sends us back to the real world, and the accumulated evidence confirmed again and again by a series of investigation, each one clearing up the few original questions that arose from a legitimate concern that some of the evidence was hidden. It was, but it is hidden no more, a simple fact that speaks volumes about how history really works. Join me on YouTube for this series, “On Background.” See you there.
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