Category Archives: Memory

“Into the Mind of the Assassin: Oswald’s Last Month, October-November 1963”

American HIstory, Books of the Times, JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Memory, Oswald, Politics, United States history, Warren Commission, Zapruder

Continuing the series of JFK assassination episodes in this, the 60th year since the assassination, we look not at the thinking of the CIA, FBI, Warren Commission, Mob, Cuba, Russia or any of the other institutions that have been falsely imagined as being behind it, but inside the mind of the man who actually did it, and did it alone: Lee Harvey Oswald.  It may not be the most popular theory, but facts don’t have to be popular. They only need to be true.  This is an essay by myself, Rick Reiman, and narrated by myself, in response to the excellent insights of Burt Griffin, who wrote the new book, JFK, Oswald, Ruby: Politics, Prejudice and Truth. A staff member on the Warren Commission (1963-1964). Griffin challenges historians to take the assassination seriously as history, something that is simple to understand once contextualized in history.  Frankly, historians have not recognized their responsibility in this regard.  Historians, when are you going to do your jobs, and take this intersection of the Cold War and cvil rights, which is what the assassination was, seriously as history?  Until they do, this will continue to be a blot, a stain and a disgrace for the historical profession, as it has been for sixty years.

Photo taken by Marina Oswald.

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“Final Word: The Landis Claim,” by Rick Reiman

JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Memory, Oswald, Warren Commission

Today, your host on Audiblyspeaking, Dr. Rick Reiman narrates his assessment of this year’s surprising news in the JFK assassination folklore: the claim by former secret service agent Paul Landis that he found a backseat bullet that allegedly refutes the famous “single bullet theory.”  The subtitle of today’s show might appropriately be, “Not so Fast.”

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Half-Story Hoaxes, 2023: A Critique of Rob Reiner’s JFK Conspiracy Theories

American HIstory, JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Memory, Oswald, Warren Commission, Zapruder

Most of the thousands of books on the JFK assassination are re-cyclings and re-spinnings of the foundational myths of the first generation of conspiracy fabulation tales. To hear Rob Reiner’s repetition of the tired magic bullet trope that we have heard before–you know the one that has long since been debunked–it seems that the half-story hoaxes that I discussed in my first Warren Commission episode two weeks ago are not just historical relics of the past.  They continue to be retailed to an unsuspecting public.  Here is the rest of the story of the very-unmagical second shot in the assassination, as well as the first shot, told in the epistemological technicolor of the truth.

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Dum-Dum Bullets or Dum-Dum Fabulists? Half-Story Hoaxes in the JFK Assassination

American HIstory, JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assassination, Memory, Oswald, Zapruder

One of the chief reasons why people still believe the nonsense of a conspiracy in the assassination of John F. Kennedy is because of the fiendishness of those, out of malice or effort at pecuniary gain, deliberately lie to their readers and tell only half of a story they know too well to be false.  We examine two of the many half-story hoaxes, as I call them, which try to spread the lie of conspiracy by covering up the proofs of no-conspiracy which have grown to mountainous proportions in the 60 years since 1963.

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Reflection on “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and the Raiders of Memory in our MAGA Moment

Memory

Movies may entertain us, but they also reflect our innermost thoughts and feelings in the time in which we make and watch them. Here I, a Professor of History, reflect on how the themes in the new movie, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” whether consciously or unconsciously meant by its makers, possess undercurrents of meaning warning us to take into account how we remembered in the past, and how dangerously many of us remember today in this moment of the MAGA movement.

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Puzzle Pieces, Episode 2: The Warren Commission as History

JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Memory

In this, our second episode of “Puzzle Pieces,” in which we examine a separate mystery in American history, we look at the weaknesses of the Warren Commission’s efforts in 1964. This first investigation of the JFK assassination suffered from mistakes of its own making and errors over which it had little if no control whatsoever. Weaknesses could sometimes later become strengths, as their obvious highlighting could be–and were–addressed in subsequent investigations. Here we have a photograph of the Commissioners themselves–who did very little of the leg work for the Commission. The unsung staff did most of the work, and may be credited with many of the Commission’s monumental, if unsung and forgotten, successes. Next time on “Puzzle Pieces,” we go over those successes–here on AudiblySpeaking.

The Warren Commission delivers its Report, September 1964

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The Need to Remember: Fighting Back Against Bigotry toward Asian Americans

American HIstory, Covid-19 crisis, Memory, World War II

The shocking attacks against Asian Americans in 2021 are outgrowths of a long history of bigotry against these, our fellow citizens. Besides bringing shame to America’s claim of “liberty and justice for all,” these attacks flow from the ignorance of too many Americans in this history of bigotry, especially of the worst violation of civil liberties in all of American history, the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. To defeat this legacy of bigotry and to break with this sorry past, Americans must first learn to remember.

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For Those in a Hurry: Summarizing the Evidence in the JFK Assassination

John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Memory

In this first part of two brief episodes, I summarize the evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald.  The evidence discussed was presented first by the Warren Commission investigation in 1964 and has only been further strengthened in the years since.  This episode focuses on only one of the two key questions: Did Oswald fire the shots that hit JFK and Texas Governor John Connally?  For Oswald’s motives, click here to buy my NEW Amazon ebook entry on the subject.

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New in our “Minute Biographies” series: Anne Frank (1929-1945)

Germany, Holocaust, Memory, World War II

Our minute biography series continues with this reflection on the life of Anne Frank, Holocaust victim and diarist non pareil. Many people regard her diary as the most famous “Holocaust book.” Yet the diary is not a book about the Holocaust nor was it written by one who was, at the time she wrote it, a Holocaust victim.  Nevertheless the story of Anne Frank is essential for those hoping for a world of respect for diversity and human rights.  This year, the ninetieth anniversary of Anne Frank’s birth, is the perfect time for this new addition to the “Minute Biography” series on Hijacking History.  Audio segments are used in this program by permission as provided under Creative Commons licenses. They include “Amesterdam Bells Birds,” by everythingsounds, licensed under the Attribution CC Unported license, no changes made; “Angry Nazi Clatters,” by kineticturtle, licensed under the Attribution CC 3.0 Unported license, no changes made; and “The Letter from Anne Frank,” by stanrams, licensed under the Attribition Non-Commercial 3.0 Unported license, no changes made.

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Peter Jackson’s New Film, “They Shall Not Grow Old”

Films, Memory, Reviews, World War I,

This podcast episode reviews the film director Peter Jackson’s new film about World War I, “They Shall Not Grow Old.”  Using new technologies and old-fashioned respect for the facts, Jackson has crafted a documentary that brings old newsreels vividly to live, converting what the film was able to capture into what the cameramen of 1918 actually saw through their lens.

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The Causes of the Civil War: The First Century After

Civil War, Historiography, Memory

Historians today largely agree that slavery was central to the causation of the American Civil War. Prior to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, however, other factors had pride of place in the estimation of most (though not all) historians. After the nationalist historians of the late nineteenth century, who did see slavery as central to the causing of the war, historians, reflecting their times, seemed to stress everything but slavery. Economic differences between North and South, geographic determinism, irrationality and incompetence all seemed more central to historians in the first half of the twentieth century than did slavery. This is ironic because in the last half century, slavery has resumed its position as the crucial issue, without which the coming of the Civil War makes little sense.

In this podcast, I summarize the issues and discuss the conclusions of Thomas J. Pressly, in his book, “Americans Interpret Their Civil War.”

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Five-Minute Review on the Audiobook of Philippe Sands’s “East West Street: on the Origins Of ‘Genocide’ and ‘Crimes Against Humanity'”

Audiobook Review, Holocaust, Memory, World War II, ,

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.”

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My Germany: Teaching and Living in Germany on an American Fulbright, 2007-2008 (Episode 1 of 2)

Memory

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 be a bit wide of the truth but this podcast is how it all seemed to me at the time.  It is impossible to really know your own culture until you have experience in another.  This was the experience of a lifetime and I aspire to capture parts of it in these two episodes.  Watch for episode Two in this two-part series in the next few days.  Happy listening!

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