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 walks us through what actually occurred during the investigation. He also reinforced the excellent case, already made by rational scholars, that the mistakes of the Warren Commission were neither terribly unusual for an investigation by human beings, nor destructive of its conclusions.  Willens takes us through the evidence and makes a strong case that the Warren Commission essentially was the best explanation for that tragic event, and that it remains standing in spite of the conspiracizing and the imagining that has usually. taken the place of a serious regard for the facts.

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Hi, this is Rick Reiman, host of the podcast “Hijacking History” 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 forthright confrontation with that past. “The Ratline” suggests that such a confronting is not easy and cannot be taken for granted.

Music for this podcast was by Sonnik, composed by Fjador Lavrov, and made available under a Creative Commons Share-alike Attribution License.  Consistent with this license, brief clips from the music were used for transitional purposes only.

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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 want you to think about the structure of this assignment: What are you asked to do? What are the specific questions–all the questions–that you need to answer? How many paragraphs must there be, and what should be the job of each paragraph?  How long does each paragraph need to be? What role does the graded rubric play in your understanding of, and preparation for, the assignment?  This episode will direct you to these questions and more. Mastering them in advance will increase the odds that you make no mistakes in the content of your essay. Then, proofreading should allow you to avoid the last hurdle–grammatical problems–that will definitely cost you points if they exist.

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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 think about it before you read the assignment instructions. Then think about it again after you do so, or, better yet, listen to this episode again before you write.  Good luck (but if you use these metacognitive techniques, you won’t need good luck).

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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.

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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 podcast was recorded the day of the Op-Ed’s release.

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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?

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

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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 politics indicate them to be. I close with news of a contest in which listeners can enter for a chance to win one Kindle copy of a new book in the field of History.

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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 interpretation of her views on memory studies are just that, mine, and are presented in the hope that they are expressed clearly and correctly.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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

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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 roots of his career and the answers to mysteries about the survival of his own family, Sands brilliantly relates a tale of memory, discovery and history. Podcast site photograph by Carol Highsmith of fresco, “Society Freed Through Justice,” in Justice Department Building, Washington, D.C. Photo in public domain in the Library of Congress.

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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 conference from afar and have no involvement in the conference or its organization. Feel free to add your thoughts on good books and articles in the field of Memory Studies at Twitter feed, @MemoryThruMedia.

After listening to the podcast post your comments on this page, if you please!

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