History on Air

Producing a Podcast

For a long time I have wanted to write a post about what I do to produce a podcast.  For episode 119 The Thirty Years War I first did a lot of research.  I read about the war on wikipedia, then I searched the Internet for other sources.  I found Hank’s History Hour episode on the religious wars, and I found Nathan Barber’s website.  I listened to what Mr. Barber had on his website and I read the materials he had there.  Then I started writing long hand, 10 pages.  I also stopped at my local library to see what they had as far as books.  I borrowed The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy and Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War 1618-48.  I took a couple of tid-bits from the latter book, but the first book is huge and I just thumbed through it.

Then it was time to start recording.  Easier said then done though.  There are a few problems to recording.  First finding the time to have a quiet house.  For those who don’t know I have a little girl that is currently 2 and a half.  If you know two and a half year-olds, then you know they are not a quiet group.  Secondly, my microphone is packed up and at my in-laws home, since we have been trying to move for a year now, with no luck.  The housing market in Southern California is less than ideal.  So I had to record on the built in microphone on my laptop.

I went back and started using Audacity to record my podcast with.  It is free and easy to use.  After recording I use another program to normalize the audio so it is not too quiet or too loud anywhere.  That software is called levelator.  Then I import back into Audacity for finishing touches, like adding the intro music.  After which I usually add the tags to the podcast using iTunes, but I think I forgot to do that this last time, so you may notice that.

Then it is already to go and I upload to Libsyn.  After they have it, it is time to update my rss feed for the podcast and post the accompanying blog article.  Thats it.  Well, thats it for the audio portion of the podcast.  For the Thirty Years War I also did a video, a PDF history guide and a timeline.  I haven’t always done all these “extras”.  I probably won’t continue to do them either.  I didn’t get any feedback on any of the extras and I received very little feedback on the actual audio podcast.

There it is.  If there are any questions just post them in the comments and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.  Thanks!

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Podcast Reviews

While you guys are still fighting over what podcast topic to cover next, 30 years war and Japan’s aspirations leading to WWII are still tied, you might want to take a look at some of these podcasts. I’ve already reviewed a few to help you choose. Also, I’m going to start working on something for the 30 years war this weekend. But you can still vote on the poll below:

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1. Stuff You Missed in History Class – Read my review.
2. A History of the World in 100 Objects – no review yet, but stay tuned.
3. BackStory with the American History Guys – no review yet, but stay tuned.
4. Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know – not yet, but this is by the same folks as number 1 on this list, howstuffworks.
5. The Stuff of Genius – not yet, but I will do one soon.
6. Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History – Read my review.
7. The History of Rome - Read my review.
8. In Our Time – This is an oldie but a goodie, I’ll have to do a review soon on this one too.
9. Laughing Historically – No review yet.
10. BBC History Magazine – Read my review.

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Podcast Review: The History of Rome

The History of Rome by Mike Duncan posted its first episode on Sunday December 30, 2007 and for the last 4 years he has been rocking the podcast world. In 2010 his podcast won the Podcast Award in the education category. It is a pretty big deal to win the podcast awards. Congratulations to Mike!

On iTunes History of Rome has 1,121 ratings and an average rating of 5 out of 5 stars! Wow! History of Rome is currently number 4 on the top 10 podcast on iTunes.

For this review I listened to episode 127 – Commanding the Economy. The duration of the episode was 28 minutes and change. It was released on February 21, 2011. Mike seems to keep the podcast fairly frequent. At the beginning of the podcast is a 60 second plug for audible. Strangely this didn’t bother me though. Mike has an almost hypnotic voice. It has a strange ability to calm you. It’s like meditation with history. But that’s good, really.

After the plug for audible there some calming music played then Mike gets right into the episode content, see his description of the episode below:

Rome’s economy was in disarray when Diocletian came to power and he initiated major overhauls to get the system running again.

As I mentioned before Mike has a great voice. He doesn’t say what he does for a living, but if he is not in radio he should be, what a voice! Here is what I could find on the History of Rome website’s about page in regards to Mike:

Mike Duncan grew up outside of Seattle, WA and has a degree in Political Science and Philosophy from Western Washington University. His deep and abiding love for Roman history is matched only by his deep and abiding love for Seattle Mariners baseball. He recently married and now lives in Austin, TX.

Mike reads nice and slow, but not too slow, just right actually. He does a great job doing a summary/overview of what will be covered in this particular episode. I don’t want to ruin the podcast for you, so I’m not going to cover the content that Mike went over. At the end of the podcast the same calm music plays.

I’m going to stay subscribed to this one! I really enjoyed it and look forward to more from Mike.

While doing my research I found two other reviews that have been done on the History of Rome Podcast. Frank Yeats for Suite101 did a review on May 20, 2010 and Charles Odom from the Yahoo! Contributor Network did a review on April 6, 2009.

In addition to the website the History of Rome Podcast also has a Facebook group.

As mentioned earlier, the History of Rome won the Podcast Awards for 2010 in the Education category. There is a Youtube video of the awards ceremony here, skip to 18:20 in the video to see just the education category:

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Podcast Review: History According to Bob

Bob gets right into it. No, “This is Bob and the show name”, nothing. The show I listened to was called, Atlanta Campaign Part 1 of 4. It was published 2/11/11. The episode was ten minutes and 32 seconds long. This is Bob’s description of the podcast episode:

This show is about the Atlanta campaign in May 1864 Part 1 of 4 this one deals with early movements and Rocky Face Ridge.

This particular episode could have used some visuals. It was hard to visualize the battle scene and who was where.

Bob is hard-core old school. He has a very distinctive almost nasally voice. His podcast has no music, no sponsors, no picture associated with the mp3. I’m some what surprised he had the show description in the lyrics field of the mp3.

I thought this particular episode was very well done. Its pretty quick so I won’t summarize it here, just go check it out for yourself. At the end of the show he does quickly cover the name of his website and sources he used to put together this episode

Even though, what I have written above criticizes Bob’s podcast, ignore all that. It has been said that content is king and if you agree with that, you will be very hard pressed to find a better history podcast than History According to Bob [iTunes Link]. Bob’s was the first history podcast available that I know of. I would say that it was one of the first 300 podcast available in the beginning. It came before History Podcast, my own creation. I still think History According to Bob is a stellar show! No one knows their stuff better than Bob. His is the podcast that inspired me to podcast. His show is simply awesome. If you only subscribe to one podcast this should be it.

History According to Bob is number 58 in the Top 100 history podcast on iTunes. His show has 114 ratings with an average rating of 5 stars.

After listening to this episode I decided to listen to the episode entitled Questions 86 as well. These are episodes that Bob creates specifically to cover what is happening with him personally and to go over the emails that he receives.

I was sorry to hear while listening to Questions 86 that Bob’s wife has cancer.  I hope she has a full recovery and is healthy soon!  I’ve missed out on a lot since not keeping up with his episodes. He does so many that I have a hard time keeping up. Strangely enough he talks about the show Who Do You Think You Are?, something that we talked about briefly in another podcast review posting, BBC History Magazine. Bob goes on to talk about request for episodes he has received and his addiction to the video game Mass Effect 3 (gotta love a guy who is a gamer). In addition to Who do You Think You Are, he also discusses the HBO program Rome.

Below is a YouTube video that Bob did on the cold war:

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Listening to Podcast on an Android Phone

I am one of the few who does not have an iPhone.  I think everyone would know how to subscribe to a podcast using their iPhone.  But, what if, like me, you have an android phone?  Well, I wanted to investigate this since I have one and sometimes I want to discover new podcast or subscribe to one and I don’t have wifi for my iPod, but I do have my trusty Android phone.  I found Google Listen.  It is an app from Google Labs.  The app allows you to search for podcast to listen to.  Once you find one you can subscribe and instantly listen to a podcast.  The podcast subscription will appear in you Google Reader under a folder called “Listen Subscriptions”.

It was hard for me to find the podcast I was looking for using my phone to search.  It was much easier to find the rss feed of the podcast, and paste it into google reader, then I dragged it to the Listen Subscriptions folder and presto, it was in my phone instantly.  That was easy, but it doesn’t solve the problem of finding and subscribing with just the phone.  It’s too bad google doesn’t have an easier way to do this.

Check out this in-depth youtube review of Google Listen:

Do you use another app for Android that you like?  Please share in the comments.

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Podcast Status Update

Soon you should see a new item for History Podcast in your iTunes list. Don’t get too excited its not a full History Podcast, but just a status update. Okay, you can get excited, I am! I want you to help me pick the next episode below.

Thats right, I want to start on the next episode of history podcast.  I’m going to put out a small status update podcast to let everyone know that I have not disappeared completely.  I do want to continue podcasting, but I need your help.  Can you help me go through all the request I have received?  I still have request that I got via email in 2005!  I want to get to them all, but I don’t know where to begin, so maybe you can help?  I’m putting a poll up on this post and it will remain up until sometime in March.  Hopefully by March I will have some time to begin podcasting again.  At least this one episode that you, the listeners and readers of this blog, will choose.  So without further delay, here is the poll:

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All of these choices are from a single email of requests that I received from Eric K. Don’t forget to check out our new Facebook Fan page and our Twitter! Thank you for listening and reading!

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Podcast Review: BBC History Magazine – February 2011

Do you know the saying, “Those who can’t, teach.” Well, this is a little like that. Since I can’t find the time to do a podcast of my own, I thought I could bring a few cool podcast to your attention. While doing so I want to also learn what other podcast are doing in my genre so that I can improve History Podcast. To find some good history podcasts, I did what anyone would do. I went to iTunes and look at the top 10 podcast. BBC History Magazine is number 9. Their most recent podcast goes over the some of the articles from their February magazine. This episode of their podcast runs 41 and a half minutes. It was released on January 1, 2011. The show begins with some light classical music. While the music plays the 3 hosts do a summary of what they will be covering in this episode.

They used the description field in the mp3 tags to show the following description if you are listening on a iPod:

Mark Ormand discusses the black death, Mark Nicholls explores the life of Sir Walter Raleigh, Simon Sebag Montefiore explains the challenges involved in writing a history of Jerusalem.

The show begins with a plug for one of BBC’s programs, Who Do You Think You Are? The show is on in the US too on NBC. It is available on Hulu as well. On the show celebrites find out about their ancestory and viewers follow them on their journey. There is also a magazine, Who Do You Think You Are.

Next the podcast moved on to interview Mark Nicholls the co-author of the book Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life and Legend. The book will be published on April 7, 2011.  Sir Walter Raleigh was a aristocrat, writier, poet, soldier, coutier, spy and explorer.

After this interview they took a quick break to plug the magazine BBC History Magazine, website, twitter and facebook page.

Next, the interviewed Mark Ormrod about his new book  The Black Death in England, 1348-1500. The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, peaking in Europe between 1348 and 1350. Ormrod gave a some what vivid description of the sysmptoms of Black Death, so be prepared for that. This, I thought, was the best interview of the three.

Lastly, they interviewed Simon Sebag Montefiore about his book Jerusalem: The Biography which releases on October 25, 2011. This interview takes place in a very noisy cafe and is hard to listen to, but the host does warn you of that before it starts.

The podcast ends with more about the magazine and what is coming up next episode while the same classical music we heard in the beginning plays.  I would recommend this podcast and intend to stay subscribed myself.

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HistoryPodcast 77 – The Enigma Machine

Much more information at the new site: historyonair.com

First Code Broken on 2/20/2006. Here is what it said.

Second Code Broken on 3/7/2006. Here is what it said.

Download here.

Links:

Downloadable Enigma Software
Make a paper Enigma Machine
Macromedia Flash Representation of a Engima Device
History of Solving the Enigma Machine

Books:

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History Podcast 76 – Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg also went by the name Bloddy Rosa. Polish born on March 5, 1871. She was a German revolutionary and agitator who played a key role in the founding of the Polish Social Democratic Party and the Spartacus League, which grew into the Communist Party of Germany. As a political theoretician theory of Marxism, stressing democracy and revolutionary mass action to achieve international Socialism. She was murdered during the Spartacus Revolt of January 1919. To be exact she died on January 15 of that year.

HP76 – Rosa Luxemburg.mp3 10:15 – 9.9MB

Links:

Wikipedia Article

A Biography

Rosa Luxemburg Library

Books:

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HistoryPodcast 75 – Hannah Duston

A request from listener Kyle from South Carolina!

Hannah Duston was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts. She was born in circa 1657. She was the daughter of Michael Emerson and Hannah Webster. Michael was a shoemaker who immigrated from England. Nothing is known about Hannah Duston before her marriage to Thomas Duston. Duston (SPELL OUT) is also written, Dustin with an I, Dusten with and E and Durstan. Thomas and Hannah married in December of 1677. Thomas was originally from Dover, New Hampshire. He was a bricklayer and farmer by trade. Thomas was a well respected citizin of Haverhill and eventually was elected a constable. They lived in a cottage two miles from Haverhill. The couple had 13 children……

HP75 – Hannah Dustin.mp3 8:57 – 8.29MB

Sources:
Robert D. Arner. “The Story Of Hannah Duston: Cotton Mather To Thoreau,” American Transcendental Quarterly, 18 (1973). 19-23.

Samuel Willard Crompton. “100 Colonia Leaders Who Shaped North America,” p.69

Tory Horwitz. “The Devil May Care: Fifty Intrepit Americans and their Quest for the Unknown,” p.25-28.

The Story of Hannah Duston. http://www.usm.maine.edu/~jdustin/hannah/hannah-story.html

Hannah Duston. Britannica Biography Collection via EBSCOhost

ANN-MARIE WEIS. “THE MURDEROUS MOTHER AND THE SOLICITOUS FATHER: VIOLENCE, JACKSONIAN FAMILY VALUES, AND HANNAH DUSTON’S CAPTIVITY” American Studies International.

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