Historiansplaining: A historian tells you why everything you know is wrong

When Jackie Kennedy told reporters that she and the late President used to listen to the soundtrack of the musical "Camelot," the word immediately caught on as the name for the Kennedy White House -- portrayed as a brief, golden period of wise rule, ended by tragedy; more than a thousand years' worth of romantic associations could be evoked with three short syllables. In this second segment, we consider how the chivalric legend of Camelot and the Round Table was conceived and elaborated, from French courtly romances, through the first English Arthurian epic (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), to the popular novels, plays, and movies of modern times. Please support this podcast and hear all lectures, including the upcoming examination of the "historical" King Arthur -- www.patreon.com/user?u=5530632 Find the new Lyceum platform and app -- www.lyceum.fm/ Suggested further reading: Nicholas J. Higham, "King Arthur: The Making of the Legend"

Why does the earliest known picture of King Arthur show him riding on a goat and charging towards a deadly cat-monster? How has the tale of King Arthur and his knights evolved since it first emerged from Celtic folklore? We consider the shaping of the Arthur story from the songs of mysterious Welsh and Breton bards to the high medieval romances of French courtier-poets. Proceed to part 2 here: https://soundcloud.com/historiansplaining/myth-of-the-month-12-king-arthur-pt-2-the-rise-and-fall-of-camelot Please support this podcast and hear all lectures, including the upcoming examination of the "historical" King Arthur -- www.patreon.com/user?u=5530632 Find the new Lyceum platform and app -- www.lyceum.fm/ Suggested further reading: Nicholas J. Higham, "King Arthur: The Making of the Legend"

After one year on Patreon for patrons only, Myth of the Month #8 becomes open to the public: The notion that there is a coherent society that can be called "the West" or "Western Civilization" -- running from Greco-Roman antiquity to modern North America -- originated during the upheaval of World War I, thanks to an eccentric German history teacher named Oswald Spengler. We consider whether any common thread or trait can be said to unite "the West," and why different nations like Egypt or Poland get tossed in or out of the basket of "the West" at different times. Finally, we consider why the idea of "the West" is often linked to conspiracy theories involving Jews, Marxists, post-modernists, or Jewish-Marxist-banker-Freemason-postmodernists. (Yes, I make an oblique reference here to Jordan Peterson.) The recent debate involving Douglas Murray, "What Is Killing Western Civilization?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJZqKKFn3Hk Please support this podcast and hear all lectures, including the next Myth of the Month, on the framing of US Constitution and the origins of the Senate & Electoral College: https://www.patreon.com/posts/29819013 cover image: Capitoline temples of Sbeitla, Tunisia, photograph by Bernard Gagnon

Romans, Brythons, Picts, Angles, Gaels, Saxons, and Jutes -- how did this kaleidoscopic welter of contending tribes crystallize into the medieval Christian kingdoms we know as England and Scotland? We consider the most tumultuous and mysterious period in British history, following the Roman withdrawal, as locals and Germanic migrants sought to assert power and maintain stability. Despite the great uncertainty, Britons mastered new knowledge, developed a poetic tradition, and passed on an enduring obsession with the sacred power of water. Please support this podcast and hear all lectures, including the upcoming examination of the King Arthur cycle -- www.patreon.com/user?u=5530632 Find the new Lyceum platform and app -- www.lyceum.fm/ Cover image: 6th-century Anglo-Saxon inlaid gold disk brooch, found in gravesite in Kent. Image courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art.

--Made of Hickory wood, shells, and copper on the Atlantic coast of North America, ca. 1640s --Held in the collection of Skokloster Castle, Sweden This elaborately carved and ornamented wooden weapon was most likely ceremonial, created by a Lenape Indian artist to represent the authority of a chieftain or warrior. But how did this priceless Native American artifact end up in the collection of a castle in Sweden? This object and its journey tell a largely forgotten story of Sweden's moment of imperial glory and ambition in the mid-1600s, which left a mysterious imprint in North America. Please support this podcast in order to keep the lectures coming regularly and hear all of the History of the United States in 100 Objects -- www.patreon.com/user?u=5530632 Suggested further reading: James Nordin, "The Center of the World," Journal of Materical Culture, 2013 -- http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1032.4165&rep=rep1&type=pdf Image courtesy of Skokloster Castle.

What is the legacy of the greatest pandemic to hit the globe in the past two centuries, carrying away 3% of the entire human race? What has been its after-life through the past century? What health and psychological impacts did it leave behind? What are the enduring questions and mysteries that science and history must unravel? And how has our art, literature, and popular culture remembered -- or more often, forgotten -- this great disaster? Please support this podcast and hear all lectures -- www.patreon.com/user?u=5530632 Find the new Lyceum platform and app -- www.lyceum.fm/ Suggested further reading: Laura Spinney, "Pale Rider"; Alfred Crosby, "America's Forgotten Pandemic." image: angel monument, Hendersonville, N.C., which formerly belonged to the Wolfe family of Asheville, N.C., and inspired the title of the novel, "Look Homeward, Angel"

In this first installment on the great Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-20, we consider the staggering scope and deep reach of the viral disease that swept the world three times, infecting one third of humankind and killing more people than the World War that nonetheless overshadowed it in the public mind. The second installment will consider the lingering impacts of the pandemic, its enduring mysteries, and the possible reasons it has been forgotten. Please support this podcast and hear all lectures -- www.patreon.com/user?u=5530632 Find the new Lyceum platform and app -- https://www.lyceum.fm/ Suggested further reading: Laura Spinney, "Pale Rider"; Alfred Crosby, "America's Forgotten Pandemic." image: Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with Spanish Flu, 1919

What can I say? I'm alive and well, how are you? Image: bronze statue of the Archangel Michael, atop the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome, commemorating the end of a plague.

What is with the spate of 1980s themes on current "prestige" television? Is it Gen. X. nostalgia for their youthful days in suburban malls? Or something more? Television critic Sonia Saraiya discusses how our unresolved identity crises seem to have led us into a fascination with the last years of the Cold War, and with the secret mistakes and machinations that took place on both sides of the old Iron Curtain. please support this podcast! -- https://www.patreon.com/creator-home The pledges for this installment will be split evenly between the two collaborators. Television series discussed: "The Americans," "Stranger Things," "When They See Us," "Chernobyl," "Leaving Neverland" Correction: The famous quote that nuclear power is "a hell of a way to boil water" comes from journalist Karl Grossman's 1980 book, "Cover Up."

What did people do when the Roman empire fell apart around them? Recent scholarship, based on new archeological discoveries and techniques, argues that in the "dark" centuries between 450 and 750 AD, the people of western Europe, from conquering kings to ordinary peasants, improvised new political alliances, maintained law and order, improved the productivity of their land, and invented new crafts and art forms, building a resilient and inventive society on the foundations (often literally) of the old. Please support this podcast -- www.patreon.com/user?u=5530632 Suggested further reading: Peter Wells, "Barbarians to Angels" Cover image: Visigothic bronze belt buckle with garnet and glass inlays, belonging to a woman in Spain, mid-6th century AD; image provided by Cleveland Museum of Art.