Patrick AllittReseñas

Allitt, whom I could listen to even if the series were a thousand lectures long, is a great tour guide to England, Scotland, and Wales. (I can't but help notice that Northern Ireland was left out, so this isn't a tour of the UK....) Each lecture is profusely illustrated, and the countryside looks incredibly inviting and the cities bustling but welcoming. Allitt offers lots of practical advice along the way, such as walking as much as possible and always being prepared for rain. The series covers lots of historic landmarks, but also lots of literary ones, and these lectures are particularly good. There are also lectures on the sporting tradition and the legacy of the British Empire--which Allitt puts a good spin on--no mention of the Opium Wars here. Just tea and an influx of immigrants that has made Britain more diverse and improved its food. These lectures will make you want to visit, and I found the canal system to be very enticing--I can't wait to have my own experience there (see Three Men in a Boat). Highly highly recommended.

Very well presented biography of Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. (This was also a free book from Audible, so even better). Albert is well covered by historians, but I personally wasn't as familiar with 1800s UK history of the monarchy, so I learned a fair bit. Particularly interesting was that there were still issues of monarch vs. parliament even at that date, due to Victoria's preference for certain politicians and parties ("Bedchamber Crisis" of 1839), and how Albert potentially prevented war between the US/Union and Britain during the US Civil War over a naval interdiction (basically, by softening the letter sent to Lincoln after the incident, leaving open the possibility that the US captain had misinterpreted or exceeded Lincoln's orders in violating British sovereignty, rather than directly accusing Lincoln and the US of doing so). Overall, seems like a genuinely great leader, and the Great Courses program presents it well.

A nice primer on teaching. Side note: I'm surprised the author attributed the usage of the generally plural possessive pronoun"their" as some sort of response to feminism's encroachment on the old de facto standard of "he" standing in to represent any singular person. The reality is English grew up using "they" and "their" to talk about an anonymous "he" or "she".

Overall, this is an excellent, balanced history of the United States. I used it as part of my daughter's home schooling. Up until the lead-in to the Civil War, the course is taught by Allen Guelzo, and this is his best performance in the Great Courses. The material is well organized and he doesn't get too bogged down in religious history as he tends to do. The Civil War years are problematic. Professor Gallagher is nerve-wracking to watch, as he seems to fear getting too far from his lectern. His delivery is also sub-par, although I found I could listen to him much easier if I just didn't watch him. Professor Alitt brings things back up to a high standard for the last part of the course. This is a fairly old course, so there aren't great visuals, just a lot of pictures of the folks being talked about. So it works very well as an audio only course, if you're looking for something educational for a VERY long car trip!

The German Prince & the British Monarchy
Review of the Audible Original audiobook edition (February 18, 2020)

In the introduction to The Life and Times of Prince Albert, historian Patrick Allitt says that he will rely on two primary sources and will attempt to strike a balance between them. The main sources are the 5 volume [book:The Life of the Prince Consort: Prince Albert and His Times|13166813] (1875-1880) by Theodore Martin, described as "solemn, worshipful and reverent" and [book:Queen Victoria|437518] (1921) by Lytton Strachey, described as "tart, satirical and detached." Overall, the tone of this series of 10 lectures of about 30 minutes each did lean towards the worshipful though, but in an entertaining manner that wasn't dry.

It was fascinating to hear about historical trivia such as Albert introducing the German custom of Christmas Trees to Britain, and thus to the rest of the world. Also that his influence probably steered the British Monarchy towards its popularization, which was his intent to prevent it being subject to revolutions such as those on the European continent. I was curious about what Allitt describes as Albert's "strong foreign accent" and did look up some further information (I don't remember it being expanded on by Allitt) that he and Victoria actually spoke German in private as she had grown up with a German governess. That is kind of interesting to think about.

The narration by author Patrick Allitt was excellent.

The Life and Times of Prince Albert was originally released February 18 2020 and was also a free Audible Original for members in the month of May 2020. It is available to everyone for a standard price.

Survey of Britain in the 19th Century. Not much new from what I already knew, but a refresher is always a good thing.

4/19/19

This is a comprehensive and entertaining overview of Victorian England. I love Allitt's dry and chatty delivery style. While I wish there was more material about the colonial experience, Allitt has 18 lectures dedicated to it in his lecture series Rise and Fall of the British Empire.

It was interesting and encouraging read as a new faculty member. Interesting to see how courses other than my own, which are engineering project courses, might be taught, and encouraging to have company; it really is okay to be apathetic to some of the complaints that I hear from students. Many passages were quite funny, some others were too much history, maybe some others contained too much information about students, but it was good to hear.

An intellectual history of the environmental movement. Sees a battle between the pessimists who speak of gloom and doom crises and optimists who argue that things are not only not quite that bad, but can be mitigated by technological improvements. The author is in the optimist camp and feels that the pessimists have damaged the environmental movement by portraying everything as a crisis. This book pairs well with with Paul Sabin's The Bet.

In this course, Patrick Allitt gives us a broad overview of American history through a series of 48 lectures, each one a mini-biography of a wide variety of notable and representative American figures, from John Smith all the way through Betty Friedan. Along the way, he introduces us to religious figures (from Mother Ann Lee to Brigham Young to Jesse Jackson), war heroes (Frances Marion, William T. Sherman, Douglas MacArthur), explorers and pioneers (Lewis and Clark, John Wesley Powell, Charles Lindbergh), inventors and entrepreneurs (Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford), artists and entertainers (Frederick Law Olmsted, Harry Houdini, Duke Ellington, Roberto Clemente), and more.

Professor Allitt is British, and it's interesting hearing a foreigner's take on America. That puts him in a long tradition going back to Alexis de Tocqueville, and he agrees with many of de Tocqueville's observations. In the end, he concludes, what defines Americans is our shared belief in progress and a sense of idealism that drives it, even if we don't always agree on or live up to those ideals. If nothing else, this keeps us moving forward.

Professor Allitt is a wealth of knowledge and an excellent lecturer. I learned a lot while at the same time he kept me entertained. I highly recommend this or any of his lecture courses.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2LM2A8F1LE3MQ½

Allitt's book describing the paradoxical history of conservatism in America is, well, paradoxical. He's very good at pointing out the tensions (dare I say inconsistencies?) in American conservative thought, and does a remarkably good job of staying disinterested about most of the authors he discusses. This does have a cost: he's aware of the tensions, but his 'objective' standpoint means that he can't criticize the bad thinking to which those tensions lead. To take the most obvious example, conservatism has always been about preserving communities; American conservatism (and, increasingly, depressingly, conservatism everywhere) since the cold war has been about supporting economic processes that destroy communities. Because of his objective standpoint, he can't do any analysis of problems like that.

Also odd is his attempt to read 'conservatism' back into American history. His approach isn't obviously objectionable (he defines early conservatives as those who try to preserve anything), and it leads to some provoking ideas (the civil war as a clash of two different forms of conservatism). The problem is clear, though- there's a big difference between 'conservatives' who want to 'preserve' market societies, and conservatives who wanted to preserve communities in the face of markets. The former want to preserve something that never existed before; the latter have to change everything in order to preserve what used to be.

But this is a problem with conservatism as such, not just with Allitt's book. It suffers all the usual flaws of 'intellectual' history (you'd never suspect from this book that conservatives reacted to anything other than the ideas of liberals, socialists, communists, democrats, abolitionists and federalists; it looks like history is nothing other than a long line of men writing their thoughts down for posterity and so on), but also possesses all of its virtues (clarity, narrative flow).

[As a special bonus, the back-cover blurbs are idiotic: the Hoover Institute representative suggests that the book is about "a uniquely American core of convictions repeatedly summoned to hold the fort against waves of Europeanizing assailants," which would be news to the large number of Europhilic conservatives throughout American history (Santayana, James, Henry Adams, just to name a few). A professor from Wisconsin-Milwaukee thinks that conservatism "has an American history best understood in terms of its fluid meanings, plural definitions and oppositional currents," which I'm pretty sure is a nice/self-delusional way of saying "American conservatives want to be part of a tradition, but they aren't; by and large they're just knee-jerk reactionaries." Which is probably close to the truth given the characteristics of conservative thought in U.S. history (i.e., that almost all conservatives became liberals during the 1960s), particularly if you ignore the above-mentioned Europhiles].

On the Burkean Conservative Tradition

In this important historical survey, Professor Patrick Allitt seeks to explore the intellectual tradition of conservatism as experienced in the U.S. and its impact on the political and economic scene. Its opposition to a liberal tradition which according to William F. Buckley is philosophically incoherent, lacking in moral foundation, suppressive of individual freedom, fetishizes doubt rather than standing firm on the certain truths, and believes in the power of the state to engineer equality and social progress.

In my opinion, Allitt does a great job emphasizing and exploring the historical construct and etymology of the term "conservatism" and what it actually means. Not until the 1950s did conservatives themselves refer to their ideology as "conservative" and therefore we must be careful in its use.

In my opinion, Allitt's analysis is especially strong during the revolutionary and antebellum era. The intellectual tradition established by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster of the Whig Party in opposition to the populist swagger of Andrew Jackson is very well explored, if a little short. By the time Allitt reaches William F. Buckley I think the book begins to feel a little rushed. The confluence of traditionalism, libertarianism, and communism could certainly fill several books, but Allitt is unfortunately only able to partially explore them fully. In this way, Allan J. Lichtman's "White Protestant Nation" does a better job exploring conservatism in the context of the later half of 20th century America.

With the ascent of a liberal, progressive, Democrat now in the White House, there has been much recent discussion about where the conservatives go from here, this book is a good primer on how they got to where they are now. Therefore, I recommend this as mandatory reading for all those who considers themselves conservatives.

(84 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture) on 14 DVDs
Course No. 8500