brightknightie | Entries tagged with podcasts

My favorite Christmas podcast, Hark! The Stories Behind Our Favorite Christmas Carols, is back for a new season. Check out their official website or find them wherever you get your podcasts. I recommend them highly.

Hark! is about "the meaning and the making of our most beloved Christmas carols and their time-honored traditions." It researches the history, lyrics, music, theology, and more of each piece. As their site puts it: "Where do these beloved yuletide songs come from? What inspired the people who composed them? How did they become popular and even mainstream? And what impact do their ancient Christian messages have on an increasingly post-Christian culture?"

So far this year, they've done "We Three Kings" and "The Little Drummer Boy." Past years have included "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," "Silent Night," "Carol of the Bells," "Good King Wenceslas," "The Huron Carol," "Joy to the World," "In the Bleak Midwinter," "O Holy Night," "Go Tell it on the Mountain," and more.

(My second-favorite Christmas podcast, Christmas Past, is also back. It's a more generalist Christmas podcast -- "equal parts nerdy deep dive and warmhearted celebration... inspired by public radio" -- and it puts out many more episodes per season. Here's their official website.)

Announcement: Effective for the new year, I'm converting my old Forever Knight monthly newsletter ("Recently:FK" tag) into a post about whatever happens to fannishly engage me at that time ("Recently:Enthusiasms" tag). Likely, that may often include FK. But it won't always. Our fannish options are wide and fascinating!

To kick off this new plan with high hopes of a happy new year, we have:

Some interesting ficathons, fests & communities

Fiction
- yuletide_admin revealed the '23 main and madness collections. yuletide has been seeing recommendation posts; it will likely soon see some reflection posts.
- hlh_shortcuts brought us 25 assorted new Highlander stories for '23. Check out the collection.
- seasonsofdrabbles, a quarterly exchange, has sign-ups 1/07-1/14, with assignments out by 1/17 and due 1/27.
- genprompt_bingo, a low-commitment challenge, runs its 25th round through 3/20.
- trope_of_the_month's January theme is "amnesty" (that is, any of the previous themes).
- allbingo's January theme is "Public Domain Day."
Non-fiction (meta)
- snowflake_challenge, an annual celebration of fandom, is back. The challenges post 1/01-1/31; there are no deadlines.
- fancake, a fic recommendation community, has a January theme of "indigenous characters."

Some history podcasts to which I currently subscribe

Wide-ranging
- Throughline (NPR; hosts Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah) -- "The past is never past. Every headline has a history. ... Go back in time to understand the present."
- The Rest is History (Goalhanger; hosts Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland) -- "Interrogating the past and attempting to de-tangle the present."
- History Extra (BBC; host Ellie Cawthorne) -- "Interviews with notable historians ... everything from crusading knights to Tudor monarchs and the D-Day landings."
Targeted
- Fall of Civilizations (Independent; host Paul Cooper) -- "Exploring the collapse of different societies through history."
- The History Chicks (Wondery; hosts Beckett Graham and Susan Vollenweider) -- "Two women. Half the population. Several thousand years of history. About an hour."
- The Gilded Gentleman (The Bowery Boys; host Carl Raymond) -- "A look behind the velvet curtains of America’s Gilded Age, Paris’ Belle Époque and England’s Victorian and Edwardian eras."
- Medieval Murders (University of Cambridge; hosts Nora Eisner and Manuel Eisner) -- "Delves into the world of violent crimes in the streets, taverns and privy chambers of fourteenth-century London, York, and Oxford. ... Show the similarities and the differences to violent crime in our modern world."

One of my favorite podcasts, Hark! The stories behind our favorite Christmas carols, is back for its third mini-season (four episodes a year; one weekly for Advent). Check it out on its own site. Or find it wherever you like to get your podcasts! (Here it is on Google Podcasts, where I get mine, until the migration to YouTube Podcasts next year.)

Each episode deep-dives a single carol though history, music theory, literary analysis, sociology, and theology. If that sounds heavy, it's not! The engaging researcher/reporter questions her expert sources on our behalf, teasing out the wonder, delight, sophistication, coincidences, and -- occasionally -- horror and tragedy, behind each composition. So far, across all their seasons to date, they've done: "O! Holy Night," "Joy to the World," "In the Bleak Midwinter," "The Huron Carol (Twas in the Moon of Wintertime)," "Silent Night," "Adeste Fideles (O Come, All Ye Faithful)," "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," "Good King Wenceslas," "Carol of the Bells," and the premiere episode devoted to the history of carols in general.

If you're interested in Christmassy podcasts, you might also be interested in Christmas Past, which puts out many more episodes per season, starting right after Halloween and increasing its rate as Christmas approaches. As they describe themselves: "Behind every Christmas tradition is a story, often a forgotten one. ... Think: NPR meets Clement Clarke Moore." It's now in its eighth season, so a great back catalogue if you're looking for something specific.

I love good guys

Entries tagged with podcasts

My favorite Christmas podcast is back

Fannish options & enthusiasms: January 2024

"Hark!" podcast is back for Advent '23

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