As I've mentioned audio and visual takes on the Berlin Wall recently, it's time for some good old fashioned text. We have an introduction to the subject, but if you want to take your reading further, how about this interview from Stanford University. It features a question and answer session with James Sheehan, a history professor, and Amir Eshel, a German Studies professor. Questions include 'Which facets of Cold War history do you find most compelling?' and 'From the perspective of your research, what do you feel are the most lasting implications of the Berlin Wall today?'

 Last week I spoke about a podcast on the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall. This week I'd like to talk about a project in a different media. Flickr is a file hosting and sharing website and a new project has been started on it called 'Experience History: Berlin 1961 - 1989'. It asks you to submit photographs you have of Berlin during that period, when the wall divided the city. Not just pictures of the wall, although those would certainly be evocative, but any life in the city. While I'm partly interested in this because of the chance to see history - there's a good photo of the kind of signs used to divide the different sectors - a post on their dedicated blog had a particular resonance: "If you were living or visiting Berlin at that time, this is a wonderful excuse to rediscover your old slides and dust off those photo-filled shoe boxes that are lurking under your bed." My father travelled behind the 'Iron Curtain' as a child, and has boxes of slides, although none of Berlin. If you have something to show, or just want to look, this is the blog with the details.

The widespread reputation for France as a country which loves wine and produces many wine varieties might be something of a cliché if it wasn't also largely true. Now Professor Paul Cartledge is hoping to settle the debate about who first introduced wine into France, by arguing it was Greek traders in 600 BC, not Etruscans or Romans. A press release from his university (Cambridge) summarises his points: "two...swing the argument firmly in the Greeks' favour. First, the Greeks had to marry and mix with the local Ligurians to ensure that Massalia survived, suggesting that they also swapped goods and ideas. Second, they left behind copious amounts of archaeological evidence of their wine trade (unlike the Etruscans and long before the Romans), much of which has been found on Celtic sites." The settlement of Massalia is present day Marseille. It does sound convincing...

I've been convinced of the educational value of the podcast for several years now, and was interested to hear of a new set of files devoted to the Berlin Wall by iMinds. Unlike the other podcasts I've spoken about on here, you have to pay for it, but having listened to them I think they're worth it for the right person. Basically, it's a set of six thematically linked podcasts commemorating and explaining the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Each is a little over eight minutes long. The wall itself is well covered, and there's a fair examination of the differences between east and west.

The material is introductory: there's nothing for those already familiar with the subject, but plenty for newcomers. There's a lot of repetition between the segments - for instance, much of the first three minutes of the eight minute 'Fall of the Berlin Wall' is covered elsewhere - but if you're learning about it for the first time this is useful reinforcement. Of course, it can be slightly off putting if you're listening to them all in one go, but one strength is that this isn't a lecture you need a full hour for, but something split into short segments you can spread over a week.

The facts and interpretations are good, and I only had two minor problems: the background music will be a matter of taste, but I found it intrusive. Equally problematic is it's unclear - at least in my package - in what order you should listen to the podcasts for optimum understanding. Those problems aside, I was very pleased with it, even more so by the fact the package of six costs $3.99, which is only just a small step above free. Overall, I think it's good for the beginner and priced accordingly. I hope future sets will have more of a consistent flow between the units, but I also hope this model is more widely adopted; there are students who would benefit greatly from hearing this. iMinds cover other areas of European history, and other - sometimes very esoteric - subjects, but I haven't heard those and can't comment. You can find them at the iMinds site.

A couple of years ago I reported on the excellent '12 Byzantine Rulers' podcast from Lars Brownworth. I'm pleased to pass on that he's now covering a new, but equally interesting, subject in the form of the Normans. Just do a search on 'The Norman Centuries' in iTunes or visit the main site and you'll be away. I've not heard any yet, but I'm sure they'll be equally good, and the source material is excellent, but somewhat overlooked in the popular mind.

The exact origins of Christopher Columbus, the man whose voyage to the Americas began a new era of European conquest abroad, have long been debated. Now a professor of linguistics has entered the debate. Estelle Irizarry, of Georgetown University, has examined over a hundred examples of Columbus' writing and discovered that he uses a grammatical tool - a slash - which at the time was peculiar to only Catalan speaking areas of Iberia, leading to the conclusion that Columbus was a Catalan, or at least raised in that region.

Irizarry goes further, arguing that the reason he was unclear about his origins - a fact that publishers should be happy about - was because he was a 'converso', a person born into a Jewish family who later converted to Christianity. The converso's were frequently under suspicion, and people did indeed try to hide their original religion. Medieval News goes into a bit more depth, but if you're really interested you should look at Irizarry's book 'Christopher Columbus: The DNA of his Writings'.

Benito Mussolini is best known for being a fascist Italian dictator who people think made the trains run on time (he didn't, but that's a great idea for a future Historical Myths piece...) Before that he was a socialist, and between those two, during the later years of the First World War, he was a pro-war journalist. New research published in a history of British spying, as reported in this Guardian piece, has revealed that Mussolini was paid a £100 a week by British spies to write pro-war articles to persuade the nation to remain in the war, equivalent to about £6000 today. He also used local thugs to rough up opposition and stop strikes. So, on the one hand, Mussolini was a British agent, on the other hand Britain was paying Mussolini to use propaganda and violence for political ends, practicing techniques he'd later use to gain power and which would influence Hitler.

The exciting art history news of recent weeks has revolved around the possible discovery of a new painting by Leonardo da Vinci, a man more famous now for poorly written adventure novels than his amazing body of work. 'Discovery' in this case doesn't equal found, as the painting has been in circulation for a while and was sold in 1998 for just £12,000 by people believing it to from the nineteenth century. However, a new owner dug deeper, and experts in Paris discovered a partial fingerprint which they have compared to one from a definite da Vinci painting, concluding they match. Other analysis also suggest that there were strong parallels to Leonardo' s style. If this conclusion is accepted, the £12,000 painting suddenly increases to tens of millions. The Telegraph has a picture, and the suggestion that the subject is Bianca Sforza, daughter of a Duke of Milan.

I've mentioned the British National Archives on here a few times - they are a repository of records relating to British history  - but now they've come in for some stiff criticism. Over recent decades it's become ever more popular to offer a blanket criticism to all of British imperial history, a past which at one point saw the country rule a third of the world's population. An exhibition at the Archive's museum unashamedly takes this view. However, a counter trend appears to be emerging, and a number of academics have lined up to attack the display. They've been helped immensely by - what appears to be - the accidental labelling of a photograph. They've put "East African slaves taken aboard HMS Daphne from a dhow, 1 November 1868" but neglected to mention they were being rescued at the time. A small error, but one news reports like this has seized upon. Of course, you can't discuss the 'Empire' (it generally just gets mentioned by the one word in Britain) without going overboard, and some critics have decided to call the display 'anti-British'. Which takes the whole thing out of history and into politics.  

I saw an article in the Guardian recently that introduced to me to an area of Europe's history I didn't know anything about, despite one of the key events happening within the last twenty years. The report begins by explaining how a half million strong community of Saxon descendants, who had lived in Transylvania for centuries, left the region and travelled to Germany in late 1989 / early 1990. They left behind, what the article suggests, is a fascinating area of cultural history, and the author, Simon Jenkins, goes on to explore what might happen to it. I'm sure the intent behind the article is political, but that doesn't stop it being a valuable introduction.