Historian and veteran Middle East journalist Michael Rank looks into the most exciting events and personalities of history in this podcast and explains them in five-minute episodes so that you can absorb the facts in the fastest way possible. Learn about the lives of Genghis Khan, Vlad Dracul, and Richard the Lionheart, and such events as the Crusades and the Black Death in these highly entertaining and informative episodes. Michael has sold thousands of books with his unique take on the past with such best-selling titles as "History's Most Insane Rulers: Lunatics, Eccentrics, and Megalomaniacs From Emperor Caligula to Kim Jon Il," and he brings the same energy to this podcast. He focuses on world history, Roman history, military history, the history of the United States, the most famous rulers in history, biographies, biography of famous people, the most famous people in history, the most powerful rulers, medieval history, violent history, world history, United States history, and how to put all these pieces together. This is a great podcast if you know nothing about a topic and need a good launching point into a deeper study.
http://www.michaelrank.net
HFM 017 | How to Memorize Like Cicero: Why Ancients Could Memorize the Phone Book
In this episode of the History in Five Minutes Podcast we look at the lost art of memorization. Boys in ancient Greece memorized Homer’s The Odyssey and the Iliad, medieval monks committed dozens of sermons to memory, and Augustine could fire off Cicero without breaking a sweat. Were all people in the ancient world like Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man, or did they make use of lost techniques?
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TRANSCRIPT
Click here to download the transcript to Episode 17 (PDF)