IGX

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ahow/all

This is a history of the world, told by 100 objects from the British Museum. There are 101 podcast episodes, plus an accompanying website. Each episode is about 15 min long.

Each object is chosen for how it represents a major event in world history- technological, financial, political, whatever. (BTW, "history" here extends deep into prehistory- all the way back to Olduvai.)

The first episode is pretty lame, so ignore it. It's mostly "This museum is awesome and so are we." After that it gets pretty good; too much speculation in the early prehistorical stuff, but that's almost unavoidable.

What I like about it is that it is truly a world history- instead of the usual "Egypt, Greece, Rome, and then how Europeans found everyone else" which is what I was exposed to. In this series they cover great empires that most people have never heard of if they were raised in the U.S.

I'm almost done with the series (episode 88: Captain Cook just bought the farm) and after this I'm going to re-listen more slowly and supplement each one with a few days of reading about that episode's subject. I think that you could do a lot worse than using this as a template for gaining a truly broad and inclusive picture of the history of the world.

One warning: if you want/need it as CD format (CDDA), you're going to end up with about 16-17 CDs by my estimate. In .mp3 format all will fit on one data CD.

Thanks for that review, GDG. I'll check it out.

Um... wrong forum. Could somebody please move this to the Book and Movie forum? I think it belongs there. I plead late night and fatigue.

I kind of petered out 47 objects in; Maybe I'll give it another try.