April 3, 2006

Listen to Authentic Sources of History

Why read a dry American history book of the 20th century when you can listen to history as it happened for free? If nothing else, speeches and news broadcasts from the past make for exciting listening that connects the dots of important events from the past century. Let me point out a few free resources that will sonically immerse you in history:

Authentic History Center – A Massive Collection of Hours of Streaming Audio well organized by decades and historic events; and they sell $10 MP3 CDs containing dozens of hours of historical recordings.

American Rhetoric – We feature over 100 free speeches from politicians and leaders throughout the last century as streaming audio and a MP3 download. I’ve yet to hear one speech that isn’t a high quality recording. Simply the best audio resource for speeches on the Internet.

Library of Congress: American Memory – From the Library of Congress comes this eclectic collection of recordings you aren’t likely to find anywhere else. Recordings of Theodore Roosevelt, Quilts and Quiltmaking in America, Voices From the Days of Slavery, and more. Interesting stuff.

Go to the historical source with LearnOutLoud.com, Your Audio & Video Learning Resource!

March 10, 2006

The Greatest Speeches of All Time

There’s something mighty powerful about listening to historic speeches. Whether you’re listening to FDR, JFK or MLK (or even someone whose name isn’t an acronym!), there’s a feeling of energy and perspective that simply can’t be duplicated. It’s one thing to read Winston Churchill or read about him. It’s another thing entirely to listen to him.

And there are many other benefits of listening to this type of stuff. You gain a better understanding of rhetoric. It’s a great way to brush up on our English if English is not your native lanugage. And it’s an incredible way to both be inspired and learn more about American and world history.

And you can do it all in your car on the way to work. 🙂

We’re proud to feature titles by companies such as Speechworks on LearnOutLoud and look forward to bringing more and more of this type of content in the future. A personal dream of mine is a service like Real Rhapsody or Yahoo! Music but for speeches like this where you could call up your favorite historical figure or inspirational leader and within seconds be listening to any of the speeches they’ve given. How cool would that be? Maybe we’ll just have to build that…