History Commons^™

Not Quite Cricket By Jon Rose: A Review, Jane Ulman

RadioDoc Review

In Not Quite Cricket, Jon Rose reaches into the well-known story of the first Australian cricket team to play at Lords and draws out a tragedy dressed up as music hall comedy, in what he calls a 'historical intervention'.

Rose is an Australian-based polymath creator: a musician, inventor, composer, improviser, educator and entertainer. Radio production is just one strand of his prolific body of work. Over decades he has forged an innovative style, a distinctive radio form. His work has always been a fusion of genres, a hybrid of fact and invention with composed and improvised music carrying its …

Little War On The Prairie: An Auto-Critique, John Biewen

RadioDoc Review

Using RadioDoc Review’s suggested criteria for evaluating a radio documentary, John Biewen delivers an auto-critique of his own program, Little War on the Prairie. It tells the story of the U.S.-Dakota War, a bloody Plains Indian war that broke out in the summer of 1862 in southern Minnesota. That six-week conflict took the lives of hundreds of people, perhaps a thousand, a larger death toll than in the better-known bloodlettings at Little Big Horn or Wounded Knee. Most of the dead were white settlers, though the U.S. government’s reprisals in the aftermath of the war killed up to several …