The BBC has published 60 years' worth of audio archive and transcripts of the Reith Lectures.
The Reith Lectures were named in honour of Lord Reith, the BBC's first director general.
The 1969 lectures, given by the ecologist Frank Fraser Darling, are considered a landmark in the debate surrounding the protection of the environment as he warned of the onset of global warming.
However, the lectures have been criticised for largely being an all-white, all-male affair. The first female Reith Lecturer was Dame Margery Perham in 1961. A writer and lecturer on African affairs, she examined the impact of colonialism.
Robert Gardiner of the UN Economic Commission for Africa was the first non-white lecturer. Speaking in 1965, his broadcasts discussed how how economic inequality affects race relations.
The youngest lecturer is the neurobiologist, Colin Blakemore, who was just thirty years old when asked to deliver the lectures in 1976. His series, Mechanics of the Mind, explored the human brain and consciousness.
The archive has been made available on the Radio 4 website, and via two podcasts Reith Lectures Archive 1948 – 1975 and Reith Lectures 1976 – 2010. Lecture transcripts are also available.
While compiling the archive, Radio 4 discovered several of the older lectures were missing, and is appealing to the public to contact the Reith Lectures team if they have copies of any of the missing recordings.
The 2011 Reith Lectures, entititled Securing Freedom, will be delivered by the Burmese pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi and former MI5 director general Eliza Manningham-Buller.
Aung San Suu Kyi's lectures will address the themes of liberty and dissent, and will be broadcast on Tuesday, 28 June at 0900 BST on BBC Radio 4 and at 1100 GMT on the BBC World Service.
Baroness Manningham-Buller's lectures will be broadcast in September to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and will reflect on the threats to freedom and the means of countering them in the post-9/11 world.
The Reith Lectures archive is the latest development in Radio 4's plan to make more of its archive available to the public. The recent publication of the Desert Island Discs archive has garnered more than three million downloads since its launch two months ago.
Originally Published On: www.bbc.co.uk – Original Article Here