I’m a night owl. OK, insomniac actually. For the sleep-challenged among us there’s little to watch on the tube after midnight. Yes, TiVos and DVRs have helped, and IPTV is just around the corner. But back in the early 90s, when I was a grad student at the University of New Mexico, those technologies were still a long way off. One show that took my mind off the fact that I couldn’t sleep was The Western Tradition, a 52-part lecture series covering the entire sweep of Western history from 3000 BCE to the current age and beyond. The series was produced by WGBH in Boston (c1989), and is now available for free on the Annenberg Media web site. The appeal here lies primarily in the person of recently deceased UCLA history professor Eugen Weber. The British-educated Weber delivers up engaging lectures in an over-the-top, highly mesmerizing, English accent. My local Albququerque public TV station would insidiously run these lectures back-to-back, thus contributing to my insomnia. After listening to lecture 9 on The Rise of Rome who could possibly resist lecture 10, The Roman Empire? —David C. Murray