In this context, I would like to recommend the excellent lecture series about the history of the guitar captured on video offered by Gresham College and Profess

In this context, I would like to recommend the excellent lecture series about the history of the guitar captured on video offered by Gresham College and Professor Christopher Page. They are very entertaining, with lots of historic background stories! It is mostly about England but the rest of the world is mentioned to give context. "Men, Women and Guitars in Romantic England" http://www.gresham.ac.uk/series/men-women-and-guitars-in-romantic-england/ http://www.gresham.ac.uk/series/men-women-and-guitars-in-rom... (I almost didn't find the video - it's at the top of each lecture page, I thought that's a static image.) The lectures are also available on their Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/GreshamCollege/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/GreshamCollege/videos > ...it has been almost universally forgotten that there was an intense guitar craze in England > between about 1800 and 1835, spanning the lifetimes of Keats, Byron, Shelley and Coleridge, and a > craze whose history has never been traced. Histories of English music and society in the > nineteenth century continue to be written as if it never happened, and yet the instrument was > cultivated from the royal family in the person of Princess Charlotte (d. 1817) down to the > poorest laundress. > This is much more than the story of an instrument and its music: the rise of romanticism, the > creation of an urban poor hungry for self improvement, the proliferation of newspapers, > serialised fiction and printed sheet music, the social position of women and other aspects of > English society and culture in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars all have a place within it.