Podcasts by Category
True history storytelling at the History Café. Join BBC Historian Jon Rosebank & HBO, BBC & C4 script and series editor Penelope Middelboe as we give history a new take. Drop in to the History Café weekly on Wednesdays to give old stories a refreshing new brew. 90+ ever-green stand-alone episodes and building...
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- 294 - #97 'a day of undiluted hell' - Ep 1 Murder. Mystery at the North Pole
We may think the main controversy surrounding American, naval commander, Robert Peary’s claim to be the first to reach the North Pole on 6/7 May 1909 was whether he, and the other ‘invisible’ five men accompanying him, actually got anywhere near the Pole. However, it’s a much more complicated and sinister story than that….
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Wed, 15 May 2024 - 41min - 293 - #48 'Gunsmoke and Mirrors' - Ep 2 Was the Wild West wild?
What was the driving force behind the settlement of the American west? Was it the so-called ‘anarchocapitalism’ so admired by the Hoover Institution and some of the followers of President Trump? The violence they fetishize turns out to have been only in those places populated by young men – we’re talking not just cowpokes or gold and silver prospectors, but also vigilantes in the towns back east. The majority of frontiers-people were peaceful Americans.
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Wed, 08 May 2024 - 36min - 292 - #47 The Law-less Frontier - Ep 1 Was the Wild West wild?
A series of land grabs and cruel clearances by the Federal government from 1781 triggered a crazy, barely-contained movement west, spearheaded by gold prospectors, cattle ranchers, homesteaders and the railroads. By 1892 it was generally agreed that the American character was forged in the violence of the shifting frontier. We look at the popular fiction and entertainment that helped create this belief: Deadwood Dick, Buffalo Bill, Calamity Jane, Mark Twain’s Six-fingered Pete and many others. And we examine what really went on!
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Wed, 01 May 2024 - 42min - 291 - #39 Newton and the Occult - Ep 2 Was Newton the last of the Magicians?
Having considered the arguments in favour of defining Sir Isaac Newton as an early 'scientist', we now consider the other side of the coin.
Newton’s best-known breakthrough – the identification of gravity – belonged not to the latest tradition of European Cartesian rationalism, but to a very English strand of occult philosophy. In fact it was only because Newton worked in this tradition that he was able to think of gravity as an unseen and mysterious force. Europeans like Leibnitz wrote the idea off as magic.
More striking, like other English philosophers, Newton believed that all this had been known to ancient thinkers going back to Noah, and spent much of his life trying to decode the myths and symbols they left behind. He was, he believed, the only man in his generation privileged to understand them. The last of magicians? Maybe.
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Tue, 23 Apr 2024 - 45min - 290 - #38 Newton the Alchemist - Ep 1 Was Newton the last of the Magicians?
The short answer to the question, ‘was Newton the last of the magicians?’ is, yes …. And also … no. Newton and alchemy turn out to be ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ We toss a coin and take a heads-and-tails approach. In this podcast we argue that the alchemical experiments he undertook had nothing to do with magic. Newton’s alchemy now looks to historians like good science (although he would have called himself both a natural philosopher and a chymist). It was well conceived and measured and drew on the work of his contemporaries and of many men before him. And Newton was certainly not the last person in Europe to practise alchemy of this kind. Within fifty years of his death it would simply evolve into modern chemistry.
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Wed, 17 Apr 2024 - 36min - 289 - #96 Extortioners and hatchet men - Ep 5 What Wars? What Roses?
Henry VII invented the idea of the Wars of the Roses and the notion that he alone could end them. With a comparatively weak claim to the throne he found a novel way to deal with the nobility - through extortioners and hatchet men. He could only get away with this because the Black Death had fatally damaged the status of the nobility and caused the rise of the small independent farmer. Feudalism in England and Wales was over… or at least we thought it was, until now.
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Wed, 10 Apr 2024 - 29min - 288 - #95 Murder in the Tower - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?
One common-girl-denies-king-until-he-marries-her, two kings, three royal murders in the Tower, and the Queen's mother accused of witchcraft. Just about standard for late 15th Century England and Wales.
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Wed, 03 Apr 2024 - 29min - 287 - #94 'Political gangsterdom' - Ep 3 What Wars? What Roses?
By the time Henry VI finally lost the last bit of England's French Empire in 1453 he could no longer go to war in France to occupy and enrich his nobility. This small, interrelated and bickering group, cooped up in England with an agricultural depression settling in, now resorted to what the historian Michael Postan long ago (in 1939) famously called ‘political gangsterdom.’
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Wed, 27 Mar 2024 - 35min - 286 - #93 'A plague on both your houses' - Ep 2 What Wars? What Roses?
Why was the 15th century in England and Wales so violent? It certainly wasn’t York v Lancaster, white-rose v red-rose rivalry. Monarchs were useless but that’s not unique to the 15th century. So what was it that defined this period? It has everything to do with the plague…
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Wed, 20 Mar 2024 - 31min - 285 - #92 'Welcome Traitor!' - Ep 1 What Wars? What Roses?
Why do we know so little about medieval history? About England and Wales in the fifteenth century? The Wars of the Roses (Lancaster v York) lasted 4 months not the traditional 85 years. Even the roses were (mostly) inventions. And was it even medieval? The execution of the King’s chief minister as a traitor in 1450, by sailors dissatisfied with an ineffective king, was shocking. It revealed that the common people believed the true crown was the community. You can’t get more modern than that.
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Wed, 13 Mar 2024 - 28min - 284 - Ep 1 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #34 Getting the vote in 1918 - the secret strategy
REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY - Mrs Pankhurst claims she won women the vote through ‘marvellous leadership.’ An all-male conference of MPs counters that it gifted women the vote. We reveal that neither is true. The door to women’s suffrage is finally opened in January 1917 through brilliant negotiations behind the scenes by Millicent Fawcett, the president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage, her female colleagues and the enlightened MPs who work with her. [Please note on our logo the NUWSS colours of berry red and leaf green - not often seen today]
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Fri, 08 Mar 2024 - 35min - 283 - Ep 2 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #35 Most women didn’t want the vote
REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY We go back to the great number of unsung women and men who made great strides towards women’s votes and female emancipation by 1900. Emmeline Pankhurst sets up her Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 as a pressure group for votes for poor working-women in the cotton mills. By then a majority of MPs is already consistently in favour. But the public are uninterested and no government will therefore act. The question is whether the WSPU can find a formula for making ministers give votes to women.
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Fri, 08 Mar 2024 - 27min - 282 - Ep 3 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #36 The Pankhursts didn’t want the poor to get the vote
REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY The WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - begin in the Manchester Labour Party in the 1890s and learn their publicity-grabbing tactics from Labour. But these tactics turn out to have the worst possible effect – making women’s votes even less likely than before. They are so bad, in fact, it makes you wonder whether the Suffragette leadership had some other agenda.
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Fri, 08 Mar 2024 - 30min - 281 - Ep 4 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #37 Hunger strikes and forced feeding
REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY The militant strategy of the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - is delivering them headlines. It gets them nowhere with the government but it makes enormous sums of advertising revenue from fancy retailers, and funds Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s society lifestyle. Rich London ladies in silks and satins pour in the money, while working-class activists take all the risks. WSPU officer Theresa Billington drafts a constitution to give everyone a say but Emmeline Pankhurst tears it up and manoeuvres anyone with a socialist agenda out. Who exactly is this organisation for?
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Fri, 08 Mar 2024 - 38min - 280 - Ep 5 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #41 The violence the Suffragettes wouldn’t admit to
REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY From 1912 the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes – are out of control and dangerous. But that is not how they're remembered. Anyone who disagrees with the violence either leaves or is thrown out. Whatever they later claim about their ‘wonderful leadership’, it is their young, poor members who are inventing new and increasingly dangerous ways of intimidating the government. The WSPU leadership claims it never threatened life, only property, but this is manifestly not true. Axes are thrown, full theatres set on fire, bombs put on trains, acid poured into mail-boxes and the leaders do nothing to contain this ‘terrorism’ with deadly intent.
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Fri, 08 Mar 2024 - 37min - 279 - Ep 6 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #42 The violence backfired
REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY November 1912 sees the first defeat for women’s votes since 1891. The government has been struggling with law and order after two years of mass strikes. That year even school children go on strike. The violence of the suffragettes is barely noticed and can definitely not be rewarded. For the first time in a generation, Parliament turns against women’s votes. What little sympathy there was for women’s suffrage among the wider public ebbs away. But Christabel Pankhurst, from her cosy Paris apartment, is enjoying the fight.
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Fri, 08 Mar 2024 - 37min - 278 - Ep 7 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #43 The Suffragettes did not win the vote
REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY Suddenly, after 1913 votes for women looks inevitable. Not through the chaotic, dying campaign of the suffragettes. But through the political brilliance of Millicent Fawcett and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Their 1913 alliance with the Labour Party changes the whole political balance. Now Liberal Prime Minister HH Asquith’s blockheaded intransigence over women’s votes is costing his party dearly and letting the Tories in. At the 1915 election all three parties will be vying to give women the vote. But then… war breaks out.
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Fri, 08 Mar 2024 - 41min - 277 - Ep 8 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #60 After 1918 - the secrets are out - Ep 8 The Secret History of the Suffragettes
REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY The reason we all believe Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst achieved women’s votes in Britain is because that’s the narrative created in the 20s and 30s by former suffragettes. The reality of what Emmeline and Christabel got up to post 1918 is shocking. Suffice it to say it involves racial purity and telling working women they can buy silk underwear, shapely shoes and fur hats, not by improving their working conditions but by giving into the feminine desire for shopping. What?
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Fri, 08 Mar 2024 - 44min - 276 - #91 Death Camp tattoos were IBM numbers - Ep 10 Trading with the Nazis
During the war US and British bankers continued to send cash to Germany, while American companies in Germany were drawn down a slippery slope of collaboration. American bosses may have kept in touch with German subsidiaries via neutral hang-outs (like the fictional Rick’s Bar in the 1942 film Casablanca). Some made use of prisoners of war for slave labour. The five-figure tattoo on every death camp inmate began as an IBM-Dehomag punch card number. Nobody was going to be called to account for trading with the Nazis.
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Wed, 06 Mar 2024 - 35min - 275 - #90 British appeasement, a sinister game? - Ep 9 Trading with the Nazis
In 1937, the new British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, believed he single-handedly could ensure world peace. He told the King, George VI, that he would do this by pursuing his objective of Germany and England being ‘the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against Communism.’
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Tue, 27 Feb 2024 - 31min - 274 - #89 Britain's Nazi Allies - Ep 8 Trading with the Nazis
In 1935 the Etonians in the British Cabinet and Foreign Office rejected all calls from the USSR to unite with France and Eastern Europe against the rise of the Third Reich. They were far too terrified of Communism. Instead, Britain agreed a treaty allowing the Germans to expand their navy. When supporters of the elected left-wing government in Spain faced annihilation by Franco’s fascists in 1936-7 the Tory Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, openly welcomed the carnage in Spain. It would, he declared, make the British public understand that Nazi Germany would be ‘an ally of ours and of all order-loving folk.’
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Wed, 21 Feb 2024 - 30min - 273 - #88 'It haunts me' - Ep 7 Trading with the Nazis
Horrified by the implications of aiding German rearmament, a few British and American companies made serious attempts to get out of Germany in the 1930s. Particularly after Kristallnacht, 10 November 1938, when Nazi thugs attacked Jewish businesses. But the British Establishment saw Hitler as ‘a man who could be relied upon’. The Bank of England argued as late as March 1939, four days after Hitler had marched into Prague, that the British couldn’t just pull out of Germany, without bringing down the whole London banking sector.
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Wed, 14 Feb 2024 - 27min - 272 - #87 Kill Nazism with kindness? - Ep 6 Trading with the Nazis
A perfect storm created the conditions for the Nazi’s march to war. The naïve belief that you could kill Nazism with kindness (aka trade agreements from which bankers and businessmen personally hoped to profit) was held simultaneously by the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, and the second in command at the British Foreign Office, Orme Sargent. Their opponents in government argued that tough action was necessary to contain Germany ‘even at a cost’ to those who had invested. They were consistently undermined.
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Wed, 07 Feb 2024 - 27min - 271 - #86 'Hell-bent to supplant our democratic government' - Ep 5 Trading with the Nazis
In 1936 the US Ambassador in Berlin, William Dodd, wrote to President Roosevelt warning of a pro-Nazi clique of US industrialists ‘hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government.’ We look at the notorious Liberty League and the dinner in New York’s Astoria to celebrate the fall of Paris to the Nazis. We showcase the businessmen who believed they were above democracy and could achieve world peace (under fascism) through world trade.
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Thu, 01 Feb 2024 - 26min - 270 - #85 Nazi sterilisation, the American way - Ep 4 Trading with the Nazis
For all the complaints about the difficulties of doing business in Hitler’s Germany, the Americans seemed strikingly settled there. Now we get to the nub of why, when Germany occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia and then part of Poland in 1938-39, its military rolled out in General Motors and Ford cars and trucks, and its planes were using General Motors and Ford parts. They were also burning American fuel. And using American research to justify forcibly sterilising those they considered mentally unfit.
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Wed, 24 Jan 2024 - 30min - 269 - #84 Dollars and Dictatorship – Ep 3 Trading with the Nazis
STAND-ALONE. The Americans insisted on extracting every cent from war-torn Britain and France in the aftermath of World War I. They made them repay the money they had borrowed, at increasingly high interest rates, to buy American weapons to fight Germany. It led to economic depression. The 1929 Wall Street Crash was part of a global financial meltdown which led to economic nationalism – survival of the fittest, everyone for himself. And that was before Hjalmar Schacht Reichsminister for Economics in Germany, trapped American companies in a series of clever regulations. It enabled Hitler to rearm. [We'll soon get to how the British also enabled Hitler!]
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Wed, 17 Jan 2024 - 24min - 268 - #83 Enrich your enemy, impoverish your allies - Ep 2 Trading with the Nazis
The US had a paradoxical strategy to ensure repayment of its WW1 loans. It would make Germany economically prosperous to ensure Germany was in a position to pay reparations to France and Britain (as per the Treaty of Versailles). This would mean that impoverished Britain and France could keep repaying the interest on their wartime loans to the Americans.Economist Maynard Keynes, aware that Britain and France would never recover from endless interest repayments, proposed cancelling all war debts. Everyone would end up better off in the long run, as was later proved. But the US government refused and American companies, including Ford, General Motors, and Standard Oil, began to invest in Germany, exploiting its economic collapse and setting the stage for the rise of the Nazis.
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Wed, 10 Jan 2024 - 31min - 267 - #82 'The whole world belongs to the Americans' - Ep 1 Trading With The Nazis
Carl Siemens, chair of Siemens the German electronics business, complained in 1929, ‘the whole world belongs to the Americans.’ If you want to understand how it was that American businesses ended up investing so heavily in Germany in the 1920s and 30s – so heavily that eventually they enabled Hitler to arm the fascist Third Reich - then you have to start by going back to the First World War. It starts with asking why the Americans declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917 but mysteriously did not ally with either Britain or France.
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Fri, 05 Jan 2024 - 28min - 266 - #33 Sex, Hollywood and Fashion
Why did fashion become so much more conservative in the 1930s? We look at the puritanical Hays Motion Picture Production Code that banned indecent passions, and at MGM’s Adrian Greenberg, the most powerful Hollywood designer of his day. The arrival of colour film stock and the invention of the close-up meant Adrian designed for the camera, experimenting with hats and calf-length dresses that flattered both the lead actresses and ‘Nancy’ in the plush seat. MGM’s Louis B Mayer, who’d started out selling second hand clothes, made a fortune producing mass-made copies to coincide with each film’s release for Nancy’s modest budget.
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Sat, 30 Dec 2023 - 33min - 265 - #79 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers
A whole lot of nonsense has been written about the invention of the modern Christmas. It was thought up by Washington Irving or Charles Dickens or Prince Albert. We just can’t resist attaching a famous name to things, especially if the name belongs to a writer or a royal. We deserve better than this. So here's our offering from the History Café Christmas Party! Have a good one.
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Wed, 20 Dec 2023 - 29min - 264 - #30 ‘A tall and desperate fellow’ - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
The night before - 4 November 1605: Guy Fawkes, a Catholic with experience as a soldier fighting for the Spanish, is found with matches and fuse powder in a storeroom under the House of Lords. He’s ‘booted and spurred’, ready for a quick get-away. Or maybe not. The government account keeps changing.
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Wed, 13 Dec 2023 - 33min - 263 - #29 The king's fear - Ep 6 Blowing up the Gunpowder plot
As his father had done, King James I's Chief Minister, Robert Cecil ,built his entrapments around a germ of genuine plotting. We uncover a small Catholic rebellion in Warwickshire in response to the king’s tougher anti-Catholic laws. And we examine Cecil’s imaginative embellishment: a mystery letter delivered to a compromised Catholic peer on 26 October warning of ‘a terrible blow this Parliament.’ It was handed to the king to decipher. If anything was designed to terrify James I, whose father had narrowly escaped death from a gunpowder blast, this was it.
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Wed, 06 Dec 2023 - 32min - 262 - #28 ‘A formidable network of secret agents’ - Ep 5 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
We dig deeper into the animosity between the King, James I of England and VI of Scotland and his Chief Minister, Robert Cecil, whom he bullied and called names. And we see the Gunpowder plot in the context of the previous plots hatched by the Cecils (father and son) against their enemies. All of which historians now agree were largely fabrications. Father was Elizabeth I's Chief Minister, like his son he had spies everywhere and openly boasted of his policy of entrapment.
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Thu, 30 Nov 2023 - 31min - 261 - #27 'Hellish miners' - Ep 4 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
To avoid any possible blame for the plot falling on himself or the king, Cecil procures confessions saying the seven gentlemen plotters began excavating a tunnel under the House of Lords long before the government stepped up its anti-Catholic legislation. They apparently lived on site, in an upstairs room, seven to a bed. They dug unnoticed, only in the day (or was it only in the night?) for almost a year, before spying a handy cellar next door for the gunpowder barrels. Yes. Of course.
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Tue, 21 Nov 2023 - 33min - 260 - #26 Why blow up Parliament anyway? - Ep 3 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
The parliament of 1604 refuses to grant the king money. They’re still paying for the effects of the last plague. But this is Cecil’s job. What to do? On 5 November 1605 the assembled MPs and peers are calmly informed that there has been a devilish Catholic plot to blow the lot of them up. A plot that their king and Cecil have brilliantly foiled. Unsurprisingly, this time, they vote the king the money he so badly needs. Job done.
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Sat, 18 Nov 2023 - 30min - 259 - Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 3 Taster
Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 3 Taster by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe
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Sun, 12 Nov 2023 - 5min - 258 - Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 2 Taster
Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 2 Taster by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe
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Sun, 12 Nov 2023 - 2min - 257 - #25 ‘Here lieth the Toad’ - Ep 2 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
We take a look at James I’s shadowy chief minister Robert Cecil who manages to implicate most of his Catholic enemies in the plot. Cecil was so desperate to improve King James’s dire view of him (his father had caused the execution of James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots) he would stoop to anything.
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Sun, 12 Nov 2023 - 34min - 256 - #24 ‘There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality’ - Ep 1 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND - FOR 5 NOVEMBER! We look at the story the government published as The King’s Book, more than 500 witness statements and other contemporary sources and conclude, like the Victorian antiquarian Jardine who wrote up the trial from the State Papers, there is no reliable corroborating evidence for the gunpowder story we’ve been told.
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Sun, 05 Nov 2023 - 32min - 255 - Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 1 Taster
Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 1 Taster by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe
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Wed, 01 Nov 2023 - 5min - 254 - #06 London fires were visible from France - ep 6 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?
Who won the Battle of Britain? For good strategic reasons Churchill claimed victory. But the Germans, who saw the eight months of the Blitz as part of the same campaign, achieved much of what they intended.
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Wed, 01 Nov 2023 - 23min - 253 - Battle of Britain - London Fires Were Visible From France - Ep 6 Taster Final
Battle of Britain - London Fires Were Visible From France - Ep 6 Taster Final by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe
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Wed, 01 Nov 2023 - 1min - 252 - #05 Forcing Britain 'to her knees' - ep 5 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?
The Battle of Britain was never as close as the popular story has it. The RAF was too well organised and supplied. But is that why the Luftwaffe switched to bombing London? Or was there another reason?
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Sat, 28 Oct 2023 - 25min - 251 - Battle of Britain - Taster Ep 5 - Forcing Britain To Her KneesTue, 24 Oct 2023 - 1min
- 250 - #04 More than a double bluff - ep 4 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?
Churchill talks up the threat of invasion, even though it looks impossible. ‘I might as well send my men straight into a sausage machine,’ writes the German Chief of Staff. But invasion preparations still go on. Who is bluffing who?
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Tue, 24 Oct 2023 - 31min - 249 - #03 'Always carry pepper to throw in their eyes' - ep 3 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?
Britain is gripped by fear of invasion. Government leaflet 'If the Invader Comes' calls for pepper and ‘a sharp knife to kill them if necessary.’ Churchill goes on BBC and says ‘we await undismayed by the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight.’ So why in private is Churchill saying he doubts the invasion would ever take place?
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Sun, 22 Oct 2023 - 31min - 248 - #02 A battle for air superiority? - Ep 2 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?
Was the Battle of Britain a fight for Luftwaffe air superiority in order to enable an invasion? The Luftwaffe itself did not think so. It had another agenda altogether.
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Sun, 22 Oct 2023 - 29min - 247 - #01 Waterworld Flotilla - ep 1 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?
The Germans make extraordinary preparations for the immense task of invading Britain in 1940. Why bother when neither Hitler nor any senior German officer wanted to do it or thought it was possible?
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Thu, 05 Oct 2023 - 24min - 246 - #72 It was mainly the poor who burned - Ep 5 Bloody Mary Tudor?
Most of those executed for their beliefs under Philip and Mary 1555-58 came from places with a long history of religious dissidence. It matches European evidence that many – perhaps most – of those burned at the stake were not Protestants, but ‘anabaptists’ or people with similar beliefs – usually poor - whom both Protestants and Catholics were persecuting. The government of Edward VI had already begun before Mary came to the throne. But why so many in England? We discover literature appearing from the late 1540s that openly encouraged dissenters to die for their beliefs. And we explore the possibility that so many died because the English uniquely insisted on public hearings, in which there was no room for quiet, face-saving compromises.
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Thu, 28 Sep 2023 - 42min - 245 - #71 Most who were burned were not Protestants - Ep 4 Bloody Mary Tudor?
Until six weeks before the child was due, everybody at court and indeed in Europe, believed Mary was pregnant. She suffered a rare disorder - pseudocyesis - maybe triggered by a tumour on her pituitary gland that would eventually kill her. The imminent birth of a Catholic heir to the Anglo-Spanish dynasty meant that the select council governing the kingdom really now had no alternative but to grasp the nettle of suppressing any potential causes of unrest – including any remaining shreds of die-hard Protestantism - and promptly. We also discover, that the majority of those who were burned were not Protestants at all, but followers of much older, rural religions.
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Wed, 20 Sep 2023 - 41min - 244 - #70 More interested in pirates than heretics - Ep 3 Bloody Mary Tudor?
Who ran the persecution of heretics in England 1555-58? England was a joint monarchy but historians traditionally accused bigoted Mary of running the clamp down herself - with her cousin, Reginald Pole the Archbishop of Canterbury. There’s no evidence it’s true and Pole was useless at running anything. But didn’t Mary intervene to make sure Thomas Cranmer was burned – Henry VIII’s archbishop? No, again. Cranmer was tried by the pope and Mary had no power to spare him. As for Mary’s Privy Council, they turn out to have been more interested in pirates than heretics. Much more important was Bartolomé Carranza, a Spanish friar, King Philip’s trusted eyes and ears at the English Court, but he was later accused of heresy by the pope for being too lenient. Finally the campaign in England was distinctively English, not Spanish. That points the finger for responsibility at Philip’s own select council of veteran English courtiers. But almost all of them had for years been Protestants. What was going on?
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Fri, 15 Sep 2023 - 39min - 243 - #69 Who exactly was a heretic? - Ep 2 Bloody Mary Tudor?
England in the mid-1550s was being governed by a joint monarchy: Philip and Mary and a select council of extremely able English politicians. Almost all of them had experience in government stretching back through the violently protestant regime of Edward VI. To all appearances they had for years been living as active protestants. And yet here they were in a government that was conducting a campaign against religious heresy that we have always understood to be a Catholic campaign to stamp out Protestantism.
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Fri, 08 Sep 2023 - 38min - 242 - #68 Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - Ep 1 of Bloody Mary Tudor?
Bloody Queen Mary? 313 people died for their beliefs 1555-58. We owe it to the victims to get the story right. In 2020 historian Alexander Samson said about the reign of Mary Tudor ‘it feels as if we are at the start.’ So dismiss everything you thought you knew and be prepared to be amazed. Ever since Mary died childless, at the age of just 42 in 1558, the history of her reign was written almost exclusively by English Protestant historians, mainly using Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ written by an Elizabethan Protestant. We look at why Foxe exclusively blames Mary and why he’s wrong.
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Wed, 30 Aug 2023 - 40min - 241 - #16 The men behind the myth - Ep 7 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?
Within days of 28 October 1962 two journalists publish the official but untruthful White House account, as instructed and edited by the President. They also call-out a political enemy for daring to consider a humiliating missile swap with the Soviets. But we show how the Kennedys had already suggested this very missile swap to Khrushchev via private backchannels, on condition he kept it secret. Which he did.
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Thu, 24 Aug 2023 - 21min - 240 - #15 ‘The Fourteenth Day’ - Ep 6 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?
28 October 1962: by holding his nerve Kennedy defuses the crisis in just 13 days. He says it’s over although he’s unable to verify whether Khrushchev ever withdraws his missiles or not. The last missiles do indeed leave Cuba on day 48 of the crisis but for very different reasons.
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Wed, 16 Aug 2023 - 29min - 239 - #14 ‘Eyeball to eyeball’ - ep 5 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuban Missile Crisis?
22 October 1962: President Kennedy goes on prime-time TV and announces a blockade around Cuba to prevent more Soviet missiles reaching the island. But US sailors call the so-called ‘quarantine’ nothing but ‘grand theatrics.’ Not a single Soviet ship is stopped by the US Navy. What was going on?
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Wed, 09 Aug 2023 - 31min - 238 - #13 ‘Russian roulette’ - ep 4 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuban Missile Crisis?
15 October 1962: Soviet nuclear missile sites are discovered. It’s only three weeks before the mid-term elections. Kennedy decides that to negotiate publicly with Khrushchev would be a disaster at the polls; as would ignoring them which is what his allies advise him to do. So, as Noam Chomsky puts it, the President chooses ‘to play Russian Roulette with nuclear missiles.’
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Thu, 03 Aug 2023 - 23min - 237 - #12 ‘The only way to save Cuba’ - Ep 3 of Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?
The Cuban Missile Crisis begins not because Castro is a dangerous communist but because he is NOT. Khrushchev tells his ruling council: ‘The only way to save Cuba is to put missiles there’ - not only to prevent an American invasion, but also to keep Fidel Castro sweet.
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Wed, 26 Jul 2023 - 22min - 236 - #11 Fidel Castro was not a communist - Ep 2 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?
Synopsis: 1959: The first country the new revolutionary president of Cuba visits is the United States of America. And he’s a big hit. The students at Princeton carry him on their shoulders. Castro wants a trade deal with the American government. So why does Kennedy fight the presidential election of 1960 on getting tougher than the Republicans with Cuba?
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Wed, 19 Jul 2023 - 28min - 235 - #10 'these missiles do not significantly alter the balance of power' - Ep 1 Cuba Missile Crisis
We have the memo to President Kennedy dated Day 2 of the crisis with his own security chiefs clarifying that 'these missiles do not significantly alter the balance of power.' So why does October 1962 develop into the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war?
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Thu, 13 Jul 2023 - 31min - 234 - #77 Stanley never got the joke - Ep 5 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'
The events that followed Livingstone’s funeral are perhaps important for the light they shed on everything that Livingstone was not. Stanley, having declared that he would complete what Livingstone had begun, undertook three ‘momentous’ journeys. Whatever the cover stories he created, Stanley’s expeditions were intended to grab and occupy African lands, sometimes through fake treaties he claimed to have signed with African leaders. One result was the wholesale mapping of central Africa; the other was what we now know as the ‘scramble for Africa’, a gruesome series of invasions and seizures by European states. Stanley’s presumption earned him the lasting scorn and hatred of the British establishment. But his ability as a publicist won Livingstone a place in the nation’s affection – and that lived on much longer. FINAL EP IN SERIES
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Wed, 05 Jul 2023 - 40min - 233 - #76 Twelve reckless Americans - Ep 4 Dr Livingstone, I presume?
Henry Morton Stanley, the New York-born journalist who was actually born in Wales, ‘finds’ Livingstone, although everyone knows he’s not lost. Stanley’s employer Gordon Bennett Jr of the daily New York Herald has spotted a fantastic money-making enterprise, pedalling fictitious stories of the romantic failures of the British explorer, Dr Livingstone. It was time for the Americans to take over the exploration of Africa. The British had bogged themselves down with ‘too many theodolites, barometers, sextants’. Stanley and other ‘energetic… reckless Americans’ would ‘command … an expedition more numerous and better appointed than any that has ever entered Africa’ and infinitely more ruthless.
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Thu, 29 Jun 2023 - 31min - 232 - #75 The Lion and the Tartan Jacket - Ep 3 Dr Livingstone, I presume?
The British audience for Livingstone’s book 'Missionary Travels' can’t get enough of his ‘manly’ and ‘forcible’ style. He brings a very personal mix of far-away adventure and science to his stories. His account of being mauled by a lion – shaken like ‘a terrier dog does a rat’ and how the tartan jacket saves his life – are still vivid reading. But had he not glossed over the danger of malaria and other diseases fatal to Victorian Britons (in much the same way as he casually dismissed as an ‘inconvenience’ the arm savaged by the lion and rendered useless even before his real exploring days had begun) fewer missionaries and their families would have died trying to follow in his footsteps.
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Thu, 22 Jun 2023 - 38min - 231 - #74 Smoke that Thunders Ep 2 Dr Livingstone, I presume?
Livingstone was the first European to record his visit to Smoke that Thunders on the Zambezi river. 100 metres of plummeting water, across the entire kilometre of the Zambezi’s width. He promptly named it after his queen, Victoria Falls. His ambition was to find a navigable river from the east coast of Africa inland. Although it was clear that Smoke that Thunders would put a stop to any trade boats navigating any further inland he remained undaunted. He calculated that just being able to bring a ship this far would be well worth the effort. Now he just had to hope that there was nothing else like these immense falls before the Zambezi reached the sea.
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Wed, 14 Jun 2023 - 37min - 230 - #73 Stronger than the ox he rode Ep 1 'Dr Livingstone, I presume'
Exploration changed in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Henry Morton Stanley met Dr David Livingstone. We discover that Livingstone isn’t remembered for anything he achieved. A missionary and medical doctor from a poor Scottish background – and an indestructible traveller - he learned to make accurate geographical calculations and used them to map a small part of Africa. Amazingly he did most of his successful exploration with an African team and backed by African funds. So why did he become an international sensation?
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Sat, 10 Jun 2023 - 37min - 229 - Memory and Myth – Oxford research project ‘Their Finest Hour’ - SOUND CORRECTED
Their Finest Hour is a University of Oxford project that aims to collect and digitally archive the everyday stories and objects of the Second World War that have been passed down from generation to generation in the UK and Commonwealth. Closing date July 2024.We interview project manager Dr Matthew Kidd and reflect on the evidential issues this online collection raises about memory and myth. website: theirfinesthour.english.ox.ac.uk
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Wed, 10 May 2023 - 25min - 227 - #81 Coronation and the chilling ghost of Lord Esher
The coronation of King Charles III on 6 May 2023 has prompted this humorous historical look at the British coronations. Since 1902, when Edward VII and his queen were crowned, the religious ceremony itself has drawn upon rites going back to the crowning of Anglo-Saxon kings. But reviving these old rites just belongs to an Edwardian fascination with a mythical Merrie England. And once you step outside all the solemnity of the Abbey, we are in a world that was entirely invented between the 1870s and the first world war. It was then that British royals turned into a strange mix of an oddly middle-class family that was given to stagey, mock-historical popular pageants, with an increasing display of military uniforms to boost Britain’s failing international image. Thespian imperialist Lord Esher, who headed the coronation planning committee in 1902, had very little time for the ordinary British people he called ‘millions of drudges’. He insisted that everyone in royal ceremonies – not just the military – had to wear a uniform. It was meant to distinguish them from the mere mortals who could watch from the sidelines. Ultimately these events were always about international politics. The coronation of Charles III occurs in the context of Brexit and deep economic crisis and carries as much international weight as anything that has gone before.
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Wed, 03 May 2023 - 55min - 226 - #57 From mayor to meat market. Getting elected in the 18th Century
It is still wrongly but commonly thought that in the 18th Century the gentry bought their way into a parliamentary seat, mainly by purchasing land, or by gaining the approval of some unrepresentative local patron who had the borough in his pocket. You've heard of pocket boroughs, and rotten boroughs? Well, Jon's 1985 doctoral thesis, researched entirely from local documents rescued from mouldy parish chests and corporation vaults, contradicted so many of the leading historians of the day so baldly that although Jon was awarded his doctorate he could never publish. But NOW that the old orthodoxy has collapsed and everyone agrees with Jon, he’s been able to bring out his book updated with all the latest scholarship. It’s a world of lively – not to say riotous, overheated, rumbustious, often embittered, endlessly partisan, endlessly changing and challenging - local politics. What reading the local records tells us is that it was a world of lively local democracy.
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Wed, 26 Apr 2023 - 35min - 225 - #53 '1066 And All That' - really serious nonsense
Published in 1930 by Methuen and never out of print since, this isn’t (as everyone has always supposed) just an innocent laugh at kids’ mistakes. It is a laugh, and we explore many of the jokes. But 1066 And All That is suffused with subversive subtexts. Our original research reveals its origins back in the academic infighting and socialism young authors Sellar and Yeatman experienced studying history in 1919 Oxford. Both had fought and been wounded in the war.
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Thu, 20 Apr 2023 - 37min - 224 - #59 The crimes of the rector George Wilson Bridges - Ep 5 Slavery
By 1832 it was clear to both the House of Lords and the Commons that the British planters in the Caribbean were dragging the British economy into a credit crash. It looks to us very like the crash of 2008. The Jamaican Rebellion of 1831 and the vicious retaliation by the white supremacist Colonial Church Union in 1832 was the final nail in the coffin of British enslavement. The CCU showed beyond doubt that the Jamaican planters, who had always dominated the West Indian planters lobby in London, were a breed of racist thug who flatly refused to make conditions tolerable on their plantations. But the result was that they would never be commercially viable. Abolition became the obvious solution.
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Wed, 12 Apr 2023 - 40min - 223 - #58 The Ship that sank and took the slave trade down with it - Ep 4 Slavery
When the HMS Lutine went down, 9 October 1799 off the Dutch coast, carrying a million pounds of gold and silver, it led to the collapse of the Hamburg sugar market and within a few years the banning of the slave trade.
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Wed, 05 Apr 2023 - 37min - 222 - #56 The Empire Strikes Back - Ep 3 Money not Morality ended British Enslavement
We look at a map of the British Caribbean to understand why losing the British north American colonies after 1783 mattered to British enslavement. We explore how the trade winds had helped create the four-cornered ‘triangle’ of the British slave trade involving North America, Africa, England and the British Caribbean – and how this doesn't work once this section of the 'Empire' - the North American States - strikes back and becomes 'out of bounds' for British trade. And we begin to see why the British government, having fought at great expense to protect the British Caribbean in the American War of Independence, began to isolate the British planters in the Caribbean and favour the East India Company instead.
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Wed, 29 Mar 2023 - 36min - 221 - #55 The woman behind the abolition of slavery - Ep 2 Slavery
Before we get down to the hard facts of whether or not British enslavement ended because the slave economy no longer worked, we should take a closer look at the moral campaign for its abolition. It turns out to be intriguing, though it was a very different campaign from what we’ve all been told (and many students are apparently still being taught). Credit for the campaign’s success should go to an enormous number of people who aren’t much remembered now. Not just William Wilberforce. We're thinking in particular about Margaret Middleton. The campaign of course stretches from the 1780s to the 1830s.
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Wed, 22 Mar 2023 - 35min - 220 - #54 'Slavery was even worse than we thought' - Ep 1 Money not morality ended British Enslavement
We start this 5-part series by trying to give a factual outline of the experience of being transported in horrendous conditions from Africa to the British Caribbean against your will. And we open up the debate started in 1938 by the brilliant young Trinidadian historian Eric Williams as to whether it was money or morality that ended British enslavement? The trade in the enslaved was banned in 1807, the enslaved were 'emancipated' in 1833.
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Tue, 14 Mar 2023 - 35min - 219 - #81 Coronation and the chilling ghost of Lord Esher
The coronation of King Charles III has prompted this humorous historical look at the British coronations. Since 1902, when Edward VII and his queen were crowned, the religious ceremony itself has drawn upon rites going back to the crowning of Anglo-Saxon kings. But reviving these old rites just belongs to an Edwardian fascination with a mythical Merrie England. And once you step outside all the solemnity of the Abbey, we are in a world that was entirely invented between the 1870s and the first world war. It was then that British royals turned into a strange mix of an oddly middle-class family that was given to stagey, mock-historical popular pageants, with an increasing display of military uniforms to boost Britain’s failing international image. Thespian imperialist Lord Esher, who headed the coronation planning committee in 1902, had very little time for the ordinary British people he called ‘millions of drudges’. He insisted that everyone in royal ceremonies – not just the military – had to wear a uniform. It was meant to distinguish them from the mere mortals who could watch from the sidelines. Ultimately these events were always about international politics. The coronation of Charles III occurs in the context of Brexit and deep economic crisis and carries as much international weight as anything that has gone before.
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Wed, 08 Mar 2023 - 55min - 218 - #32 The curious case of inventing Scottishness
Were Scottish clan tartans nothing more than clever marketing? With an eye on the forthcoming coronation of King Charles III we re-release this wry look at the invention of tradition in Scotland – which had a whole lot to do with the hunting, shooting, fishing Royals at their Scottish castle, Balmoral. There they famously adopt a Scottish style of dress complete with royal tartans, kilts for all, pipers and Scottish dancing. Indeed the fashion for all things Scottish has been termed ‘Balmoralisation.’ But we reveal that the commercialisation of romantic Scottishness in the nineteenth century had far deeper and darker roots than the manufacture of tartan and romantic fiction.
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Thu, 02 Mar 2023 - 35min - 217 - #39 Newton and the Occult - Ep 2 Was Newton the last of the Magicians?
Having considered the arguments in favour of defining Sir Isaac Newton as an early 'scientist', we now consider the other side of the coin. Newton’s best-known breakthrough – the identification of gravity – belonged not to the latest tradition of European Cartesian rationalism, but to a very English strand of occult philosophy. In fact it was only because Newton worked in this tradition that he was able to think of gravity as an unseen and mysterious force. Europeans like Leibnitz wrote the idea off as magic. More striking, like other English philosophers, Newton believed that all this had been known to ancient thinkers going back to Noah, and spent much of his life trying to decode the myths and symbols they left behind. He was, he believed, the only man in his generation privileged to understand them. The last of magicians? Maybe.
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Wed, 22 Feb 2023 - 44min - 216 - #38 Newton the alchemist - Ep 1 Was Newton the last of the Magicians?
The short answer to the question, ‘was Newton the last of the magicians?’ is, yes …. And also … no. Newton and alchemy turn out to be ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ We toss a coin and take a heads-and-tails approach. In this podcast we argue that the alchemical experiments he undertook had nothing to do with magic. Newton’s alchemy now looks to historians like good science (although he would have called himself both a natural philosopher and a chymist). It was well conceived and measured and drew on the work of his contemporaries and of many men before him. And Newton was certainly not the last person in Europe to practice alchemy of this kind. Within fifty years of his death it would simply evolve into modern chemistry.
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Wed, 15 Feb 2023 - 36min - 215 - #09 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 of 2 May 1937: King, wife, Führer, lobster
We complete our exploration of the dark shadows in the background of Cecil Beaton’s sunny photograph. The laws of the time made it perfectly possible to prevent Edward VIII from marrying Wallis Simpson. Then there wouldn’t have been any point in abdicating. But nobody even tried. Did the yet-to-be-crowned king himself manufacture the crisis? Or had Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, by never revealing the private letters he had from Wallis Simpson, carried off a quietly brilliant palace coup?
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Wed, 08 Feb 2023 - 33min - 214 - #08 I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: King, wife, Führer, lobster
As the newly appointed king, but not yet crowned, Edward VIII secretly told the Nazis he admired, that he was going ‘to concentrate the business of government in himself…. Who is king here? Baldwin or I?’ Did Prime Minister Baldwin get rid of the King because he was too pro-Nazi, as Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop, maintained? Or was there another reason?
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Wed, 01 Feb 2023 - 26min - 213 - #07 That Dress - Ep 1 '2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster'
If you enjoyed #BBCRadio4 drama #NazisTheRoadToPower by #JonathanMyerson you will love this series of 3 podcasts: '2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster. Cecil Beaton photographs for American Vogue the twice-divorced American heiress soon to marry the ex-King Edward VIII. Wallis Simpson wears a Schiaparelli ‘waltz dress’ with a Salvador Dali red lobster down her skirt. The setting is a French chateau belonging to the American businessman who a few months later will mastermind the Windsors’ honeymoon tour of Nazi Germany. But what – other than Wallis Simpson - connects all these people?
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Wed, 25 Jan 2023 - 24min - 212 - #80 Nazis: The Road to Power - conversation with author Jonathan Myerson
#80 Nazis: The Road to Power. Conversation with Jonathan Myerson, playwright and author of BBC Radio 4’s new drama series Nazis: The Road to PowerThe story of how in just 13 years, Hitler led a fringe sect with less than a hundred members and outlandish ideas to be the dominant force in German politics.Jonathan talks to us at History Café about the challenges of bringing this extraordinary and shocking story to life through the eyes of the people closest to him. He tells us how every scene in a long series of 8 plays was based on a real event and that much of the dialogue including Hitler’s speeches comes from contemporary sources.“Extracts from Nazis: The Road to Power by kind permission of Promenade Productions and BBC Radio4 (and BBC Sounds)”
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Wed, 18 Jan 2023 - 39min - 211 - #48 'Gunsmoke and Mirrors' - Ep 2 Was the Wild West wild?
What was the driving force behind the settlement of the American west? Was it the so-called ‘anarchocapitalism’ so admired by the Hoover Institution and some of the followers of President Trump? The violence they fetishize turns out to have been only in those places populated by young men – we’re talking not just cowpokes or gold and silver prospectors, but also vigilantes in the towns back east. The majority frontiers-people were peaceful American homesteaders. But they’ve even been written out of US school history books.
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Wed, 11 Jan 2023 - 36min - 210 - #47 The Law-less frontier - Ep 1 Was the Wild West wild?
A series of land grabs and cruel clearances by the Federal government from 1781 triggered a crazy, barely-contained movement west, spearheaded by gold prospectors, cattle ranchers, homesteaders and the railroads. By 1892 it was generally agreed that the American character was forged in the violence of the shifting frontier. We look at the popular fiction and entertainment that helped create this belief: Deadwood Dick, Buffalo Bill, Calamity Jane, Mark Twain’s Six-fingered Pete and many others. And we examine what really went on!
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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 - 42min - 209 - #79 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers
A whole lot of nonsense has been written about the invention of the modern Christmas. It was thought up by Washington Irving or Charles Dickens or Prince Albert. We just can’t resist attaching a famous name to things, especially if the name belongs to a writer or a royal. We deserve better than this. So here's our offering from the History Café Christmas Party! Have a good one.
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Fri, 23 Dec 2022 - 29min - 208 - #31 ‘Remember, remember, the Fifth of November’ - Ep 8 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
Christmas podcast coming next week. We have yet to record it!! In the meantime, here's the last in this series which began on 5 November: At the time, London gossip accused Cecil of fabricating the entire plot to blow up everyone who mattered and leave the country ungovernable. When Cecil died seven years later, he was remembered as lying and self-serving. ‘The King’s misuser, the Parliament’s abuser, Hath left his plotting… is now a rotting.’ On the first anniversary, 5 November 1606, people were forced to celebrate by going to church and lighting bonfires. Anti-Catholic sentiment has kept the anniversary alive. But if the Gunpowder plot was the invention of a vicious, torturing and intolerant regime, perhaps we shouldn’t be celebrating it any more?
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Wed, 21 Dec 2022 - 22min - 207 - #30 ‘A tall and desperate fellow’ - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
The night before - 4 November 1605: Guy Fawkes, a Catholic with experience as a soldier fighting for the Spanish, is found with matches and fuse powder in a storeroom under the House of Lords. He’s ‘booted and spurred’, ready for a quick get-away. Or maybe not. The government account keeps changing.
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Wed, 14 Dec 2022 - 33min - 206 - #29 The king's fear - Ep 6 Blowing up the Gunpowder plot
As his father had done, King James I's Chief Minister, Robert Cecil ,built his entrapments around a germ of genuine plotting. We uncover a small Catholic rebellion in Warwickshire in response to the king’s tougher anti-Catholic laws. And we examine Cecil’s imaginative embellishment: a mystery letter delivered to a compromised Catholic peer on 26 October warning of ‘a terrible blow this Parliament.’ It was handed to the king to decipher. If anything was designed to terrify James I, whose father had narrowly escaped death from a gunpowder blast, this was it.
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Wed, 07 Dec 2022 - 32min - 205 - #28 ‘A formidable network of secret agents’ - Ep 5 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
We dig deeper into the animosity between the King, James I of England and VI of Scotland and his Chief Minister, Robert Cecil, whom he bullied and called names. And we see the Gunpowder plot in the context of the previous plots hatched by the Cecils (father and son) against their enemies. All of which historians now agree were largely fabrications. Father was Elizabeth I's Chief Minister, like his son he had spies everywhere and openly boasted of his policy of entrapment.
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Thu, 01 Dec 2022 - 31min - 204 - #27 'Hellish miners' - Ep 4 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
To avoid any possible blame for the plot falling on himself or the king, Cecil procures confessions saying the seven gentlemen plotters began excavating a tunnel under the House of Lords long before the government stepped up its anti-Catholic legislation. They apparently lived on site, in an upstairs room, seven to a bed. They dug unnoticed, only in the day (or was it only in the night?) for almost a year, before spying a handy cellar next door for the gunpowder barrels. Yes. Of course.
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Wed, 23 Nov 2022 - 33min - 203 - #26 Why blow up Parliament anyway? - Ep 3 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
The parliament of 1604 refuses to grant the king money. They’re still paying for the effects of the last plague. But this is Cecil’s job. What to do? On 5 November 1605 the assembled MPs and peers are calmly informed that there has been a devilish Catholic plot to blow the lot of them up. A plot that their king and Cecil have brilliantly foiled. Unsurprisingly, this time, they vote the king the money he so badly needs. Job done.
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Wed, 16 Nov 2022 - 30min - 202 - #78 Remembrance Day - Aren't We Forgetting Something?
We don't apologise for repeating this broadcast made for Remembrance Day 2020. The story is so important it's worth telling again and again.At least 50% of deaths from war in the last three centuries were civilians. In 2001 the International Red Cross calculated that in modern warfare ten civilians die for every member of the military killed in battle. In the two World Wars the vast majority of soldiers were "civilians in uniform" - conscripts or volunteers. But do we officially remember them?
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Fri, 11 Nov 2022 - 20min - 201 - #25 ‘Here lieth the Toad’ - Ep 2 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
We take a look at James I’s shadowy chief minister Robert Cecil who manages to implicate most of his Catholic enemies in the plot. Cecil was so desperate to improve King James’s dire view of him (his father had caused the execution of James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots) he would stoop to anything. (Rpt)
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Wed, 09 Nov 2022 - 34min - 200 - #24 ‘There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality’ - Ep 1 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND - FOR 5 NOVEMBER! We look at the story the government published as The King’s Book, more than 500 witness statements and other contemporary sources and conclude, like the Victorian antiquarian Jardine who wrote up the trial from the State Papers, there is no reliable corroborating evidence for the gunpowder story we’ve been told.
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Wed, 02 Nov 2022 - 32min - 199 - #77 Stanley never got the joke - Ep 5 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'
The events that followed Livingstone’s funeral are perhaps important for the light they shed on everything that Livingstone was not. Stanley, having declared that he would complete what Livingstone had begun, undertook three ‘momentous’ journeys. Whatever the cover stories he created, Stanley’s expeditions were intended to grab and occupy African lands, sometimes through fake treaties he claimed to have signed with African leaders. One result was the wholesale mapping of central Africa; the other was what we now know as the ‘scramble for Africa’, a gruesome series of invasions and seizures by European states. Stanley’s presumption earned him the lasting scorn and hatred of the British establishment. But his ability as a publicist won Livingstone a place in the nation’s affection – and that lived on much longer. FINAL EP IN SERIES
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Wed, 26 Oct 2022 - 40min - 198 - #76 Twelve reckless Americans - Ep 4 Dr Livingstone, I presume?
Henry Morton Stanley, the New York-born journalist who was actually born in Wales, ‘finds’ Livingstone, although everyone knows he’s not lost. Stanley’s employer Gordon Bennett Jr of the daily New York Herald has spotted a fantastic money-making enterprise, pedalling fictitious stories of the romantic failures of the British explorer, Dr Livingstone. It was time for the Americans to take over the exploration of Africa. The British had bogged themselves down with ‘too many theodolites, barometers, sextants’. Stanley and other ‘energetic… reckless Americans’ would ‘command … an expedition more numerous and better appointed than any that has ever entered Africa’ and infinitely more ruthless.
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Wed, 19 Oct 2022 - 31min - 197 - #75 The Lion and the Tartan Jacket - Ep 3 Dr Livingstone, I presume?
The British audience for Livingstone’s book 'Missionary Travels' can’t get enough of his ‘manly’ and ‘forcible’ style. He brings a very personal mix of far-away adventure and science to his stories. His account of being mauled by a lion – shaken like ‘a terrier dog does a rat’ and how the tartan jacket saves his life – are still vivid reading. But had he not glossed over the danger of malaria and other diseases fatal to Victorian Britons (in much the same way as he casually dismissed as an ‘inconvenience’ the arm savaged by the lion and rendered useless even before his real exploring days had begun) fewer missionaries and their families would have died trying to follow in his footsteps.
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Wed, 12 Oct 2022 - 38min - 196 - #74 Smoke that Thunders Ep 2 Dr Livingstone, I presume?
Livingstone was the first European to record his visit to Smoke that Thunders on the Zambezi river. 100 metres of plummeting water, across the entire kilometre of the Zambezi’s width. He promptly named it after his queen, Victoria Falls. His ambition was to find a navigable river from the east coast of Africa inland. Although it was clear that Smoke that Thunders would put a stop to any trade boats navigating any further inland he remained undaunted. He calculated that just being able to bring a ship this far would be well worth the effort. Now he just had to hope that there was nothing else like these immense falls before the Zambezi reached the sea.
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Wed, 05 Oct 2022 - 37min - 195 - #73 Stronger than the ox he rode Ep 1 'Dr Livingstone, I presume'
Exploration changed in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Henry Morton Stanley met Dr David Livingstone. We discover that Livingstone isn’t remembered for anything he achieved. A missionary and medical doctor from a poor Scottish background – and an indestructible traveller - he learned to make accurate geographical calculations and used them to map a small part of Africa. Amazingly he did most of his successful exploration with an African team and backed by African funds. So why did he become an international sensation?
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Wed, 28 Sep 2022 - 37min - 194 - #59 The crimes of the rector George Wilson Bridges - Ep 05 Slavery
By 1832 it was clear to both the House of Lords and the Commons that the British planters in the Caribbean were dragging the British economy into a credit crash. It looks to us very like the crash of 2008. The Jamaican Rebellion of 1831 and the vicious retaliation by the rector George Wilson Bridges and his white supremacist Colonial Church Union in 1832 was the final nail in the coffin of British enslavement. The CCU showed beyond doubt that the Jamaican planters, who had always dominated the West Indian planters lobby in London, were a breed of racist thug who flatly refused to make conditions tolerable on their plantations. But the result was that they would never be commercially viable. Abolition became the obvious solution.
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Wed, 21 Sep 2022 - 40min
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