Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchFunding cuts and culture wars: history behind the headlines
Episode 2248
In the latest episode of our monthly series, Hannah Skoda and Rana Mitter discuss recent headlines about funding cuts to history departments in the UK’s universities - and we hear from Lucy Noakes, p…
Published on 8 months, 4 weeks ago
Why we shouldn't see museum artefacts as 'stolen'
Episode 2247
Debates about whether museum artefacts should be returned to the cultures that made them have made headlines several times in recent years. But historian and author Justin M Jacobs explains to Matt E…
Published on 9 months ago
The Belle Époque: everything you wanted to know
Episode 2246
Paris's Belle Époque – or 'Beautiful Era' – conjures up images of cafés, can-can dancers and sunny walks along the River Seine. But was life in the French capital in the late 19th and early 20th-cent…
Published on 9 months ago
Body in the basement: Dr Crippen and the 'crime of the century'
Episode 2245
In 1910, music hall performer Belle Elmore went missing. Her husband Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen claimed Belle had gone to America to visit a dying relative. But before long, Crippen's stories began to …
Published on 9 months ago
The Philadelphia gun-runners who supplied the IRA
Episode 2244
In the 1970s, as the Troubles divided Northern Ireland, hundreds of armalite guns were sent to the IRA from across the Atlantic. Reporter Ali Watkins follows the smuggling operations of a ragtag grou…
Published on 9 months ago
Thomas Becket: life of week
Episode 2243
Thomas Becket is probably medieval England's most famous martyr and saint – yet the circumstances of his life are overshadowed by his infamous feud with King Henry II, and his shocking murder in Cant…
Published on 9 months ago
Why Africa's history is more than just the slave trade
Episode 2242
Has our focus on the impact of the transatlantic slave trade blinded us to the diversity and complexity of Africa's past? That's one of the arguments at the heart of Luke Pepera's new book Motherland…
Published on 9 months, 1 week ago
The Great Stink: everything you wanted to know
Episode 2241
Why, in the 1850s, was the excrement of thousands of people being deposited straight into the Thames? How lethal were Victorian London's cholera outbreaks? And why is Joseph Bazalgette one of the mos…
Published on 9 months, 1 week ago
Handel's Messiah: the scandalous birth of a classical masterpiece
Episode 2240
Even if you're not a fan of classical music, chances are you will have heard Handel's Messiah. Going behind the scenes of its creation, Charles King delves into the shifting politics of the Hanoveria…
Published on 9 months, 1 week ago
Women killers of the early modern era
Episode 2239
From true crime pamphlets to reports from the scaffold, early modern Britain was gripped by tales of women who killed. But were these cases as common as they seemed, or was something else at play? Sp…
Published on 9 months, 1 week ago