HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-03-07T13:00:17.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Is this the best routine to boost your health? Yes, according to an ancient Roman intellectual
items: Were medieval toilets as filthy as you think?
items: Were the Victorians the luckiest people in history?
items: The forgotten wars that redefined Europe
items: Think the Victorians were prudes? Their filthiest jokes will shock you
items: Have archaeologists just found proof of ancient Carthage's legendary anti-Roman war weapon?
items: Before the Nuremberg Trials, this was Winston Churchill’s shocking plan for Nazi war criminals
items: How Nazi investigators used secret tools to create Hitler’s Holocaust ‘hitlist’
items: 3,100 years ago, ancient Egyptian workers defeated a God-King – without using any weapons
items: The Tudor law that forced an occult practice underground for centuries

Is this the best routine to boost your health? Yes, according to an ancient Roman intellectual
type: item
date: 2026-03-07T10:35:13.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Pliny the Elder was an intellectual powerhouse of ancient Rome. Though not a physician, in describing the ideal daily routine of a Roman gentleman he revealed how the ancient elite believed health could be improved
encoded: In the first century AD, the Bay of Naples was fringed by villas belonging to ancient Rome’s political and military elite. The slopes of Mount Vesuvius rose above lush orchards and gardens, while trading ships came in and out of the harbour, bringing exotic imports. This was one of the most fashionable regions of the Roman empire – a retreat for senators, generals and imperial officials with vast reserves of political power and private wealth. Pliny the Elder lived here in the final years of his life. A senior Roman official, he had been a cavalry commander in his youth, later a provincial administrator, and eventually commander of the fleet stationed at Misenum (now Miseno, in the north-west of the Bay of Naples). Born around AD 23, he lived through the reigns of emperors such as Claudius, Nero and Vespasian, at a time when Rome governed vast territories stretching from Britain to north Africa and the near east. Alongside his public duties, he was an impressive scholar. According to his nephew, Pliny the Younger, he read and dictated notes almost constantly, wrote while travelling, and had books read aloud to him as he ate. His greatest work, Natural History, filled 37 volumes. It was an encyclopaedic attempt to catalogue all aspects of life and the natural world: astronomy, geography, zoology, botany, mineralogy, art and medicine. “He literally said: ‘I want to cover everything in the world’,” explains Dr Jess Venner, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “It was ambitious, and he did pretty well.” The work survives today as one of the largest single texts to survive from antiquity, preserving fragments of earlier Greek and Roman science that might otherwise have been lost. That ambition shaped his thinking about health, including his views on exercise. “He’s very specific about what he likes to do in a day,” says Venner. By the first century AD, Roman notions of health rested on a sophisticated Greek-derived system, especially the Hippocratic tradition and Galen’…

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Were medieval toilets as filthy as you think?
type: item
date: 2026-03-05T11:23:06.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Whether in medieval castles or monasteries, toilets in the Middle Ages were more varied than you might expect
encoded: Walk through a busy European town in the 14th century, and numerous powerful and distinct smells would assail your nostrils. Horses trot along, leaving heaps of dung in the streets. Loud market stalls hawk fish and meat that quickly spoil in summer heat. Leather is tanned in vats filled with pungent liquid. To modern noses, the scents would be sharp and unfamiliar. But one thing you wouldn’t necessarily smell would be an open latrine. The idea that medieval people routinely emptied chamber pots straight into the street as their primary method of waste disposal isn’t quite accurate. Medieval towns were governed by councils or guild authorities who issued local bylaws, including regulations on waste disposal, drainage and street cleaning. Across cities such as London, Paris and York, civic authorities specifically banned residents from throwing waste into public roads. Indeed, as historian Katherine Weikert explains on the HistoryExtra podcast series Toilets Through Time, “we like to think of the Middle Ages as being filthy, but people were cognisant that faeces and urine needed to be somewhere else.” In other words, waste management was a top priority in the later Middle Ages – even if the standards of sanitation weren’t as sophisticated as they are today. What did a medieval toilet actually look like? “In general, [a medieval toilet would] probably have had some kind of seat over a pit or a cess,” says Weikert. “It may have been not too dissimilar to what we think of as an outhouse.” That pit, perhaps timber- or stone-lined, might have been set in a yard. Construction depended on wealth and location: stone-lined pits were more durable and easier to clean than simple earth-dug holes. In townhouses, the seat might be in a structure projecting out from an upper floor, with a vertical chute dropping waste into a cesspit below. However, there was no flush mechanism, and no water trap to block odours. Waste simply sat in the pit until it decomposed or was removed – by whi…

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Were the Victorians the luckiest people in history?
type: item
date: 2026-03-04T12:11:38.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: In the middle decades of the 19th century, Britain experienced rapid industrial change without suffering revolution or major conflict. How?
encoded: Imagine you’re standing on a railway platform in Britain in 1850. The air is thick and acrid with coal smoke. Ears ring with hissing and clanking as a steam locomotive pulls in, brakes squealing as it grinds to a halt. Newspapers – read by an increasingly literate and educated society – report on the country’s industrial expansion, booming imperial trade and widening political inclusion. London has become the largest city on Earth, and the heart of this industry. But it’s only one part of a broader national picture: Manchester’s mills spin cotton imported from across the Atlantic, while shipyards along the Clyde and Tyne build great vessels that will circle the globe. Such was the early phase of the reign of Queen Victoria. To many contemporaries, the scale of change wrought over the past century represented staggering progress. The long wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France had ended in 1815. Britain had emerged victorious from more than two decades of near-continuous conflict, culminating in the defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo. The spirit of European revolution seemed, by the mid-century, to have left Britain unscathed. Did the Victorians unknowingly live in one of the most fortunate moments in modern history? Jamie Camplin, author of Being Victorian, argues that the answer might be yes. “If we want to get into the heads of people living in 1850, it’s very important to focus on a simple thing,” says Camplin, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “They had their present, and they had some knowledge of their past. What they didn’t know anything about was the future.” That future would, within a century, encompass two world wars, the Great Depression, the decline of the British empire, and the waning of Britain’s global influence. But in 1850, Britain still presided over the largest empire in the world, with colonies and trading posts spanning India, Canada, the Caribbean, parts of Africa and Australasia. But just how prosperous was Britain at…

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The forgotten wars that redefined Europe
type: item
date: 2026-03-02T10:44:43.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Aleks Pluskowski traces the story of the Baltic crusades and their transformative impact on eastern Europe
encoded: While the crusades raged across the Holy Land in the southern Levant, the kingdoms of central and northern Europe were engaged in their own battle to extend Christendom. Speaking to James Osborne, Aleks Pluskowski details how and when the Baltic crusades – or Northern crusades – began, and examines their links to the broader crusading culture of the Middle Ages. To learn more about the medieval history of central and eastern Europe, listen to our episode on the role of the Rus people in the formation of the lands that are now Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Go beyond the podcast

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Think the Victorians were prudes? Their filthiest jokes will shock you
type: item
date: 2026-02-28T13:00:38.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Victorian audiences revelled in riddles, physical comedy and bawdy jokes that challenge everything we think we know about 19th-century respectability
encoded: The words ‘Victorian Britain’ might evoke images of men with waxed moustaches and women in high-necked dresses, sitting upright in houses drawn back from the London smog. Indeed, ‘Victorian’ has become shorthand for prudishness, referring to the long reign of Queen Victoria: a period associated with notions of strict social etiquette, restraint and rigid ideas about respectability. But this view irons out a lot of the period’s complexities. Beneath a visage of stiff morality was a culture that delighted in wordplay, physical comedy and, in private, jokes that were startlingly explicit. So what, precisely, did these people find funny? As historian Dr Bob Nicholson explains on the HistoryExtra podcast: “It’s really hard to define the sense of humour of millions of people over a generation, just as it would be now. But when I look at Victorian comedy, I guess there are certain recurring patterns or themes that they really liked.” The Victorian sense of humour The Victorian-era was defined by transformation on a vast scale, powered by world-leading industrialisation, urbanisation and expanding literacy. The population of England and Wales more than doubled during the 19th century, and cities like Manchester and London grew at rapid pace. Now, newspapers, penny weeklies and comic magazines such as Punch could reach a new, mass readership. Music halls became hugely popular too, offering working and lower-middle class audiences a place to enjoy an evening of singing and comedy. Read more | What was daily life like for 'ordinary' Victorians? It was both in print and the spoken word that the Victorian sense of humour really managed to flourish. “The first thing you’ll see when you look at their jokes is that they love puns,” Nicholson says. “They absolutely love wordplay, to a degree that I think we would look at now and think: these are some pretty laboured, torturous puns.” The increasingly literate Victorians delighted in verbal dexterity, double entendres and clever ling…

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Have archaeologists just found proof of ancient Carthage's legendary anti-Roman war weapon?
type: item
date: 2026-02-27T10:46:21.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: During the Second Punic War, the famous Carthaginian general Hannibal led his forces to numerous victories. But did he really take war elephants across the Alps?
encoded: The Punic Wars – and the Second Punic War (218–201 BC) specifically – were a definitive chapter in the history of the ancient world. Fought between the formidable Mediterranean power of Carthage and the upstart Roman Republic, the conflict ultimately saw the balance of power shift decisively away from the Carthaginians and towards the Romans. Had Rome fallen, Carthage would have retained its influence, and Roman civilisation may never have grown out of its infancy. Instead, the Romans won. Rome’s destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, at the end of the Third Punic War, eliminated its greatest rival. In victory, they took hold of the ancient Mediterranean, using it as a springboard for imperial expansion across Europe, North Africa and the Near East. It wasn’t until the invasions associated with Attila the Hun centuries later that Rome would again face such an existential threat. But that’s not to say that Roman victory was inevitable. During the apogee of the war, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca inflicted a series of devastating defeats on Roman armies. At Cannae in 216 BC, perhaps 50,000 Roman soldiers died in a single day – one of the worst military disasters in Roman history – while earlier victories at Trebia (218 BC) and Lake Trasimene (217 BC) had already demonstrated Hannibal’s military genius. Read more | Long before the ancient Roman empire, a rival superpower looked set for supremacy His most audacious, move, however, was none of these. Marching from Carthaginian territories in Iberia – modern-day Spain – Hannibal led an expeditionary force through southern Gaul and across the Alps, where he traversed the imposing mountainous slopes with a vast army that included war elephants. It was a force that arrived at the gates of Rome, pushing for a Roman surrender. It’s an astonishing story that underlines Hannibal’s determination, and most of all, his astounding logistical capabilities. But for all its fame, did it really happen? While many historians and arc…

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Before the Nuremberg Trials, this was Winston Churchill’s shocking plan for Nazi war criminals
type: item
date: 2026-02-26T20:15:06.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: As Europe lay in ruins following the end of the Second World War, Churchill’s instinct was to punish the surviving Nazi leadership without a trial. How was the decision made to stage the Nuremberg Trials instead?
encoded: In May of 1945, Allied forces pressed through Germany. With Adolf Hitler dead and Berlin fallen, the last remnants of Nazi military resistance were slipping away. As the Allied soldiers broke the Third Reich’s grip on Europe, they encountered scenes that defied belief. With each concentration camp liberated, the mountain of evidence of mass murder on a scale previously unimaginable grew taller. There was a question now looming large in the minds of the victorious Allies: what should be done with the remaining Nazi leaders, such as Hermann Göring, who had led Europe into catastrophe? There was no standing international criminal court, no established legal framework for prosecuting aggressive war, and no precedent for putting a defeated government on trial. International law in 1945 was largely concerned with relations between states, not criminal responsibility for individual political leaders. Some proposed that the most straightforward option would be to execute the surviving architects of Nazi rule and move on from a staggeringly awful chapter of European history. That was precisely the instinct of Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill. So how did the Nuremberg Trials emerge from that backdrop? And how was Churchill convinced to support an unprecedented trial instead? Planning justice before the war had ended Nuremberg wasn’t conceived only after Germany surrendered in May 1945. The question of how to prosecute Nazi leaders had already been percolating for years. Reflecting on the origins of Nuremberg for a four-part HistoryExtra podcast series, international lawyer Phillipe Sands says, “Already in 1942, efforts were underway – with governments in exile in particular – committing to the prosecution of Nazi criminals for crimes committed on their occupied territories.” Nazi Germany | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | Everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees. Exp…

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How Nazi investigators used secret tools to create Hitler’s Holocaust ‘hitlist’
type: item
date: 2026-02-24T15:19:43.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: New research reveals that paper conservators and manuscript restorers helped make centuries-old records legible for Nazi racial investigations, demonstrating how highly specialised crafts became entangled in the machinery of the Holocaust
encoded: It was SS officers and concentration camp guards who implemented and actualised much of the genocidal policy that had been crafted by senior Nazi officials. The SS, led by Heinrich Himmler, oversaw the police, the concentration camp system and many of the administrative structures that carried out the mass murder of Jewish populations and minority groups. These officers may have been the most visible architects of the Holocaust during the Second World War. But many historians have long argued that the systematic genocide levelled against Europe’s Jewish populations could never have reached the scale that it did without the complicity and active aid offered by ordinary people in everyday professions. It was office administrators, clerks, railway workers and local officials whose work sustained the machinery of the Nazi state. Now, new research has added more occupations to that list: bookbinders, paper conservators and restoration specialists. According to findings by historian Dr Morwenna Blewett, first published in The Guardian, newly uncovered Nazi-era correspondence reveals a Europe-wide programme in which restorers repaired and chemically treated fragile archival documents so that they could be used to better trace Jewish ancestry. The work, she argues, helped Nazi authorities to compile genealogical records that functioned, in effect, as a bureaucratic “hitlist”. Uncovering Jewish ancestry In research that features in her upcoming book, Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime, Blewett uncovered letters and administrative files showing how these expert restorers were recruited to clean and stabilise old church registers and civil records which documented local births, baptisms, marriages and religious conversions stretching back centuries. Many of these manuscripts had become illegible through years of decay. Rather than preserving them in accordance with proper conservation standards, restorers used aggressive chemical treatments, including saturating pages with …

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3,100 years ago, ancient Egyptian workers defeated a God-King – without using any weapons
type: item
date: 2026-02-21T10:45:11.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
description: Before picket lines and unionisation, ancient Egyptian artisans learned that collectively withdrawing labour could force even a pharaoh to negotiate
encoded: “1768 is really when the word ‘strike’ begins to develop out of the UK.” That’s the view of classicist Sarah E Bond, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. As Bond explains, the word ‘strike’ comes from a moment when sailors in the port of Sunderland decided to literally strike down the topsails of their ships, immobilising them until their demands were met by their bosses. The tactic worked, spread south to the shipyards of the Thames, and quickly entered the political vocabulary. But the behaviour the word came to describe – the collective withholding of labour – is actually far older. “What that word represents is an action that goes all the way back to the second millennium BC,” Bond says. Before the concept of money or coinage, workers had figured out a fundamental principle: stopping work was a way to force those in power to negotiate. The ancient Egyptian origins of strikes “Even if these words were not familiar to those within the ancient world, there are still methodologies within labour disputes that have been happening for thousands of years,” says Bond. One of the earliest, clearest examples of what would now be termed a ‘strike’ comes from ancient Egypt – a civilisation that was rigidly hierarchical and dominated by unquestionable royal authority. Beneath the monumental architecture and other cultural feats, Egyptian society depended on a vast pool of labour. Read more | Long before Cleopatra, another female pharaoh redefined ancient Egyptian power In the second millennium BC, during the reign of Ramesses III, Egypt had passed the peak of imperial expansion it had enjoyed a century earlier. Ramesses III ruled during the early 12th century BC, at the end of the New Kingdom, a period marked by mounting economic pressure, as well as internal and external instability. Ramesses III presented himself as a traditional warrior-pharaoh, defending Egypt against repeated Libyan incursions and threats from other foreign enemies, such as the mysterious ‘Sea Peoples’.…

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The Tudor law that forced an occult practice underground for centuries
type: item
date: 2026-02-18T12:45:38.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: As well as creating new regulations on faith, Henry VIII’s 16th-century government also decided which kinds of knowledge were legitimate – and which were criminal
encoded: The people who controlled Tudor England made certain that any belief that didn’t align with strictly Christian values was deemed to be highly suspicious, and likely criminal. Witchcraft and demonology were stark examples, but Henry VIII himself also passed a law that criminalised palmistry: the reading of one’s fate from the palm of the hand. Henry VIII ruled from 1509 to 1547, presiding over one of the most transformative periods in English and wider British history. His reign encompassed religious revolution, repeated rebellions and an unprecedented expansion of royal authority. But while Tudor governments worked to centralise authority and standardise religious belief after decades of dynastic instability, many elite thinkers continued to explore esoteric ideas in private: the truth was, the early modern period was the perfect hotbed for alternative ideas to flourish. The people who lived in the early 16th century were wracked by uncertainty. England was still emerging from the Wars of the Roses, and Henry VIII was only the second Tudor king; his claim to the throne rested on recent victory in battle rather than ancient lineage, making loyalty to the crown a constant concern. Early modern governance relied heavily on local surveillance and reputation, and strangers presented a challenge to that system. Roma communities were newly visible in England in the early 1500s. As historian Alison Bashford explains, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, contemporary Europeans believed these communities came from Egypt. “Hence the term ‘gypsy’,” she says. It was a misidentification that would shape Tudor laws, based on false ideas that Roma people came from a place imbued with ancient, supposedly occult forms of knowledge. The Egyptian Acts and Tudor control Under Henry VIII, Parliament passed a series of statutes known collectively as the Egyptian Acts. They aimed to fix populations in place and eliminate practices that escaped oversight. But they had a much longer reach t…

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