HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-10-27T12:01:06.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Kavita Puri's hidden histories: the enduring appeal of archaeological sites
items: Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict"
items: Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "A UK museum that tells the long, rich history of migration is long overdue"
items: "Museums are magical places": Kavita Puri on a new initiative encouraging close encounters with history
items: Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Samba schools used the carnival to foreground overlooked histories"
items: Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed"
items: “Some say that the first Jews sailed here on King Solomon’s ships”: Kavita Puri on India's long Jewish history
items: Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many are turning against prejudice. But we cannot be complacent"
items: Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "I wish that there was no need for specialist history months"
items: Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories"

Kavita Puri's hidden histories: the enduring appeal of archaeological sites
type: item
date: 2025-10-27T12:00:45.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: "Nothing beats feeling the earth in your hands and uncovering the past", writes Kavita Puri
encoded: It was late morning, but already hot enough to warrant wearing a sun hat and sticking to the shade. I was in a quiet part of Andalucía, looking at an archaeological treasure that I visit regularly. However, this time there was more activity than usual. There were scores of people digging, others with notepads, some wearing gloves – all situated in different parts of the site. It was July and students had come from across Europe to take part in excavations. A 35-minute drive from Granada in southern Spain, the hill town of Tózar is located close to La Ruta del Califato (the Route of the Caliphate). Here, the local council recently purchased the archaeological area from a private owner. Investigations started on the land in 2012 when a Mozarabic cemetery was found. Eighty tombs of Christians who lived under Muslim rule in al-Andalus (the Iberian peninsula) were carved into the rock on the highland projecting into the surrounding landscapes. The site was believed to have been used as a cemetery between the ninth and 12th centuries. If you walk below, archaeologists have found another burial chamber, known as Dólmen Pileta de la Zorra, dating from sometime between the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. There are also remnants of ancient agricultural terraces and irrigation systems. Further below is a Mozarabic village. I chatted to the lead archaeologist who told me they recently found a small refuse dump, which she excitedly said revealed what people had eaten, the utensils they used, the tools they worked with. Clues of life. And then she led me to what was once a dwelling. In the ground were three small rectangular holes. Two weeks ago, they discovered the remains of a child in one. She says they think these were graves for babies who had died before they had been baptised, which meant they were buried in the home, rather than in the cemetery above. As she spoke, enthused by the find, she described the moment of discovery, and what it could reveal about the practices and bel…

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Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict"
type: item
date: 2025-09-03T08:00:44.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Fascism
subject: Hiroshima
subject: Second World War battles
description: On the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, broadcaster Kavita Puri – presenter of a new BBC Radio 4 series on the Second World War in Asia – considers why this was the conflict’s forgotten theatre
encoded: Matt Elton: Your new series, exploring fighting on the Asian front during the Second World War, is called The History Podcast: The Second Map. Why did you choose that name? Kavita Puri: It came to me after I met a man called Peter Knight, who is now 98. At the time of the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor [on 7 December 1941], he was a 14-year-old boy living in a terraced house in Bromley, a south-eastern London suburb. He had been following the war in Europe using a map posted on the wall alongside his dresser. After Pearl Harbor, he put up another map on the other side of the dresser – a map of Asia and the Pacific. He would sit down every evening with his mum and grandparents to listen to the BBC bulletin, hearing about places for the first time, and about this other war on the Asian front, in British colonies. And he would trace what was happening on that second map. So he was now updating two maps in tandem: one covering the war in Europe against the Nazis, and the second encompassing the war against Japan in Asia. Why has the war against Nazi Germany come to dominate how we view this conflict, at least partly to the exclusion of the conflict in Asia? I think it’s understandable: that war was close by and involved places whose names were more familiar to people in Britain. And it affected people here more directly: Peter Knight had experienced the Blitz, for example. So the European war was close to home, whereas this other war was far away. It was also a messy, complicated war – and not just because it was fought in jungle terrain, and soldiers were dying of malaria and other diseases as well as in combat. It wasn’t a neat good-v-bad situation, like the war against the Nazis. The war with Japan was essentially about two empires competing with each other, so it’s a much harder story to explain. It also involved a lot of troops from the colonies, as well as from Australia. So again, it’s a story about our empire. Historians such as Rana Mitter, who…

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Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "A UK museum that tells the long, rich history of migration is long overdue"
type: item
date: 2025-08-28T08:00:15.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Civil rights
subject: Global cities
subject: Historical people
description: Kavita Puri on explorations of the migrant experience
encoded: If you gaze up at the skyline in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, you might spot a new addition. Made from stainless-steel panels and shaped like a rollercoaster, the Tornado sits on top of the city’s newly opened Fenix, a museum that tells the story of human migration. Visitors climb to the distinctive Tornado up a sweeping staircase at the museum’s entrance, along a meandering route that represents the many different journeys people take to reach their destinations. On arriving at the viewing platform, you can take in a panoramic view of the city and its waterways where millions of Europeans once boarded ships in Europe’s largest port, many of them leaving for a new life in the US. Today, Rotterdam is home to more than 170 nationalities. It’s an interesting choice to open a museum to migration at a time when the subject has become so toxic, not least in the Netherlands. Designed by the Chinese firm MAD Architects, the museum displays have exhibits including thousands of suitcases, images of refugees, and a life-sized city bus. Perhaps reasoned discussions about migration can be inspired by art. Read more | "Museums are magical places": Kavita Puri on a new initiative encouraging close encounters with history This is not the first European museum dedicated to migration: they exist in many countries, including Germany, Sweden, Greece, Italy, Poland and France. So it is surprising that the UK does not have a permanent migration museum, only one that has spent years in makeshift venues. After all, millions of people have left Britain over the centuries, not least during the building of its empire, while inward migration – particularly during the postwar years – has shaped our language, culture, cuisine and art. Until recently, you could visit the Migration Museum in its temporary home in Lewisham Shopping Centre, housed in a former H&M store between Foot Locker and TK Maxx. Outside the entrance stood a sculpture entitled Wall, comprising two panels from the Berlin Wall …

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"Museums are magical places": Kavita Puri on a new initiative encouraging close encounters with history
type: item
date: 2025-07-30T08:00:36.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Exhibitions
description: Kavita Puri on a groundbreaking museum initiative by the V&A
encoded: Museums are magical places. They are the keepers of so many histories and stories from near and far. However, there’s a large part of every museum that most people never see. Behind the scenes lies another world: one of conservation, upkeep, research and the moving around of collections, perhaps for an exhibition or to loan to another museum. But what if you could walk around those areas in which objects are stored and restored? What if you could hold the object that you wanted to study or observe up close? That’s now possible in the new V&A East Storehouse in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, east London. This huge space spanning four levels is home to some 250,000 objects and 350,000 books from the museum’s collection. Its 1,000 archives document a diverse array of subjects, including the Glastonbury Festival and the world of theatre and performance. Read more | Michael Wood on the future of the Parthenon Sculptures Dotted throughout the building are 100 mini-displays on topics ranging from resistance movements to the artistry of east London, charting how and why items are collected and preserved, and outlining the latest scholarship on their stories. They also explore the ways in which archives and collections are part of creative expression and understanding, and how we describe and contextualise the past. The workings of museum practice are made transparent here. As a trustee of the V&A, I have been watching this remarkable and ambitious project unfold across recent years. I’ve admired the extraordinary care taken in all aspects of the process, from the moving and installation of objects to consideration of how the visitor experience can be enhanced. The first object moved into the V&A East Storehouse was a very large installation. It’s a significant example of brutalism: a two-storey section of a maisonette from Robin Hood Gardens. This housing estate in Poplar, east London, was completed in 1972 and demolished from 2017 as part of the redevelopment o…

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Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Samba schools used the carnival to foreground overlooked histories"
type: item
date: 2025-06-26T08:00:34.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Civil rights
subject: Slavery
description: Kavita Puri on the important role of carnivals in remembering neglected histories
encoded: I was recently in Rio de Janeiro, in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, admiring some of the brightly coloured floats that had featured in this year’s world-famous carnival. Each spring, just before the start of Lent, hundreds of thousands of people attend the parades in the city’s Sambadrome stadium and enjoy watching the floats. Like pieces of art many metres high, they are designed and intricately handmade in Rio’s numerous escolas de samba (samba schools), each strongly identified with a local neighbourhood. The schools are organised into leagues for the carnival, during which they compete for the prestigious design award. Pre-Lenten festivities in Brazil began in the early 18th century, during the Portuguese colonial era. The Catholic influence is evident in the name of the event, which is believed to derive from the Latin carnem vale (farewell to meat) or carnem levare (remove meat), referring to the 40-day period of abstinence leading up to Easter. It’s said that the earliest form of the festivities in Brazil evolved from the pre-Lenten Entrudo, celebrated by immigrants from other Portuguese colonies on the Azores, Madeira and Cabo Verde. During that festival, people soaked each other with buckets of water and hurled mud and food, wreaking cheery mayhem that often degenerated into street brawls. Read more | Brazil: a society shaped by slavery In the 19th century, more organised parades attracted elite participants: even the Portuguese emperor joined in the celebrations, together with aristocrats wearing masks and extravagant costumes. Carnival balls were arranged, with music from Europe such as polkas and waltzes becoming popular. By the middle of that century, street parades with horse-drawn floats and military bands had become the focal points. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that samba – the music and dance style most strongly associated with carnival today – was developed by Afro-Brazilians whose ancestors had been transported to South Ameri…

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Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed"
type: item
date: 2025-05-23T08:00:08.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Kavita Puri on the urgent need to commemorate historical famines
encoded: During the Second World War, Deaths related to hunger matched or outnumbered military losses. Famines afflicted regions including the Soviet Union, China, India, Vietnam and Greece. Yet those who perished are rarely remembered in the same way as fallen soldiers. Starvation is not relegated to the past. The latest UN Hunger Hotspots report identifies places of highest concern as Haiti, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan and Palestine. Sadly, the list of countries where hunger persists is much longer, with violence and conflict the key drivers. Professor Alex de Waal, research professor at Tufts University and a leading expert on famine, explains that part of the reason famines are not remembered and memorialised is that the experience is so painful to recount, and so full of shame, that people want to forget it. In extremis, social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed; a neighbour refuses to give food to a neighbour; forbidden foods are eaten; people sell their bodies to survive; some profit from scarcity. The authorities who engineered a famine, or who neglected the population, have no reason to remember it, either. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories" In Ireland, it wasn’t until some 150 years after the start of the Great Famine, which began with an outbreak of potato blight in 1845, that victims were widely memorialised. Around a million people died – from a population of fewer than 9 million – and close to 2 million emigrated in a bid to survive. An expression of remorse by the British government of its role in the famine came only as recently as 1997, though there is still debate about whether the statement issued on behalf of then prime minister Tony Blair constituted an apology. Monuments to the victims and those who fled the country are now dotted around Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain – though none are in London. There are also significant memorials in places to which…

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“Some say that the first Jews sailed here on King Solomon’s ships”: Kavita Puri on India's long Jewish history
type: item
date: 2025-04-25T08:00:33.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she explores the long-standing but now dwindling Jewish community of Kochi
encoded: In the warm winter sun of Mattancherry, a district of Kochi in Kerala, I wandered the labyrinthine streets of Jew Town. The main thoroughfare, Synagogue Lane, is lined with shops sporting names such as Shalom, some displaying the Star of David in their windows, and selling Kashmiri shawls, spices and handicrafts. This is the historical heart of India’s Jewish community – though today there are hardly any Jews living here. Kochi (formerly Cochin) has a centuries-long Jewish presence. The date of the earliest arrivals is debated; some say that the first Jews sailed to south India on the ships of King Solomon some 30 centuries ago. Certainly, references to Jewish traders in India have been found in documents dating back to the eighth and ninth centuries AD, kept in a synagogue genizah (storage area) in Cairo. A number of Jews settled in the ancient trading port of Kodungallur (formerly Cranganore) and, from the 14th century, dispersed; many moved to Kochi, around 20 miles to the south. Over the following centuries, European Jews, known in the local Malayalam language as Paredesi (literally, ‘foreigners’), began to arrive in India. Many of them were refugees fleeing the Iberian peninsula during the Spanish Inquisition and following the expulsion of Jews in 1492. Over later centuries, more Jews came from western Europe, as well as from north Africa and the Middle East. At its height, Kochi’s Jewish community numbered around 2,000 members. In the 19th century, though, some began leaving to pursue opportunities in Bombay (now Mumbai), and Calcutta (now Kolkata), and then, from 1948, to live permanently in the newly created state of Israel. The Paradesi Synagogue, built in 1568 by Sephardic Jews, still stands next to Mattancherry Palace. As you enter the courtyard today, you can see that it shares a wall with a Hindu temple. The synagogue remains open for visitors and for worship, and is cared for by the local Indian community. The small but colourful interior features hand…

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Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many are turning against prejudice. But we cannot be complacent"
type: item
date: 2024-11-21T14:55:29.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Civil rights
description: Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she explores how the far-right violence seen across the UK in the summer of 2024 fits in with the history of race riots, and the fight against racism troubling history of racist attacks in Britain
encoded: Far-right violence erupted across Britain following the horrific mass stabbing of children in Southport on 29 July. Attacks in towns and cities were driven by anti-immigrant sentiment, racism and Islamophobia, and fuelled by misinformation on social media about the Southport murderer. As I watched news reports, I heard words being said out loud that many of us had not heard for years. I saw shops vandalised, mosques attacked. And I thought of the people I have interviewed, and the memories that these scenes would have brought back. The generation who came from the colonies (or who were once colonial subjects) invited to Britain after the Second World War to do the hard jobs – the worst shifts in the factories, or in the newly established National Health Service (NHS) – went through so much to be accepted. They began the long and ongoing struggle for equality. Then their children, who were confronted by overt racism and violence, even murder – like that of teenager Gurdip Singh Chaggar, stabbed to death in Southall in 1976 – took to the streets, alongside black Britons and white anti-racists, to defy the National Front. Read more | “London is the place for me”: David Olusoga on the Windrush generation I’m reminded of something one of my interviewees told me after riots that flared in 2001 in Oldham, where the British National Party and National Front were agitating among British south Asian communities. Abdul was a youth worker in Oldham whose family had come from Bangladesh in the 1970s. Back then, his dad had stood up to the National Front, and he himself had faced bitter racism at school in the 1980s. “There’ve been times when we thought: should we up and go?” he told me. “But the question is: where do you go? This is your home. We fought for this country – my forefathers were in the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War. So we’ve got a stake in this country. We don’t just take – we give.” When things flare up he experiences a familiar feeling. “Once a…

Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "I wish that there was no need for specialist history months"
type: item
date: 2024-09-19T08:00:51.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
description: Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she questions why we celebrate diverse histories only at particular times in the UK – like Black History Month in October and South Asian Heritage Month in July and August – rather than all year round
encoded: South Asian Heritage Month (SAHM) is celebrated each year from 18 July to 17 August, although it is still a relatively new addition to the calendar. Incredibly, 2024 marked only its fourth edition. I well remember its inception. In 2017, the TV documentary My Family, Partition and Me aired on BBC One. One of its strands followed SAHM co-founder Binita Kane as she retraced the journey taken by her father, Bim Bhowmick, from East Pakistan – now Bangladesh – to India in 1947. It was a deeply affecting programme, and a transformative moment for her. Binita had grown up in Wales and had previously known little of her father’s history – the story of his migration across a border, but also of the devastating loss of family members during the partition of British India. After participating in that programme, she made it her mission (alongside her day job as a doctor) to make sure that no one else ever felt cheated of their history. I’ve watched how, in a short space of time since its launch, SAHM has gained momentum, its reach expanding from museums to blue-chip companies and media organisations as staff hold sessions on British south Asian history and culture. It is long overdue. First marked in 1987, UK Black History Month is now well established, particularly in schools. That is not the case for SAHM. It’s not helped by the fact that the designated month runs from mid-July to mid-August – timed to coincide with the anniversary of India’s independence from British colonial rule on 15 August 1947, and the creation of India and Pakistan, but outside the school term. The 2021 census revealed that British Asians are the largest ethnic minority group in Britain. Yet we are only now starting to understand British south Asian history more widely, let alone its complex nature. Rather than one homogeneous subject, it encompasses various south Asian countries, regional histories and socio-economic factors affecting different populations in Britain in different ways over the years. …

Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories"
type: item
date: 2024-08-30T09:47:48.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
description: Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she considers the emotional trauma that historians can endure while researching the most horrific events of the past, and talk about the unspeakable
encoded: I’ve been researching a new project and have just finished one of the most harrowing books I have ever read: Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Written in 1997, and drawing on interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Chang chronicled the devastating weeks during the Second Sino-Japanese War in December 1937 when the Imperial Japanese army swept into the ancient Chinese city of Nanking (now called Nanjing). What followed was the systematic rape and torture of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians. What is so disturbing about the book is the excruciating detail Chang goes into of the crimes inflicted. I imagine she didn’t shirk from including the specificity of what the victims endured because she wanted to document the horror in its totality, and leave it for the public record. But there were points at which I could not continue reading. The book was a sensation. It made me think of the toll that researching, interviewing survivors, documenting, editing and promoting the book must have had on Chang, as well as the responsibility to do justice to the victims. Years later, in 2004, Chang was working on another book about another Japanese war crime, featuring the stories of Filipinos and Americans forced to travel across the Philippines on the 1942 Bataan Death March. One morning, Chang took her own life at the age of 36, after experiencing depression. It’s impossible to know what connection, if any, there was to her work. Read more | From the Napoleonic Wars to Vietnam and Iraq: a history of war trauma The author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera, in his 2024 book Empireworld, considers the impact that reading about colonial violence has on historians who analyse such accounts on an almost daily basis. He quotes James Robins, author of 2020’s When We Dead Awaken: Australia, New Zealand, and the Armenian Genocide, who lost the ability to fall comfortably asleep during the five years he spent studying that subject a…