HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-06-26T08:01:13.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Samba schools used the carnival to foreground overlooked histories"
items: "If you represent Pinochet in this case, I will divorce you”: the sensational trial of the Chilean dictator
items: Shipwrecked: the 18th-century looters who endured five months of hell
items: Aztec myths
items: Aztec warfare
items: Tracking down the Nazi 'Angel of Death': one man's hunt for Josef Mengele
items: How a proto-Indiana Jones rediscovered the Inca stronghold of Machu Picchu
items: Alternate history: what if Argentina had won the Falklands War?
items: “Indigenous Americans who travelled across the Atlantic were horrified by inequalities in European society”
items: The Inca empire: everything you wanted to know

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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"If you represent Pinochet in this case, I will divorce you”: the sensational trial of the Chilean dictator
type: item
date: 2025-05-27T08:00:52.000Z
creator: Rob Attar
subject: 21st Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical events
description: Philippe Sands tells Rob Attar about his involvement in the sensational trial of the Chilean dictator, and how it connects to a Nazi on the run
encoded: Rob Attar: In 1998, the former dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, was arrested in London. How seismic a moment was this? Philippe Sands: I remember the moment of learning of Pinochet’s arrest. It was a Saturday afternoon. It happened to be my birthday, and I was settling down to watch the football results at five o’clock when the news came on and they announced that Augusto Pinochet had been arrested for murder and crimes against humanity. It was huge. It was the first time that a former head of state, while travelling abroad, had been arrested on international crimes. Someone not familiar with the story might wonder why this was happening in London, not Santiago. What can you tell us about the geography of these events? By way of background, in September 1973 Augusto Pinochet, head of the Chilean military, seized power in a coup d’etat and remained there for 17 years. Over that period, hundreds of thousands were arrested, tens of thousands were tortured and ‘disappeared’, and many remain so to this day. There are about 1,300 people unaccounted for. This had attracted considerable interest around the world, because these are actions that would be characterised as international crimes within the meaning of the 1945 Nuremberg trials and definitions. And that is coupled with a principle known as universal jurisdiction, where when certain crimes take place, the courts of any country in the world may exercise jurisdiction. In October 1998 a Spanish judge named Baltasar Garzón decided to issue an arrest warrant for Senator Pinochet, while he was in London receiving medical treatment, for international crimes. That was the start of this part of the story. The connection with Spain is interesting because Pinochet’s relationship with the west was quite complex. He had a lot of friends in western countries, particularly America and Britain, for example. Pinochet did indeed have friends, on the political right, in the United States and in Britain. He was a good friend of Mar…

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Shipwrecked: the 18th-century looters who endured five months of hell
type: item
date: 2024-07-12T11:16:48.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: In the brutal world of 18th-century privateering, one remarkable expedition stands above the rest. The tumultuous voyage would lead to disaster, dissention, and one of the most desperate gambles in the annals of naval history. Matthew Doherty tells the tale...
encoded: In the dying light of 25 May 1720, the 22-gun privateer ship Speedwell was trapped against a jagged, rocky coastline in the lonely waters of the Pacific. Anchored off the Juan Fernández Islands, its captain – George Shelvocke – had noted a “hard gale” developing out to sea. Before they could slip away there came “a great, tumbling swell” that threw the little wooden vessel hard into the rocks. The ship began to break to pieces – and Shelvocke had to hold fast to a scrap of rigging to avoid being thrown overboard. Struggling to shore, the bewildered crew collected just in time to witness all three masts of their ship collapse. Shelvocke recalled poignantly that, “Words cannot express the wretched condition we were in, or the surprise we were under at being so unfortunately shipwrecked, or the dread we had upon us of starving on the uninhabited island we were thrown upon.” The story of Speedwell’s wrecking began two years before. In 1718, a meeting took place in London between a cabal of less-than-reputable English merchants who saw a golden opportunity in the coming war with Spain. It was Spain that had control of South America, and Spain that regularly shipped wealth from its colonies back home. This cabal called themselves the Gentleman Adventurers. Headed up by Edward Hughes, a former Royal Navy man-turned-wealthy trader, they decided to finance a privateering expedition to the far side of the world. What was privateering? Privateering was legalised piracy. A ship’s captain would be granted a commission from a government to cruise against its nation’s enemies. But the line between privateering and piracy often blurred, especially in the lawless waters outside Europe. The aim of the Gentleman Adventurers’ expedition was simple – loot the Pacific side of Spanish America for all it was worth. This would involve seizing Spanish ships, raiding Spanish harbours, and, if possible, carrying off a great prize of the South Seas – one of the silver-laden La Nao de China, or …

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Aztec myths
type: item
date: 2024-05-07T10:32:09.000Z
creator: Emily Briffett
subject: General Early Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Aztecs
description: Camilla Townsend delves into the stories, myths and legends of the Aztec people
encoded: Were the Aztecs really obsessed with death and sacrifice? Did they have a pantheon of deities similar to the ancient Greeks or Romans? And how did a magical gem change the fortune of the Aztec people? Speaking to Emily Briffett, Camilla Townsend delves into their myths, legends and folklore to reveal a society bursting with life and colour. View Green Video on the source website

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Aztec warfare
type: item
date: 2024-01-24T11:07:37.000Z
creator: Emily Briffett
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Aztecs
description: Caroline Dodds Pennock considers how warfare came to be a pivotal part of Aztec society, considering superstitious traditions, sacrifices and brutal methods of attack
encoded: Why did warfare play such a pivotal role in Aztec society? How could claiming captives benefit a warrior in life and death? And what was 'Flower War'? Speaking to Emily Briffett, Caroline Dodds Pennock takes a look at the warriors and weaponry of the Aztecs to consider how warfare played a prominent part in everyday life, from the cradle to the grave – and beyond. View Green Video on the source website

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Tracking down the Nazi 'Angel of Death': one man's hunt for Josef Mengele
type: item
date: 2023-10-23T09:12:53.000Z
creator: Matt Elton
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Holocaust
description: In 1949 the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele fled to South America. Three decades later, Gerald Posner set out to track him down. Here the former lawyer tells us about his mission to catch the ‘Angel of Death’.
encoded: Matt Elton: Before we talk about the part you played in the hunt for Josef Mengele, can we briefly set out his role in the Holocaust? Gerald Posner: Mengele was a doctor at Auschwitz, where he did two things for which he’s become notorious. First, he conducted all kinds of human experiments, some on children and many on twins. And, second, he waited at the camp entrance for trains to arrive packed with people, mostly Jews, from all over Nazi-occupied Europe, and selected who lived and who died. He wasn’t the only Nazi doctor at Auschwitz, but he became the most notorious for his enthusiasm for his gruesome work – and for escaping after the war and remaining a fugitive for many decades. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/09/AKG9399538web-d66c88f.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Mengele (centre) pictured with two commandants of Auschwitz, Richard Baer (left) and Rudolf Höss, at an SS retreat in 1944. (Photo from AKG Images)" title="Mengele (centre) pictured with two commandants of Auschwitz, Richard Baer (left) and Rudolf Höss, at an SS retreat in 1944. (Photo from AKG Images)" /> Did his crimes mean he was regarded as particularly worthy of being brought to justice after the war ended? There was a limit to how many Nazis could be brought to justice. Some 50,000 worked at the camps in different positions, from guards to doctors and overseers to commandants. About 2,500 were eventually tried; thousands more returned to normal lives after the war without paying any price for their actions. It may be hard to accept, but not every Nazi at every concentration camp liked the work. Some were sadistic, and some were pathological, but for many it was not considered a great assignment. Auschwitz was in Poland, where summers were hot and winters freezing – bad for the prisoners, but also for those who worked at the camps. I don’t mean to suggest that anyone should feel sorry for the Nazis, but some of them didn’t like it. That’s not the c…

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How a proto-Indiana Jones rediscovered the Inca stronghold of Machu Picchu
type: item
date: 2023-06-29T10:25:52.000Z
subject: Edwardian
subject: General Early Modern
subject: Period
description: The Inca stronghold of Machu Picchu lay abandoned for over 350 years, until whip-cracking archaeologist Hiram Bingham III stumbled across it
encoded: Bingham had been scrambling ever upwards – often on hands and knees – for hours now. His legs ached, his clothes were damp with sweat, and his lungs struggled to take in the increasingly thin mountain air. And for what? A vague promise from a local man called Melchor Arteaga of Inca ruins at the top of a nearby precipice. For all Bingham knew, Arteaga could have been sending him on a wild – and exhausting – goose chase. But then Bingham’s weary legs felt a surge of energy. For he and his guides suddenly came across what he later described as “an unexpected sight, a great flight of beautifully constructed stone terraces, perhaps a hundred of them, each hundreds of feet long and ten feet high”. Then, “suddenly I found myself confronted with the walls of ruined houses built of the finest quality of Inca stonework”. He had discovered the long-lost Inca city of Machu Picchu, and – though he couldn’t have known it at the time – it was to prove one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century. Hiram Bingham III is sometimes hailed as a kind of proto-Indiana Jones – a buccaneering archaeologist-turned-adventurer who felt more at home in the middle of a jungle than buried in a textbook. He developed a passion for Latin American history as a boy and, armed with a PhD in the subject, made the journey to Yale University to pursue a career as a lecturer. He might have stayed at Yale, had he not met and married Alfreda Mitchell, an heiress to the Tiffany jewellery fortune. Bingham now had the financial security to fulfil his dream – embark on his first expedition to South America. That first adventure, in 1906, saw him trace the celebrated political leader Simón Bolívar’s routes through Venezuela and Colombia in 1819. But it was a people who dominated South America 300 years before Bolívar who really fired Bingham’s imagination, and ultimately led him to that first, historic sighting of Machu Picchu. They were the Inca. Who was Hiram Bingham? If Hiram Bingham II…

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Alternate history: what if Argentina had won the Falklands War?
type: item
date: 2023-04-02T07:05:57.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Dr Martin Farr and Nige Tassell consider how the political landscape may have changed had Britain – and the prime minister Margaret Thatcher – been defeated in the 1982 conflict
encoded: In January 1982, the Conservative Party of prime minister Margaret Thatcher was trailing in third place in the opinion polls, behind the Liberal-SDP Alliance, which stood at 40 per cent, and Labour at 30 per cent. By June of that year, the polls had been turned on their head: Labour were still second, but the Tories now had the approval of 51 per cent of the country. The Falklands War had been fought between these polls, and the events in the South Atlantic, where Britain’s naval taskforce had evicted the invading Argentinians in a bloody conflict, transformed Thatcher’s political fortunes. As the taskforce sailed home in triumph, her future in Downing Street was assured. The following year, she recorded the biggest landslide victory in a general election since 1945. On the podcast | Helen Parr discusses the conflict that erupted between Britain and Argentina 40 years ago But what if the Argentinian military had sent the Royal Navy packing? The popular belief is, after all, that the electoral success of 1983 was all due to the war and that, without the air of triumphalism, the Conservative Party would have been on shaky ground heading towards a general election. That belief isn’t completely watertight. “Even without a Falklands victory, the re-election of the Conservatives in either 1983 or 1984 was still more likely than not,” explains Dr Martin Farr, senior lecturer in contemporary British history at Newcastle University. “But, in the event of an Argentinian victory, Thatcher would have resigned immediately and a new leader would still probably have gone on to win, as Harold Macmillan did in 1959 after replacing Anthony Eden, who had been brought down by his own foreign crisis – Suez.” Had Thatcher resigned, her unpopular economic policies may well have been jettisoned by the party. “It would have all depended on when a subsequent leader replaced her. Early on in her premiership, there were few sufficiently senior figures who were so like-minded, but over time, as…

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“Indigenous Americans who travelled across the Atlantic were horrified by inequalities in European society”
type: item
date: 2023-01-19T10:55:07.000Z
subject: General Early Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Slavery
description: Caroline Dodds Pennock talks to Ellie Cawthorne about her new book tracing the remarkable stories of Indigenous Americans who voyaged to Europe after 1492
encoded: Let’s start with the title of your book, On Savage Shores. What can you tell us about the meaning? People often use the term “savage” as a racial slur to diminish and belittle Indigenous peoples. I wanted to deliberately invert that stereotype. In my book, I follow Indigenous Americans who travelled to Europe after 1492 – from their perspective, Europe was a much more savage place than the Americas. We tend to think of the “Columbian exchange” as a one-way cultural encounter – a story of Europeans going to the Americas. Why is it that we don’t hear much about Indigenous Americans coming to Europe? That’s a good question. It’s not that historians have never written about this; I’m standing on the shoulders of other scholars in my work. But for some reason the presence of Indigenous peoples in Europe doesn’t seem to have made an impression on popular understanding of the past. I think that might be because, in our imagination, 15th and 16th-century Europe is a white, ruffed and codpieced “Golden Age”. The stories we’re told are about kings, lords and royal dramas. But how many people know that there was a Brazilian king at the court of Henry VIII, or that there were tens of thousands of enslaved Indigenous people in Spain? Read more | America: Brave new world or accident? How many Indigenous Americans came to Europe, and when? Exact numbers are difficult to pin down, because the official statistics we have are almost certainly far too low. We know that there were tens of thousands, at least, but the number may be very much larger. The vast majority came as enslaved people into Spain and Portugal, but there are also Indigenous people recorded in England, the Netherlands, the other Low Countries and Germany. And they appear from as early as Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, when he brought back Taíno people from the Caribbean. So, from the first moment of encounter, Indigenous travellers are part of the story. On the podcast | Indigenous American travellers in Europe…

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The Inca empire: everything you wanted to know
type: item
date: 2022-07-17T10:39:27.000Z
creator: Emily Briffett
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
description: Bill Sillar answers listener questions about the mighty South American empire
encoded: What did an ordinary day in the Inca empire look like? How did the Inca count using knots? And why were stones so sacred to the civilization? In conversation with Emily Briffett, Bill Sillar answers listener questions on the mighty empire which dominated swathes of land in South America.

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