HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-12-10T13:04:57.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: The summer that changed everything for the Kennedys
items: Idi Amin's willing helpers
items: Aids: the epidemic that changed Britain
items: WW2's Tunisian campaign: the Stalingrad of Africa
items: Forgotten female secret agents of WW2
items: What does Hitler’s DNA really tell us?
items: After Franco: Spain's miraculous transition to democracy
items: A new history of multicultural Britain
items: The librarian who stole KGB secrets
items: It was Operation Unthinkable: Churchill's "impossible" plan to start World War 3

The summer that changed everything for the Kennedys
type: item
date: 2025-12-10T08:00:45.000Z
creator: Elinor Evans
subject: 20th Century
subject: Cold War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Leigh Straw takes listeners into the pivotal summer of 1944 at the Kennedys' Cape Cod summer home, where scandal and personal loss collided to reshape the destiny of America’s most famous political family
encoded: Historian Leigh Straw describes one pivotal summer in the life of the Kennedy family. With most of the family in their Cape Cod summer home, the summer of 1944 was marked by personal grief and political legacy. As eldest son Joe Jr flew dangerous missions in the Second World War's European theatre, and Kathleen 'Kick' Kennedy scandalised her parents with an aristocratic English match, the family gathered under the looming shadow of tragedy. Talking to Elinor Evans, Straw explores how this fateful summer reshaped the ambitions of younger brother Jack and steered the family’s destiny towards the White House. Leigh Straw is the author of The Kennedys at Cape Cod, 1944: The Summer That Changed Everything (Bloomsbury, 2025). Buy it now from Amazon

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Idi Amin's willing helpers
type: item
date: 2025-12-08T10:07:21.000Z
creator: Rob Attar
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Derek R Peterson explains why many ordinary Ugandans worked tirelessly to serve Amin's repressive regime
encoded: Idi Amin is 20th-century Africa’s most notorious ruler – a cartoonish tyrant who has been bracketed with the likes of Hitler and Stalin. And it’s true that, as Uganda’s dictator for most of the 1970s, he oversaw murderous repression as well as the forced expulsion of the nation’s Asian community. But why did so many ordinary Ugandans willingly serve the regime and help to maintain his power? That’s a question at the heart of a new book by the historian Derek R Peterson, and in this episode he shares his conclusions with Rob Attar. Derek R Peterson is the author of A Popular History of Idi Amin's Uganda (Yale University Press, 2025). <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Popular-History-Idi-Amins-Uganda/dp/0300278381/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=AUTHOR&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.7asZBQQWAZKsuHp8ZQ6vEJACr_TDgPYF6VppcpEALLBwzrnat70DnfBdLe23Fq1NjYcpJVsmX_qpCT4hW1xageeVMJB9yDQdZNRtwQmsf_s7mKADzEet_olde5WsCvbHySmwMG5ChnSUyfhQ42ZjCg.zqMhWkSai2mwT7Qlw7rU5NTGyU_7y7n8vg53f6wnbfQ&tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty.">Buy it now from Amazon

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Aids: the epidemic that changed Britain
type: item
date: 2025-12-05T13:47:11.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Forty years ago, the UK found itself in the grip of a virus that killed thousands of people and sparked fear, confusion and prejudice – HIV. Janet Weston explores the Aids crisis as it unfolded throughout the 1980s, and how it transformed attitudes about everything from sexuality to healthcare
encoded: In the early 1980s, reports of a strange new disease began emerging from the United States. It was picked up in the British gay press – Gay News ran a story in November 1981 under the headline “Gay cancer or mass media scare?” – but relatively few people noticed. Even among those who did, confusion and doubt reigned: weren’t these tales of a “gay cancer” just fear-mongering, a backlash against the gains of the fight for gay liberation in the 1970s? How could a disease target gay men, anyway? Such suspicions were not without good reason. The medical profession had a difficult history with people who didn’t conform to heterosexual norms: less than 10 years earlier, homosexuality had still been categorised by the internationally influential American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder. And when it came to Aids, the lack of knowledge about its cause or mode of transmission led to wild speculation. One theory linked Aids to the use of “poppers”, a recreational drug popular on the gay scene; another proposed that Aids was the end point of too many sexually transmitted infections. The picture grew still more complex as the symptoms associated with this new illness were also identified both among injecting drug users and people with the blood-clotting disorder haemophilia, including women and children. By July 1983, there had been 14 reported cases of Aids in Britain, all among men. Most were gay, including one man who also injected drugs, but the group included another who had been receiving treatment for haemophilia in the form of blood products. Just two months later, the number had risen to 24, and included a woman and a second man with haemophilia. As numbers of diagnoses in the United Kingdom started to rise sharply, the deaths began. Many people died very soon after diagnosis, as an array of opportunistic infections took advantage of their weakened immune systems. Terrence Higgins died in July 1982, one of the first deaths in the UK attributed to Aids. His p…

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WW2's Tunisian campaign: the Stalingrad of Africa
type: item
date: 2025-12-03T09:00:24.000Z
creator: Rob Attar
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: Saul David explains why the 1942-3 Tunisian campaign should be viewed as one of the decisive moments of the Second World War
encoded: For the Allies it was an enormous triumph and for Nazi Germany it was another Stalingrad. But 80 years on, the battle for Tunisia is barely mentioned in popular accounts of the Second World War, having been totally eclipsed by the iconic clashes in Europe and the Pacific. In his new book, Tunisgrad, military historian Saul David seeks to redress the balance, arguing that this north African campaign was one of the three biggest turning points of the entire war. In conversation with Rob Attar, he explains why. Saul David is the author of Tunisgrad: Victory in Africa (HarperCollins, 2025). Buy it now from Waterstones

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Forgotten female secret agents of WW2
type: item
date: 2025-11-28T08:00:23.000Z
creator: Elinor Evans
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: Kate Vigurs reveals the stories of little-known women who parachuted into occupied European territory as secret agents during WW2
encoded: From sabotage operations to devastating betrayals, stories of the women of Special Operations Executive are some of the most incredible stories of the Second World War – but, says Kate Vigurs, many remain little known. In her new book, Mission Europe, Vigurs reveals the astonishing bravery of such female agents operating in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Poland, and Mandate Palestine, many of whom parachuted behind enemy lines. Speaking to Elinor Evans, she reveals how their courage and sacrifice changed the course of the war.

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What does Hitler’s DNA really tell us?
type: item
date: 2025-11-22T08:00:21.000Z
creator: Matt Elton
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: A recent documentary drawing conclusions from new analysis of Adolf Hitler’s DNA has sparked headlines around the world. But how did the programme’s researchers get hold of the key evidence? And what issues – and implications – are prompted by linking the Nazi leader with a range of physical and psychological conditions?
encoded: Two of the experts behind the documentary, Turi King and Alex J Kay, spoke to Matt Elton about what led to their involvement – and offer their take on the real value of such research. To find out more about Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, don’t miss our HistoryExtra Academy course Nazi Germany, with historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees.

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After Franco: Spain's miraculous transition to democracy
type: item
date: 2025-11-20T09:00:32.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Fascism
subject: Historical events
subject: Historical people
description: The nation’s transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s surely counts as one of modern Europe’s most remarkable stories. On the 50th anniversary of General Franco’s death, Paul Preston explores how pluralism arose from the ashes of tyranny
encoded: When General Francisco Franco died on 20 November 1975 – 39 years after the start of the brutal civil war that brought him to power – the prospect of a bloodless transition to democracy in Spain appeared vanishingly small. Franco had prepared a rigid framework to guarantee the permanence of the dictatorship over which he had ruled with an iron fist for almost four decades. Spain teetered on the edge of bloodshed and chaos, with powerful groups at the political extremes ferociously opposed to compromise. And so, as El Caudillo (‘The Leader’) was buried in the vast Valley of the Fallen memorial just outside Madrid – acclaimed by tens of thousands of blue-shirted supporters – few commentators would have predicted a future of pluralism and relative peace. Yet that’s exactly what was achieved. That the Spanish people were, over the next 10 years, able to negotiate a perilous path towards democracy through the minefields laid by Franco himself – and the ambushes set by terrorists of both right and left – counts as an extraordinary achievement. Even from a distance of 50 years, it surely ranks among modern Europe’s most remarkable stories. So how did it happen? Blurring the past To answer that question we must rewind to the end of the Second World War. Terror had underpinned Franco’s regime from the moment he was propelled to power at the end of the 1930s. But defeat for the Axis powers in 1945 shattered his initial plans for a fascist future – one in which Europe was dominated by authoritarian regimes. Franco realised that he needed to end Spain’s international ostracism in the postwar period and be incorporated into the western community. To achieve that, a new approach was required. And so, to blur the Spanish dictator’s Axis past, a scheme was devised by his crony, naval captain Luis Carrero Blanco, to perpetuate the regime behind a monarchist facade. The Law of Succession of 26 July 1947 established Spain as a kingdom with Franco as its head of state. Franco would gov…

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A new history of multicultural Britain
type: item
date: 2025-11-17T08:00:45.000Z
creator: Matt Elton
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Kieran Connell offers a fresh look at Britain's multicultural history in the years after the Second World War – from Cardiff docks to Birmingham cafes
encoded: As Britain's influence on the world around it grew throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, so too did the world influence Britain – and a key part of that influence was the arrival of people from other places and cultures to its shores. Kieran Connell's new book, Multicultural Britain, explores the experiences of some of these people, and the ways in which their stories combined, sometimes fractiously, to create a newly diverse nation. Kieran Connell is the author of Multicultural Britain: A People’s History (C Hurst & Co, 2025). Buy it now from Amazon

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The librarian who stole KGB secrets
type: item
date: 2025-11-12T08:00:41.000Z
creator: Elinor Evans
subject: 20th Century
subject: Cold War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Gordon Corera introduces Vasili Mitrokhin, a Soviet archivist whose quiet rebellion exposed the deepest secrets of the KGB
encoded: When an elderly man with a battered suitcase walked into the British embassy in Vilnius in 1992, few could have guessed what he was about to hand over. Gordon Corera tells the story of Vasili Mitrokhin, an under-the-radar Soviet archivist who copied thousands of classified KGB documents over 12 years. Speaking to Elinor Evans, he reveals how a project that began as a private rebellion against the agency he once served evolved into one of the greatest intelligence coups of the 20th century. (Ad) Gordon Corera is the author of The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB (William Collins, 2025). Buy it now from Amazon

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It was Operation Unthinkable: Churchill's "impossible" plan to start World War 3
type: item
date: 2025-11-11T12:01:59.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: 20th Century
subject: Cold War
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: In 1945, as Europe celebrated peace, Winston Churchill quietly asked his generals to plan an attack on the Soviet Union. But how close was Britain to an immediate and consecutive war?
encoded: In the summer of 1945, Europe lay in ruins. But for the first time in close to a decade, the continent was contemplating the prospect of peace. Hitler was dead, the Nazi high command had collapsed, and while the war raged on in the Pacific, bombs had at least finished dropping across Europe. It was a fresh and uneasy peace – but it was still a peace. But even as celebrations were filling the streets of Europe’s great cities, British prime minister Winston Churchill was already considering another conflict. At Churchill’s request, the British chiefs of staff had drafted a proposal codenamed Operation Unthinkable. Its goal was immense: a plan to drive the Red Army out of eastern Europe and restore the independence of the nations that had now fallen under Soviet control. Within weeks of the Second World War ending, Britain was already assessing the possibility of a third. It was, as its name implied, almost inconceivable. And yet, Churchill insisted on seeing the plans. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Tim Bouverie explained how the idea developed. From WW2 allies to adversaries During the war, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union had fought together against Nazi Germany. But their alliance was built on a pragmatic necessity rather than trust, or a sense of shared politics. By the time of the Yalta conference in February 1945, the cracks were already showing. Read more | The rise and fall of the Third Reich At Yalta, Churchill, US president Franklin D Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin agreed on a postwar settlement for Europe, including a promise that liberated countries would hold free elections. Yet, as Bouverie explains, those promises began to crumble almost immediately. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-2642765-1-b0480b2-e1762862505374.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="In the grounds of the Livadia Palace at Yalta, Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin …

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