HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-05-02T13:15:59.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Pageantry and politics: a history of British royal visits to the US
items: 40 years on from the world’s worst nuclear disaster, what's Chernobyl really like today?
items: The Bay of Pigs Invasion: was this CIA fiasco JFK's worst embarrassment?
items: This secret speech gave people heart attacks: when Khrushchev denounced Stalin
items: 8 weird stories from the Space Age: from hungry tortoises to gorilla suits
items: Nato is in crisis. Can history predict what happens next?
items: Churchill vs Stalin: did this one speech cause the Cold War?
items: Winston Churchill created the special relationship. Could Donald Trump kill it?
items: What inspired the darkness of Lord of the Flies? The disturbing history behind the novel
items: In the aftermath of WW2, why did FDR’s Latin American experiment end in abject failure?

Pageantry and politics: a history of British royal visits to the US
type: item
date: 2026-04-27T01:10:19.000Z
creator: Sam Edwards
subject: 20th Century
subject: 21st Century
subject: Cold War
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: British prime ministers
subject: British queens
subject: Historical people
subject: The royal family
subject: US presidents
description: As transatlantic tensions swirled about King Charles III’s visit to Washington DC in 2026, Sam Edwards reveals how past royal tours have steadied the ‘special relationship’ in times of crisis
encoded: The April 2026 royal visit to the United States came at a particularly challenging moment for the US-UK ‘special relationship’. In the preceding months, President Donald Trump had repeatedly singled out prime minister Keir Starmer for blunt criticism, even going so far as to declare that Starmer as “no Churchill”. Meanwhile, the royal family similarly found itself caught up in transatlantic controversy: the Epstein scandal. If all that wasn’t challenging enough, King Charles’s visit to America also came at a time when the US-UK relationship was drawing even more scrutiny than usual. 2026 is year is the 80th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, which popularised the phrase ‘special relationship’, and it’s also the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. The latter was of course the event that severed the connection between the American colonies and the British Crown and thereby put the transatlantic relationship onto a very different trajectory. In short, the visit came at a time of significant turbulence in the US-UK relationship. King Charles, however, might have been able to take some reassurance from the fact that several of his predecessors had similarly travelled to the United States during moments of challenge, change and upheaval... <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/2GettyImages-1320405043big-566d798-e1777245347971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large group of men and women in formal 19th-century dress gather outside a red-brick tomb set within a leafy landscape, their attention focused on a central meeting of figures. Women wear layered gowns with bonnets, while men in dark suits and top hats stand in lines, with trees and a distant sky framing the scene." title="A painting by Thomas Pritchard Rossiter captures the Prince of Wales’s historic visit to George Washington’s tomb in 1860. The young prince, who later ruled as Edward VII, can be seen standing with President James B…

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40 years on from the world’s worst nuclear disaster, what's Chernobyl really like today?
type: item
date: 2026-04-26T06:00:15.000Z
creator: Jonathan Wright
subject: 20th Century
subject: Cold War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Trends-Anniversary
description: On 26 April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. Parts of the site, polluted with radioactive elements that take centuries to decay, will remain lethal for millennia. Journalist Adam Higginbotham, who has visited on multiple occasions, tells Jonathan Wright about what Chernobyl is like today, and its fascinating contradictions
encoded: It was as a reporter for The Observer that Adam Higginbotham first visited the exclusion zone that surrounds the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. Working on a piece to mark the 20th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear accident, he wanted to see at first hand where the disaster had occurred. Higginbotham also wanted to interview eyewitnesses, which is how he came to visit the Moscow apartment of Alexander and Natalia Yuvchenko. A 24-year-old mechanical engineer, Alexander was working on the night of the explosion. “He described seeing this pillar of ethereal blue-white light extending up from the ruins of reactor number four and disappearing into infinity in the sky,” says Higginbotham. It was, Yuvchenko remembered, a beautiful sight, a sharp contrast to the ugliness the disaster left in its wake. That devastation is what confronted Higginbotham when he first visited Chernobyl in “the dead of winter”, in 2006. What is Chernobyl like now? During the shortest days of the year, modern-day Chernobyl is “incredibly grim”, says Higginbotham. “Everything is in monochrome tones of grey and black. The clouds seem to descend crushingly towards the horizon. There’s very bleak light. And the landscape around the plant – certainly when I went there 20 years ago – was like a stereotypical vision of a post-apocalyptic landscape.” It’s an image Higginbotham drew on for Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, a book that takes his first-hand experience of the site and plunges into the story of the disaster. On this first visit, Higginbotham saw the concrete sarcophagus that covered reactor number four, constructed in the wake of the disaster to contain the radiation. He likens the structure to “a medieval conception of a prison designed to imprison the devil himself”, all “sharp angles and rusting steel”. Nearby, massive pylons that long ago shed their power lines stretched out into the distance. “The landscape itself is very fr…

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The Bay of Pigs Invasion: was this CIA fiasco JFK's worst embarrassment?
type: item
date: 2026-04-17T07:38:38.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Cold War
subject: Period
subject: Evergreen
description: The botched Bay of Pigs invasion stands as one of several US failings in the 1960s as the Cold War rolled on. Why was it such a disaster?
encoded: Unfolding over three chaotic days in April 1961, the Bay of Pigs Invasion would come to symbolise the perils of Cold War brinkmanship and growing American hubris. It was the culmination of flawed assumptions, hasty decision-making, and a deep underestimation of a revolutionary regime’s resolve. But it was also a moment that transformed geopolitics in the western hemisphere. While often remembered as a military failure, the Bay of Pigs was also a diplomatic shock that reshaped US strategy, deepened Soviet ties with Cuba and set the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis just one year later. What happened with the Bay of Pigs is a story inseparable from its Cold War context, the revolutionary fever of 1950s Cuba, the clandestine corridors of CIA planning rooms, and the charged ideological landscape of early 1960s international politics. What was the Bay of Pigs fiasco? The Bay of Pigs invasion was a failed CIA-backed operation in April 1961, in which Cuban exiles, backed by the US, attempted to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government. But the Cuban people failed to rise up to support invasion. Castro quickly repelled the assault, strengthening his grip on the island and pushing Cuba closer into an alliance with the communist Soviet Union. How powerful was Fidel Castro before the Bay of Pigs invasion? Ahead of Fidel Castro’s ascent to power, Cuba – an island to the south of Florida – in the 1950s was a paradox. Beneath a façade of prosperity in Havana’s casinos and nightclubs were vast inequalities. The island was effectively a neo-colonial economy: heavily reliant on sugar exports and deeply enmeshed in US corporate interests. American companies controlled around 70 per cent of Cuba’s arable land, as well as its electricity and telephone systems. The regime of Cuban politician Fulgencio Batista, a military strongman who had seized power in a 1952 coup, was tolerated (if not outright endorsed) by those in power in Washington, DC. However, his repressive policies and close ties…

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This secret speech gave people heart attacks: when Khrushchev denounced Stalin
type: item
date: 2026-04-15T14:30:54.000Z
subject: Cold War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Communism
subject: Historical events
description: Seventy years ago, Nikita Khrushchev stood before a packed hall in central Moscow and delivered a four-hour denunciation of Josef Stalin, one that exposed mass terror and attempted to reclaim the legacy of Leninism. So what drove this extraordinarily radical move? And did the Soviet people buy Khrushchev’s message?
encoded: When I was an undergraduate, a perennial exam question was ‘Did Stalin betray the revolution?’. The question gets to the heart of Soviet history, and I still ask my students to address it. What does it mean? It suggests that Stalin’s policies, especially in the 1930s, were either a logical consequence of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 or they were a deadly departure from its promises. At the end of the 1920s, when Stalin consolidated his personal hold on power, he made a sharp leftward turn. His programme was headlined by a centrally planned economy, the collectivisation of agriculture, and breakneck industrialisation. It sounds like the fruits of a socialist revolution. Mass state violence accompanied this ‘great break’ in Soviet life. Collectivisation led to falls in grain output and the forcible transfer of some of it to industrial centres; famine followed, killing millions, worst of all in Ukraine. The network of Gulag labour camps dramatically expanded. Enemies of the people – innocent men and women – were shot in their hundreds of thousands during the Great Terror of 1936–38. Did these appalling atrocities subvert the liberations of 1917? Or were they the natural follow-up to the terrors of the civil war (1917–22) and a predictable explosion of the implied violence of socialism? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/HIP2591053-6c687f8-e1776154310242.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A Soviet propaganda poster depicts a large hand gripping a sword marked with the hammer and sickle, slicing through a snake labeled with words such as espionage, sabotage, and provocation. The left side is dark with the snake, while the right shows a bright, orderly cityscape. Russian text urges vigilance." title="A poster from 1953 proclaims “Vigilence is Our Weapon. Be Vigilant!” Millions of people had died as a result of Stalin’s violent policies during his long rule (Image by Topfoto)" /> Generations of students have written essays ab…

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8 weird stories from the Space Age: from hungry tortoises to gorilla suits
type: item
date: 2026-04-01T18:03:43.000Z
creator: Jonathan Wright
subject: 20th Century
subject: 21st Century
subject: Cold War
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Discover / Apple News
subject: Space
description: As the Artemis II mission prepares to send humans around the moon, Jonathan Wright explores the stranger side of space history – from UFO sightings to Cold War curiosities and beyond
encoded: Exploring space is a serious business. To use the term employed by Tom Wolfe in his 1979 book about the first US test pilots to enter astronaut training, you need the “right stuff” to sit atop an enormous firework leaving the protection of our atmosphere. But space travel is also a human endeavour. In the heavens as on Earth, that means it throws up stories that can be bizarre, funny or melancholy. As Nasa prepares to send astronauts back to the vicinity of the moon for the first time since 1972, here are eight strange-but-true tales from the ongoing history of the Space Age. 1. Ballistic legacy At the end of the Second World War, the USSR and the US competed to snaffle up as much German rocketry expertise and kit as possible. So it was that, despite his Nazi past, V-2 co-designer Wernher von Braun became chief architect of the Apollo programme’s Saturn V rocket. Less well remembered is the role of the V-2 itself in space exploration. In 1945, US Army Special Mission V-2 recovered parts and equipment needed to make the missiles from an underground factory in eastern Germany. Subsequently, much of the haul was taken to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, where initial work resulted in the assembly of 25 rockets. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/1aGettyImages-544605263-d284276-e1775049918462.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A mid-20th-century photograph of a suited man seated at a desk, holding a pen and looking towards the camera. In front of him are several model rockets and a black rotary telephone. Behind him, a large illustration shows a spacecraft flying past the moon." title="Wernher von Braun - director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center" /> The first flights from the US followed in the spring of 1946. By October, the grandly named Upper Atmosphere Research Panel was expert enough in launching missiles to use one to capture the first photograph of the Earth from space. A terror weapon had found a mo…

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Nato is in crisis. Can history predict what happens next?
type: item
date: 2026-03-22T11:30:56.000Z
creator: Sam Edwards
subject: 20th Century
subject: 21st Century
subject: Cold War
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: As tensions build between the US and its long-term allies, historian Sam Edwards examines how the international military organisation has withstood moments of turbulence in the past – and whether we can glean any lessons for the future
encoded: “If there's no response – or if it's a negative response – I think it will be very bad for the future of Nato.” So said US President Donald Trump in March 2026, after asking European allies for their help in securing the Strait of Hormuz. This primary export route for most of the world's largest oil and gas fields had lately been declared closed by Iran as a response to US-Israeli military operations. However, the response to the president’s call to aid to his European allies has, so far, been distinctly muted. No doubt this is in part because much of Europe is still reeling from the events at the start of the year. Back in January, the American-led alliance was thrown into disarray by the president’s desire to assert control over Greenland – a semi-autonomous territory of Nato member Denmark. At the height of the crisis, with Trump adamant that the US “needed” Greenland “very badly”, the Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen went so far as to say that "if the United States chooses to attack another Nato country militarily, then everything stops. That includes Nato, and thus the security that has been provided since the end of the Second World War." Now, amid renewed transatlantic tensions stemming from the US–Israeli war with Iran, those key questions provoked by the recent Greenland debacle have resurfaced again: is Nato in crisis, and can it endure? Read more | Winston Churchill created the special relationship. Could Donald Trump kill it? On the latter, history does at least provide some reassurance. In fact, surviving crises is something of a Nato speciality. Nato’s troubled origins The alliance initially coalesced in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, a period characterised by growing concern in the west about the expanding influence and power of the Soviet Union. In March 1946, Winston Churchill warned that an “Iron Curtain” had descended “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic”. A year later, in an effort to “contain” the threa…

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Churchill vs Stalin: did this one speech cause the Cold War?
type: item
date: 2026-03-20T15:30:35.000Z
subject: Cold War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: British prime ministers
subject: Historical events
subject: Historical people
description: It’s 80 years since the war victor delivered his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, sounding the alarm for a perilous new age. The speech, given as tensions with Stalin soared, is among the most famous in modern history. Yet, asks Richard Toye, has it been misunderstood?
encoded: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” It was the soundbite of the century – or at least of the Cold War. Uttered by a former prime minister in a speech on 5 March 1946 at a small college in Missouri, its intended audience was far larger than the scholars and public figures assembled in the institution’s gymnasium. The fact that the ex-PM in question was war victor Winston Churchill – and that sitting on stage alongside him was US president Harry S Truman – helped turn this lecture into a world-shaking historical event. Churchill made a lot of speeches in his long political career. Few of them, however, had the same resounding impact as this warning about the Soviet threat. A set of unique circumstances lent his oration its unusual power – and endowed it with the capacity to shape the language of east-west conflict for decades to come. The Iron Curtain speech was delivered at a time of acute – and escalating – tensions between the Soviet Union and western powers. It’s often been described as the moment that the starting gun was fired on the Cold War. It’s indisputably among the most momentous pieces of oratory of the postwar period. And yet, for all that, it’s clouded in misunderstanding. Much of that misapprehension stems from the fact that the speech had surprisingly long roots – roots stretching all the way back to Anglo-Russian imperial conflicts in the late 19th century. When Churchill rose to his feet and addressed his audience at Fulton, he was 71 years old. He was, as he declared himself, a child of the Victorian age. The legacy of the so-called ‘Great Game’ – strategic competition between Britain and Russia in central Asia – was a factor throughout his political career. Even as a schoolboy, he wrote an essay in which he fantasised about a British invasion of Russia and gloated of “the superiority of John Bull over the Russian bear”. Strangling Bolshevism Yet Churchill’s attitude to Russia…

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Winston Churchill created the special relationship. Could Donald Trump kill it?
type: item
date: 2026-03-16T16:29:41.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: 20th Century
subject: 21st Century
subject: Cold War
subject: Period
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: From the Suez Crisis and Vietnam, to 21st-century political tensions, the alliance between Britain and the United States has been declared dead – or dying – many times
encoded: Few diplomatic partnerships have been declared to be on life support quite as often as the so-called ‘special relationship’ between the United Kingdom and the United States. The phrase refers to the theoretically unique presumption of shared understanding and cooperation that has existed between the two countries in the decades since the Second World War. But did the special relationship ever actually exist? And if it does, what exactly does it mean in the cold light of day? “This is a perennial subject of discussion,” says historian Sam Edwards, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “You could probably go back to the 1960s to find the first obituary of the special relationship – the first moment where commentators were asking the question: is the special relationship done and dusted, or can it survive?” Those debates have resurfaced repeatedly whenever London and Washington DC have had public differences over foreign policy or military strategy. It’s a question that has arisen once again in March 2026, as President Trump has instigated a new wave of military operations in the Middle East, albeit without Downing Street’s unconditional support. Winston Churchill coins the phrase The term ‘special relationship’ has been in the political vocabulary for 80 years, making an entrance in the early days of the Cold War. In March 1946, Winston Churchill travelled to Fulton, Missouri to deliver a speech formally titled Sinews of Peace. Churchill was no longer the UK’s prime minister at the time – he had lost the 1945 British general election – but he remained one of the most influential political figures of the era. The Second World War had ended less than a year earlier, but tensions between the Soviet Union and western powers were already hardening along ideological faultlines. Churchill used the speech to warn about Soviet expansion across eastern Europe, and what he saw as the impending threat of communism. As Sam Edwards explains, the speech is “famous for two evocative …

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What inspired the darkness of Lord of the Flies? The disturbing history behind the novel
type: item
date: 2026-03-01T20:00:09.000Z
creator: Danny Bird
subject: 20th Century
subject: Cold War
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Trends-Entertainment
description: The first TV adaptation of William Golding’s haunting 1954 novel Lord of the Flies arrives on Netflix in May 2026. This disturbing and mesmeric four-part series of the modern classic challenges viewers to ponder human nature. Here, we look at the history of Golding’s dystopian masterpiece, and the real-life events that inspired him to write it
encoded: William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in the shadow of the 1930s’ ideological polarisation, the Second World War and the Holocaust. These had convinced him that evil was not an aberration but was deeply ingrained in the human condition. He recognised that the Nazis had not simply imposed their murderous regime through sheer force alone, but that millions of everyday people had acquiesced or enthusiastically gone along with it. And though many in the postwar years assured themselves that they’d never have participated in its savagery, Golding was less sanguine. Read more | The myth of the innocent bystander: conformity and complicity in Nazi Germany “My book was to say: you think that the war is over and an evil thing destroyed. You are safe because you are naturally kind and decent,” he wrote while reflecting on the success of Lord of the Flies. “But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country.” As the most destructive conflict in history gave way to the Cold War and the mounting threat of nuclear annihilation, Golding’s bleak verdict seemed apposite. In later years, he maintained that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.” Who was William Golding? Golding was born in 1911 in Newquay, Cornwall and raised in Marlborough, Wiltshire. He trained as a teacher, gaining first-hand insights into boys’ hierarchies and social rituals – knowledge that would later inform the tribalism in Lord of the Flies. Serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he took part in the D-Day landings at Gold Beach in June 1944. The experience was formative, as he witnessed the machinery and the immense destructive capacity of modern warfare. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/WilliamGolding1983-2a64892-e1772205569790.jpg" width="1500" height="1500" alt="Black-and-white portrait of author William Golding in 1983, showing the Nobel laureate with a full white beard and wispy hair, wearing a collared jacket…

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In the aftermath of WW2, why did FDR’s Latin American experiment end in abject failure?
type: item
date: 2026-02-10T16:19:02.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Cold War
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Before the Cold War hardened into coups and counterinsurgency, the United States backed reformist governments across Latin America. The abrupt reversal of policy after 1945 wasn’t inevitable, but it reshaped the politics of the northern and southern American continents for generations
encoded: The Cold War in Latin America is sometimes seen as an inevitable extension of rivalry between two emergent superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – in the new geopolitical context created in the aftermath of the Second World War. But the Cold War antagonism between the US and its southern neighbours wasn’t a foregone conclusion amid the wider ideological conflict. In the decades before the Cold War took hold, the US pursued a markedly different relationship with Latin America that had embraced national sovereignty, tolerated economic nationalism and actively supported the leadership of left-leaning reformers. As historian Greg Grandin, Professor of History at Yale University, explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, this earlier period shows that more cordial relations were possible, and demonstrates how quickly they were abandoned. Why Latin America mattered before the Cold War “You can’t really understand the Cold War unless you understand Latin America’s role in the 1930s and 1940s,” Grandin explains. During those years, Latin American governments were active participants in an anti-fascist coalition that spanned the Atlantic world. Several countries broke relations with the Axis powers early; they restricted German and Italian influence and aligned diplomatically and economically with the Allies well before the Second World War formally reached the hemisphere. WW2 | The Big Questions Member exclusive | Historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees explains major moments of the global conflict in this five-part series. Listen to all episodes now This partnership between the US and Latin American governments emerged against a long history of tension. Since the late 19th century, Latin American states had protested a right claimed by the United States to intervene militarily and politically across the hemisphere via the Monroe Doctrine, a claim first articulated in 1823 that purportedly justified intervention in order to protect US economic and military intere…

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