HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-04-10T08:17:04.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: How Britain’s Industrial Revolution RESHAPED the world
items: Oh, Mary! makes a monster of Mary Todd Lincoln – but has history been too harsh?
items: Did the Industrial Revolution make life better – or worse?
items: Why did Britain industrialise first? It’s more complicated than you think
items: "It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
items: The Industrial Revolution wasn’t what you think
items: Be wary of technology’s big promises, but roll with the changes
items: What working-class autobiographies can tell us about the Industrial Revolution
items: From family to factory: women's lives during the Industrial Revolution
items: "An enlightened turn": how medicine (and the vaccination) developed in Victorian Britain

How Britain’s Industrial Revolution RESHAPED the world
type: item
date: 2026-04-10T08:16:49.000Z
creator: Professor Emma Griffin
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Why did industrialisation take root so easily in places like France and Germany – but struggle in Portugal or Spain? Why did Japan industrialise, while China and India followed very different paths? Professor Emma Griffin explains more
encoded: The Industrial Revolution didn’t stay in Britain – it reshaped the entire world. In this final episode in her series on the Industrial Revolution, you'll hear from Emma Griffin, Professor of History and Head of School at Queen Mary, University of London. She moves beyond Britain to explore how industrialisation spread across Europe, the Americas, and further – and why some countries surged ahead while others were left behind. From industrial espionage in continental Europe to the rapid growth of industry in the United States and Germany, this is a story of technology transfer, natural resources, and global networks. But it’s also a story of inequality. As some nations industrialised and grew richer, others found their resources extracted, their industries undercut, and their development stalled. Why did industrialisation take root so easily in places like France and Germany – but struggle in Portugal or Spain? Why did Japan industrialise, while China and India followed very different paths? And how did empire and global trade shape who benefited – and who paid the price? View Green Video on the source website

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Oh, Mary! makes a monster of Mary Todd Lincoln – but has history been too harsh?
type: item
date: 2026-04-07T07:14:30.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Trends-Entertainment
description: Mary Todd Lincoln has been much maligned for her erratic behaviour ever since she stepped foot into the White House, and stage play Oh, Mary! leans into that, portraying her as a drunk, cabaret-obsessed drama queen. But the story of the real First Lady is one of enduring tragedy after tragedy
encoded: The legacy of US President Abraham Lincoln is beyond reproach: he emancipated the slaves and saved the Union in the American Civil War. That’s enough to enshrine him as one of the best to have ever served in the Oval Office. When it came to his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, however, the history books have been less kind. The First Lady is remembered as a tragic figure with a troubled mental state, which worsened throughout her life as she endured a series of devastating personal losses, including Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. Prone to depression, headaches and tempers, she battled inner demons within and censure without. Her own son had her committed to an insane asylum. While that does not sound like a story filled with laughs, Mary Todd Lincoln has inspired the darkly comic and deeply silly stage play Oh, Mary!, currently playing on Broadway in New York City and in London’s West End. *Warning: spoilers for the stage play ahead * Leaving historical accuracy far behind, it gleefully reframes her as a miserable alcoholic longing to escape her closeted homosexual presidential husband and become a cabaret star. Who was the real Mary Todd Lincoln? Mary Todd Lincoln was the wife of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, who served from 1861 to 1865. Following his assassination, she would live for another 17 years, although she was consumed by her grief and deteriorating mental health. Her sad end was the more poignant given that, in her youth, Mary had the makings for a successful role in the political landscape of Washington, DC, thanks to an upbringing that fostered her education, intelligence and social standing. Born on 13 December 1818, she was the fourth child of a wealthy and well-connected businessman, Robert Smith Todd, and Eliza Ann Parker Todd, daughter of a prominent family. Mary lost her mother at the age of six and her father quickly remarried. With a total of 16 children, there was little affection in the Todd household. Yet Mary r…

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Did the Industrial Revolution make life better – or worse?
type: item
date: 2026-03-27T09:35:15.000Z
creator: Professor Emma Griffin
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: We’re often told a simple story: before factories, people lived peaceful, rural lives. Then industry arrived, bringing smoke, slums and suffering. But Professor Emma Griffin reveals in this video that the truth was far more complex
encoded: We’re often told a simple story: before factories, people lived peaceful, rural lives. Then industry arrived, bringing smoke, slums and suffering. But as this episode reveals, the reality was far more complex. In this video, Emma Griffin, Professor of History and Head of School at Queen Mary, University of London, explores how most people – even at the height of industrialisation – never worked in factories. Rural life was already harsh, wages were low, and poverty was widespread. Cities brought overcrowding and pollution – but they also offered steady employment, higher wages, education, entertainment and political engagement. Did industrialisation make life better or worse? It certainly made society more complicated, more unequal, more dynamic, and more modern than ever before. View Green Video on the source website

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Why did Britain industrialise first? It’s more complicated than you think
type: item
date: 2026-03-13T09:26:19.000Z
creator: Professor Emma Griffin
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
description: The Industrial Revolution didn’t happen because the British were uniquely inventive. There's much more to the story, explains Professor Emma Griffin
encoded: From spinning jennies to steam engines, British factories changed the world in the 18th and 19th centuries. But those machines didn’t operate in isolation. In this video, Professor Emma Griffin, Professor of History and Head of School at Queen Mary, University of London, reveals how – without coal, cotton, and colonial networks – the revolution might never have happened. In the second episode of her HistoryExtra series on the Industrial Revolution, Professor Griffin explores why Britain was the first country to industrialise – and why the answer lies not just in technology, but in empire, economics, and exploitation. Was it the abundant coal under British soil? The breakthroughs in machinery? Or something more hidden – like the profits of slavery and access to cheap raw materials? From the growth of the textile industry to the importance of African enslavement in Caribbean plantations, this video dismantles the old myths of British exceptionalism, and shows how the wealth and resources extracted through colonialism helped fuel industrial growth at home. View Green Video on the source website

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"It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
type: item
date: 2026-02-25T15:30:07.000Z
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Death
subject: Georgian
subject: Historical events
subject: Murder
subject: Slavery
description: In the 18th century, developments in finance, weapons and industry converged to create a modern economy born of bloodshed. Clifton Crais explores how killing powered the industrial age
encoded: Imagine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C heat of summer you’re accompanying Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark as they head west towards the Pacific Ocean, exploring the commercial possibilities of this vast new country. Stretching away in front of you is a sea of chocolate-brown: thousands of animals, each standing as high as a man and weighing upwards of 900kg. Now picture putrefying carcasses and heaps of bleached bones extending as far as the eye can see. “The bones were everywhere,” homesteaders complained, “as thick as cones under a big fir tree”, and so numerous that it was impossible to plough the land. That was mere decades after Lewis and Clark’s fabled expedition. By the end of the 19th century, America’s population of bison had been reduced from tens of millions to around 350. Much of this killing unfolded over the course of just a few years – one of the most concentrated acts of ecological destruction in history. The usual explanation for the slaughter of the American bison ties it to the government’s decision to solve its ‘Indian problem’ – kill the bison and you destroy the Indigenous peoples’ food supply. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who had fought in the Civil War before heading west to subdue the Native American population. But politics didn’t kill the bison. Economics did. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-515301392webready-0494d00-e1771951017974.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing large piles of bison hides piled up after many animals have been killed for their skins" title="Thousands of bison hides lie in huge piles in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878. Advances in chemistry enabled hides to be processed and used in belts in industrial mac…

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The Industrial Revolution wasn’t what you think
type: item
date: 2026-02-13T09:16:08.000Z
creator: Professor Emma Griffin
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
description: The Industrial Revolution wasn’t just about cotton mills and steam engines – it was a radical transformation of how the world worked. Professor Emma Griffin explains more
encoded: Professor Emma Griffin, Professor of History and Head of School at Queen Mary, University of London, explores the real story behind the world’s most transformative era. As you'll hear, it wasn’t just spinning machines and factories – it was a complete shift in how we produced goods, traded, and lived. Find out why the shift from local, home-based manufacturing to globalised mass production changed the course of human history. View Green Video on the source website

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Be wary of technology’s big promises, but roll with the changes
type: item
date: 2025-07-07T08:45:07.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: From spinning jennies to ChatGPT, the advent of new technology often sparks widespread anxiety, Professor Emma Griffin tells Dr David Musgrove. But the industrial revolution shows we can adapt
encoded: I hate my vacuum cleaner with a passion that sometimes surprises me. I was sucked into buying an expensive model a few years ago. When it’s working, it’s great, no doubt about it. But it’s often not working, as it gets clogged up very easily. So I spend a lot of time taking it apart and removing the blockages. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there is a substantial element of user error at play here, and there is definitely a surfeit of dog hair that I’m asking it to deal with. But, for a labour-saving device, I spend a lot more time labouring on it than it does labouring for me. Quite often, I revert to a broom instead. One of the most pressing questions for our modern age is how to navigate the rapid advance of technology. From artificial intelligence to automation, we’re told that machines will make our lives easier. But will they? Or are we simply shifting the labour elsewhere? Are we creating more work for ourselves, or creating machines that do all our work and make us obsolete? And how do we cope with it all? To shed light on this, I spoke to Professor Emma Griffin, a historian of the industrial revolution and author of Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (Yale University Press, 2020). Can we take any lessons from her research into working-class life in 19th-century Britain, a period when the white heat of technology was really smoking? The age of machines The industrial revolution, which began in Britain in the late 18th century, transformed everything. Machines began to replace manual labour on a mass scale. Factories powered by steam engines and filled with spinning jennies and power looms revolutionised the production of textiles. Coal mining, iron smelting and transport infrastructure all expanded dramatically. It was an age of innovation, but also of anxiety. “There was always a lot of fear that new technology and new machinery would throw people out of employment,” Griffin explains, “[That] they would de-skill jobs. It would lea…

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What working-class autobiographies can tell us about the Industrial Revolution
type: item
date: 2024-12-05T00:00:00.000Z
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: Emma Griffin explains how 19th-century working-class autobiographies could revise our understanding of the industrial revolution
encoded: The British industrial revolution stands out as a pivotal moment in human history. But when we think about the men, women and children who, with their strong backs and nimble fingers, did the most to power it, we tend to feel that there is less to celebrate. All of the great Victorian commentators – Engels, Dickens, Blake – painted those industrial times in a very dark hue: they lamented the introduction of new working patterns that compelled men to work at the relentless pace of the machines; children forced into factories and down mines at ever-younger ages; families squeezed into dark, disease-ridden cities; and no future but the workhouse for those who slipped through the net. Listen on the podcast | The Industrial Revolution: everything you wanted to know Their dismal litany echoed through the 20th century as a succession of pioneering social historians – Barbara and John Hammond, Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson, to name a few – turned their attention to the devastating impact of the industrial revolution on the working poor. Workers’ words Yet, despite the frequency with which various versions of these bleak perspectives have been retold, their central claim – that this period was worse than anything that has gone before – has not received the scrutiny it deserves. In particular, it is remarkable that so little effort has been made to listen to what working people themselves had to say about their life and times. Of course, it is usually countered that such an effort would be futile because such people did not leave behind much in the way of written sources. But though it is certainly true that they wrote far less than their social superiors, it is not the case that they wrote nothing at all. Their legacy is a little-known but remarkable collection of autobiographies written by working people. If we listen to these, we hear a story very different from the one that we are used to. Historians have long been aware of the existence of such memoirs, but most have bee…

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From family to factory: women's lives during the Industrial Revolution
type: item
date: 2024-12-02T09:00:51.000Z
creator: Elinor Evans
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Period
description: The Industrial Revolution saw thousands of women enter the workplace alongside men – but it was far from emancipatory, writes Elinor Evans
encoded: The Industrial Revolution caused a dramatic shift in women’s roles in society. Before industrialisation, the household would have been the centre of production, and women’s work largely confined to the domestic sphere, but no less physical for it. Tasks such as fetching water, and tending livestock would have kept women as busy as clothing and feeding a family, while many also took other work into their home such as hand-spinning or weaving. Cottage industry, as it was called, didn’t entirely end with the arrival of large- scale manufacturing, but the advent of machinery had an irreversible impact on women’s lives. As machines replaced individual labour and burgeoning industries needed coal, women became part of the growing working classes that laboured in mines and mills. In the late 18th century, many families would seek employment together, with husband, wife and children all working at the same factory or pit, while for many single women, taking a job outside the home offered the chance of greater independence. LEARN MORE: Women's lives during different historical periods But women were seen as less physically strong and skilled than men and were paid less. Many employers were quick to exploit this cheaper option, and soon, tasks such as printing and working at spinning machines that didn’t require as much strength and were easy to learn, became seen as ‘women’s labour’. Work-life-imbalance Despite the disparity in pay, the conditions in many factories were no less dangerous for women. They could work as many as 80 hours in a week, were offered few breaks, and often served inedible food. In 1832, 23-year- old Elizabeth Bentley was interviewed by a parliamentary investigation into conditions for textile workers. She described working in the card room of a flax mill near Leeds. “It was so dusty, the dust got up my lungs, and the work was so hard... I got so bad in health, that when I pulled the baskets down, I pulled my bones out of their places." As well as the l…

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"An enlightened turn": how medicine (and the vaccination) developed in Victorian Britain
type: item
date: 2024-11-25T09:00:41.000Z
creator: Emma Slattery Williams
subject: Georgian
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
description: With industrialisation making living conditions worse in the cities, the improvements to hospital provision, surgery and the care of the poor needed to gain apace. Emma Slattery Williams explores how healthcare in 18th-century Britain changed, and the pioneering preventative treatments that helped combat a killer disease
encoded: By the late 18th century, Britain was seeing the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, a process that eventually led to a huge migration of people to industrial cities, with widespread overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions. Drinking water was often contaminated with raw sewage, rubbish rotted in the streets, and crowded living conditions meant disease could easily spread. As many as one in five children died before their second birthday. There was, however, growing institutional provision for curing the sick and the number of hospitals grew in Britain – some of these were run by local parishes, while others were founded by philanthropists wishing to help the poor and perhaps improve their own social position in the process. In return for an annual contribution, a benefactor could recommend a sick person for admission to hospital. “The notion was that you could intervene and save working class people who might otherwise die for lack of healthcare,” explains Mary Fissell, professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. “It was part of a larger, almost mercantilist, view of the health of the population being a significant variable for government.” Read more | The history of vaccination: from Edward Jenner to anti-vaxxers The 18th century also saw improvements in surgery. Surgeons such as William Cheselden, Percival Pott, and John Hunter delved into anatomical studies, diagnosing new diseases, and inventing new procedures. In 1745, the Company of Barber Surgeons was divided into two separate bodies by an act of Parliament, thus forming the Company of Surgeons, a body that formalised the training and licensing of surgeons and which today is known as the Royal College of Surgeons. Dispensaries began to be established – these provided what we might today class as outpatient medical treatment and advice, solely for the poor and free of charge. By 1800, about 40 dispensaries had been founded across Britain. Professor Fissell explains: “In 18th-ce…

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