HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-11-26T17:20:32.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Think you know everything about the history of Thanksgiving? Here’s 21 facts that will prove you wrong
items: Toilets through time: early modern chamber pots
items: Myspace and MTV: how will future historians study the 21st century?
items: Sex and sensationalism: a history of the tabloids
items: "Violence and American politics have gone hand in hand right from the beginning": a history of political violence
items: Crime fiction history: everything you wanted to know
items: Britain and the Caribbean: from slavery to Black Lives Matter
items: Tariffs and trade wars: a history of economic warfare
items: Trump's tariffs: “They are dramatic only if you have a short historical memory”
items: Blue Fugates: the rare blood disorder that turned the ‘Blue People of Kentucky’ blue

Think you know everything about the history of Thanksgiving? Here’s 21 facts that will prove you wrong
type: item
date: 2025-11-26T15:03:54.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
subject: Thanksgiving
description: From tales of pumpkin-pie panics to the story of the president who turned his dinner into a pet, Jonny Wilkes uncovers the surprising history behind Thanksgiving: America’s turkey-tastic holiday
encoded: There are only two accounts of the first Thanksgiving The story of the first Thanksgiving has been highly mythologised in American history. In 1621, the so-called Pilgrims who travelled on the Mayflower and formed the settlement of Plymouth, in Massachusetts, came together with the local indigenous peoples, the Wampanoag, for a feast to celebrate a good harvest and the growing friendship of settler and Native American in the New World. That is the version long told in schools. In truth, the Pilgrims threw themselves a harvest festival and around 90 of the Wampanoag showed up. Without their help, especially a man named Squanto, the European settlers would have likely perished in their brutal first winter. The only sources for the three-day feast are sparse mentions in writings by two of the Pilgrims, Edward Winslow and William Bradford. Neither actually used the word ‘thanksgiving’, however, and since they gave few details of what happened, the mythologising took over. They may not have eaten turkey at the first Thanksgiving For many Americans, no modern Thanksgiving meal is complete without a turkey as the centrepiece of the table. It’s unclear, however, whether this tradition began in 1621. The Pilgrims cooked up a selection of fowl – which may have included turkey, but could just as easily been duck and goose – while the Wampanoag killed a number of deer, meaning venison was on the menu. They might have had seafood, too, including eels, clams, mussels and lobster. Yes, William Bradford mentioned a “great store of wild Turkies” in the region, but the bird did not become a staple of the Thanksgiving meal until the 19th century. The first Thanksgiving may have happened earlier than 1621 While the 1621 feast became the foundation for the Thanksgiving holiday, perhaps Americans should celebrate a different year. Other acts of thanksgiving, based in the tradition of Christian harvest festivals, took place earlier in the short-lived Popham Colony in Maine and Jamestown i…

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Toilets through time: early modern chamber pots
type: item
date: 2025-11-19T10:55:20.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Toilets through time podcast series
description: Professor Mark Stoyle leads David Musgrove into the early modern water closet
encoded: David Musgrove and Mark Stoyle tackle the toilets of the early modern period – from Samuel Pepys' graphic garderobe confessions to chamber pots and literary loo paper Samuel Pepys describes in great detail the toilet experiences of 17th-century Londoners. But how far did that reflect the bathroom habits of the whole population? For this final episode of Toilets through Time, Professor Mark Stoyle leads David Musgrove into the early modern water closet.

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Myspace and MTV: how will future historians study the 21st century?
type: item
date: 2025-10-29T09:12:09.000Z
creator: Matt Elton
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Jane Winters and John Wills discuss how social media and digital records chart the story of recent decades – and how they pose a challenge for historians
encoded: From social-media accounts to TV shows and video games, recent decades offer an enormous wealth of material for future historians to explore. But what are the challenges presented by this vast amount of data? And how will historical researchers a hundred years from now make sense of 2025? Matt Elton spoke to historians Jane Winters and John Wills to answer these questions – and find out how the ephemeral digital archives of our current era might differ from the historical sources of previous generations.

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Sex and sensationalism: a history of the tabloids
type: item
date: 2025-10-24T14:15:58.000Z
creator: Jon Bauckham
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Terry Kirby investigates the 500-year history of tabloid journalism – from the first gossip rags to the muckraking exploits of the 20th-century popular press
encoded: Tabloid journalists often get a bad press. From publishing libellous headlines to hacking celebrities’ phones, recent years have not exactly done much to enhance Fleet Street’s reputation. But where did tabloid journalism originally come from? And have media barons always had such a profound influence on current affairs? Journalism lecturer Terry Kirby talks to Jon Bauckham about the evolution of the popular press, covering everything from Georgian gossip sheets to the rise of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Terry Kirby is the author of The Newsmongers: A History of Tabloid Journalism (Reaktion Books, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon

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"Violence and American politics have gone hand in hand right from the beginning": a history of political violence
type: item
date: 2025-09-18T10:17:20.000Z
creator: Matt Elton
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
subject: Trends-News
description: Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July 2024, Matt Elton spoke to historian Adam IP Smith about the history of violent attacks on US leaders. In this interview, first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine, Smith discussed the political and social repercussions of such assaults across the decades
encoded: Matt Elton: Assassinations, and attempted assassinations, have occurred around the world throughout history. But is there a particularly American aspect to this story of political violence? Adam IP Smith: I think there is. Political violence is hardly unique to the US, sadly, so we must be careful about ascribing American exceptionalism to what we saw at Donald Trump’s rally [in Pennsylvania on 13 July 2024]. There is nevertheless an American political tradition into which this specific kind of gun violence – the attempted assassination of leading political figures, especially presidents and presidential candidates – fits. On the podcast | Adam IP Smith on assassinations that shaped US history As a historian, do you think it’s a stretch to suggest that the violence that shaped the founding of the modern nation may have paved the way for later political violence in the US? Certainly the political polarisation and the potential for political violence we’re seeing today form part of a recurrent pattern in US history. There are several reasons, but maybe the core one is that there’s long been a fundamental disagreement within the US about who constitutes the legitimate American nation. That has led to a fear, genuinely held by significant numbers of people involved in the political process, that the stakes are so high because if their political enemies win then everything will be lost – that their freedom, the republic, even their own place in society will be jeopardised. That’s partly because, from the beginning, the president of the United States has held many of the powers held by monarchs – in some respects, even greater powers. George Washington had more influence over the government of the US than George III had over the government in London, for instance. So the monarchical style of the US head of state puts a huge amount of pressure on that role, which needs to feel like the embodiment of America at that particular moment in time. The first US president targeted…

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Crime fiction history: everything you wanted to know
type: item
date: 2025-08-31T07:00:43.000Z
creator: Isabel King
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
description: From Hercule Poirot to Sherlock Holmes, Martin Edwards answers key questions on the history of the crime fiction genre
encoded: From Hercule Poirot to Sherlock Holmes, crime fiction has long been a popular genre. But what was the first crime novel? How has crime writing affected real-life cases? And what was the 'Detection Club'? In this 'everything you wanted to know' episode, Isabel King is joined by crime fiction author and researcher Martin Edwards to discuss the history of the influential genre.

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Britain and the Caribbean: from slavery to Black Lives Matter
type: item
date: 2025-08-25T07:00:23.000Z
creator: Rob Attar
subject: General Modern
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Imaobong Umoren argues that we need to take a longer view of British involvement in the Caribbean
encoded: Histories of British involvement in the Caribbean tend to focus mainly on the period of plantation slavery but, in her new book Empire Without End, Imaobong Umoren argues that we need to take a broader view. It's only by taking the story back to the 16th century and forward until the present, she contends, that we can fully understand the intertwining themes of colonialism and racism in the region – and see how they connect to events in Britain. In this episode, Imaobong explores these ideas in conversation with Rob Attar. Imaobong Umoren is the author of Empire Without End: A New History of Britain and the Caribbean (Fern Press, 2025). Buy it now from Waterstones

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Tariffs and trade wars: a history of economic warfare
type: item
date: 2025-04-02T08:00:31.000Z
creator: Matt Elton
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Frank Trentmann explores the long history of economic warfare and considers whether today's tariffs are as historically unprecedented as we might think
encoded: Trade wars and tariffs have once again been making headlines in recent weeks, as US president Donald Trump's government adopts combative economic policies. But are such approaches really that unusual? Speaking to Matt Elton, Frank Trentmann looks back at centuries of economic warfare – and reveals the historical factors that have sparked it.

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Trump's tariffs: “They are dramatic only if you have a short historical memory”
type: item
date: 2025-04-01T14:00:52.000Z
creator: Frank Trentmann
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
description: Tariffs and trade wars have hit the headlines in recent months as US president Donald Trump pursues aggressive economic policies. But are they really so unprecedented? Frank Trentmann spoke to Matt Elton about centuries of ‘discriminatory taxes’
encoded: Matt Elton: Which historical precedents sprung to mind when you were reading the news about high tariffs being imposed by the US on imports of commodities such as steel and aluminium? Frank Trentmann: States have always tried to control what comes in and goes out. But it’s probably worth mentioning, in the current context, that a tariff was one of the first-ever acts of Congress passed by the United States in the late 18th century, mainly as a way to bring money into its coffers. And that’s one of the key points we should make about tariffs: although we tend to refer to them generically, they can have many different functions. One is raising revenue; another is to keep out foreign competition to benefit producers at home; yet another is as a negotiating tool, to improve trade or political relations. The big problem we can see from history is that you can’t achieve those three goals simultaneously because they cancel out one another. So nations have come up with a range of different ways to try to reconcile those three aims and to maximise how well they work. Is it true that, despite variations in form designed to balance those three objectives, tariffs are always taxes imposed on goods and services? It’s important to make the point that a tariff is a discriminatory tax, to distinguish it from a regular revenue duty, which is not set out to be discriminatory. Britain in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, for instance, was a free-trade country which had revenue duties – for example, on beer – but these applied to domestic beer as well as foreign beer. They are so-called excise duties. Tariffs only target foreign imports, with the specific purpose of giving home producers an advantage over foreign producers trying to sell their goods in your market, which it penalises. So that’s a big distinction. When we chart how tariffs have been applied, and trade wars have kicked off, throughout the centuries, does it tell us anything to look at the changing nature of the goods inv…

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Blue Fugates: the rare blood disorder that turned the ‘Blue People of Kentucky’ blue
type: item
date: 2025-02-24T08:37:41.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Evergreen
description: The name sounds like an old folk legend, or the title of a sci-fi story, but for the generations of isolated families in eastern Kentucky, the phrase ‘feeling blue’ had a very literal meaning
encoded: Anyone who strayed into the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly around an area known as Troublesome Creek, might have come across a close-knit cluster of families. Here, there would have been plenty of people with surnames like Fugate, Smith, Combs, Ritchie and Stacy. Not that they would not have been difficult to spot: as their nickname the ‘Blue People of Kentucky’ suggests, there was a good chance they had blue skin. Who were the Blue People of Kentucky? The origins of the Blue People of Kentucky go back to 1820, when a French immigrant named Martin Fugate came to the United States. Settling at Troublesome Creek, he married an American woman, Elizabeth Smith, and together they had seven children. Imagine their shock, however, when four of them were born blue. There were no obvious health concerns and, otherwise, they developed normally. Yet they remained head-to-toe indigo for the rest of their lives. That could have been the end of the story, were it not for the remoteness of the region. It did not exactly attract a diverse wave of settlers willing to make the difficult journey and endure the inhospitality there once they did. That meant that marriage and inbreeding between a small number of families became common practice. Considering the shallow gene pool, it might come as no surprise that each new generation welcomed more blue members. Read more | Why were people of noble birth said to be ‘blue blooded’? It was only in 1960 – 140 years after Martin Fugate came to the US – that the strange condition became the subject of medical investigation. That was thanks to the efforts of a young haematologist at the University of Kentucky, Dr Madison Cawein, and a nurse named Ruth Pendergrass. The problem would be to find one of the Blue People, with Troublesome Creek many hours away from Cawein’s base at the university. Then one day out of the blue, as it were, two blue-skinned siblings, Rachel and Patrick Ritchie, just…

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