HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-01-29T14:23:37.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Humble Victorian heroes: the ordinary Britons who sacrificed their lives for others
items: In 1848, the US ended a war with its neighbour and took its land. What happened next?
items: Buckingham Palace was the height of royal power – so why did Queen Victoria and Albert hate it?
items: A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York
items: These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators?
items: Meet the reluctant US president who accidentally changed American political norms forever
items: A short history of ghost hunting
items: Fake news and the Dreyfus affair: the media-fuelled scandal that divided France
items: Did he photograph the ghost of a president? Meet the scheming Victorian who exploited a grieving America
items: Toilets through time: Victorian lavatories

Humble Victorian heroes: the ordinary Britons who sacrificed their lives for others
type: item
date: 2026-01-28T16:00:38.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Death
subject: Historical people
description: Statues celebrate monarchs, rulers and conquerors – but who remembers the brave folk who gave their lives to save others? Anna Maria Barry recounts stories of self-sacrificing but otherwise ordinary people from the 19th and 20th centuries who are commemorated in one London park
encoded: Tucked away in the City of London, a short walk north of St Paul’s Cathedral, lies a curious, oddly-shaped, leafy little sanctuary. Opened in 1880, Postman’s Park is named for the workers at the nearby General Post Office who liked to visit during their breaks. Today, though, it’s best known as the home of the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, honouring dozens of heroic Londoners who lost their lives while trying to save others, most in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Unusually, the memorial describes the details of each tragic death, from drownings and carriage accidents to house fires and poisonings. No wonder this moving, if somewhat macabre, celebration of bravery continues to fascinate. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1411624515webready-b2b4c26-e1769529632536.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a low, long wooden and brick structure against a building. In front of it there is a garden with a stone font in the middle" title="The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice honours ordinary people (Image by Getty Images)" /> Flames faced with fortitude One such quietly heroic Londoner was Alice Ayres. During the night of 24 April 1885, the 26-year-old lay asleep in her bedroom on Union Street, in the home of her older sister and brother-in-law, who employed her as a nursemaid and household assistant. Sharing this room were her nieces Edith, Ellen and Elizabeth, aged five, four and three, respectively. Shortly after 2am, Alice was jolted awake by the crackling of flames, and quickly realised that something was very wrong. Her brother-in-law’s oil and paint shop on the ground floor was on fire, and his wares were rapidly accelerating the flames. Alice had to think fast. Unable to exit the bedroom, she rushed to the window and threw it open to scream for help. She grabbed two bedsheets to tie together before realising that this makeshift rope wouldn’t enable her to lower her nieces to safety…

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In 1848, the US ended a war with its neighbour and took its land. What happened next?
type: item
date: 2026-01-22T13:59:22.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: A peace treaty ended the Mexican–American War in February 1848 and officially left California as new American territory. Unbeknownst to any of the negotiators, gold had been discovered in California just nine days before the treaty was signed
encoded: In February 1848, after almost two years of conflict, Mexico signed a peace treaty that formally ended a war with the United States which it no longer had any chance of winning. But the peace treaty didn’t only mark an end to the war. It saw the formal loss of a huge swathe of Mexican territory to the victorious US, significantly expanding the American frontier to the west and south and marking a new border. This was only one more chapter in the long history of American expansionism; another instance of Manifest Destiny – the quasi-religious belief that the United States was destined to span the continent. It was an idea that would, in just a few decades, cause US sights to turn towards Alaska and Greenland. The 1848 treaty brought peace, but just nine days before it was signed, gold was discovered in California – this soon-to-be American territory. The discovery came on 24 January 1848 when James W Marshall found flakes of gold while supervising construction of a sawmill on the American River in the Sierra Nevada foothills. This began an economic boom that shaped the next decades of American prosperity. For Mexico, the timing couldn’t have been crueller. According to historian Paul Gillingham, that short period of days between the signing of the treaty and the discovery of gold marks one of the most consequential turning points in North American history: as much as it was actively a disaster for Mexico, it put rocket fuel beneath the rise of the United States. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Gillingham situates this moment within a much longer story of imperial inheritance, fragile statehood and American expansionism. Mexico’s colonial inheritance When Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1821, it inherited an enormous territorial claim. On paper, the new republic stretched “from Oregon in this giant triangle, to Texas and then down to Guatemala,” as Gillingham puts it. These borders were the legacy of Spanish colonial administration rather than the res…

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Buckingham Palace was the height of royal power – so why did Queen Victoria and Albert hate it?
type: item
date: 2026-01-10T10:45:27.000Z
creator: Serafina Kenny
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had to battle to turn Buckingham Palace into the iconic royal residency that it serves as today
encoded: For most young married couples, moving into a new house represents an exciting new start. But for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, their newlywed bliss was marred by their cold, smelly, disorganised new home: Buckingham Palace. Today Buckingham Palace is synonymous with the British monarchy, but this was not always the case. “It’s only in the 20th century [that we get] Buckingham Palace as we know it today,” says Kate Williams, speaking on an episode of her HistoryExtra Academy series: Royal Residences: Secrets and Scandals. Victoria and Albert were the first monarchs to use it as their primary residence, and it took substantial work to turn it into a home fit for a queen. Before Victoria, Buckingham Palace wasn’t an official royal residence Buckingham House first passed into the royal family’s ownership in 1761. It was originally intended only to be a retreat for Queen Victoria’s grandmother, Queen Charlotte, who loved the house and raised 14 of her 15 children there, including Victoria’s father. It officially became known as a palace from the 1790s, but St James’ Palace continued to be the main royal residence. The royal family steadily began to spend more and more time at Buckingham Palace, though it would never become the official residence of George IV and William IV – Victoria’s uncles – either. In fact, William IV thought of it as “something of a white elephant” that he was “stuck with”, Williams says. He tried to pass it on by offering it as a new Parliament building when the Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834, but MPs rejected it as too dingy. Nevertheless, work was slowly being done on the palace to expand and renovate it. The main phase of this work was finally finished in May 1837. By this time, St James’s Palace had become increasingly less desirable. The area around the main residence had been built up, so there was less privacy available for royals living there, and its Tudor architecture and fire damage meant it was no longer a comfortable pl…

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A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York
type: item
date: 2026-01-08T14:31:50.000Z
creator: Serafina Kenny
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Pioneering journalist Nellie Bly went undercover to expose the shocking conditions inside an infamous Victorian-era asylum in New York
encoded: In autumn 1887, a 23-year-old woman checked into a temporary boarding house for working women in New York City. She immediately alarmed the other residents: she didn’t sleep for days, and insisted that she didn’t remember who she was. But for all that it looked as if she might be in need of psychiatric support, the woman wasn’t experiencing any mental ill health. She was, in fact, a journalist. And she was trying to get herself admitted to a psychiatric unit for a story. Elizabeth Jane Cochran, better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was working for the New York World newspaper, reporting on the conditions inside the infamous Woman’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in NYC’s East River. The resulting article and book would shock America, and lead to reform. But it also helped to boost Bly’s reputation usher in a new style of sensationalist investigative reporting that would come to be known as ‘stunt journalism’. She became a “proper bona fide celebrity, in a way that almost no journalists of the 19th century were,” explains Dr Bob Nicholson, a historian of Victorian media and popular culture at Edge Hill University, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast about how the story unfolded. How Nellie Bly tricked psychiatric doctors Soon after starting to alarm her fellow boarding house residents, Bly was examined by the police, a judge and doctors at a hospital. “She had the challenge of trying to convince people that she was mad, but not to also terribly mistreat her. [Eventually] the judge sent her to a hospital in New York to be examined. And from there, they were absolutely convinced she's mad. Every doctor was 100 per cent certain,” Nicholson says. Read more | What was life like for 'ordinary' Victorians? “They then send her to Blackwell's Island, which is a small island in the river between Manhattan and Queens.” Her employer, the New York World, promised to retrieve her in ten days – meaning that “for those ten days, she was entirely at the mercy of the people …

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These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators?
type: item
date: 2025-12-26T16:00:35.000Z
creator: Rosalind Crone
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Death
subject: Historical people
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
subject: Murder
subject: Victorian crime and punishment
description: Women accused of violent murders have often faced assumptions about their motives and disbelief that the ‘gentle sex’ could commit such bloody crimes. Rosalind Crone investigates four cases from the 19th century
encoded: 1. A female bodysnatcher? At a time when selling human bodies to anatomy schools reaped hefty payouts, some desperate criminals killed to get their hands on fresh corpses. Was Elizabeth Ross one such grasping murderer? In the early 19th century, ‘resurrection men’ dug up recently buried corpses to meet the huge demand for cadavers to use in teaching and surgical practice. Others were too impatient to wait for someone to die before snatching a body – and took matters into their own hands. Between 1828 and 1831, William Burke (operating with accomplice William Hare) in Edinburgh, and John Bishop and Thomas Williams in London, were convicted and hanged for murdering numerous people in order to sell their bodies to anatomy schools. Indeed, all of the infamous bodysnatchers of 19th-century Britain were male. It’s certainly conceivable that women were involved in the trade as helpmates – but could they ever have been the instigators, or even killers? Meet Elizabeth Ross (alias Cook), a 38-year-old Irish immigrant in London with a reputation for drunkenness, violence and petty crime. She had once been accused of skinning alive six of her neighbours’ cats, and it was rumoured that she had murdered a 14-year-old girl who went missing while in her care. Elizabeth’s common-law husband, Edward Cook, who worked as a nightwatchman for the parish of Aldgate, associated with resurrection men. Little wonder, then, that fellow parishioner Ann Buton was very concerned when her grandmother, Caroline Walsh – at that time an 84-year-old pedlar – accepted Elizabeth’s offer of cheap lodgings. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/Credit-Wellcome-CollectionEliza-Rosswebready-6e9dca8-e1766488850584.jpg" width="613" height="420" alt="A black and white sketch of an elderly woman wearing a frilly bonnet and a high necked coat" title="An illustration of “the atrocious Eliza Ross” from an 1832 book about London ‘Burkers’ – bodysnatchers – including an accoun…

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Meet the reluctant US president who accidentally changed American political norms forever
type: item
date: 2025-12-20T10:45:42.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: In an era when candidates were expected to remain silent, detached and above the chase for votes, James Garfield’s improvised presidential campaign in the late 19th century transformed the race for the highest office in the USA
encoded: When James A Garfield reluctantly accepted the Republican nomination for president in June 1880, he stepped into a fraught political culture that was governed by strict codes of restraint. Put simply, in the late 19th century, a presidential candidate wasn’t meant to appear eager for the job. Publicly courting votes was distasteful, demeaning, and incompatible with the dignity of the office. As biographer CW Goodyear puts it, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, the prevailing view was that “if you are interested in the job, it’s not for you.” The job of actively campaigning was delegated to party operatives, loyal newspapers and travelling surrogates. The candidate was supposed to stay out of public view while conveying lofty neutrality. On one level, that was a culture that suited Garfield. He was a man who, to all appearances, never intended to become the Republican party’s presidential nominee, let alone the actual president. So how did he – who was both dignified and reluctant – end up being the man who dismantled such norms of dignified reluctance? It feels like an irony, and yet, as Goodyear explains, Garfield’s election campaign of 1880 did indeed mark a turning point that upended the long-standing taboo against candidates speaking directly to voters. It changed campaign culture forever. American presidential ideals in the 19th century “It was seen as being desperate and pathetic for a presidential candidate to go rally voters. That was seen as being beneath the office,” explains Goodyear, setting out the attitudes that prevailed as the 1880 presidential election loomed. But where had that notion come from? Read more | The 5 most notorious presidents in US history The expectation that candidates should remain silent was rooted in early republican ideals inherited from the late 18th century, when the American colonies had won their independence from Britain and forged the United States of America. The Founding Fathers had worried that unrestrained electionee…

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A short history of ghost hunting
type: item
date: 2025-12-15T08:00:30.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
description: Ben Machell discusses the history of ghost hunting
encoded: A spooky story during the Christmas season has become traditional – and the modern ghost story was invented by the Victorians, who embraced the supernatural and tried to understand it. Ben Machell has investigated the history of ghost hunting and supernatural investigations since the mid-19th century for his new book, Chasing the Dark, and in this episode David Musgrove talks to Ben about the history of our passion for the paranormal.

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Fake news and the Dreyfus affair: the media-fuelled scandal that divided France
type: item
date: 2025-11-24T09:00:02.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Civil rights
subject: Historical people
description: The wrongful conviction for treason of a Jewish army captain in France in the late 19th century exposed antisemitism and virulent nationalism – but also, as Mike Rapport reveals, sparked a flood of ‘fake news’ that presaged the worst of the modern media landscape
encoded: In the oppressive heat of his cell in the Mont-Valérien military prison west of Paris on 31 August 1898, Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry wrote a despairing letter to his wife, drank half a bottle of rum, and killed himself. This desperate act was a pivotal moment in one of the best-known causes celebres in modern history: the Dreyfus Affair. The story of Henry’s suicide, following his arrest for forging a document in the controversial case, was co-opted by the nationalist rightwing media as part of a tidal wave of coverage that threatened to destabilise French democracy and public trust in the Republic. The background is well known today. In September 1894, Henry, a counter-espionage officer, had uncovered evidence of a mole within French military intelligence. A cleaner working in the German embassy (and in Henry’s pay) had found a memorandum, since dubbed the ‘bordereau’, written by an officer in the French General Staff revealing military secrets. The handwriting was identified as that of Alfred Dreyfus, an army captain then working in the War Ministry, who was arrested, court-martialled, publicly degraded and hauled off to solitary confinement on the notoriously harsh penal colony of Devil’s Island, off French Guiana. But the army had the wrong man. Contradictions and irregularities in the case soon began to appear. In August 1896, the new head of military intelligence, Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart, was examining more papers stolen from the German embassy. The handwriting on one was identical to that in the bordereau used to convict Dreyfus – but the signature was that of Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a dissipated, debt-ridden, disreputable officer who had been selling secrets to the Germans for two years. Dreyfus, Picquart realised, was innocent. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/BAL1756949-CMYKWeb-Ready-2c9d689.jpg" width="3683" height="2456" alt="An engraving shows a man lying dead on the floor, while a p…

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Did he photograph the ghost of a president? Meet the scheming Victorian who exploited a grieving America
type: item
date: 2025-11-22T10:45:44.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: In the aftermath of the American Civil War, a grieving nation turned towards spiritualism in the hope of seeing the dead once more. Facilitated by new technologies like photography, some unscrupulous fraudsters stepped in to manipulate the vulnerable
encoded: In the decades after the American Civil War ended in 1865, the United States was a nation still grappling with its own grief. As many as 750,000 people had died in the conflict as they fought their own countrymen. It was a scale of loss unprecedented since the inception of the United States as an independent nation. Families were torn apart, as many husbands, sons and fathers had died on American battlefields. Of course, with the widespread loss, many people were struggling to come to terms with their grief, which in turn created a vulnerability. And, for some less scrupulous individuals, that uncertainty and collective sadness presented a new opportunity for fame and wealth. Enter William Mumler, a so-called spirit photographer. Born in 1832, Mumler later became a fraudster who claimed to be able to reunite people with their dead loved ones via his photography. Mumler was only a small part of a quasi-religious movement, which, in the wake of the war, became a subject of fascination. “It was in the middle of the 19th century that ghost-hunting became a cultural obsession,” explains Alice Vernon, author and academic at Aberystwyth University, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “It swept across America as this new pseudo-scientific religion called spiritualism.” The rise of spiritualism was inseparable, says Vernon, from this wave of collective mourning. Science and spiritualism in the 19th century The idea of spiritualism offered many people a kind of conceptual comfort, and new technologies, including photography, were giving it a seemingly evidential backbone. “I think the reason why spirit photography became so popular at that moment,” Vernon says, “was because photography was a fairly new innovation, and it was something that people didn’t really understand.” Early photographs were incredibly precious. So when spiritualists claimed that cameras could record the unseen world – as well as the images of the dead – many saw it as a logical extension of what the te…

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Toilets through time: Victorian lavatories
type: item
date: 2025-11-19T07:00:30.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Toilets through time podcast series
description: David Musgrove and Jerry White revisit the avant-garde sewerage systems, shining porcelain cisterns, and unsanitary conditions of the Victorian era
encoded: In the fourth episode of Toilets Through Time, we’ve finally reached the age of avant-garde sewerage systems and shining porcelain cisterns: the Victorian era. David Musgrove is joined by historian and author Jerry White, who explains why the period nevertheless saw appalling sanitary conditions that sparked debates about the public health of Britain’s cities – and shares some surprising toilet-based euphemisms.

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