HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-02-27T15:31:04.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: "Forget AI – never has the role of the historian been more urgent"
items: "I can lose myself for hours in a hypnotic trance": why we should all spend more time in archives
items: Was Homer a real person? Michael Wood on the surprising origins of The Iliad
items: Uncontacted peoples: why do nearly 200 groups choose to live outside 'civilisation'?
items: He shot down 3 planes in 4 minutes: meet the WW2 pilot you won't have heard about
items: The Book of Kells: "a masterpiece of medieval calligraphy and painting"
items: AI: good or bad for history? Our experts weigh in
items: Michael Wood on the rise and fall of Asian empires
items: "Imagine starting a life with so little": the stories of South Asians in Britain
items: Michael Wood on the struggle of memory against forgetting | "Place names are signposts to the past"

"Forget AI – never has the role of the historian been more urgent"
type: item
date: 2026-02-27T15:30:44.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: 21st Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
description: "Great histories have been written under the intense pressure of events", writes Michael Wood
encoded: Recently, I read a news item about the jobs most likely to disappear because of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). And first among them, along with translators, are historians! Now I’m biased of course, but in times like these, when the president of the United States himself can tell the world that Ukraine started the war with Russia, it seems to me we need historians more than ever. In the face of spreading authoritarian rule and growing rightwing populism, good history is a refuge and a beacon. Complicating matters further, it often seems as if the owners of the mass media, billionaires who wish to shape debates, don’t want historians any more than they want independent journalists. It seems that from their perspective, the less historically literate the people are, the better. But in an open democratic society, we need informed historical perspectives, the painstaking interrogation of sources, and public explanation and interpretation. History is not only entertainment. In an age of lies and disinformation, history acts as our reality check. Read more | Artificial intelligence: a modern advance or an ancient nightmare? And history, don’t forget, is not a fireside job. Great histories have been written under the intense pressure of events, in the moment. Think of Thucydides writing as the Peloponnesian War raged, or Ibn Khaldun, lowered down a wall in a basket to parley with the monstrous Timur (Tamerlane) at the siege of Damascus. Or what about the heroic Emanuel Ringelblum? Samuel D Kassow’s account of Ringelblum’s efforts to record the experiences of those trapped in the Warsaw ghetto – Who Will Write Our History? – is surely one of the most staggering books about why we write. To be a true historian is to make a kind of pact with the living and the dead – and with future generations. We have a duty to tell the truth. A new book brings all this into sharp relief. Jean-Pierre Filiu is a distinguished French historian, the author of The Middle East: A Po…

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"I can lose myself for hours in a hypnotic trance": why we should all spend more time in archives
type: item
date: 2026-02-06T15:30:51.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
subject: Historical people
description: "Every one of us has an archive of our life, which is part of a bigger history", writes Kavita Puri
encoded: Having spent so much time in newsrooms and edit suites making television and radio documentaries, I have come to archives late on in my life. These are the precious places that hold records, whether that’s a digital file, an audio recording, or perhaps a paper diary, all of which can take you instantly back in time and place. I can lose myself for hours in some hypnotic trance as I stumble across a sentiment, a betrayal, a confession. All the while, I’m piecing together from these different voices a part of history. There are the official records and the private. And in both it can feel as if you are trespassing, as you turn a page that was perhaps once held by its author. In his beautiful book An Archive (Ivory Press, 2025) the British artist, potter and author Edmund de Waal writes: “Archives are purposeful and they are random. They record the personal and the institutional, plural and singular histories. They are passed on, inherited, stolen, plundered and lost. They are destroyed by accident and by design. They record rewritings, rethinking and retellings. They hold stories so they don’t disappear. They preserve information in the hope of a future.” Read more | “A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions”: the future of history Archives are, as he suggests, many things. They also reflect choices made about what and who we think should be recorded, and of what we remember. They can be self-consciously curated, but they may also not look in the direction we are expecting. Walking around de Waal’s vast studio in south London, I saw the rows of shelves that hold all the pots he has ever made (and are not currently out on loan to museums). He pointed at different ones, and was instantly able to explain when he’d made it and how he’d felt at that precise moment in time. Standing in that room, I realised the objects in that space were not only a record of his work, but were also an emotional map of his life. Archives are not just for his…

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Was Homer a real person? Michael Wood on the surprising origins of The Iliad
type: item
date: 2026-02-04T15:30:02.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
subject: Historical people
description: " Scholars have applied models used in genetic research to Homer’s Iliad", writes Michael Wood
encoded: Proust’s famous novel is called In Search of Lost Time, and isn’t that the key to why we love history? It’s the urge to recover the lost past. Can we get beyond the mysterious veil to real events and people? Can we even feel how they felt? And as historians, we always hope to find new sources and new ways of seeing. In our time, many new paths have been opened up by science. For example, scientists have adopted techniques used for decoding the genetic history of humans, not only through their genes, but by tracking transformations in language. This form of historical linguistics, known as time depth linguistics, has helped establish the family tree of languages. One branch, the Indo-European languages, has been known since the 18th century, connecting Greek, Latin, Persian and Sanskrit in the east, and English, Welsh and Old Irish in the west. Now we can see when and where the branches on the family tree diverged. It’s been proved, for example, that, as tradition had always said, Sanskrit-speaking migrants – so called ‘Aryans’ – migrated from Afghanistan into north-west India in the late Bronze Age, the period of the earliest Sanskrit texts in the Rig Veda. Scholars have applied the same models used in genetic research to one of the most celebrated texts in western culture, Homer’s Iliad. As a tool kit, they used word lists invented by the linguist Morris Swadesh (1909–67) and other scholars. In this case the focus was key words shared among the Indo-European languages. With the Iliad, science came up with a likely date of composition: 762 BC (plus or minus 50 years). The exactness is perhaps illusory: but it corroborates the older ideas of Homeric scholars that the poem dates from the eighth century BC. Read more | National English: the language that would save England It has long been known that the Iliad is the product of oral composition, a tissue of repeat phrases that allowed the poet to improvise his story. In fact, the Homeric epics came out of centuries of …

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Uncontacted peoples: why do nearly 200 groups choose to live outside 'civilisation'?
type: item
date: 2026-01-12T15:30:12.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Civil rights
subject: Column
subject: Historical people
description: "These are the last humans who have stayed outside 'civilisation'", writes Michael Wood
encoded: A new report by Survival International, Uncontacted Peoples: At the Edge of Survival, is the latest accounting of the human story – and it is a historical document of unparalleled power. It reveals that at least 196 groups in the world are still uncontacted, most of them gravely threatened by logging, mining and drilling for oil. These are the last human beings who have stayed outside ‘civilisation’ since the violence of the West reached across the globe after 1492. The report cast my mind back 25 years to when we made a series of four films telling the story of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Cortés, Pizarro, Orellana, Cabeza de Vaca: these were men who experienced some of the most incredible adventures in human history. We tracked them on the ground, following in their footsteps over the Andes, up Inca trails to lost cities, and rafting down the Amazon. The third film was especially powerful in its implications for the here and now, as well as the events of the 16th century. It told the story of the expedition led out of Quito in 1541 by Gonzalo Pizarro (younger half-brother of Francisco, who spearheaded the conquest of the Inca empire). Its goal was to find the fabled El Dorado – ‘the Golden Man’ – a mythical city of gold believed to exist somewhere in the jungles beyond the Andes. The city was, in fact, unfindable – because it never existed. In trackless terrain, the expedition ran into disaster: soaked by incessant rains, running out of food, the men were reduced to eating their horses and cooking their boot leather. Francisco Orellana pushed onward in a home-made boat to scout what lay ahead, but such was the speed of the river that he couldn’t make his way back to the rest of the men. Read more | “Indigenous Americans who travelled across the Atlantic were horrified by inequalities in European society” After untold sufferings, the survivors of the main army made it back to Quito nearly a year and a half later. Meanwhile, after many adventures, Orellana …

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He shot down 3 planes in 4 minutes: meet the WW2 pilot you won't have heard about
type: item
date: 2025-12-19T09:00:18.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Column
subject: Historical events
subject: Second World War battles
description: "Everyone cried unashamedly at the news of this young pilot’s death", writes Kavita Puri
encoded: If you stroll across the green swathe of the Maidan in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) – past the monumental marble Victoria Memorial built to honour that Empress of India – and keep heading south, the city noise fades, and so too does the bustle. Off Debendra Lal Khan Road by the Tolly Canal, and opposite the zoological garden, are the gates of Bhowanipore Cemetery. Walk through them and you enter a world of order and peace. At the back, beyond lines of graves from the 19th and 20th century, are the headstones of young, mainly British men who fought in both world wars and died here. Many perished from diseases such as malaria and smallpox; some were killed in accidents, and one was apparently murdered while off duty. Also here are the graves of 14 Scottish soldiers from the Black Watch battalion who died in the cyclone of 16 October 1942 in Midnapore, west of Kolkata, as well as troops from a merchant ship hit by the Japanese in the Second World War. Read more | Before the atomic bombs, the USA hit Japan with one of the most overlooked (but deadly) campaigns in WW2 On one headstone is etched the name of a man I had heard about from elderly Indians and British people who had lived in the city during the war. Arthur Maurice Owers Pring – known to everyone simply as Pring – was a pilot in the Royal Air Force. He was killed at the age of just 22 while defending Calcutta from an aerial bombing attack by Japanese forces. This dark chapter opened on 20 December 1942, when Japanese fighter planes filled the skies. Navigating by moonlight, a force of eight Imperial Japanese Army Air Service medium bombers, code-named ‘Sally’ by the Allies, scattered their weapons around the city. The oil plant at Budge Budge, on the Hooghly river south-west of the city, was one of the places hit. Raids continued the following night, and on 23, 24 and 28 December – the most devastating assault coming on Christmas Eve. The city was largely undefended militarily. A detachment of Beaufighters from …

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The Book of Kells: "a masterpiece of medieval calligraphy and painting"
type: item
date: 2025-12-12T08:55:00.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Celts
subject: Column
subject: Medieval life
description: "The Book of Kells is a masterwork of medieval calligraphy and painting", writes Michael Wood
encoded: The Book of Kells, one of the greatest pieces of medieval art, is today displayed in the library of Trinity College Dublin. This illuminated gospel book is named after the monastery in County Meath where it was kept in the Middle Ages. It’s a masterwork of medieval calligraphy and painting, with its Celtic knot patterns, scintillating colour, and the staggering intricacies of the display pages and canon tables – all smoky golden magnificence. An Irish annalist called the book “the great Gospel of Columcille [Columba], the chief relic of the western world”. It may be the work described by the historian Gerald of Wales in the 1180s, in his book on Ireland. “Look more keenly at it and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art,” he wrote. “You will make out intricacies so delicate and so subtle… that you might say that all this were the work of an angel, and not of a man.” The book survived war, plunder and the English – Cromwell’s troops were once billeted in Kells. In the 19th century, it was a huge influence on the Celtic revival movement in the arts, and today is seen as the pinnacle of the western tradition of illuminated manuscripts. Read more | Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life The book was produced around the end of the eighth century, just at the moment Britain and Ireland were about to be changed forever by the arrival of the Vikings. It was long believed to have been created on Iona. But in The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma, published in October, Victoria Whitworth suggests that it was actually written at the Pictish monastery of Portmahomack on the Moray Firth in north-east Scotland. This is one of the least known areas of the medieval British Isles. The Pictish monasteries were destroyed in the Viking age, and with them virtually all written records. The kingdom of the Picts became part of the Scottish kingdom of Alba in the ninth century, and gradually the memory of the Picts faded, leaving many unsolved mysteries. One key …

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AI: good or bad for history? Our experts weigh in
type: item
date: 2025-12-10T09:00:39.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
subject: Debate
subject: Holocaust
description: As artificial intelligence penetrates almost every aspect of our lives, six historians debate whether the opportunities it offers to the discipline outweigh the threats
encoded: “We must experiment thoughtfully, push back critically, and make the case that slow, humanistic thinking still matters” Artificial intelligence isn’t inherently good or bad. Like the printing press or the written word itself, AI is a force – and whether it enhances or undermines historical practice will depend on who uses it, how, and why. AI’s most obvious advantage is that it can process vast amounts of data much faster than your regular historian, which turns it into an incredible asset. The trick here is to use it as it was originally meant to be used – not to replace human interpretation but to identify patterns that humans might not notice and, thus, to enable us to come up with better, more nuanced questions. But it goes beyond that. AI is forcing historians to rethink what constitutes evidence, authorship and interpretation. In doing so, it is not just supporting existing historical methods, it’s helping evolve them. Though I am not worried that historians will be replaced by AI any time soon, there is a risk that indiscriminate use might flatten out the practice. Good history requires doubt, contradiction, ambivalence, even uncertainty, but AI models are designed to produce smooth answers even when the data is messy or the past is unknowable. Moreover, history isn’t just knowledge – it’s a method of knowing. If AI shortcuts the method, it threatens the discipline’s integrity. There is little doubt that AI will be part of historical research, but it is crucial that historians shape its use to enhance rather than undermine our craft. We should resist the urge to scale for scale’s sake, and instead use AI to deepen, not dilute, historical understanding. If we do that, and embed AI within the discipline’s values – critical thinking, reflexivity, contextual awareness – then historians will become central in answering the question of whether AI is good or bad for history. We must experiment thoughtfully, push back critically, and make the case that slow, humanist…

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Michael Wood on the rise and fall of Asian empires
type: item
date: 2025-11-28T09:00:39.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: General Early Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
subject: Historical people
description: "Emperor Jahangir and Shah Abbas literally bestride the world like colossi", writes Michael Wood
encoded: Watching the recent spectacle of those latter-day emperors President Xi of China and India’s Narendra Modi hugging each other at the summit in Tianjin, my mind cast back to an earlier image of a pan-Asian summit. There’s a wonderful painting from 1618 of the Mughal emperor Jahangir embracing Shah Abbas of Iran – one of several such pictures painted for the Indian ruler. These heads of two superpowers were in fact not bosom buddies but intense geopolitical rivals, especially in the Kandahar region of south-west Afghanistan, then under Mughal control. Framed by a huge golden halo, in an image of peace, one stands on a lamb, the other on a lion, both on a globe whose surface extends from the strait of Gibraltar to the South China Sea: they literally bestride the world like colossi. In the foreground of the map, a product of the new science of cartography, are shown north Africa, India and south-east Asia, with the Nile, the Ganges and the Yangtze accurately depicted. The painting is allegorical; the hoped-for meeting never actually took place. But the timing, and the details, have much to tell us. In the painting, western Europe lies, unseen, over the horizon. Yet at that moment the small, aggressive maritime powers on the edge of the Eurasian landmass were already extending their influence and carving up the New World – and were now threatening the old powers in the Asiatic heartland of civilisation. The Spanish had begun colonisation of the Philippines in 1565, the Portuguese leased Macao in 1557, the English East India Company was founded in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company was established two years later. Elizabeth I had earlier sent an ambassador to Jahangir’s father, Akbar, to negotiate trade links. In another painting, Jahangir greets a Sufi mystic in the presence of the Ottoman Sultan and King James VI & I – not an imaginary likeness but one taken from a portrait brought to India by the ambassador Thomas Roe in 1616. In an uncanny touch by the painter, Ja…

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"Imagine starting a life with so little": the stories of South Asians in Britain
type: item
date: 2025-11-08T09:00:06.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
subject: Historical people
subject: Wartime Britain
description: Kavita Puri on the importance of the stories of South Asians in Britain
encoded: I remember looking in the BBC archives for stories of the first arrivals of South Asians in the postwar years, and being surprised at how little programming had been made documenting the experiences of my parents’ generation. That was well over 10 years ago now. From then on, I began to record testimonies of people who came to the UK from South Asia after the Second World War for my Radio 4 series Three Pounds in My Pocket. The title of that programme was inspired by the fact that, for years after the war, strict currency controls dictated that those arriving from India could not bring more than £3 into the UK. Imagine starting a new life in a new country with so little. Over time, I went on to record accounts from the descendants of that three-pound generation, hearing about their struggles and achievements. Many of the people I first interviewed – including my father – are no longer with us. I feel so grateful that I was able to capture their stories: memories of what these former subjects of the Raj had imagined Britain to be, what it was actually like when they arrived, how they were received and, so many decades on, where they now felt ‘home’ was. Read more | “The nation is a very novel idea, and imposing it on millions of people is hard work” | Joya Chatterji on south Asia in the 20th century Asians comprise the largest minority ethnic group in Britain today, yet it’s always struck me how little the history of South Asians in Britain is known – among South Asians themselves as well as across the country as a whole. It’s noticeable that in 2025 there is still no central British South Asian cultural archive, and that South Asian Heritage Month is only in its sixth year. South Asians have had a presence in Britain for centuries, as Rozina Visram’s seminal 2002 book Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History discusses. The first such settlers came as sailors and servants, brought by the East India Company. In time, students, ayahs (nursemaids), princes and profession…

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Michael Wood on the struggle of memory against forgetting | "Place names are signposts to the past"
type: item
date: 2025-07-29T08:00:44.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
description: "Place names are signposts to the past. And how revealing they are", writes Michael Wood
encoded: I was recently back in Devon. Long ago, on childhood holidays from the industrial north, this seemed to me the ‘real’ England. Still today, a rusting cast-iron signpost peeping through the foliage in a sunken lane gives me an inexplicable thrill. It’s the idea that the deep past might still be touched, just around the corner. Place names are signposts to the past. Chulmleigh, Woolfardisworthy, Nymet Rowland… what names! And how revealing they are. Take Ipplepen, a village with Roman and Iron Age roots in the hills near Torquay. A recent dig here turned up a small post-Roman cemetery, in use till the eighth century, and a Roman butchers shop, with coins and broken amphorae that once held olive oil, wine and fish sauce imported from the Mediterranean. The name Ipplepen was first recorded in the 10th century, and contains a personal name that appears to be Roman-British or Celtic: Epilus or Ipela. In a region where the Celtic (pre-Welsh) language may have died out only after 1066, the name of the pre-English landowner was, incredibly, passed down. Read more | The Romans were blamed for massacring these Iron Age warriors. But did they actually murder themselves? In the Home Counties, ancient British (or Welsh) place names are mainly gone – except for river names. Here they linger, from the Thames to smaller watercourses such as the wonderfully named Rib, Beane and Maran (or Mimram) in Hertfordshire. Sometimes English newcomers didn’t understand these words. Avon, of course, has the same derivation as afon, Welsh for river. Bredon Hill includes no fewer than three words with the same meaning: bre is Welsh and dun is Old English, both translating as ‘hill’. So: Hill-hill Hill! Some place names tell of events. You can track the first phase of Viking settlement in hybrid names such as Grimston, denoting an English settlement (or village) taken by Grim, a leading member of the Great Army that invaded Britain from 865. Then, with the second wave of migration, came the names e…

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