HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-12-12T08:55:03.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
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"
items: Michael Wood on the New Angel | "Few works of 20th-century art have such a distinguished list of past owners"
items: Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed"
items: Was there a best time to be alive? The pitfalls of looking back for a nostalgic 'golden age'
items: Michael Wood on crafting a new national narrative
items: Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "I wish that there was no need for specialist history months"

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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Michael Wood on the New Angel | "Few works of 20th-century art have such a distinguished list of past owners"
type: item
date: 2025-06-24T09:54:54.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
subject: Historical events
description: "It’s an iconic image for the 20th century, certainly, but for our own century, too", writes historian Michael Wood
encoded: A postwar baby boomer and a late sixties student, in my adult life I naturally grew up optimistic. I believed in progress. I witnessed the civil rights movement, feminism, decolonisation, the beginning of ‘Reform and Opening Up’ in China at the end of the seventies, and the break-up of the communist tyranny in Europe a decade later. Not that there weren’t bad things in the world: horrific wars in Vietnam and Biafra (Nigeria), the ravages of international capitalism, the first manifest intimations of climate disaster. But, despite terrors in far-off places, it seemed that – to paraphrase Martin Luther King – the long arc of the moral universe was indeed bending to justice. But now? On the wall in my student room I had a black-and-white copy of a monoprint by the artist Paul Klee. He served as a soldier in the German army in the First World War – a conflict in which a number of his friends, including fellow artists such as August Macke and Franz Marc, were killed. When the war was over, Klee returned to his art, and in 1920 created the picture that I put on my wall. Read more | Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life He called it Angelus Novus – New Angel – and it is now the subject of a compelling new exhibition at the Bode-Museum in Berlin, displayed alongside images and sculptures of angels from Berlin museums that were smashed by bombing in the Second World War. There are excerpts, too, from Wim Wenders’ famous film Wings of Desire (1987), in which two mournful angels stand watch over the people of a divided Berlin, and in which Klee’s picture is namechecked. More than 100 years on from its creation, Angelus Novus is now seen as one of the seminal artworks of the 20th century. It shows a strange, deformed creature – a weird, scrawny, transparent homunculus, wings raised, hair like parchment scrolls, cloven bird feet, opaque eyes looking sideways at something that causes distress (or is it wonder?). Behind him are eddying clouds of chaos. The titl…

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Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed"
type: item
date: 2025-05-23T08:00:08.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Kavita Puri on the urgent need to commemorate historical famines
encoded: During the Second World War, Deaths related to hunger matched or outnumbered military losses. Famines afflicted regions including the Soviet Union, China, India, Vietnam and Greece. Yet those who perished are rarely remembered in the same way as fallen soldiers. Starvation is not relegated to the past. The latest UN Hunger Hotspots report identifies places of highest concern as Haiti, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan and Palestine. Sadly, the list of countries where hunger persists is much longer, with violence and conflict the key drivers. Professor Alex de Waal, research professor at Tufts University and a leading expert on famine, explains that part of the reason famines are not remembered and memorialised is that the experience is so painful to recount, and so full of shame, that people want to forget it. In extremis, social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed; a neighbour refuses to give food to a neighbour; forbidden foods are eaten; people sell their bodies to survive; some profit from scarcity. The authorities who engineered a famine, or who neglected the population, have no reason to remember it, either. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories" In Ireland, it wasn’t until some 150 years after the start of the Great Famine, which began with an outbreak of potato blight in 1845, that victims were widely memorialised. Around a million people died – from a population of fewer than 9 million – and close to 2 million emigrated in a bid to survive. An expression of remorse by the British government of its role in the famine came only as recently as 1997, though there is still debate about whether the statement issued on behalf of then prime minister Tony Blair constituted an apology. Monuments to the victims and those who fled the country are now dotted around Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain – though none are in London. There are also significant memorials in places to which…

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Was there a best time to be alive? The pitfalls of looking back for a nostalgic 'golden age'
type: item
date: 2025-01-23T09:00:26.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
description: It has always been human nature to look at the civilisations of the past through rose-tinted glasses, driven by nostalgia and a need to impose a sense of order to the complexity of history. But, asks Robert Blackmore, can any age truly be considered golden?
encoded: In the beginning, life was perfect. That, at least, was what our ancient antecedents believed. In c700 BC, mirroring the biblical Eden, the Greek poet Hesiod told how people “lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote from toil and grief”. Some seven centuries later, Hesiod’s Roman successor Ovid recounted in his Metamorphoses how “the formation of man is followed by a succession of the four ages of the world. The first is the golden age, during which innocence and justice alone govern.” Were Hesiod and Ovid on to something? Was the dawn of humanity the best time to be alive? Historians rarely agree on anything, least of all whether things were going well for people in a past society. Were they good or bad times? Were they getting better or worse? Politicians and journalists frame the present in these terms. We, too, sense the ups and downs of our own lives. But can this apply to history? Should historians assess an age in the same way? Comparing past societies Some might flat-out reject value judgments and insist we only appraise a time by its own standards. Culturally at least, this works. Yet the increase of interest in social and economic history since the mid-20th century has made discussion of the relative prosperity of past societies more relevant than it had been with, for example, constitutional history. Furthermore, such questions seem especially crucial to public history. We want to understand the differences and similarities between our lives and those who came before. History is, more than anything, about understanding change. Read more | How Europe won the race to prosperity Then there’s the problem of what we mean by ‘good’ or ‘bad’ times. How do we define ‘prosperity’? This depends on your priorities, but little could be more important than basic material living standards. How well were people fed, clothed and housed? How robust was their health and security? Of course, beyond modest survival, quality of life is a far harder thing to articulate,…

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Michael Wood on crafting a new national narrative
type: item
date: 2024-09-19T10:39:22.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: 21st Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
subject: The British Empire
description: “We need a meaningful story for the new generation – our composite union,” writes historian Michael Wood
encoded: What a summer we have had in 2024, with an astonishing election result. There has been much talk of national renewal, and in due course we’ll see what that means. But it felt like a watershed. The new prime minister Keir Starmer’s dad was a toolmaker, his mum a nurse; the cabinet is majority comprehensive-educated, with more alumni of Parrs Wood High School than of Eton. Among commentators – not just on the left – there’s been a growing feeling that 14 years of Tory rule, compounded by Brexit, have undermined what the great medieval historian Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah: group feeling – the glue that makes societies work. And watching TV on election night, I found myself wondering whether, like sediment settling in a glass, the time has finally arrived for a new national narrative. Read more | Opinion: “History is currently being used for political purposes that have very little to do with the past” One hundred years ago, the British empire reached its apogee. It was a world, as depicted in popular culture, orchestrated by Elgar and redolent with the scent of saddle soap and railway smoke. As Jan Morris memorably put it in the Pax Britannica trilogy: a world of P&O liners rolling down to Rio, of “dominion over palm and pine”, of an empire on which the sun never set. It is amazing to think that our oldest fellow citizens today were alive then. What changes they have seen over the span of a single lifetime. World war, imperial decline, the election of ’45 and the birth of the welfare state. Wilson’s recovery in the Swinging Sixties, then the Thatcher era that saw Britain’s de-industrialisation. Blair’s Cool Britannia orchestrated by cocky Oasis optimism – till, fatefully, Iraq ushered us into the past quarter century to Brexit and beyond, with its starkly divided narratives of Britain. Read more | Clement Attlee: Labour's postwar leader That’s a very simplistic sketch, I know. But it seems to me that certain ideas of national identity continue to have a massive influ…

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Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "I wish that there was no need for specialist history months"
type: item
date: 2024-09-19T08:00:51.000Z
creator: Kavita Puri
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
description: Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she questions why we celebrate diverse histories only at particular times in the UK – like Black History Month in October and South Asian Heritage Month in July and August – rather than all year round
encoded: South Asian Heritage Month (SAHM) is celebrated each year from 18 July to 17 August, although it is still a relatively new addition to the calendar. Incredibly, 2024 marked only its fourth edition. I well remember its inception. In 2017, the TV documentary My Family, Partition and Me aired on BBC One. One of its strands followed SAHM co-founder Binita Kane as she retraced the journey taken by her father, Bim Bhowmick, from East Pakistan – now Bangladesh – to India in 1947. It was a deeply affecting programme, and a transformative moment for her. Binita had grown up in Wales and had previously known little of her father’s history – the story of his migration across a border, but also of the devastating loss of family members during the partition of British India. After participating in that programme, she made it her mission (alongside her day job as a doctor) to make sure that no one else ever felt cheated of their history. I’ve watched how, in a short space of time since its launch, SAHM has gained momentum, its reach expanding from museums to blue-chip companies and media organisations as staff hold sessions on British south Asian history and culture. It is long overdue. First marked in 1987, UK Black History Month is now well established, particularly in schools. That is not the case for SAHM. It’s not helped by the fact that the designated month runs from mid-July to mid-August – timed to coincide with the anniversary of India’s independence from British colonial rule on 15 August 1947, and the creation of India and Pakistan, but outside the school term. The 2021 census revealed that British Asians are the largest ethnic minority group in Britain. Yet we are only now starting to understand British south Asian history more widely, let alone its complex nature. Rather than one homogeneous subject, it encompasses various south Asian countries, regional histories and socio-economic factors affecting different populations in Britain in different ways over the years. …

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