HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-12-19T09:01:03.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: He shot down 3 planes in 4 minutes: meet the WW2 pilot you won't have heard about
items: The US 'voodoo' scare: why 19th-century racists spread fake news about Haiti
items: Star witness: how the Royal Observatory transformed our understanding of astronomy and time
items: After Franco: Spain's miraculous transition to democracy
items: Not 1066 again! Should we ditch our obsession with dates?
items: “I hope I would have defended the Nazis at Nuremberg”
items: Terror in the deep: how Hitler's U-boats pushed Britain to the brink
items: Michael Wood on China's immense suffering in the Second World War
items: The making of Rome's monster
items: The Stalingrad of Africa: the story of the battle for Tunis

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 US 'voodoo' scare: why 19th-century racists spread fake news about Haiti
type: item
date: 2025-12-08T09:00:17.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical events
subject: Slavery
description: From sexual orgies to Satan incarnated as a snake, lurid depictions of ‘voodoo’ in North America long titillated and shocked readers. As David G Cox explains, they were also wielded as justifications for racist oppression during the social and political upheavals of the 19th-century US
encoded: On 2 January 1893, the black American abolitionist and reformer Frederick Douglass delivered a lecture on Haiti to an audience in Chicago. It was widely alleged, he reflected, that the Caribbean republic was riddled with “voodooism, fetishism, serpent worship and cannibalism”, and that “little children are fatted for slaughter and offered as sacrifices to their voodoo deities”. Such claims, Douglass declared, were false. He told his listeners that, while serving as US minister (effectively, ambassador) to Haiti between 1889 and 1891, he found no evidence of ritual sacrifice, despite diligent investigation. By the time Douglass spoke in Chicago, the idea of Haitian ‘voodoo’ as a murderous cult was lodged in the American public consciousness. As he noted, the features of this myth would have been familiar to many. According to scores of white writers at the turn of the 20th century, ‘voodoo’ was an imported African religion devoted to the worship of Satan incarnated as a snake. ‘Voodoo’ ceremonies, it was claimed, consisted of frenzied dances, sexual orgies and the ritual sacrifice of animals or humans followed by the consumption of their bodies or blood. The priests and priestesses of this imaginary faith were said to be the real rulers of Haiti, holding all its citizens – from presidents to peasants – in the grip of terror. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-556636225webready-f31fffd-e1765183494712.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a black man dressed in a suit with a small bow tie. He has short hair and a thick moustache" title="Ebenezer Bassett denounced claims that the black-led Caribbean nation was a hotbed of ‘voodoo’ cannibalism and human sacrifice (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 1901, claims about Haitian ‘voodoo’ coalesced in a widely reprinted newspaper report on the “demoniacal orgies” of this purported “devil’s cult”. Supposedly reproducing the findings of the famous American geologist …

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Star witness: how the Royal Observatory transformed our understanding of astronomy and time
type: item
date: 2025-11-26T09:00:37.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Education
subject: Historical events
subject: Space
subject: The Restoration
description: From the moment it was founded 350 years ago, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich drove our understanding of astronomy, navigation and time. Louise Devoy explores eight milestones in the history of this pioneering scientific institution
encoded: The big bang moment 1675: Charles II sparks a star-gazing revolution In the 17th century, the great maritime nations were vying to solve a puzzle that had confounded philosophers for many centuries: how to determine exact positions on the Earth’s surface. And in Britain, Charles II took a major step to ensure his realm’s position at the head of the pack. On 4 March 1675, the king signed a royal warrant appointing John Flamsteed as the first “astronomical observator”, tasked with “perfecting the art of navigation”. Flamsteed’s specific objective was to devise a method by which sailors could establish their longitude (east–west position) at sea – which involved measuring the positions of celestial bodies – and of knowing the time at a ship’s local position. And Flamsteed would get to carry out this vital research from the surroundings of the country’s first state-funded, purpose-built scientific institution: the Royal Observatory. It was urgent work, because England’s great rival, France, had stolen a march: Louis XIV had established an observatory in Paris nearly a decade earlier. Flamsteed was, in effect, playing catch-up. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/T809MT-CMYKWeb-Ready-7606aa3.jpg" width="2663" height="1775" alt="an illustration showing a large crowd looking at several artefacts including a globe, a map, and a satellite dish" title="King Louis XIV visits the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1671. The creation of an observatory in the French capital had left England playing catch-up (Image by Alamy)" /> The size of the task facing the astronomer clearly wasn’t lost on Charles II, for the king appointed none other than the celebrated architect Christopher Wren to design the observatory. Wren’s chosen site was the hilltop ruins of Greenwich Castle – and it was here that the foundation stone was laid on 10 August 1675. With its lofty windows, royal portraits and accurate pendulum clocks, the octagonal ‘star chamber…

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After Franco: Spain's miraculous transition to democracy
type: item
date: 2025-11-20T09:00:32.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Fascism
subject: Historical events
subject: Historical people
description: The nation’s transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s surely counts as one of modern Europe’s most remarkable stories. On the 50th anniversary of General Franco’s death, Paul Preston explores how pluralism arose from the ashes of tyranny
encoded: When General Francisco Franco died on 20 November 1975 – 39 years after the start of the brutal civil war that brought him to power – the prospect of a bloodless transition to democracy in Spain appeared vanishingly small. Franco had prepared a rigid framework to guarantee the permanence of the dictatorship over which he had ruled with an iron fist for almost four decades. Spain teetered on the edge of bloodshed and chaos, with powerful groups at the political extremes ferociously opposed to compromise. And so, as El Caudillo (‘The Leader’) was buried in the vast Valley of the Fallen memorial just outside Madrid – acclaimed by tens of thousands of blue-shirted supporters – few commentators would have predicted a future of pluralism and relative peace. Yet that’s exactly what was achieved. That the Spanish people were, over the next 10 years, able to negotiate a perilous path towards democracy through the minefields laid by Franco himself – and the ambushes set by terrorists of both right and left – counts as an extraordinary achievement. Even from a distance of 50 years, it surely ranks among modern Europe’s most remarkable stories. So how did it happen? Blurring the past To answer that question we must rewind to the end of the Second World War. Terror had underpinned Franco’s regime from the moment he was propelled to power at the end of the 1930s. But defeat for the Axis powers in 1945 shattered his initial plans for a fascist future – one in which Europe was dominated by authoritarian regimes. Franco realised that he needed to end Spain’s international ostracism in the postwar period and be incorporated into the western community. To achieve that, a new approach was required. And so, to blur the Spanish dictator’s Axis past, a scheme was devised by his crony, naval captain Luis Carrero Blanco, to perpetuate the regime behind a monarchist facade. The Law of Succession of 26 July 1947 established Spain as a kingdom with Franco as its head of state. Franco would gov…

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Not 1066 again! Should we ditch our obsession with dates?
type: item
date: 2025-11-19T13:00:01.000Z
creator: Dr Rob Blackmore
subject: General History
subject: Magazine
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical events
description: From 1066 to 1918, our obsession with battles, elections and even voyages of discovery risks distorting a true understanding of the past
encoded: In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That, at least, is what the famous rhyme tells us. Memorising such dates is a common experience of being taught history – a cliché superbly lampooned by the witty 1930 book 1066 and All That. “History is not what you thought,” its preface suggested. “It is what you can remember.” Accordingly, as per its subtitle, it offered a “Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates.” Conspicuously, though, “two out of the four dates originally included were eliminated at the last moment” because “they are not memorable.” Though evidently both humorists, the book’s authors – Punch writers WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman – were making a serious point. History has long been thought to be concerned with preserving the past. The 12th-century historian and Byzantine princess Anna Komnene observed how “time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity”. Her solution was the study of history, which “forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time”. This is a powerful idea – one that perhaps moved King Charles I, moments before his execution in January 1649, to utter a last single word to William Juxon, the former bishop of London, instructing him: “Remember.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1066-and-all-that-later-edition-CMYKWeb-Ready-dfb5326.jpg" width="2295" height="1530" alt="The cover of a book, with the title 1066 And All That across the top, and two men standing side by side in green and pink clothing" title="The 1930 book 1066 and All That wittily parodied the conventional approach to teaching history in schools at that time (Image by Amazon)" /> But do our efforts to remember really require us to do something so trivial as memorising dates? More radically, do the historical events these dates mark even matter? The Oxford Eng…

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“I hope I would have defended the Nazis at Nuremberg”
type: item
date: 2025-11-07T16:34:36.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Fascism
subject: Historical events
subject: Holocaust
subject: Trends-Entertainment
description: That’s what renowned barrister, and bestselling historian, Philippe Sands told us, but could you? With the 80th anniversary of the famous war trials upon us – and a new movie to boot – Dave Musgrove reflects on the perils of staging a trial the likes of which the world had never seen before
encoded: To have defended someone like Hans Frank, the governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland during WW2, charged with the murder of four million human beings, is a tough thing to imagine. Nevertheless, when I asked Philippe Sands – lawyer and writer – whether he would have defended the Nazis in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials, he told me “I hope so! I'm a believer that everyone is entitled to have their lawyer to defend their rights and their interests, irrespective of who they are or what they've done.” That was my final question to Sands after we’d recorded four episodes of an upcoming HistoryExtra podcast series on the Nuremberg Trials at the conclusion of the Second World War. I wanted to know where he’d stand on that question, because our conversation had reminded me how complicated some of the moral, as well as legal, questions were around the decision by the Allies to put a selection of leading Nazis on trial in November 1945. As a UK barrister, Sands is subject to the ‘cab-rank rule’, which obliges members of his profession to “take on any case provided that it is within their competence and they are available and appropriately remunerated”, but the idea of having to defend a Nazi war criminal, quite understandably, gave him pause for thought. Read more | Hitler's downfall and the end of the war and the Third Reich The trial of the century We shall all be given pause to reflect on the Nuremberg Trials as they hove back into public consciousness on their 80th anniversary. The trials ran from November 1945 through to October 1946. Twenty-four leading Nazis were indicted, though only 21 of them eventually stood trial in the courtroom proceedings. Neither Adolf Hitler nor the SS leader Heinrich Himmler were among them, as both had already taken their own lives. That left the biggest name in the dock as Hitler’s successor Hermann Göring, along with Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess, Admiral Karl Donitz and others. As with many big anniversaries, there will be media depictions, …

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Terror in the deep: how Hitler's U-boats pushed Britain to the brink
type: item
date: 2025-11-03T09:00:20.000Z
creator: Roger Moorhouse
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Historical events
subject: Naval battles
subject: Second World War battles
description: Did German U-boats conduct a ‘clean’ campaign during the Second World War? Or were they guilty of routinely murdering survivors in the water? Roger Moorhouse weighs the evidence
encoded: On the night of 13 March 1944, the Greek-registered steamship SS Peleus was en route from Freetown to Buenos Aires when she was hit amidships by two torpedoes, launched by a German U-boat, U-852. The twin-masted merchantman, of around 5,000 tons, swiftly began to sink, her internal bulkheads ruptured by the detonations. Within three minutes, the Peleus disappeared below the surface, leaving the surviving members of her 39-strong crew clinging to rafts and flotsam in the darkness. As sinkings go during the naval war, it was unremarkable, one might even say routine. But what followed would set it apart. Soon after, U-852 surfaced close to the debris field, hoping to identify her prey and glean some information. Her captain, 27-year-old Kapitänleutnant Heinz‑Wilhelm Eck, ordered one of his men – who spoke some English – to come up to the bow to question one of the survivors. After learning the identity of his target, Eck gave the order for U-852 to move away. But then he changed his mind. Eck was nervous. Prior to his departure from port, he had been given a lecture from his superiors on the perils of passing through the Atlantic Narrows, around Ascension, and was told that all four of the previous patrols undertaken by his predecessors had ended with the vessels being sunk. Due to the heightened risk of air attack he was urged to take every precaution to avoid being spotted by enemy aircraft. Even debris from a sinking, it was stressed, could give away his position. Calculating that he could be only some 200 miles away by daybreak, when the wreckage of the Peleus would doubtless be spotted, he made the decision to attempt to destroy the debris. He brought a party of his men up on deck and ordered them to open fire on the rafts and other debris with machine guns. In the moonless night, they were largely firing blind, but the operation continued for hours, with grenades being thrown and U-852’s anti-aircraft gun even being brought to bear. The number killed by these act…

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Michael Wood on China's immense suffering in the Second World War
type: item
date: 2025-10-29T09:00:55.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Historical events
description: "China suffered horrendous losses, second only to the Soviet Union", writes Michael Wood
encoded: The Second World War still plays a massive role in our national mythology in Britain. But if I were to ask you: “Who was the fourth ally?” I imagine that most readers would have to think twice. The answer is China. China fought the entire war – and longer – and suffered horrendous losses, second only to the Soviet Union. Frank Capra’s Why We Fight documentaries, which included a 1944 film called The Battle of China, saw the war with Japan as part of “the struggle of freedom against slavery, civilisation against barbarism”. Films in the series close with the hope that a victory for the democracies – Republican China in the 1930s, don’t forget, had been a fledgling democracy – will bring about “the utter defeat of the war machines of Germany and Japan”. Today, history is a big deal in China. Since 1949, the Chinese view of modern history has centred on the ‘century of humiliation’ following the First Opium War (1839–42), when foreign powers carved up the country. But more recently, the Second World War has assumed a powerful new role in Chinese nationalism. There’s a museum to the war in Beijing, the Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and a harrowing memorial to the 1937–38 Nanjing Massacre. At the China Modern History Museum in Nanjing, you can dress up in nationalist Kuomintang or communist uniforms and have your photo taken in wartime dioramas. The Chinese view of the conflict has shifted towards showing the country as a heroic participant in a war that was moral and just. The Chinese had been engaged in hostilities with Japan since 1931, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria. The conflict proper lasted from July 1937 until 2 September 1945 – the 80th anniversary of the conflict’s end is being marked this year. So the Second World War effectively started earlier, and lasted longer, here than in Europe. And without China, the course of the wider war might have been very different. Read more | Michael Wood on amazing insights …

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The making of Rome's monster
type: item
date: 2025-10-08T08:00:55.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Historical events
subject: Roman rulers
description: In the second century BC, Roman troops razed the city of Carthage and obliterated its civilisation. So why, asks Eve MacDonald, did the victors remain obsessed by their conquered foes for the next 200 years?
encoded: Carthage burned for six days. After three long years of siege, in the spring of 146 BC Roman soldiers finally broke through the city’s defences and began to slaughter the population. But still the Carthaginians resisted. Street by street, they threw themselves at their enemy. Rome’s relentless military machine moved from the city’s ports, across the temple-filled marketplace and up the streets that lined the central hill. There they were assailed by projectiles hurled down from roofs by women, children and old men. Yet the Romans’ fierce assault on that already ancient city on the north African coast could not be stopped. They went from house to house, ascending to roofs, rooting out Carthaginians from their hiding places. Houses burned and bodies lined the streets while a unit of ‘sweeper’ soldiers cleared away the dead to allow access for more troops. The scene, as told by the Greek historian Appian – in what, it seems, was an eyewitness account – paints a gruesome picture of conquest in the ancient world. It was so brutal, in fact, that the Roman commander, Scipio Aemelianus, had to change his troops frequently, sending in fresh fighters to combat the Carthaginians’ desperate attempts to defend their land, their houses, their families, their gods and their very lives. Those attempts at defence came to nought. The people of Carthage were slaughtered or enslaved, their once-beautiful city left in smouldering ruins on the shores of the Mediterranean. As a result of the destruction, and of the memory of the wars fought between these two ancient superpowers, Carthage became an integral part of the story of Rome and its rise to empire. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/shutterstockeditorial14491209jWeb-Ready-b90d516.jpg" width="5824" height="3883" alt="A photograph of a ruin. The foreground is a large, ragged stone arch, and beyond it, there are some white columns coming out of various size of rocks" title="A century after des…

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The Stalingrad of Africa: the story of the battle for Tunis
type: item
date: 2025-10-03T08:00:29.000Z
creator: Saul David
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Historical events
subject: POWs
description: In 1943, Allied and Axis troops contested one of the most decisive campaigns of the Second World War. Saul David tells the story of the battle for Tunis – as hard-fought as the struggle for the Soviet city
encoded: Early on 8 November 1942, Adolf Hitler’s special train was en route from Berlin to Munich when it was stopped at a small station in the Thuringian Forest to receive an urgent message from the Foreign Office. A day earlier, Hitler’s HQ staff had received a “very disturbing signal” from German agents in Gibraltar, informing them that a large Allied troop convoy had passed heading in an easterly direction. Most on the train assumed the convoy was bound for Libya, a colony of Germany’s ally Italy since 1912. But its true destination was revealed by the Foreign Office communiqué: “A US expeditionary corps is disembarking in Algiers and Oran,” ports in French-controlled Algeria. Hitler was aghast. Aware that French North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, controlled by the collaborationist Vichy regime) was an area of the “greatest political and strategic importance”, he asked his advisors what resources were available to meet the threat. The answer was: none. Farther down the line, Joachim von Ribbentrop boarded the train. So concerned was the German foreign minister about the news coming from the Mediterranean that he urged Hitler to put out peace feelers to Stalin, hoping to free up German men and materials to be rushed to north Africa. The Führer refused: “a moment of weakness is not the proper time to negotiate with an enemy.” Instead, Hitler ordered General Alfred Jodl, chief of operations staff of his high command, to “organise the Wehrmacht for the defence of Tunis”, the capital of French Tunisia, which was a short flight or sea journey from Sicily. By securing Tunisia, Hitler hoped to stymie Allied plans to trap Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel’s Italo-German Panzer Army in Libya between General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army, advancing from Egypt in the east, and the forces just landed in Algeria and Morocco to the west. Such was indeed the Allies’ plan – and the subsequent ‘Race for Tunis’ would set the scene for one of the decisive campaigns of the war. …

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