HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-02-14T14:29:06.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Rationing, school closures and 'Blitz spirit': how did people cope in WW2?
items: Elma Brenner on medieval wellbeing: "People in the Middle Ages were absolutely focused on staying healthy"
items: How William Shakespeare shaped America
items: Coronavirus: what might we learn from pandemics in the past?
items: Secrets of a 20th-century Jewish family: Hadley Freeman on her book House of Glass
items: How do dictators seize power? The malevolent careers of eight 20th-century leaders explained
items: A history of nakedness in art: Mary Beard on her new BBC series Shock of the Nude

Rationing, school closures and 'Blitz spirit': how did people cope in WW2?
type: item
date: 2020-09-07T14:22:46.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: 21st Century
subject: First World War
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Podcast transcripts
description: In a recent HistoryExtra podcast, Jonathan Boff explains how ordinary people coped with the challenges of the world wars and considers what parallels can be drawn with the current Coronavirus crisis. Read the full interview below
encoded: Note: this is an unedited transcript of our podcast Blitz spirit David Musgrove: Today I'm joined by Dr Jonathan Boff, who is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Birmingham. We’re going to be discussing how the government got the population on a war footing in the first half of the 20th century. First off – and it's quite a big question – but is there such a thing as the ‘Blitz spirit’? If so, what was it? And what do you think of it today? JB: The answer is yes, there was, in the sense that there was a level of popular consent for the war effort in the Second World War amongst the civilian population – even under the privations of the German air attack. The sort of myth, I suppose, is that there were all these jolly cockneys going around suddenly rolling out the barrel in the middle of air raids and never worrying – that everyone stuck together, pulled together, and together defeated Hitler. Now that sort of level of the myth is not true; that was a propaganda artefact designed for the consumption in the United States. There was a very famous film, many people would have seen it, London Can Take It! This was made by Humphrey Jennings and Quentin Reynolds and was designed to be exported to the United States in this very much ‘London can take it’ kind of mode. He said, for instance, “there's no panic or despair in London town, London can take it” – that was the climax of the film. Of course, it was important to convince the Americans that the British were not going to collapse as the French had just done, if there was to be any chance of getting American support in the war effort. The second aspect to the manufactured bit of the myth, if you like, is that it was also important for people outside of London – particularly in the autumn of 1940, when it was London that was really taking the brunt of the bombing from the Luftwaffe – that people outside London felt that they were involved as well. And also they didn't need to worry about morale in London. An…

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Elma Brenner on medieval wellbeing: "People in the Middle Ages were absolutely focused on staying healthy"
type: item
date: 2020-05-15T02:30:00.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Medieval Life and Death
subject: Pandemics
subject: Podcast transcripts
description: In a recent episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Dr Elma Brenner, Wellcome Collection’s medieval specialist, talks to Dave Musgrove about medieval medicine, health and wellbeing. Read the full, unedited interview below...
encoded: Note: this is an unedited transcript of a HistoryExtra podcast, which you can listen to here. David Musgrove, Content Director at HistoryExtra: I’m here with Dr Elma Brenner who is Wellcome Collection’s medieval specialist. She’s written a piece on medieval diseases for BBC History Revealed magazine, along with another piece she wrote a little while ago on medieval medicine for BBC History magazine, and that piece is now on our website. She also gave a lecture on disease and medicine in the Middle Ages as part of our free virtual Medieval Life and Death History Festival, which took place in May 2020. So she’s an expert on medieval medicine. We’re here at Wellcome Collection. So, Elma, first thing, you’d better just tell me about Wellcome, what it does and what it’s all about. Elma Brenner, Wellcome Collection’s medieval specialist: Yeah, we’re in a remarkable place, it’s a biomedical research charity, the Wellcome Trust, that funds all kinds of amazing and important projects. As part of that charity, there is a public venue, Wellcome Collection, which is based around a phenomenal collection of library and archive materials dating from the early centuries AD right up to the present day. And including a number of really important medieval manuscripts. DM: OK, so what we’re going to talk about today is medieval medicine, broadly. We’re going to pick up on some of the themes that you’ve talked about in the feature that you’ve done. But before we do that, can you just define the general period and sort of geographical spread of your research? Where do you focus on? EB: So I focus on the period, really, towards the end of the medieval period, the centuries between, roughly, really just before the Black Death in the mid-14th century up till the very end of the 15th century. And I look at Europe, particularly at France and England. But it’s really important to think about the global side of the Middle Ages and the fact that we can study all parts of the world in that period…

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How William Shakespeare shaped America
type: item
date: 2020-03-23T16:40:31.000Z
subject: Elizabethan
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Podcast transcripts
description: Why did Shakespeare have such a profound impact on the United States? This was the question at the heart of a recent HistoryExtra podcast with James Shapiro. Read the full interview below
encoded: Note: this is an unedited transcript of our podcast Shakespeare and America Matt Elton, editor of BBC World Histories Magazine: Is there a moment or a particular staging of a play that inspired you to write this new book on Shakespeare and America? James Shapiro: There was a moment and there was a production. The moment was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and that November, I woke up, that November morning, I woke up and realised that living in my blue bubble, in New York City, I misunderstood something fundamental about my country and I realised that I had better get to work figuring out what that was. And having spent the past quarter century or so investigating London in Shakespeare’s day, two years really, 1599 and 1606, I had ignored my own nation and turned about face and have spent the last few years trying to grapple with that. And, as far as the production is concerned, about a month after the election, Oskar Eustis, who’s the Artistic Director at the Public Theatre in New York, where I advise Shakespeare productions, called me in and told me that he would be doing a production of Julius Caesar at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, 50,000 New Yorkers line up to see this free every summer. And he told me that it would star a Trump look-a-like as Julius Caesar. And that production, which frames my book, Shakespeare in a Divided America, really was galvanising for me. 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about William Shakespeare 8 places that shaped the life of William Shakespeare ME: I mean, obviously Shakespeare is someone that we usually associate very much with England and with English culture. In what ways is it far more important and pivotal in US culture and politics than we might expect? JS: In its own day, I have great confidence that Shakespeare’s work spoke to Elizabethan preoccupations. But in many ways, he speaks more clearly and directly to American preoccupations than he does to English ones. And I’m not exactly sure why, that’s one of …

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Coronavirus: what might we learn from pandemics in the past?
type: item
date: 2020-03-16T15:57:32.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: 21st Century
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Pandemics
subject: Podcast transcripts
description: As Covid-19 dominates the news, read our interview with Laura Spinney (author of Pale Rider, an account of the 1918 influenza pandemic known as Spanish flu) from the HistoryExtra podcast. In the interview, Spinney draws historical parallels with other pandemics in history and asks what we might learn from disease outbreaks in the past
encoded: Note: this is an unedited transcript of our recent podcast Coronavirus – a historical perspective Matt Elton, editor of BBC World Histories Magazine: Obviously, Coronavirus is something that’s hitting a lot of headlines at the moment. Why does it strike such a chord, why are we so afraid of pandemics? Laura Spinney: Well, I think it’s something very primitive in us really. I mean, we’ve had to deal with epidemics of infectious disease, plagues if you like, to use a more kind of ancient and Biblical term, since we settled down in kind of semi-permanent settlements, since we started farming, that is, about 10, 12,000 years ago. And, you know, these diseases that kind of adapted to big groups of densely-living people, we call them the crowd diseases, and they kind of evolved in parallel with us as we adopted those new, more sedentary lifestyles. So it’s been a kind of arms race for a very long time, they know us very well and unfortunately because they’re small and they reproduce much faster, they tend to be a step ahead. They can just mutate and adapt and, you know, they’re just wherever we don’t want them to be before we can do anything about it and we’re seeing that again now. In some ways, there are many aspects, I think, of a pandemic which don’t change over time. There are many that do but there are many that don’t and those are the ones that speak to our, obviously speak to our most ancient fears. ME: And, of course, it’s natural for humans to look back at past examples of a similar thing to see if there’s any parallels or any lessons that could be drawn. Do you think there are particular pandemics from history that are most useful to look at in terms of parallels or is it just not a useful exercise generally? LS: No, I do think it’s a useful exercise, I just don’t know why we immediately rush to pick the worst possible example. Given that the Spanish Flu, or the not Spanish Flu, we should really call it the 1918 Flu, was pretty much forgotten for most of the la…

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Secrets of a 20th-century Jewish family: Hadley Freeman on her book House of Glass
type: item
date: 2020-03-16T09:15:38.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Podcast transcripts
description: In a recent HistoryExtra podcast, Hadley Freeman spoke to our deputy digital editor Elinor Evans about her quest to uncover her family’s history through some of the most tumultuous events of the 20th century. Read the full transcript here...
encoded: Note: this is an unedited transcript of our recent podcast Hadley Freeman on a 20th-century family history Elinor Evans, deputy digital editor of HistoryExtra: We are talking today about your book House of Glass, which is an account of some members of your family through the 20th century. How did you come by their stories? Hadley Freeman: I grew up hearing these vague stories – for example, I would hear about my great-uncle Alex and how he managed to escape from a train to a camp, and I would hear that my grandmother had come from France to America to escape the war. So I always had this idea that there was a story in the background, and they all died by the end of the 1990s – which was just when I graduated from university – and I sort of had this idea of just writing about my grandmother – a very melancholic, elegant figure. I knew there was something – I didn’t know what that was, or if I would fictionalise it, or even if there was a story – but I spent five years ‘dicking around’ trying to make some enquiries into what her life might have been like. Then I went to her old apartment, which my father’s younger brother lives in, and he hadn't thrown anything away of hers, which was very lucky for me. I was just going through her closet, because I had this idea that I might write about her relationship with clothing, and I found this shoebox filled with letters and photos and photo albums – and other keepsakes that didn't make any sense. And then, at the bottom, this drawing by Picasso – and that was kind of it. That was 2006. So I had these dots that I was trying to join, and I couldn’t figure out how to join them. And then eight years later – eight years after me travelling around the world going through archives in all kinds of places around the world – my uncle found, among my grandmother’s belongings, this unpublished memoir by my great-uncle Alex. This was my line connecting the dots; I could now make the story and I was able to fact-check everything. That’s h…

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How do dictators seize power? The malevolent careers of eight 20th-century leaders explained
type: item
date: 2020-03-05T09:45:46.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Podcast transcripts
description: How do dictators gain power? In the latest episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Frank Dikötter talks to our deputy digital editor Elinor Evans about his new book How to Be a Dictator, which explores the malevolent careers of eight 20th-century rulers including Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Mussolini. Read the full, unedited interview below
encoded: Note: this is an unedited transcript of our recent podcast Dictators Explained Elinor Evans, deputy digital editor of HistoryExtra: Your book How To Be A Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the 20th Century focuses on eight figures that many of our listeners will be familiar with. Could you talk about this ‘cult of personality’ and how it links these eight figures together? Frank Dikötter: The book does as it says it really; how to be a dictator. It traces every step these eight dictators take to seize power and stay in power for as long as they can. Some fail, some succeed. Adolf Hitler dies, kills himself. Stalin and Mao die in their beds. I believe that there are two main instruments that dictators use – one is terror and the other one is image. Now the terror, we know – the concentration camps; the secret police; the knock-on-the-door in the middle of the night; the atrocious crimes against humanity – but I think image, in particular the ‘cult of personality’, we tend to overlook a bit – even though if you look at the 20th century, literally hundreds of millions of people cheered their own dictators, even as they were led down the road to serve them. I thought that was rather striking; so the book does focus quite a bit as well on that cult of personality. I don’t think it’s a French phenomenon; I think it’s very much fear and image that go hand-in-hand. Now, why is this cult so important? Because I think there is a paradox at the very heart of modern dictatorship: people in an age of democracy are supposed to be sovereign – it is they who elect those who should represent them. But dictators go for a shortcut; they seize power, and once they do this, through violence, they realise that they must maintain it through violence – violence is a very blunt instrument. Of course they need the police; they need the praetorian guard; they need to rely on armed forces (torturers, spies, informers, you name it)… but the cult of personality helps a great deal. They must in…

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A history of nakedness in art: Mary Beard on her new BBC series Shock of the Nude
type: item
date: 2020-02-03T16:31:51.000Z
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
subject: Podcast transcripts
description: In the latest episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, classicist Mary Beard discusses her new BBC Two series Shock of the Nude, which explores western art’s depiction of nakedness across history. Read the full, unedited interview below...
encoded: Note: this is an unedited transcript of our recent podcast Mary Beard on the nude in western art, which you can listen to here. It contains some explicit content Matt Elton, editor of BBC World Histories magazine: OK, so your new series is called the Shock of the Nude, what inspired you to make this particular programme on this subject? Mary Beard: I think we were all looking for a subject in the history of art that people really wanted to kind of argue about. That still made people cross or puzzled or take very, very different views. An awful lot of art history somehow comes down to admiration and here was a subject where you could see there were controversies. And so it was fun to try and unpick what those controversies were and how we might resolve them. ME: And some of your comments have caused a bit of a stir. You said, I believe, that female nudes in western art are soft porn for the elite dressed up in a classical guise. MB: I don't think I quite said that. ME: OK, OK. MB: I mean, when those things get reported, they get cruder and cruder the further they go down the food chain. I think what I said, I can’t remember the exact words, is that you’ve got to face the question of that – of whether nudes are soft porn for the elite. And, you know, in a way, what I was thinking was committed gallery-goers tend to be terribly snippy when they hear someone say, “Oh this is just soft porn for the elite, isn’t it?” And, you know, I can be sniffy about that too, but I think it’s a question that you really have to answer (or you have to ask). I’m not sure what… there isn’t an answer, is there? But I think you do have to look at this and think: “so what is the difference between this and soft porn?” And that comes over very clearly in one of the paintings that we feature in the first episode, which is Courbet’s Origin of the World, which is a very detailed, hyper-realistic painting of a woman’s genitals and she doesn’t have a head and she doesn’t have any limbs. And you th…

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