HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-03-15T19:09:57.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: 16 remarkable moments in the history of the Oscars
items: "We shall never surrender": 14 quotes that have defined the past century
items: From Stranger Things to communist cars: why we can't resist nostalgia
items: Think the Victorians were prudes? Their filthiest jokes will shock you
items: 10 children and 12,000 pieces of art: the remarkable life of Lady Charlotte Schreiber
items: Fascism? No thanks! Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1930s
items: "I can lose myself for hours in a hypnotic trance": why we should all spend more time in archives
items: From maniacal horses to bat-men on the moon: 14 strange newspaper headlines from history
items: Medieval vampire slayers: why did our ancestors dig up and dismember the dead?
items: It was an "extravaganza of brutality": how the Vikings menaced the Mediterranean

16 remarkable moments in the history of the Oscars
type: item
date: 2026-03-15T19:00:13.000Z
creator: Ellie Cawthorne
subject: 20th Century
subject: 21st Century
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
subject: TV interest
description: When was the first Academy Awards? How many Oscars did Titanic win in 1998? Why did Will Smith slap Chris Rock? Here's everything you needed to know about the history of the most notable event in the film industry calendar...
encoded: The Academy Awards were first held in 1929, and each year the film industry awards gold-plated statuettes – commonly called Oscars – in a glittering and star-studded ceremony. Officially the Academy Award of Merit, everyone knows the golden knight holding a sword and standing on a reel of film as Oscar. Cedric Gibbons, art director at movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, gets the credit for designing the statuette but not for naming it. Read more | The best historical movies of all time There are three theories. Hollywood journalist Sidney Skolsky always maintained he thought it up as a less-grandiose antidote to the pretentiousness of the award ceremony. Meanwhile, actor Bette Davis claimed she once remarked the statuette’s backside resembled that of her husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson. The most likely winner, however, is Margaret Herrick, a librarian at the Academy, who said the knight (not just his rear) looked like her uncle Oscar. But how much do you really know about the history of the awards themselves, and the dramatic moments that have played out on the biggest night of the Hollywood calendar? The history of the Oscars: 16 key moments 1929: The first ceremony takes place Founded by Louis B Mayer, head of MGM studios, in 1927, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was intended as a non-profit organisation with the goal of advancing the film industry. The first Academy Award ceremony took place two years later at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, on 16 May 1929. Tickets for the private dinner cost $5 and the presentation ceremony hosted by Douglas Fairbanks (actor and first president of the Academy) lasted just 15 minutes. The film industry was undergoing a dramatic change at the time, with the revolutionary introduction of new sound technology. Although hugely popular ‘talkies’ such as The Jazz Singer (1927) had been released before the first Academy Awards, they were not considered, because it was seen as unfair to compare them to silent movies. Read more …

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"We shall never surrender": 14 quotes that have defined the past century
type: item
date: 2026-03-13T15:54:08.000Z
creator: Dr Seán Lang
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Civil rights
subject: Historical people
subject: Wartime Britain
description: Words have the power to alter the course of history. They can harden the resolve of an entire nation or people, encapsulate the ideals of a movement, and evoke joy – or provoke anger – long after they have been said. Here, Dr Seán Lang explores 14 of the most influential quotes of the past 100 years
encoded: <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/RooseveltGettyImages-464783507-622899f-e1773405930967.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Franklin D. Roosevelt sits at a desk in an official setting, with papers, a microphone, glasses, and an ashtray arranged in front of him, heavy curtains framing the background." title="President Franklin D Roosevelt prepares for his inaugural speech, 1933. The former New York governor had won the presidency based on his promised ‘New Deal’, which lasted until the Second World War (Image by Getty Images)" /> 1. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” Franklin D Roosevelt, 1933 The United States lay devastated by the Great Depression, an economic collapse without precedent that destroyed the country’s global image as a land of opportunity and reduced millions of Americans to poverty and destitution. The governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had run for and won the presidency on the promise of a massive recovery programme, dubbed the ‘New Deal’, but he knew he could do nothing unless the American people first regained their self-belief. In his inaugural address on 4 March 1933, Roosevelt reassured them that they had nothing to fear, except fear itself – “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” The New Deal lasted throughout the 1930s until World War II set the country back towards full employment. Through the programme of reforms, regulations and projects, Roosevelt understood the power of words. He explained policies simply and clearly to radio listeners in his ‘fireside chats’, reassuring Americans that they had what it would take to improve their own lives and that the government would help. Roosevelt was elected an unprecedented four times, but it was that first inaugural message that set the tone for his time in office and helped give back the US its self-belief. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production…

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From Stranger Things to communist cars: why we can't resist nostalgia
type: item
date: 2026-03-04T15:30:20.000Z
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Communism
subject: Psychology
description: In our politically unstable modern world, the allure of retreating into memories – sometimes mirages – of bygone eras seems to have grown. Six historians explore how this tendency impacts our historical understanding
encoded: “The nostalgia that Stranger Things evokes is complicated” The first thing to remind ourselves is that our view of the past is definitely shaped. The way that we understand history is translated, constructed, created for us in multiple ways – the majority of which have very little to do with the actuality of what happened. We imagine and dream history across culture, making versions of it that comfort us and accord with our world views. Film, television, games, adverts, heritage spaces, novels – they all enable us to inhabit other times, to form our sense of memory, to consume the past. Nostalgia is simply one of the ways that we access these feelings of pastness. It is incredibly powerful because of its appeal to emotion beyond rationality. It is a way of connecting with the historical that ignores order and authority – and historians underestimate it at their peril. Nostalgia has become a keynote for contemporary collective memory. Global populist politics are shot through with a dangerous nostalgia for a claimed glory that has been seemingly squandered. This is not new, but it is newly dominant. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2WX7XXY-CMYK-12a5f8b-e1772530438298.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A poster for the TV show Stranger Things, showing four children on bikes on a long road with a yellow line down the middle. They are all looking towards a red, cloudy sky" title="The hit series Stranger Things is “a confection of an imagined 1980s”, says Jerome De Groot, enjoyed by an audience of whom many have “no memory of the eighties other than a cultural hangover of tropes and clichés” (Image by Alamy)" /> In the television series Mad Men (2007), Don Draper cynically uses the past to sell product, observing: “Nostalgia – it’s delicate, but potent.” Memories of the past can be manipulated. The biggest English-language show worldwide in 2025 was Stranger Things, a confection of an imagined 1980s – Spielberg, Nike, Kate Bu…

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Think the Victorians were prudes? Their filthiest jokes will shock you
type: item
date: 2026-02-28T13:00:38.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Victorian audiences revelled in riddles, physical comedy and bawdy jokes that challenge everything we think we know about 19th-century respectability
encoded: The words ‘Victorian Britain’ might evoke images of men with waxed moustaches and women in high-necked dresses, sitting upright in houses drawn back from the London smog. Indeed, ‘Victorian’ has become shorthand for prudishness, referring to the long reign of Queen Victoria: a period associated with notions of strict social etiquette, restraint and rigid ideas about respectability. But this view irons out a lot of the period’s complexities. Beneath a visage of stiff morality was a culture that delighted in wordplay, physical comedy and, in private, jokes that were startlingly explicit. So what, precisely, did these people find funny? As historian Dr Bob Nicholson explains on the HistoryExtra podcast: “It’s really hard to define the sense of humour of millions of people over a generation, just as it would be now. But when I look at Victorian comedy, I guess there are certain recurring patterns or themes that they really liked.” The Victorian sense of humour The Victorian-era was defined by transformation on a vast scale, powered by world-leading industrialisation, urbanisation and expanding literacy. The population of England and Wales more than doubled during the 19th century, and cities like Manchester and London grew at rapid pace. Now, newspapers, penny weeklies and comic magazines such as Punch could reach a new, mass readership. Music halls became hugely popular too, offering working and lower-middle class audiences a place to enjoy an evening of singing and comedy. Read more | What was daily life like for 'ordinary' Victorians? It was both in print and the spoken word that the Victorian sense of humour really managed to flourish. “The first thing you’ll see when you look at their jokes is that they love puns,” Nicholson says. “They absolutely love wordplay, to a degree that I think we would look at now and think: these are some pretty laboured, torturous puns.” The increasingly literate Victorians delighted in verbal dexterity, double entendres and clever ling…

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10 children and 12,000 pieces of art: the remarkable life of Lady Charlotte Schreiber
type: item
date: 2026-02-20T15:30:55.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Amazing lives
description: She was a headstrong scholar who contributed hugely to the study of medieval literature and challenged the societal norms of the 19th century. So why isn’t she better known? Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth traces the adventures of an unsung heroine
encoded: While hunting for antiques in the Netherlands in the 1880s, the esteemed art dealer Joseph Joel Duveen received a tip-off that some “wonderful pieces of china” had come up for sale in a remote village. Getting there would involve a tediously long journey but, undeterred, Duveen set out. Several hours later, however, he spotted a carriage speeding past in the opposite direction, and was able to make out its passenger. Recognising the face of his great rival, Duveen promptly turned around, empty-handed, ruefully realising that she had beaten him to the village and “snatched the prize”. The victor on this occasion was Lady Charlotte Schreiber. Surprisingly, given her long life – she was 82 when she died, in 1895 – which included two marriages, 10 children, scandalous affairs and a celebrated translation of the medieval Welsh Mabinogion, Lady Charlotte remains relatively unknown today. Often erroneously dismissed as a mere magpie obsessed with trinkets, for decades her second husband and sons were credited for accumulating her great collection. Yet, shortly before her death, she donated a trove of some 5,000 pieces to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and the British Museum. Defiance and scandal Charlotte endured a difficult childhood. Born Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Bertie in 1812, she lost her father, the 9th Earl of Lindsey, when she was only six years old. Her mother remarried, and her new stepfather, the Reverend Peter Pegus, turned out to be a violent alcoholic; he once drank a whole mug of lamp oil, mistaking it for beer. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain At the age of 10, Charlotte started keeping a diary, in which she wrote almost every day until she lost her eyesight in her late seventies. A true polymath, she gave herself “a man’s education”, studying history and literature, and learning Arabic and Farsi (Persian) as well as Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and even Hebrew. She dedicated hours to her “oriental …

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Fascism? No thanks! Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1930s
type: item
date: 2026-02-16T15:30:41.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Fascism
subject: Historical people
subject: Wartime Britain
description: Extremism was on the march across continental Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet Britons chose a different, more moderate, path. Alwyn Turner explores why the posturing and rants of would-be dictators largely fell on deaf ears between the wars
encoded: “Is this the age of dictators?” asked veteran journalist Sir Sidney Low. He was writing in September 1923, the month in which a military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in Spain. At the same time, Benito Mussolini was reinforcing his new dictatorship in Italy, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was shaping the nascent republic of Turkey, and disruptions – including those fomented by Hitler’s Nazis – were building to a climax in Germany. Taken together, these developments led Low to wonder whether the world might be witnessing “the general decline of parliamentary institutions”. Over the years that followed, his comments were to become commonplace. By 1938, there was autocratic rule in more than a dozen European countries across the continent, from Portugal to Poland and beyond to the Soviet Union. Even in some countries that remained democracies, substantial anti-democratic elements were growing in power and influence: in the 1936 Belgian elections, the far right won nearly 20 per cent of the vote, while the Communist Party took 15 per cent in French elections that year. In Britain, however, there was no equivalent body of support for extremism in the interwar years. There was, of course, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under the leadership of Oswald Mosley – a Conservative MP who then sat as an independent before switching to Labour and eventually finding his way to fascism. But Mosley was never more than a peripheral figure. At its peak in mid-1934, the BUF briefly numbered around 45,000 members. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) never got above 20,000 members in the 1930s. By comparison, the Labour Party claimed up to half a million members, and there were 6 million trade unionists. The CPGB’s best electoral showing came in the 1931 general election when it fielded 26 candidates, averaging fewer than 3,000 votes each – 0.3 per cent of the total – while Mosley’s New Party got 0.2 per cent. In 1935, the BUF didn’t even put up candidates. It…

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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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From maniacal horses to bat-men on the moon: 14 strange newspaper headlines from history
type: item
date: 2026-02-01T15:30:24.000Z
creator: Hilary Mitchell
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical events
description: Muckraking journalists and money-hungry editors have been publishing sensational stories since newspapers first began. Hilary Mitchell flicks through the archives and reveals some of the weirdest press cuttings of all time
encoded: 1. "German ghouls: corpses converted to soap and explosives” Yorkshire Telegraph and Star, April 1917 If you think that ‘fake news’ is a new phenomenon, think again. One of the most notorious pieces of misinformation actually dates to the First World War. During the conflict, a gruesome rumour spread that German leaders were using “Kadaververwertungsanstalten” – ‘corpse factories’ – to turn the dead bodies of their own soldiers into products such as soap, candles, and even bombs. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/German-Ghouls-0741ad1-e1769765897344.jpg" width="620" height="411" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline GERMAN GHOULS across the top" title="German leaders were creating soap and explosives out of corpses, claimed this 1917 newspaper article. In reality, they were victims of a deliberately shocking propaganda campaign (Image by the Newspaper Archive)" /> The lurid story unsurprisingly sparked widespread outrage, but it wasn’t true. It was a purposefully shocking piece of war propaganda, and the German government protested in the strongest terms against the “loathsome and ridiculous” claims. However, that didn’t stop the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star gleefully reporting on the hoax in April 1917, in an article that claimed the Germans were making “dividends from death” by distilling glycerine from dead bodies “and so obtaining some portion of their explosives.” 2. "O Dammit wants his name changed" The Richmond Climax, 6 June 1913 Orlando Dammit was featured in the 6 June issue of the equally curiously named Richmond Climax newspaper. The short article explained that the man wanted to change his name from “O. Dammit” because he “can’t tell whether people are calling him or merely venting injured feelings when they say ‘O, dammit.’” It’s not clear what he wanted to change his name to, or if he was successful in his attempts to change it, but presumably he would have been happy with anything that didn’t begin wit…

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Medieval vampire slayers: why did our ancestors dig up and dismember the dead?
type: item
date: 2026-01-30T15:30:00.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Burial
subject: Death
subject: Medieval life
description: At the turn of the 12th century, two men from a Staffordshire village died suddenly. A few days after they were solemnly laid to rest, they were spotted walking around the village, with their coffins on their backs. John Blair investigates the medieval terror of the living dead
encoded: In the last decades of the 12th century, the townsfolk of Annan in the Scottish borders were terrified by a sinister nocturnal revenant that stalked the dark byways. “Each night his corpse, driven by Satan, left his grave and wandered through the streets” accompanied by howling dogs and spreading sickness and death, according to the contemporary chronicler William of Newburgh. Desperate to put an end to the unholy scourge, two brothers whose father had been carried off by the plague opened the grave and “exposed the corpse, which was distended to a huge corpulence, with a swollen, livid face. It was observed that the shroud, which had been wound around it, was completely shredded up. Too angry to be frightened, the young men struck a blow at the lifeless corpse, whereupon such a flow of blood gushed out that they understood it to be a sucker of many people’s blood. Dragging it out of the town, they quickly built a pyre.” Recalling the accepted wisdom that such a being would burn only after they’d cut out its heart, the brothers took their shovels and hacked out the organ – after which the cadaver was immolated. The curse was finally over. Walking corpses To modern ears, this story stretches credulity far beyond breaking point. Not so to William of Newburgh: he recorded another three such tales, and hinted at many more. There are “numerous modern cases and abundant reports”, he wrote, but “it would be just too laborious and burdensome to write down all episodes of this kind that I have heard to have happened in our own times”. Yet though walking corpses were boringly commonplace in the 1190s, they had almost vanished from the English scene only a few decades later. Apparently they retreated northwards, leaving only occasional traces south of the border with Scotland. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/W45702webready-05b1689-e1769699879666.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration shows two people standing over a cu…

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It was an "extravaganza of brutality": how the Vikings menaced the Mediterranean
type: item
date: 2026-01-19T15:30:53.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Historical events
subject: Historical people
subject: viking
subject: Viking life and culture
subject: Viking warfare
description: Killing, burning, pillaging, enslaving. Even when heading to sunnier climes, Viking raiders deployed the same tactics that they had used along the shores of northern and western Europe, reveals Thomas Williams
encoded: The poor citizens of Al-Jazira al-Khadra never knew what hit them. In 859, an unfamiliar fleet sailed into the bay separating this Muslim settlement – which later evolved into the city of Algeciras, now in southern Spain – from Gibraltar. Making landfall nearby, the alien ships disgorged their fearsome crews: Vikings. In a sequence of events terrifyingly familiar to victims in more northerly parts of Europe, these formidable marauders wreaked havoc. They occupied the city, burned the mosque, ravaged the countryside – and then moved on to the next target, and the next. The campaign later known as the ‘Great Raid’ was well and truly underway – part of a chapter in Norse history that’s less known today, but no less bloody. Stone cold killers The Vikings of our imagination are emphatically creatures of the north – avatars of cold climes and bleak weather, manifestations of ice and snow made flesh and steel. Dragon-prowed ships slice through the frigid waters of steep-sided fjords swathed in midnight-green pine forests. Fur-clad adventurers hunt walrus amid the crashing icebergs of the northernmost seas. Giants haunt the ice-capped mountains in an unreal world of midnight sun and northern lights. We are used to reading tales of Viking rampages through lands both near and far from home: around the Baltic coastline, in Britain and Ireland, in what’s now northern France, Russia, even Canada. But none of these places seem so different from Scandinavia, in climate at least; indeed, some boast similar extremes of latitude. Even in the most temperate of these places, a sharp north-easterly or a rare winter snowstorm may come and go without raising an eyebrow. Likewise Vikings in times past. But, like the ice, it can feel jarring to find Vikings in places where we feel instinctively they don’t quite belong. Like Mallorca, southern France, even Egypt. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/CreditCopyright--Museo-San-Isidoro-de-Leon-Derechos-r…

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