HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-04-22T16:47:05.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: 2,000 years ago, ancient Roman forces annihilated Jerusalem. Was its destruction inevitable?
items: Creating fake Paris: why did one man build a hoax French capital?
items: Attila the Hun: life of the week
items: One of medieval history’s biggest mysteries has just been solved – and it rewrites 1066
items: I’ve just been to Europe’s weirdest theme park – and came face to face with Josef Stalin
items: How Nazi investigators used secret tools to create Hitler’s Holocaust ‘hitlist’
items: Napoleon: hero or “Little Boney”? | Alice Loxton on the world of the Georgians
items: Conquest? What conquest? The other dramatic events that really mattered in 1066
items: The SAS played a vital role in defeating Hitler – so why did Britain disband them?
items: Keep calm and carry on singing: why Britons fell in love with opera during World War Two

2,000 years ago, ancient Roman forces annihilated Jerusalem. Was its destruction inevitable?
type: item
date: 2026-04-22T16:47:05.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: The first of the Jewish-Roman wars was interrupted by one of the defining events of the 1st century, and gave birth to one of ancient Rome’s most powerful dynasties
encoded: In AD 70, Roman forces captured and destroyed Jerusalem after a brutal siege. The fall of the city was one of the defining events of the first century. It marked the crushing of a major revolt in Judea – a region roughly corresponding to parts of modern Israel and Palestine – and reshaped both Jewish and Roman history. It also cemented the power of a new ruling family in Rome, the Flavians, whose legitimacy depended in part on military success. But this outcome certainly wasn’t inevitable. The destruction of Jerusalem stemmed from a very specific chain of events; a convergence of political chaos at the heart of the Roman empire and deep internal divisions within the city of Jerusalem itself. Together, these forces turned what might have remained a contained regional rebellion into a prolonged and devastating war. Rome’s original strategy When rebellion broke out in Judea in AD 66, Rome didn’t immediately move to annihilate Jerusalem. Revolts weren’t too perturbing to the Roman emperors, who had dealt with regional uprisings before – it was, in many ways, the cost of having an empire. The task of restoring order was given to the general Vespasian, an experienced commander who had previously led campaigns in Britain and Germany. In the Roman system, such generals were expected to stabilise provinces and reassert imperial control, as well as achieving military victories. “Vespasian’s response is a strategy of going from place to place in the countryside, defeating town after town,” explains historian Barry Strauss, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. Some communities surrendered while those who didn’t were “massacred, or enslaved”. This was a standard Roman method of counterinsurgency. Rather than attacking the strongest position first – in this case Jerusalem, where the rebels had retreated to – the army would systematically secure the surrounding region to gain power in case of a siege and isolate the seat of the resistance. By advancing through towns and villages,…

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Creating fake Paris: why did one man build a hoax French capital?
type: item
date: 2026-04-01T10:35:41.000Z
creator: Gavin Mortimer
subject: First World War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: As German aircraft attacked Paris during WWI, one man had an idea: what if you could fool the enemy into dropping their bombs elsewhere? Gavin Mortimer tells the story of an audacious wartime ruse...
encoded: Tucked away in a British newspaper called The Globe in its edition of 4 October 1920 was a short story with an intriguing headline: “A Mock Paris: French Plan to Hoodwink German Raiders.” The ruse, explained the paper, had only just come to light, and it was almost too fantastical to be true. “Camouflaged streets, factories, dwelling houses, railways, with stations and trains complete, and in fact a camouflaged capital, was the gigantic task on which French engineers were engaged when the Armistice put an end to military operations,” ran the report. It was the brainchild of an electrical engineer called Jacopozzi; a way to draw German aircraft away from the capital and onto a fake conurbation where bombs could fall without causing death and destruction. But the Germans sued for peace as the city began to take shape and Jacopozzi’s ingenuity was never put to the test. Paris was first bombed by German aircraft on 30 August 1914, the first time that a capital city had been attacked in such a manner. Four small bombs were dropped from the hands of Ferdinand von Hiddessen and his observer from their Rumpler Taube monoplane. The casualties were minimal, but the wider psychological damage was profound. A little over a decade after the Wright brothers had made the first brief flight in an airplane, the Americans’ invention was a new and terrifying weapon of war. The home front was now a battlefront, and women and children were no longer safe from enemy fire. Death from above There were other sporadic attacks in the 18 months that followed, including the first attack by Zeppelins (named after their inventor, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin) in March 1915. The airships came from their bases in Belgium, but none caused serious casualties. However, on 29 January 1916, two Zeppelins appeared in the grey winter sky over the French capital. Their bombs wreaked havoc, killing 24 and wounding 30. The funerals of the dead were held on 7 February 1916 in a service that brought Paris to a…

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Attila the Hun: life of the week
type: item
date: 2026-03-31T08:45:47.000Z
creator: Spencer Mizen
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Life of the week (podcast series)
description: Few historical figures have reputations quite as diabolical as that of Attila the Hun. Miles Russell explains Attila's astonishing life and legacy.
encoded: Few historical figures have reputations quite as diabolical as that of Attila the Hun. This nomadic leader pitched up on the edge of the Roman empire in the fifth century AD, and spread terror and chaos so effectively that he came to be dubbed the ‘Scourge of God’. But was he really all that bad? Miles Russell talks to Spencer Mizen about Attila's astonishing life and legacy.

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One of medieval history’s biggest mysteries has just been solved – and it rewrites 1066
type: item
date: 2026-03-21T00:01:25.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Anglo-Saxon
subject: Early medieval
subject: Medieval
subject: Norman
subject: Period
subject: Discover / Apple News
subject: Trends-News
description: A fresh re-reading of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle suggests that King Harold Godwinson didn’t race south by land after Stamford Bridge, but instead used a coordinated naval strategy. What does that mean for how we should understand the events of 1066?
encoded: Alongside the Roman invasion of Britain in 43 AD, 1066 stands as one of the most pivotal years in British history. It marked the end of Anglo-Saxon rule and the ascendancy of the Normans under William the Conqueror. At the centre of this story is King Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king. In the space of just a few weeks, he fought two major battles at opposite ends of England. In September, he defeated the Viking king Harald Hardrada at the battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire. He is then said to have rushed south, covering some 200 miles to confront William, Duke of Normandy, who had landed on the Sussex coast to attempt to take the throne. According to the traditional account, Harold and his army arrived exhausted – but just in time to fight at the battle of Hastings on 14 October, where he was killed. This dramatic forced march has been used to explain both the pace of events, and Harold’s eventual defeat: his troops, worn out from the journey, were at a disadvantage against William’s forces. But what if that version of the story is wrong? New research now suggests that one of the most famous – and decisive – military marches in English history may never have happened at all. A journey by land – or sea? In new research, Professor Tom Licence of the University of East Anglia argues that Harold didn’t lead a desperate overland march from Yorkshire to Sussex. Instead, much of the journey south may have been made by sea. The idea that the march itself may be implausible is not entirely new. “There’s an argument going back to the that this great heroic march is almost impossible,” he says, speaking to HistoryExtra. He explains that even when compared with the most demanding marching rates recorded in modern warfare (for example, in the American Civil War) the speed required to cover the distance simply doesn’t hold up. “To cover that distance in that period of time on foot is just unfeasible,” he says. Crucial to Licence’s argument, he says, is the finding t…

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I’ve just been to Europe’s weirdest theme park – and came face to face with Josef Stalin
type: item
date: 2026-03-01T15:30:45.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Communism
subject: Historical people
subject: Second World War battles
description: There aren’t many theme parks that place statues of Soviet leaders next to Snow White and her seven dwarfs, but you’ll find one in southern Lithuania. Keith Lowe takes us on a tour of one of Europe’s most bizarre – and controversial – tourist attractions
encoded: I am standing in a clearing in a Lithuanian forest, surrounded by guard towers and electrified fences. To all intents and purposes, it looks like I’m in a Soviet prison camp. Up above me a loudspeaker barks out orders in Russian. I hurry along a corridor of barbed wire. Up ahead, peeping ominously through the trees, I can see the barrel of an anti-aircraft gun. But all is not as it seems. It doesn’t take long to realise that the loudspeaker is playing some sort of recording on a loop. The guards in the towers are not real either, but poorly disguised mannequins in theatre costume. And who are they guarding? Beneath them, in the barbed wire enclosure, is a row of Communist statues and half a dozen grazing llamas. Further along there are emus, cockatoos, a depressed-looking brown bear, and some statues of mass murderers. As for the gun, when I reach it, I discover that the only thing it is guarding is a children’s playground. Rifles and roundabouts, cockatoos and cattle-trucks, Lenin and llamas: welcome to Grūtas Park, Europe’s weirdest open-air museum. Its combination of terror and kitsch is so controversial that it almost got shut down. I first came here in 2018 as part of my research for a study of Second World War monuments. But I felt compelled to return, because I still can’t quite believe that this place actually exists. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/1DSC1437-Lenin-Llamas-05-18c368a-e1772191107175.jpg" width="1506" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a white llama grazing on the grass alongside a tall stone marble statue of a bust of man. In the background is a lake, several trees and a brown llama laying on the ground" title="A llama grazes next to a bust of Vladimir Lenin at Grūtas Park, Lithuania. The unconventional visitor attraction, opened in 2001, is filled with relics of the former Soviet Union (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> A brutal past Grūtas Park has its roots in Lithuania’s very troubled history. Like s…

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How Nazi investigators used secret tools to create Hitler’s Holocaust ‘hitlist’
type: item
date: 2026-02-24T15:19:43.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: New research reveals that paper conservators and manuscript restorers helped make centuries-old records legible for Nazi racial investigations, demonstrating how highly specialised crafts became entangled in the machinery of the Holocaust
encoded: It was SS officers and concentration camp guards who implemented and actualised much of the genocidal policy that had been crafted by senior Nazi officials. The SS, led by Heinrich Himmler, oversaw the police, the concentration camp system and many of the administrative structures that carried out the mass murder of Jewish populations and minority groups. These officers may have been the most visible architects of the Holocaust during the Second World War. But many historians have long argued that the systematic genocide levelled against Europe’s Jewish populations could never have reached the scale that it did without the complicity and active aid offered by ordinary people in everyday professions. It was office administrators, clerks, railway workers and local officials whose work sustained the machinery of the Nazi state. Now, new research has added more occupations to that list: bookbinders, paper conservators and restoration specialists. According to findings by historian Dr Morwenna Blewett, first published in The Guardian, newly uncovered Nazi-era correspondence reveals a Europe-wide programme in which restorers repaired and chemically treated fragile archival documents so that they could be used to better trace Jewish ancestry. The work, she argues, helped Nazi authorities to compile genealogical records that functioned, in effect, as a bureaucratic “hitlist”. Uncovering Jewish ancestry In research that features in her upcoming book, Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime, Blewett uncovered letters and administrative files showing how these expert restorers were recruited to clean and stabilise old church registers and civil records which documented local births, baptisms, marriages and religious conversions stretching back centuries. Many of these manuscripts had become illegible through years of decay. Rather than preserving them in accordance with proper conservation standards, restorers used aggressive chemical treatments, including saturating pages with …

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Napoleon: hero or “Little Boney”? | Alice Loxton on the world of the Georgians
type: item
date: 2026-02-02T09:03:09.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: The world of the Georgians
description: In episode three of the World of the Georgians, Alice Loxton explores how British caricature turned Napoleon Bonaparte from feared enemy into a figure of ridicule
encoded: For Georgians in Britain, Napoleon Bonaparte loomed large as both a military threat and a propaganda obsession. In this episode, Alice Loxton examines how satirical artists helped shape public perceptions of Britain’s greatest enemy during the Napoleonic Wars. From heroic self-fashioning in France to the British invention of “Little Boney”, caricature became a powerful weapon of war, shrinking Napoleon’s image and undermining his authority through humour. View Green Video on the source website Want more from Alice? Find more episodes of the World of the Georgians. Alice Loxton is a historian, presenter and Sunday Times bestselling author with over three million followers on social media.

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Conquest? What conquest? The other dramatic events that really mattered in 1066
type: item
date: 2026-01-26T16:00:28.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical events
subject: Medieval battles
subject: Medieval kings and queens
subject: Medieval Life and Death
description: 1066 is synonymous with the battle of Hastings. Yet while Duke William was launching his conquest of England, the rest of Europe had its own crises to contend with. Charles West takes us on a tour of the continent during a dramatic year
encoded: It was the summer of 1066 and two powerful leaders were rallying their supporters behind them and preparing for war. Their clash would result in political chaos, the spilling of much blood, and one of those leader’s violent deaths. Yet the people of England barely noticed. That’s because the clash took place hundreds of miles to the south-east on the Italian peninsula, and it involved two figures – a renegade cleric named Arialdo and Guido da Velate, the archbishop of Milan – who have rarely troubled British history books. These two men had been butting heads since the 1050s and, by 1066, their intense rivalry had pitched the city-state of Milan into chaos. The trouble started when Arialdo and his supporters began accusing Milan’s formidable clerical elite of corruption, chiefly because the city’s priests were married – a longstanding local practice that many non-Milanese found deeply shocking. Things quickly turned violent: armed skirmishes erupted on the streets. The showdown was soon heading for a bloody denouement. We might suppose that the pope in Rome would take a dim view of an open rebellion against the clerical hierarchy in a major Italian city. But from the middle of the 11th century, the papacy was occupied by men who agreed that the Catholic church was in desperate need of an overhaul, and so they sided with Arialdo. In March 1066, Pope Alexander II went so far as to excommunicate Archbishop da Velate because of the charges Arialdo laid against him. It was a radical move. And it backfired spectacularly. The canny archbishop was able to spin his excommunication to his benefit by positioning himself as the champion of Milanese traditions against toxic ‘external’ interference. An enraged local populace turned on Arialdo and chased him out of the city. In June 1066, while he was making his way to Rome, emissaries of da Velate hunted down Arialdo and murdered him. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-9311733…

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The SAS played a vital role in defeating Hitler – so why did Britain disband them?
type: item
date: 2026-01-23T15:30:41.000Z
creator: Gavin Mortimer
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Historical people
subject: Second World War battles
subject: Soldiers
subject: Wartime Britain
description: Britain’s War Office thanked the SAS for its remarkable efforts in WW2 by abolishing it – yet soon realised the error of its ways. Gavin Mortimer tells the story of how the elite unit reinvented itself to confront the challenges of the postwar world
encoded: “Light-hearted banditry”, “ruthless pirating”, a “phantom army” – it’s fair to say that the Special Air Service (SAS) didn’t always attract the most complimentary headlines. In the white heat of the Second World War, when this and other British special forces achieved unlikely successes through a series of daring raids, disparaging press reports could be discarded as merely tomorrow’s chip paper. Nonetheless, they fuelled the impression that the SAS operated outside the rules of the regular British army, and were used as ammunition by some who aimed to whip special forces into line – or even shut them down altogether. That threat became a reality after the conflict ended. David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, coined a description – “freemasons of mediocrity” – for a certain kind of staff officer who looked upon his men with suspicion and, in some cases, hostility. These ‘freemasons’ regarded the SAS and other irregular outfits – the Long Range Desert Group and the Chindits – at best as private armies, at worst “café gangsters”. This view extended to the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), which spent the spring of 1944 waging a bloody guerrilla campaign in the Aegean to tie down German troops ahead of the invasion of France. Its actions prompted a sharp exchange between Winston Churchill and Simon Wingfield Digby, the Conservative MP for West Dorset. “Is it true, Mr prime minister,” enquired Wingfield Digby, “that there is a body of men out in the Aegean Islands, fighting under the Union Flag, that are nothing short of being a band of murderous, renegade cut-throats?” “If you do not take your seat and keep quiet, I will send you out to join them,” retorted Churchill. One could argue that Churchill was the founding father of Britain’s special forces. It was he, shortly after coming to office in May 1940, who instructed the formation of a commando force to launch a “vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive” against the Axis. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/p…

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Keep calm and carry on singing: why Britons fell in love with opera during World War Two
type: item
date: 2026-01-07T15:00:58.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Historical events
subject: Second World War battles
subject: Soldiers
subject: Wartime Britain
description: As the conflict with Nazi Germany raged on, British tram drivers tuned in to Tchaikovsky and waitresses revelled in Wagner. But why? Alexandra Wilson explores the surprising Second World War obsession with opera
encoded: Glasgow, 1942. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was in town to perform Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Tickets had been snapped up by local people – including many who didn’t really know what an opera was. The soprano Joan Hammond, who sang the title role that night, later recalled that there were always newcomers in the audience wherever the Carl Rosa performed, searching for something different to do – but also for some kind of transcendental escapism. Invariably, they cheered the singers to the rafters. Surprising though it may seem to us today, opera was hugely popular during the Second World War. This was part of a broader surge of interest among the British in the so-called high arts – a sudden and rather urgent desire to ‘become cultured’ and to enjoy the best that life had to offer – when every day might be your last. Guy Ramsey reported in the Daily Mail in 1943 that “every day in every way Britain’s musical and dramatic taste is becoming more and more ‘highbrow’”. Tram drivers were listening to Tchaikovsky, waitresses were revelling in Wagner, and operas were drawing large audiences at provincial theatres. This war, Ramsey wrote, was more personal than any before it, and felt closer to home. Serious times called for serious art, and popular variety shows no longer seemed in step with the national mood. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/2X2FXR2webready-9f2accf-e1767623285427.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph shows a man in a cap with round glasses and a cigarette in his mouth sitting on one of many stools outside a theatre. In front of him to the right, a billboard advertises the Sadler's Wells Opera" title="Stools for hire by people queueing for Sadler’s Wells Opera Company performances at the New Theatre, 1943. Tickets started at just 1/6 (about £4 today) (Image by Alamy)" /> Workers’ playtime Opera had already enjoyed reasonably wide popularity in Britain during the interwar years. In Lond…

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