HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-03-20T15:31:03.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Churchill vs Stalin: did this one speech cause the Cold War?
items: "We shall never surrender": 14 quotes that have defined the past century
items: Could YOU survive Henry VIII’s reign?
items: From Stranger Things to communist cars: why we can't resist nostalgia
items: I’ve just been to Europe’s weirdest theme park – and came face to face with Josef Stalin
items: "Forget AI – never has the role of the historian been more urgent"
items: Why Rome fell
items: Fascism? No thanks! Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1930s
items: The prince and the brothel: 6 scandals that rocked the British monarchy
items: The SAS played a vital role in defeating Hitler – so why did Britain disband them?

Churchill vs Stalin: did this one speech cause the Cold War?
type: item
date: 2026-03-20T15:30:35.000Z
subject: Cold War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: British prime ministers
subject: Historical events
subject: Historical people
description: It’s 80 years since the war victor delivered his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, sounding the alarm for a perilous new age. The speech, given as tensions with Stalin soared, is among the most famous in modern history. Yet, asks Richard Toye, has it been misunderstood?
encoded: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” It was the soundbite of the century – or at least of the Cold War. Uttered by a former prime minister in a speech on 5 March 1946 at a small college in Missouri, its intended audience was far larger than the scholars and public figures assembled in the institution’s gymnasium. The fact that the ex-PM in question was war victor Winston Churchill – and that sitting on stage alongside him was US president Harry S Truman – helped turn this lecture into a world-shaking historical event. Churchill made a lot of speeches in his long political career. Few of them, however, had the same resounding impact as this warning about the Soviet threat. A set of unique circumstances lent his oration its unusual power – and endowed it with the capacity to shape the language of east-west conflict for decades to come. The Iron Curtain speech was delivered at a time of acute – and escalating – tensions between the Soviet Union and western powers. It’s often been described as the moment that the starting gun was fired on the Cold War. It’s indisputably among the most momentous pieces of oratory of the postwar period. And yet, for all that, it’s clouded in misunderstanding. Much of that misapprehension stems from the fact that the speech had surprisingly long roots – roots stretching all the way back to Anglo-Russian imperial conflicts in the late 19th century. When Churchill rose to his feet and addressed his audience at Fulton, he was 71 years old. He was, as he declared himself, a child of the Victorian age. The legacy of the so-called ‘Great Game’ – strategic competition between Britain and Russia in central Asia – was a factor throughout his political career. Even as a schoolboy, he wrote an essay in which he fantasised about a British invasion of Russia and gloated of “the superiority of John Bull over the Russian bear”. Strangling Bolshevism Yet Churchill’s attitude to Russia…

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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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Could YOU survive Henry VIII’s reign?
type: item
date: 2026-03-10T09:00:12.000Z
creator: Emily Briffett
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
description: Tracy Borman steps into the vibrant – and dangerous – world of the Tudor court, and considers what it took to maintain law and order over the turbulent 16th century
encoded: The Tudor world was a turbulent one, with momentous decisions reliant on the whims of those in power. But how was authority felt by the average person? And what were the consequences of losing favour with those in charge? In this first episode of our series Tudor England: the big questions, Tracy Borman introduces Emily Briffett to the movers and shakers of the Tudor royal court, exploring what it took to run the country - and escape the monarch’s wrath. Watch the full episode, or listen ad-free at the link below: View Green Video on the source website

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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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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. A brutal past Grūtas Park has its roots in Lithuania’s very troubled history. Like several of its Baltic neighbours, Lithuania began the 20th century as part of Russia and only gained its independence in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War. Just over 20 years later, at the beginning of the Second World War, it was invaded by Soviet troops all over again. Then came the Nazis, followed once again by the Soviets three years later – and with each new invasion came new brutality. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/42Y7B3TJ-ac517fe-e1772189389657.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white…

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"Forget AI – never has the role of the historian been more urgent"
type: item
date: 2026-02-27T15:30:44.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: 21st Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Column
description: "Great histories have been written under the intense pressure of events", writes Michael Wood
encoded: Recently, I read a news item about the jobs most likely to disappear because of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). And first among them, along with translators, are historians! Now I’m biased of course, but in times like these, when the president of the United States himself can tell the world that Ukraine started the war with Russia, it seems to me we need historians more than ever. In the face of spreading authoritarian rule and growing rightwing populism, good history is a refuge and a beacon. Complicating matters further, it often seems as if the owners of the mass media, billionaires who wish to shape debates, don’t want historians any more than they want independent journalists. It seems that from their perspective, the less historically literate the people are, the better. But in an open democratic society, we need informed historical perspectives, the painstaking interrogation of sources, and public explanation and interpretation. History is not only entertainment. In an age of lies and disinformation, history acts as our reality check. Read more | Artificial intelligence: a modern advance or an ancient nightmare? And history, don’t forget, is not a fireside job. Great histories have been written under the intense pressure of events, in the moment. Think of Thucydides writing as the Peloponnesian War raged, or Ibn Khaldun, lowered down a wall in a basket to parley with the monstrous Timur (Tamerlane) at the siege of Damascus. Or what about the heroic Emanuel Ringelblum? Samuel D Kassow’s account of Ringelblum’s efforts to record the experiences of those trapped in the Warsaw ghetto – Who Will Write Our History? – is surely one of the most staggering books about why we write. To be a true historian is to make a kind of pact with the living and the dead – and with future generations. We have a duty to tell the truth. A new book brings all this into sharp relief. Jean-Pierre Filiu is a distinguished French historian, the author of The Middle East: A Po…

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Why Rome fell
type: item
date: 2026-02-23T15:30:21.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Historical events
subject: Life in ancient Rome
subject: Roman rulers
description: How do civilisations collapse? That was the question at the heart of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two hundred and fifty years after it was published, Guy de la Bédoyère argues that Gibbon’s magnum opus remains a landmark in the writing of history
encoded: Sometimes, a single narrative comes to dominate how we remember a year. So it is with 1776. This, as every history lover knows, was the date that the American colonies declared their independence, beginning the history of the United States. But back in the old world, another, rather more modest event would have a profound influence on cultural history. For 1776 was also the year that the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in London. And though it may not have spawned a nation, there’s little doubt that the book’s release was a landmark moment in the writing of history. Authored by Edward Gibbon, an essayist and, at this time, Whig MP for Liskeard, this epic work eventually grew to encompass the story of the Roman empire from the accession of the emperor Trajan in AD 98 through to 1453, when the Ottomans captured Constantinople and the rump of the Eastern empire fell. The last of its six volumes appeared in 1788 just before another tumultuous year in global history, 1789, when the opening salvos were fired in the French Revolution. What, in the year of its 250th anniversary, are we to make of Decline and Fall? Is it coincidental that a book written at a time of rebellion, and where so much of the narrative is about political intrigues and the loss of power, connected with 18th-century readers? And how did a history based on limited resources that few scholars would refer to today escape its time to become a classic? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-122219029webready-2206e03-e1771851490986.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A life‑sized marble statue of a Roman leader stands upright against a carved stone wall. The figure wears ornate armor decorated with reliefs, including a central face and small mythological scenes. A heavy cloak drapes over the left shoulder and arm, adding a sense of movement to the otherwise rigid pose. The right arm is raised, holding a …

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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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The prince and the brothel: 6 scandals that rocked the British monarchy
type: item
date: 2026-02-02T15:30:45.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: British queens
subject: Georgian
subject: Historical people
subject: Royal children
subject: Royal weddings
subject: The royal family
description: At a time when the royal family is under significant strain, historians shine a spotlight on some of the biggest crises to have enveloped the British monarchy over the past three centuries
encoded: The prince, the brothel and a culture war Katie Hindmarch-Watson describes a sex scandal that consumed Queen Victoria’s grandson On 7 July 1889, a policeman arrested a sometime telegraph boy, Henry Newlove, at his mother’s house in Camden Town. Newlove had been recruiting younger telegraph boys at London’s Central Telegraph Office to provide sexual services for affluent male clients at a brothel on Cleveland Street. Defiant, Newlove said that he thought it “very hard that I should get into trouble while men in high position are allowed to walk around free… Why, Lord Arthur Somerset goes regularly to the house at Cleveland Street; so does the Earl of Euston and Colonel Jervois.” Within months, Newlove was in prison and Somerset was in exile. Yet Henry Fitzroy, Earl of Euston, triumphed in a libel suit that exonerated him from any “gross indecency”, and Colonel Jervois received no further mention in police records or the press. However, another man in high position became the focus of speculation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL11686324webready-dfc0737-e1770036564257.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A newspaper depicting several scenes of men in top hats and young boys standing in the street" title="The Cleveland Street Scandal, as reported in The Illustrated Police News on 25 January 1890. The affair – which embroiled Prince Albert Victor – “evolved into a morality tale about rich men’s predatory vices” (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> We still don’t really know why Prince Albert Victor – or ‘Eddy’, grandson of Queen Victoria and oldest son of the Prince of Wales – became linked to the story. Arthur Somerset had been his father’s equerry, but there is no evidence that the two men associated with one another, and no proof has emerged one way or another about Eddy’s propensity for sex with teenage telegraph boys. The Cleveland Street Scandal evolved from Newlove’s revelations into a morality tale about rich men’s pred…

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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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