HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-05-04T14:31:04.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: "Today, the defenders of the Enlightenment are in retreat"
items: From ancient China to modern America: an astonishing history of censorship
items: Pageantry and politics: a history of British royal visits to the US
items: Blood and plunder: the looted African gold – and the fight to get it back
items: Long to reign over us: how did Queen Elizabeth II survive seven decades of dizzying change?
items: Power, pomp and the Peacock Throne: the Mughal empire at 500
items: Friends, Romans, citizens: why Rome opened its doors to people across the empire
items: This secret speech gave people heart attacks: when Khrushchev denounced Stalin
items: England's mistress: how Nell Gwyn won the heart of Charles II – and became a political powerhouse
items: I wrote a letter to the world's most famous terrorist – and nothing could have prepared me for his reply

"Today, the defenders of the Enlightenment are in retreat"
type: item
date: 2026-05-04T14:30:48.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Civil rights
subject: Column
description: Michael Wood on the evolution and erosion of universal human rights
encoded: I’ve just returned from a trip to Versailles. On a bitterly cold, end-of-winter afternoon, the great symbol of French monarchy, gilded anew for the 2024 Olympics, gleamed against a steel-blue sky. The crowds were huge: it’s one of the biggest tourist draws in France after Disneyland – which is somehow fitting, for Versailles is a fairytale palace, too. I walked the gardens, browsed the bookshop (stacked with books on Marie Antoinette, of course) and then strolled back through the town to the station. On the way, there was a surprise. In a side street, display boards along an old wall told the story of the National Assembly of the summer of 1789 – the very moment of revolution. Down a lane, a faded wooden sign over a crumbling gateway marked the site of the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs du Roi, where the scenery, costumes, instruments and props used in royal entertainments were stored; it’s now a centre of baroque music. Inside was a tree-lined courtyard and a rain-filled hollow marking the oval outline of the temporary auditorium where the National Assembly met. Here, affronted by the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and powerful, the representatives of the people voted to “abolish privilege” and create a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Read more | How Napoleon (almost) destroyed the French Revolution The Rights of Man! Such were the ideals of the Enlightenment, the great 18th-century movement towards rational thought, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, human autonomy, secularism and democracy. That declaration in 1789 came hot on the heels of the American Revolution, whose 250th anniversary we celebrate this year. That, in turn, was inspired by English precedent: Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689. These ideals have been upheld by western thinkers ever since, despite the horrendous deeds of imperialists across the world in the intervening time, colonising and enslaving other cultures, and fighting catastrophic inter…

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From ancient China to modern America: an astonishing history of censorship
type: item
date: 2026-04-29T16:00:22.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Civil rights
subject: Communism
subject: Debate
subject: Trends-News
subject: US presidents
description: A mistrust of ‘experts’ and ‘intellectuals’ has recently crystallised into US government interventions targeting academic institutions. Emily Knox and Joan Scott share their thoughts with Danny Bird about the troubling history of anti-intellectualism
encoded: Danny Bird: Anti-intellectualism can feel like quite a contemporary concern – but when did this phenomenon emerge? Joan Scott: It goes back a long way. In the case of the United States, a key reference is Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter, published in 1963 in the wake of the McCarthy anti-communist hearings. I return to it often. Hofstadter traces anti-intellectualism almost to the nation’s beginnings, particularly in debates over education. Attempts to centralise schooling repeatedly provoked hostile reactions from local communities determined to control what their children were taught. Hofstadter locates this strain chiefly among non-elite, less formally educated groups who are suspicious of expertise and claims to superior competence, and wary of those in elite positions. The US therefore has a long history of anti-intellectualism, though it also appears in different forms elsewhere. France may be something of an exception – as a historian, I have seen philosophical disputes conducted at every level of French society in a way quite unlike anything in the US. In any case, though the tradition of anti-intellectualism is long-standing, we may now be experiencing it at its most acute. Emily Knox: When I think about anti-intellectualism, I see a rift. There is a fear that, if someone becomes more educated or begins to listen to experts, a break opens within their community. This is especially visible with first-generation university students, who can feel pulled away from their families and local ties. In many cases, anti-intellectualism grows from that sense of separation. It is rooted less in abstract questions of trust than in fear of loss, distance and change. Viewing it in those terms helps us to understand it more clearly. Has it commonly been during times of upheaval – such as religious conflicts, revolutions and the rise of authoritarian and populist regimes – when academic freedom has been attacked? EK: Yes. One of the earliest and …

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Pageantry and politics: a history of British royal visits to the US
type: item
date: 2026-04-27T01:10:19.000Z
creator: Sam Edwards
subject: 20th Century
subject: 21st Century
subject: Cold War
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: British prime ministers
subject: British queens
subject: Historical people
subject: The royal family
subject: US presidents
description: As transatlantic tensions swirled about King Charles III’s visit to Washington DC in 2026, Sam Edwards reveals how past royal tours have steadied the ‘special relationship’ in times of crisis
encoded: The April 2026 royal visit to the United States came at a particularly challenging moment for the US-UK ‘special relationship’. In the preceding months, President Donald Trump had repeatedly singled out prime minister Keir Starmer for blunt criticism, even going so far as to declare that Starmer as “no Churchill”. Meanwhile, the royal family similarly found itself caught up in transatlantic controversy: the Epstein scandal. If all that wasn’t challenging enough, King Charles’s visit to America also came at a time when the US-UK relationship was drawing even more scrutiny than usual. 2026 is year is the 80th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, which popularised the phrase ‘special relationship’, and it’s also the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. The latter was of course the event that severed the connection between the American colonies and the British Crown and thereby put the transatlantic relationship onto a very different trajectory. In short, the visit came at a time of significant turbulence in the US-UK relationship. King Charles, however, might have been able to take some reassurance from the fact that several of his predecessors had similarly travelled to the United States during moments of challenge, change and upheaval... <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/2GettyImages-1320405043big-566d798-e1777245347971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large group of men and women in formal 19th-century dress gather outside a red-brick tomb set within a leafy landscape, their attention focused on a central meeting of figures. Women wear layered gowns with bonnets, while men in dark suits and top hats stand in lines, with trees and a distant sky framing the scene." title="A painting by Thomas Pritchard Rossiter captures the Prince of Wales’s historic visit to George Washington’s tomb in 1860. The young prince, who later ruled as Edward VII, can be seen standing with President James B…

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Blood and plunder: the looted African gold – and the fight to get it back
type: item
date: 2026-04-24T14:30:43.000Z
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Slavery
subject: The British Empire
description: It’s a tale of slavery, racism and naked imperial power. Barnaby Phillips traces the fate of the exquisite golden treasures looted by British forces from the kingdom of Asante 150 years ago
encoded: In a poorly lit cabinet in the Oriental Armoury of London’s Wallace Collection, there is a near-life size gold cast head, weighing nearly 1.5kg. It is perhaps the largest gold object to have come from Africa outside of ancient Egypt. When this head arrived in England in 1874, part of the haul of treasure brought back by Sir Garnet Wolseley’s army from the kingdom of Asante in west Africa, it attracted widespread comment, not all favourable. The Times said: it “seems to represent the head of a victim gagged for sacrifice”, and pronounced it “ghastly”. The Illustrated London News said it was “hideous and horrible”. But Richard Wallace, the wealthy aristocrat whose collection was later bequeathed to the nation, may have disagreed, because he paid £500 for it (about £62,000 today). In 1974, William Fagg, a curator at the British Museum, said the ‘Wallace Head’ was “a masterpiece… a technically excellent piece of lost-wax craftsmanship” that impacted like “a bomb” on the complacent artistic sensibilities of Victorian London. What was the African civilisation that had produced this golden head? And how did it, and other Asante pieces, end up in British museums and private collections? The Asante kingdom traces its origins to the late 17th century, when smaller kingdoms inland in the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) amalgamated under the control of a ruler based in the emerging city of Kumasi. Europeans were familiar with the Gold Coast, having traded there for gold, as the name suggests, but also enslaved people, ever since the 15th century. In the 18th century, Asante profited handsomely through both these trades, typically selling gold and human captives through Fante middlemen to the British, Portuguese, Dutch and other Europeans in their castles on the coast. But it wasn’t until 1817 that a British delegation travelled some 125 miles inland to Kumasi, and paid its respects to the Asante king, known as the Asantehene. One of the envoys, a young man from Bristol called Tho…

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Long to reign over us: how did Queen Elizabeth II survive seven decades of dizzying change?
type: item
date: 2026-04-21T14:30:26.000Z
subject: 21st Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: British queens
subject: Historical events
subject: Royal children
subject: Royal weddings
subject: The British Empire
subject: The royal family
description: When Elizabeth II ascended the throne in 1952, she could barely have conceived the currents – imperial retreat, multiculturalism, de-industrialiation – that would transform the nation during her reign. On the centenary of the Queen’s birth, David Cannadine explores how she navigated seven decades of dizzying change
encoded: When I was born in September 1950, King George VI had just over a year to live. I have no memory of him or his reign, and my first royal recollection was of the coronation of the second Queen Elizabeth – or, more precisely, of images of her state coach and horses, which I cut out of a souvenir magazine. My parents did not own a television set, and did not know anyone who did, so it was only in 2012, the year of Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee, that I watched the remastered version of the original coronation broadcast from Westminster Abbey. Richard Dimbleby’s reverential commentary, suffused with ardour and optimism, did indeed belong to that earlier time. When the Queen celebrated her platinum jubilee in 2022, few people in the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth could remember when she had not been on the throne. Like Queen Victoria, Elizabeth II had become part of what Victoria’s biographer Lytton Strachey called the “indissoluble” scheme of things, which made it impossible for many people to imagine the world without her. Apart from just over a year at the beginning, and (thus far) four years at the end, my own life has coincided exactly with the 70 years of her reign. I was no part of her life, and never met her, but she was certainly a part of mine, as she was of millions of people in the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and far beyond. Joining Shakespeare I never imagined it would one day fall to me to tell Queen Elizabeth’s life story, but in 2014 I was appointed editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and it seemed likely that the Queen would die on my watch. The convention established for the ODNB’s predecessor, the original Dictionary of National Biography, was that when the monarch died, the editor would contribute the entry on him or her, and it duly fell to me to write the life of Elizabeth II. I did so in two forms: as a short book of 50,000 words, published late in 2025 by Oxford University Press; and as her entry in the ODNB, available onl…

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Power, pomp and the Peacock Throne: the Mughal empire at 500
type: item
date: 2026-04-20T15:46:07.000Z
subject: General Early Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
description: Five centuries ago, the birth of the Mughal empire heralded a new era of social and religious tolerance, international trade, and artistic and intellectual flourishing. Jagjeet Lally traces the fortunes and legacy of the dynasty that transformed India
encoded: Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall deeply in love. Boy’s disapproving father forbids their union. The pair strive to be together, against the odds – but, in a tragic denouement, their young love is thwarted forever. It’s a timeless trope that’s long been stock in trade of Bollywood cinema. But when the girl is a courtesan and dancer, and her suitor is an imperial prince whose father – the Mughal emperor Akbar – holds the power to sentence her to death by immurement (being bricked up in a wall), the result is a sensational, lavish box-office hit. Mughal-e-Azam (The Great Mughal), a 1960 blockbuster that smashed records for Indian cinema, is now an established classic. That film, based on a legend about the prince who later ruled as the emperor Jahangir, is rooted in the popular consciousness of the Mughal empire. That mighty, influential and long-lasting power was, according to one definition, founded 500 years ago this month, and ruled much of India for som e three centuries. The film touches on themes of romance, power, conflict, control and more, all linked in many minds with that dynasty. But who were the real Mughals, how are they remembered today – and is that legacy accurate? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/DXN48Awebready-d474b24-e1776688295226.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two individuals in elaborate historical attire stand in an ornate interior with carved pillars and arches. One wears a purple‑and‑pink outfit with gold embroidery and a jeweled headpiece; the other wears a light green garment with maroon and gold detailing and a pearl necklace." title="Dancer Anarkali is courted by Salim, son of the Mughal emperor Akbar, in the 1960 Bollywood blockbuster Mughal-e-Azam, based on a legend about the future ruler Jahangir (Image by Alamy)" /> The dynasty originated in 15th-century central Asia with a prince named Babur, whose ancestors included Genghis (or Chinggis) Khan. Babur was an even more direct descendan…

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Friends, Romans, citizens: why Rome opened its doors to people across the empire
type: item
date: 2026-04-19T11:30:48.000Z
creator: Dr Shushma Malik
subject: General ancient history
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Life in ancient Rome
subject: Roman rulers
subject: Roman women
description: From Romulus’s open-city policy to Claudius’s reforms, citizenship was used by Rome as both a reward and a weapon. And, as Shushma Malik explains, it enabled the burgeoning empire to build power and define identity
encoded: What made Rome so powerful? Writing in the early 16th century in his Discourses on Livy, Niccolò Machiavelli (best known for The Prince) argued that the secret lay not in geography or luck, but in people – and in a ruthless flexibility in acquiring them. “Those who design a city to create a great empire must strive with great diligence to fill it full of inhabitants,” he wrote (as translated in 1997 by JC and P Bondanella). “This may be done in two ways: either through love or through force. It is done through love by keeping the pathways open and safe for foreigners who wish to come there to live… it is done through force, after nearby cities are destroyed, by sending their inhabitants to live in your city.” Rome enlarged its population through both of those two methods, enabling it to build enormous fighting forces – Machiavelli cited a figure of 80,000 men, compared with just 20,000 for Athens or Sparta at their peak. Rome flourished, said Machiavelli, not because it had an advantageous location but because of one simple but powerful policy: it made outsiders into Romans. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-113636408-4087aad-e1776332738730.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A bronze sculpture shows a she‑wolf standing alert with her head turned, while two human infants beneath her reach toward her teats." title="A bronze statue shows Romulus and Remus suckled by a she-wolf. According to legend the twins, who founded Rome in 753 BC, were themselves refugees (Image by Getty Images)" /> This concept was integral to the city’s founding story. Romans were not from Rome – as Athenians were thought to be born from the earth of Athens – but travelled and settled there as refugees. According to myth – specifically, Virgil’s epic Aeneid – Aeneas came to Italy after fleeing from a burning Troy. Romulus and Remus, twins supposedly descended from the line of kings that traced back to Aeneas’s son Ascanius, were rescued fr…

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This secret speech gave people heart attacks: when Khrushchev denounced Stalin
type: item
date: 2026-04-15T14:30:54.000Z
subject: Cold War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Communism
subject: Historical events
description: Seventy years ago, Nikita Khrushchev stood before a packed hall in central Moscow and delivered a four-hour denunciation of Josef Stalin, one that exposed mass terror and attempted to reclaim the legacy of Leninism. So what drove this extraordinarily radical move? And did the Soviet people buy Khrushchev’s message?
encoded: When I was an undergraduate, a perennial exam question was ‘Did Stalin betray the revolution?’. The question gets to the heart of Soviet history, and I still ask my students to address it. What does it mean? It suggests that Stalin’s policies, especially in the 1930s, were either a logical consequence of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 or they were a deadly departure from its promises. At the end of the 1920s, when Stalin consolidated his personal hold on power, he made a sharp leftward turn. His programme was headlined by a centrally planned economy, the collectivisation of agriculture, and breakneck industrialisation. It sounds like the fruits of a socialist revolution. Mass state violence accompanied this ‘great break’ in Soviet life. Collectivisation led to falls in grain output and the forcible transfer of some of it to industrial centres; famine followed, killing millions, worst of all in Ukraine. The network of Gulag labour camps dramatically expanded. Enemies of the people – innocent men and women – were shot in their hundreds of thousands during the Great Terror of 1936–38. Did these appalling atrocities subvert the liberations of 1917? Or were they the natural follow-up to the terrors of the civil war (1917–22) and a predictable explosion of the implied violence of socialism? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/HIP2591053-6c687f8-e1776154310242.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A Soviet propaganda poster depicts a large hand gripping a sword marked with the hammer and sickle, slicing through a snake labeled with words such as espionage, sabotage, and provocation. The left side is dark with the snake, while the right shows a bright, orderly cityscape. Russian text urges vigilance." title="A poster from 1953 proclaims “Vigilence is Our Weapon. Be Vigilant!” Millions of people had died as a result of Stalin’s violent policies during his long rule (Image by Topfoto)" /> Generations of students have written essays ab…

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England's mistress: how Nell Gwyn won the heart of Charles II – and became a political powerhouse
type: item
date: 2026-04-13T14:30:56.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
description: Nell Gwyn became famous for her love affair with Charles II, and for her love of drinking, gambling and carousing. Yet, writes Sophie Shorland, this upwardly mobile celebrity was also a canny political operator who wielded substantial power in court
encoded: On a first date with the king of England, you might reasonably expect him to pay the bill. Yet Nell Gwyn’s relationship with Charles II started as it went on: unconventionally. The celebrated actress met the king for the first time in 1668 at a London playhouse, where Gwyn caught his eye from an adjacent box; according to reports, they flirted throughout the performance. Afterwards, Gwyn and her companion joined Charles and his younger brother, the Duke of York (later King James II & VII), at a hostelry. There, legend has it, once the party had eaten and drunk their fill, the landlord presented them with the tab. Upon searching his pockets, we’re told, Charles found that he had no money with him, and was forced to lean on one of the royal hangers-on to pay up. Gwyn’s reaction to this unexpected turn of events was typically droll: she joked that she had got into “the poorest company that ever [she] was in!” Across her extraordinary life, that acerbic wit never let her down. Pepys’ pin-up Nell Gwyn was, quite literally, the pin-up girl of Restoration England. Above his desk at the Admiralty, the diarist Samuel Pepys kept an engraving of the actress posing as Cupid. In it, with wings her only attire, one perfectly toned arm made an ineffectual attempt to preserve some modesty. Pepys was clearly enchanted by Gwyn – as was King Charles. Despite that inauspicious first liaison in the London tavern, the actress and the monarch embarked upon a scandalous love affair that produced two sons and set tongues wagging across the kingdom. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1751434017-f189007-e1775638623277.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A monochrome engraving shows a winged, classical figure from the waist up. The figure has curled hair, holds an arrow in one hand, and gazes slightly toward the viewer." title="An engraving of a c1672 painting depicts Nell Gwyn as Cupid. A copy of this image hung above Samuel Pepys’ desk a…

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I wrote a letter to the world's most famous terrorist – and nothing could have prepared me for his reply
type: item
date: 2026-03-29T15:30:04.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Death
subject: Historical events
description: In December 1975, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – better known as Carlos the Jackal – attacked the headquarters of a global oil organisation in Vienna. Jason Burke recounts the story of the incident, and reveals how his efforts to interview the terrorist helped solve a 50-year-old mystery
encoded: About half an hour after opening the letter sent to me by one of the most notorious terrorists of all time, I realised that not only did it contain a note offering “revolutionary greetings”, but that it would lead to the solution of a decades-old mystery. It was the summer of 2023, and for months I had been trying to contact Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. While researching my book, a narrative history of 1970s terrorism entitled The Revolutionists, I had already spoken to several of those who had bombed, hijacked and shot their way through the decade, but Ramírez Sánchez was the most iconic figure of these years. Arguably the world’s first real ‘celebrity terrorist’, Ramírez Sánchez was responsible for around a dozen major attacks in western Europe between 1973 and 1983. But despite the many articles, books and films about him, there was still much about his career of deadly violence that was unknown. As such, the letter on my doormat marked a significant breakthrough. From Caracas to Paris It had been easy to locate Ramírez Sánchez, who by that point had been incarcerated for nearly 30 years. Captured by the French intelligence service while undergoing minor surgery in Sudan in 1994, he had been convicted of multiple terrorist offences and held in several different prisons across France. Now locked away in a high-security facility in Fresnes, about 20 miles south of Paris, he was allowed a small number of visitors. To be among them, however, I needed an invitation. As a first step, I got a message to him via an intermediary to establish my bona fides. I then wrote directly, explaining my interest in hearing his own version of events. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/9-GettyImages-115106383-1d24d91-e1774617817390.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A multi‑storey brick complex with red‑tiled roofs and uniform tall windows fills the foreground. The older industrial‑style buildings sit within a to…

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