History Extra podcast
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History Extra podcast
The HistoryExtra podcast brings you gripping stories from the past and fascinating historical conversations with the world's leading historical experts. HistoryExtra is a free history podcast, with episodes released six times a week. Subscribe now for the real stories behind your favourite films,...
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2610 episodes
The astonishing laws of medieval Wales
From divorce settlements and cattle disputes to surprisingly modern ideas about gender and compensation, the laws of Hywel Dda shed unique light on ho...
Inside the Declaration of Independence
It’s 250 years since the Declaration of Independence brought a new nation into formal existence. But what did it actually say – and who did it leave o...
Cannibalism, heartbreak and Madame Guillotine: George Forster's extraordinary life
He sailed to Antarctica with Captain Cook, rubbed shoulders with Benjamin Franklin and helped found a revolutionary republic. It’s little wonder, then...
Charlotte Brontë's life through clothes
We might picture Charlotte Brontë's life as an isolated one, separated from much of the world and its fashions as she whiled away the hours in her fat...
Emma Goldman: life of the week
Anarchist, feminist, revolutionary: 19th-century activist and writer Emma Goldman emigrated from the Russian empire to the United States as a teenager...
Stealing the V2 rocket: Britain’s secret WW2 intelligence coup
In 1944, as Allied troops pushed across Europe after D-Day, the Allies faced a terrifying new threat: Hitler’s V2 weapons, striking without warning at...
The road to the American Revolutionary War
The United States often presents its birth as a straightforward struggle for liberty – but reality was far more messy. In this first episode of Histor...
The protestant missionaries that didn't change the world
Why did Protestant missionaries travel the globe across the course of centuries, only to convert remarkably few people? Alec Ryrie – author of new boo...
Strangers and aliens in Tudor England
Many histories of the 16th century tell stories of monarchs and courtiers – but there is, of course, much more to the century than that. Speaking to C...
Alexander the Great: life of the week
Stretching from Greece to India, Alexander the Great’s empire was one of the largest in human history, and he’d conquered it all by the time he was 30...
What myths do we tell about royal women?
Have royal women's stories been misconstrued? Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Kate Williams argues that many of them have been, tracing the lives of a w...
Cleopatra’s death – and cultural afterlife
The final chapter of Cleopatra’s life is shrouded in mystery. Did she really take her own life? Was an asp involved? And why don’t we know where her t...
Masters of disinformation: how British spies played dirty in the Cold War
They 'haunted' an Indonesian general with a talking ghost and planted fake hippies in a Bulgarian youth festival. But did they change the course of th...
Churchill's toughest decision
In the summer of 1940, the Royal Navy attacked a French fleet moored off the coast of north Africa, killing almost 1,300 sailors. Winston Churchill de...
Henry Paget: life of the week
Henry Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, lived a life of extravagance, luxury and theatre – and for this, he was the subject of much intrigue in the lat...
The hidden history of female sexual pleasure
How did women in the past experience sex and pleasure? Kate Lister reveals that this is a rather complicated question. Instead of simply lying back an...
Why Cleopatra was more than a bewitching beauty
We often think of Cleopatra as using her feminine wiles to secure, and maintain, power. But was that really the case? And what other skills and qualit...
Better than Bridgerton: the real Georgian masquerade
Is there a real historical phenomenon behind Bridgerton’s masked ball? And what would it really have been like? In this episode, Meghan Kobza takes us...
Weimar's descent from democracy to barbarism
Weimar is a small German city. Yet it looms large in European history. In the 1920s, it was synonymous with liberalism, internationalism and the fine...
Alan Turing: life of the week
Alan Turing is one of the most celebrated of all British scientists. His work in cracking Nazi codes at Bletchley Park, and his role in the evolution...
The self-made Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe is synonymous with glamour, beauty and stardom – but scratching the surface of her public image reveals another story. Author and profe...
Cleopatra’s bloody rise to power
From formidable overseas leaders to vicious internecine conflict, Cleopatra’s rise to the top was bloody and brutal. So what personal qualities did sh...
Gullible Georgians: hoaxes in the Enlightenment period
The 18th century was an age of industrialisation, scientific exploration and ‘progress’, but what happened when those rational foundations were shaken...
Spies, radicals and deportees: one hotel in wartime Paris
The Hotel Lutetia in central Paris lived several lives in the tortured times of the 1930s and 1940s. Before the war, it was the hub of dissenting acti...
Timur: life of the week
Timur – sometimes known as Tamerlane – carved out one of history’s largest empires through sweeping military campaigns and ruthless violence. Emily Br...
How Orkney became the centre of Viking Age violence
For much of the Viking Age, the Orkney archipelago served as a vibrant hub of Norse activity. But these islands were also plagued by violence, not lea...
Young Cleopatra: the making of a queen
Thousands of years ago, a woman emerged on to the world stage whose name would echo down through the centuries: Cleopatra. But what we do we know abou...
A history of Christian sacrifice
What's the role that sacrifice has played in the history of Christianity? It's a history that might be more complex, and more surprising, than we thin...
Redefining historical mothers
Motherhood has long been considered as something expected, rather than extraordinary. Yet from midwives questioning the status quo to pregnant women p...
Lady Jane Grey: life of the week
Think of Lady Jane Grey, and your mind probably goes straight to her legacy as the Nine Days’ Queen. But what do we really know about her life? She mi...
The peacemakers of WW2
Politicians and generals today talk a lot about the need for exit plans to be established if conflict erupts between nations. In the middle of the hor...
The long shadow of the Black Death
When the first wave of the Black Death finally subsided, what sort of world did it leave behind? How did societies adapt in the decades that followed?...
The secret plot to end Scottish independence
How did the union of England and Scotland come to fruition? From failed Scottish colonies to anti-independence espionage, Marc Mierowsky's book A Spy...
How did communism conquer China?
How did a tiny band of guerrillas come to rule a quarter of humanity? And was the outcome of the Chinese Civil War really the ‘heroic’ popular uprisin...
Olaf Tryggvason: life of the week
From thrall to king; from pagan to Christian: Olaf Tryggvason was one of the titanic figures of the Viking Age, whose story straddles the line between...
The death of Adolf Hitler
What do we really know about Adolf Hitler’s death? In this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, historian and author Caroline Sharples tells Charlotte...
Fear and faith: coping with the Black Death
For those who lived through it, the Black Death left a legacy of fear, loss and uncertainty. But how did people cope with such overwhelming catastroph...
Attenborough: a life on screen
This May marks the 100th birthday of leading British documentary-maker and natural historian David Attenborough. But what's the longer history of wild...
A worker's eye-view of ancient Rome
We know plenty about the lives of rich and powerful Romans – men such as Julius Caesar and Augustus. But Kim Bowes is more interested in those who wor...
Niccolò Machiavelli: life of the week
From obscure beginnings to torture, exile, and desperate reinvention, the biography of Renaissance diplomat and author Niccolò Machiavelli reads like...