Christianity: a success story from the start? | HistoryExtra‘Up until the conversion of Constantine Christianity is a small sect of very devout believers. Entry rules are very strict. It's a multi-year multi-stage process and baptism is of adults after many years of initiation in the final run-up to baptism which always happened on Easter Sunday, you met with your exorcist literally every day for a couple of months and, baptism is viewed as a kind of one-off hit of cleansing. There are real arguments, they haven't resolved them in 300 but they're real arguments about whether serious sins can be forgiven after baptism so if you've sinned after baptism that might be it. And the vision is that very few people are going to go to heaven, the standards required of people are very strict and that of course matches up with the entry rules. In the late Roman period that starts to change as we see Christianity becoming a mass religion for the first time... Christianity does become much bigger in percentage terms particularly in urban populations and in the life of the politically enfranchised elites of the Roman Empire and that forces it to change because actually the kinds of standards that Christianity behavioral stands, the early Christianity is enforcing won't work with these kinds of people who are rich and live quite worldly lives in particular. Early Christianity was very worried about money and it was very worried about sex and if you're going to become a mass religion then you have to make your peace in one way or another with both of these things because you will not get everyone or you will not get lots of people to give up both of those kind of very normal types of human activity...
It also evolves new authority structures. The pre-Constantinian Christianity is a series of autonomous self-running communities in various towns around the Mediterranean that are in periodic contact with one another. There is no authority structure, no one's in charge of Christianity. When you look at what happens in the late Roman period you get a centralized authority structure for the first time within the Christian religion and it's the Roman Emperor, because the Roman Emperor has the unique right to call large-scale councils where Bishops supposedly from every community within the Empire come together. The Bishops make the formal decisions but in practice it's up to an emperor whether he calls the council and he usually doesn't call a council unless he knows what answer he wants from it on some particularly crucial decision. So you know Emperors are firmly in charge'...
‘I think the really weird thing about miracles because we think oh superstitious rubbish is actually what it expresses is a desire and a belief that the universe is rational. If you behave well and approach the right source of power, good things will happen. If you behave badly um or fail to approach the right source of supernatural assistance things will go wrong. So it's a a very human desire I think "that the the universe should be a rational place. That you get rewarded if life is good or you know if you behave well. And that if you modify your behavior because bad things are happening and do the right thing then things will get better’...
'European Christianity is organized in the high medieval period around this vision [of Purgatory] and you know that's so a lot of people are going to get to heaven, it's going to be rough through Purgatory. It's so completely different from the pre-Constantinian Christian vision of a small um self-selecting group of people who have to live perfect lives now and only a very few of whom even I think from within the Christian Community would would be the vision only very few of them will get to heaven ever'...
‘You've sort of suggested that the rise or growth of Christianity in Europe isn't something that's necessarily inevitable. I think we've sort of busted that myth. So what were the tick boxes of success would you say that allowed Christianity to flourish when perhaps other religions didn't?’
‘There's a whole series of things that come together. I think one is the absolute capacity to maintain a facade of continuity while changing pretty much everything underneath. So it allows the sort of continuous living institution to grow so what you see in each era is that every time a new and specific block of converts are added in, Christianity makes adjustments to make itself livable for those converts. So in the late Roman period we get mass elite transformation, well what are the late Roman elites all about? They're about Greco-Roman philosophy and culture. And we find Christianity making its peace and incorporating substantial elements of Greco-Roman philosophy and culture into itself. In the Early Middle Ages well we've got peasantry and we get miracles as mentioned but we also then are spreading to elites like Anglo-Saxons or Irish or Franks who are deeply military. And you know that ought to be a problem. You know, one of the things Christ says in the New Testament is turn the other cheek. It doesn't say you know slice someone up out of a good sense of honor to show that you're a man, you know. It doesn't say that. It should be a problem. It's much less of a problem in practice than it ought to be in theory and Christianity finds a way to accommodate warriors. I mean the problem for warriors is you know you're going to die sometime. The problem is to die with honor, not to be disgraced… dying with honor and dying in a state of grace become equated. There's also the thing that warriors want to be remembered. Memory is a crucial thing in warrior societies and Christianity brings along writing and also brings along new ways of thinking about honor and thinking about glory.'"
Of course, Christians claim Christianity hasn't changed for 2 millennia
Pharaohs' pants & knightly toilet troubles: teaching history to kids | HistoryExtra - "There was a young boy with red hair who said you know were people with red hair mocked in medieval times or was it was it exciting to have red hair and it's like that's a great question. So children have all, they've got all manner of questions they want to ask as do grown-ups. So often I get asked about the history of menstrual hygiene by by predominantly women. Um that feels then perhaps as a an interesting thing perhaps that's something that's not well talked about very often and perhaps it's more so these days. But I think um cleanliness, hygiene, washing, shampooing, brushing your teeth: these are the things that come up over and over and over whenever I asked ask people about their questions. And then obviously things like is Downton Abbey accurate, I saw a movie, it said this. Did that happen? Those sort of engagements with popular culture and and dramatic storytelling or historical novels or video games. People want to know is The Crown accurate? Did you know did Diana really say that? That sort of thing also really comes up a lot so I guess there's quite a lot of variety but certainly young people seem they seem particularly interested in bodily functions and in and in sort of etiquette and manners and decency and what they do with their bodies and what they wear and that sort of stuff seems particularly important and they don't ask about Weimar Germany or you know. They ask who's your favorite King and I always say it depends what you mean because Henry VII was the best King but he was a monster. Um so uh that's always interesting they would sort of ask you know they kind of a sort of top trump style like you know who would win in a battle between Henry VIII and Edward IV you sort of go that's a good question I don't know. But I think the ordinary is actually quite fascinating’
‘What was the answer to the red hair question?’
‘Well it's, I didn't, I had to be quite careful because obviously the answer is quite saucy, quite rude but there was a belief in in European medieval uh health and hygiene that red hair might be a byproduct of of people having sex during menstruation and it could therefore be a bit of a problem, so I had to be quite cautious in answering that. That was at the Hay Festival so that was uh I think that was filmed… the Bayeux Tapestry… people wanted to know about the penises… how did knights poo in their armor? That is a, it's a basic question isn't it? And yeah on the one hand you kind of get uh gross. On the other hand you go yeah but how do you poo in your armour? Do you just go and get someone else to clean it up or did you try and squat?...
Bad health was the norm in ancient Roman Greece. Good health was a rare thing because of the lack of antibiotics, because of the lack of modern medicine. So most people were in pain most of the time from something. A broken leg that never healed properly. An ear infection, an eye infection.'...
‘My favorite one usually is just how many underpants Was Tutankhamun buried with? And the answer being 145 spare pairs… so it's so many or not enough because if you want to live forever in the afterlife you either need a billion pairs or you need one pair that can magically be cleaned’...
‘There's a really lovely thing called a fire clock which is a medieval Chinese time keeping device which allowed you to smell the time rather than, rather than look at it. So each hour had a different smell. So it would burn through the incense and after an hour had passed a new incense would ignite and that would smell different, so you could walk into a room and know what time it was by sensing it, and that's a really exciting idea, that you can tell the time with other parts of the body and when you think about it, again, that's that's a really good idea. Why don't we do that now?... [The tin can] invented as part of a competition by Napoleon’s France to try and get the Army into the field because they were struggling to supply the the troops with with food. And it ends up being a British, you know ends up in in British production instead of French production because the the scientists who sort of pioneered it, they couldn't get the copyright to work in France so they hopped across the channel and secretly took it to the British instead’"
Inside Germany’s postwar prisons | HistoryExtra - "‘East Germany was adamant that there was no such thing as a political prisoner in Germany but there were crimes against the state. Um about half of those crimes were what was called Republikflucht, so fleeing the Republic, um people trying to cross the border and the question then arises you know if you've got this ideal Republic which East Germany believed itself to be why would people flee? So in 1968 they actually changed the name of that crime um and it became illegal border crossing uh but still you know loads of people in prison for that. And what else is different is that there's a special police force in East Germany for dealing with crimes against the state. So regular criminality uh is dealt with by a force called the volkspolizei the people's police but crimes against the state are dealt with by the Ministry for State Security which we know as the Stasi um and that is a very different experience...
It was the fault of crimes against the state, of people who committed crimes against the state that the perfect socialist State hadn't yet emerged. These people were the reason why crime still existed. So when they go into prison they're likely to meet guards who are waiting to beat them up, much worse conditions than regular prisoners’"
Conspiracy: Hitler’s escape to South America | HistoryExtra - "‘Stalin… wanted to sow confusion amongst the Western allies about Hitler's death so he started to hint that very strongly that Hither had survived. This is incidentally not what the initial Red Army report said immediately after Hitler's death but that was then suppressed. Hitler was dead but Stalin wanted to suggest he might still be alive in case the Western allies then said: all right, we're not gonna occupy Germany in a serious way, you know there's no danger of Hitler coming back. And of course everyone's thinking historically, interestingly about Napoleon… the source of the modern day Conspiracy Theory actually Stalin is that, where it goes back to… uh there was even an unfortunate German who was interviewed many times by the police because he does rather look like Hitler but he said I'm fed up… Eichmann had a number of discussions with some other Nazis who'd escaped to Buenos Aires. And these discussions were recorded. They, they were written down and what they talked about was the possibility of a comeback. Of going back to Germany and starting up Nazism again. Complete and total fantasy. What's really interesting, that is that none of them mentioned Hitler. They all knew that Hitler was dead. If he'd been in Argentina they would have said something about it… Hitler was a political figure to the very core he would have been like Eichmann and his friends. He would have been plotting a comeback of some sort. He would not as the conspiracy theorists like to suggest, he would not have sat there in quiet retirement just sort of enjoying uh cups of tea and cake… They interviewed this old lady so yes well I worked in this house owned by a German and this mysterious man came and stayed in the house and I was told that he he was Hitler. I had to leave, I wasn't allowed to see him. I had to leave meals outside his door, a door of his room and they were typical German meals, you know Wiener schnitzel and wurst and sausages and so on. Of course Hitler was a, an uncompromising vegetarian’...
‘Why do you think this period is so ripe for this kind of speculation?’
‘It has a perennial fascination for people, I think because it represents in what is now increasingly a secular age, a kind of substitute for Satan or the devil it's a kind of picture of ultimate Evil and particularly Hitler. There's uh something called Godwin’s Law which was propagated by an American writer that says that every internet discussion and any debate on the internet on social media eventually ends up by mentioning Hitler. Um he is this sort of icon of of evil. You'll find that some groups that are propagating what I call alternative knowledge, UFOs... The Nazis were not conspiracy theorists in the whole in that way. If you look at Stalin, he was constantly dreaming up imaginary conspiracies, arresting people including most of his top ranked supporters like Bukhari or Zinavia and putting them on trial for having engaged in conspiracy to undermine the Soviet Union or destroy him, whatever it might be. Hitler wasn't like that. Stalin came up out of a kind of a group of equals at the top of the Soviet, the Bolshevik party, the Communist Party after Lenin’s death and so he was constantly terrified that his other top Soviet officials would be plotting against him. Hitler from the very beginning was the focus of massive adulation by his followers, even by the top ones like Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and so on. They all had huge faith in him. They were not a threat. The only threat was Ernst Röhm, 1934 killed in the Night of the Long Knives... The Nazis were not conspiracy theorists in the whole in that way. If you look at Stalin, he was constantly dreaming up imaginary conspiracies, arresting people including most of his top ranked supporters like Bukhari or Zinavia and putting them on trial for having engaged in conspiracy to undermine the Soviet Union or destroy him, whatever it might be. Hitler wasn't like that. Stalin came up out of a kind of a group of equals at the top of the Soviet, the Bolshevik party, the Communist Party after Lenin’s death and so he was constantly terrified that his other top Soviet officials would be plotting against him. Hitler from the very beginning was the focus of massive adulation by his followers, even by the top ones like Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and so on. They all had huge faith in him. They were not a threat. The only threat was Ernst Röhm, 1934 killed in the Night of the Long Knives...
you can see that there are people who think like you… we're also in a society, in a culture where truth has now much more doubtful. People doubt the truth. People don't even think you can find out the truth. That's partly a consequence of the influence of post-modernist relativism, at least in the universities and remember you know the very high proportion of the population now go to university. It's also of course the politicians, the populists we have politicians who have no regard for the truth at all and just lie and lie and lie’"
Social contagion is not an issue when it comes to things liberals support of course
Conspiracy: did aliens build the pyramids? | HistoryExtra - "‘The actual idea that aliens built the pyramids it's a fairly recent one and it I would say it really develops after H.G Wells publishes The War of the Worlds in 1897. This starts a run of sort of sci-fi books. There's one in particular in 1898, Edison's Conquest of Mars, which reveals that the great *something* Sphinx are alien Martian constructions. It's not supposed to be a serious book, you know it's fiction and that's what it's intended to be. But this idea that someone from outside Earth might have visited Egypt and built these pyramids then took a hold. So pretty soon after that the idea that the pyramids might have been built by aliens was starting to take a hold.’"
Conspiracy: was the moon landing faked? | HistoryExtra - "‘The possibility of a moon landing hoax is zero. To begin with, hundreds of thousands of Americans worked on that program and here we are half a century later and there's been no credible evidence of any way of being able to fake it. It's clear that all that evidence would have come out by now. We know that from all the other conspiracies that have proven to be true in the world, we know that this stuff leaks out very very quickly. There's no way that this could have been kept such a watertight secret for so long… the major thing about this one is the Russians were America's sworn Cold War enemy. They had the ability to track any spacecraft going to the Moon, they could read the same signals coming back from the spacecraft as America could, as could many other radio dishes around the world. The whole world was watching these landings. They saw things go to the moon and land and come back, so clearly something was going to the Moon. It would have been harder to have faked something landing on the moon under automated circumstances and it would have been with people in at that point. So the only way a conspiracy theory can hold up is if the Russians were in on it as well. And if you're into that kind of conspiracy theory where the Russians and America were in on some kind of big conspiracy in the heights of the Cold War then we're in territory there I don't think any rational person can really um stomach... not only did the Russians not support any of the conspiracy theories about America landing on the moon, they actually went as far as to celebrate America landing on the moon. In muted ways, clearly... they were clever in that they said well we were never going to land on the moon as well, we were actually trying to build space stations. They um basically hid their own moon landing program for many many decades, so in a way they had their own little conspiracy going on which having lost the race to the moon they then pretended they'd never been in the race at all. That was a lie that came out towards the end of the fall of the Soviet Union... It's almost a compliment to NASA and Apollo that people go: this can't be possible because in 1957 people hadn't even put anything in space...
It's easy to debunk any conspiracy theories about the footage of people walking on the moon being inaccurate because all you have to do is look at incredibly high budget movie, 2001 by Stanley Kubrick, that was being filmed right before the moon landings and see that our ideas of what the surface looked like were completely changed when we actually got there... there are things in the footage as well that are impossible to replicate on Earth, as the lunar rovers. The the cars that are driving on the moon are driving along, they kick up dust. As people are walking, they kick up dust, and that dust goes in a perfect fan tail and comes down and lands absolutely flat. There's no dust cloud… the ability to fake that would have needed technology that's not possible now... they will try and find things in footage and say, look that's fake, that's a prop. Most of these things are easily debunked. There's rocks on the surface that under certain, you look at certain photos, look like they have a marking on them and people say well they look it's a prop, it's got a marking on it. That's because there's a hair on the lens. When they've been redoing the pictures, you go back to the original, it's not there... everything that the moon landings did would be pretty much impossible to do without some incredible technology, that essentially it’s easier to go to the Moon"
Curious cures for medieval maladies | HistoryExtra - "[On gout] ‘Take in the month of May a handful uh or two of sage royal and a great quantity of blackened snails and a quantity of boars’ grease, then take a fat dog whelp, so a little puppy, uh that is suckling on, on upon his dam, so he's still a still a little baby puppy, um and strip him out of his skin and take his um spleen and liver out of his belly and make his belly clean as you can and then put the sage the snails and the boars’ grease into the belly of the whelp and prick the belly fat. So stitch it closed basically. Um and then put the wellp upon a spit and let him be roast as long as he will drop. So you're basically rendering the fat off off him. And receive the dropping in a clean vessel, and when he will drop no more, take him off the spit and chop him all into pieces and then with a little more boars’ grease fry him as dry as you can. So you're getting absolutely everything out of this, this puppy and as much moist as you can get of that, put into the dropping and then put them in a glass, so in a kind of glass vessel and it will look like a green salve. And therewith anoint the patient any time of the year whence is needed... I thought there's no way that this is going that I'm going to find this anywhere else and then a few weeks later I was looking at another manuscript at the UL and lo and behold I found a very similar version of the same recipe. Um, though the only difference is that it, recommended the use of a cat, a male cat instead of a puppy. But fundamentally it was the same recipe... there's a researcher here, a postdoctoral research called Hannah Bower who was, um who works on recipes and has has published a book recently kind of arguing that some of the contents of these books were actually never really used as medical treatments but had a kind of entertainment value and often you get recipes of different genres mixed together’"
Dandies, fops & macaronis: fashionable men through history | HistoryExtra - "‘One of the terms that was widely used in the middle of the 18th century was the macaroni. And, macaroni, well where did that come from? Some people said that this term came from a certain kind of playful verse called macaronic verse which is where you play at mixing different languages together and making puns but most people actually think there's something a little bit more straightforward about this term. It actually refers to pasta. So macaroni as in macaroni or yeah as I now discover mac and cheese is how we have to relearn to ask for it these days. So pasta in 18th century Britain was a luxury. Rather like tea. It was an exotic product that had to be imported or specially made. Now, British people were very proud of their native produce and this tended to focus on things like beer and also beef. So when you had the sons of rich aristocrats going off to Italy, to do what's known as The Grand Tour, which was supposed to be about admiring classical architecture, perfecting your Latin and all this sort of thing. But when you have people like that coming back to Britain not only with some lovely sketches of bits of the Roman forum and and so forth but also wearing the French clothes that they picked up in Paris on the way back and then demanding from good British hostel keepers that they serve them Italian food, like pasta, people started to take notice. So yes this is this is where the term macaroni actually comes from. Allegedly young gentleman from aristocratic families who've gone out to Italy and picked up a taste for Italian food and French fashion...
We don't think about pasta as being an excessive food. But if you think about it as part and parcel of a kind of luxury culture. You import the wine, you import the pasta, you import the Italian chef to actually make it. Then this is also part of kind of consumer excess as well...
Britain as a nation is a creation of the, of the 18th century… [it] increasingly defined itself as separate and superior to the nations of Continental Europe. Now, you couldn't claim for example that the weather in Britain was better than the weather in Italy. Because it wasn't. And it was a little bit difficult to say that the nation was larger and more populous than France. Since it wasn't. So what did you do? You focused on a number of things and one of those things was the notion of virtue. That somehow the British were more virtuous and the Continentals were more kind of vice-ridden. And another thing that was latched onto was the notion of manliness. That somehow British men were inherently better men than their Continental counterparts. So what does that actually mean well? It means some things which I think we'd be quite sympathetic to. In theory - whether they were in practice or not - in theory, they looked after their families, they supported their wives, they supported their children. In theory they took a responsible role in politics. And in theory they were good at earning money but judicious at spending it. Now that set up a whole set of rather high standards. Now in practice what happens is that people drunk, they gambled, they created scandal, and it was found rather convenient to blame certain groups in society. Certain groups who were the spendthrifts. Those people who didn't really look after their aristocratic estates but basically went around, sleeping around, gambling and spending all their money in clothes and fast living.'"
Railway history: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'They certainly changed the nature of warfare because if you think about it, you know Napoleonic Wars, the Battle of Waterloo, it lasts for less than a day. And 100 years later you get the Battle of the Somme in the First World War which lasts for nine months. And what was the difference? Well the difference was obviously on technology in terms of weaponry but the key difference was that uh the railways were able to feed the troops on the front line both with ammunition and and with with men almost to an infinite degree because they they were able to supply the front lines kind of absolutely constantly whereas in the Battle of Waterloo that had to end within a day because it was all dependent on horses, horses need feeding, they use vast amounts of forage you can't actually sustain that sort of battle for any sort of time without, uh the railways backing you up. And it is noticeable that, I mean this is is a huge subject, but it is noticeable that even today with the war in Ukraine the railways are paying, playing an absolute key role in the conflict, both in moving people around but also in moving equipment around. And one of the first things the Ukrainians did when the Russians tried to attack from the north, from uh into Kiev, they blew up the railways behind them and that stopped the Russians from actually supplying their lorries and their tanks and whatever and was one of the reasons why though famously all that equipment got stuck to the north of Kiev and then had to retreat, and that was because they had no railway support. So railways ever since their invention in the 1830s have played a key role in every war that has happened since then... South America has not built a lot of railways and I think that was uh one real problem for their economy. Let's just give a couple of examples. One thing is that railways pull countries together, so in America there was always this idea of building a transcontinental railway across from east to west, 3000 miles long. And it was finally built in the uh 1860s. Actually started during the Civil War there, finished in 1869 and if you think about it one of the reasons why America became a united country, remember the states kind of joined kind of individually very much over the space of the 19th century, one of the reasons why it was a united country was because one was able to travel right across it and if it hadn't been for the railways I somewhat suspect that California and Washington State and and the likes in the the West would be in a different country than New York and Massachusetts in the East. Similarly, Russia built a Trans Siberian Railway, again on which I've written a book, and one of the reasons they built that railway was to hold Russia together, to establish itself over that territory. And it played a very key role in in doing so... the Indians took to railways in a way that probably no other nation has taken to them and the railways in India is absolutely symbiotic and the railways were enormously instrumental in enabling India to hold together as a nation and to enable people to travel around it and to is to help establish the Indian economy’"
Tools, temples & tower blocks: how wood has shaped human history | HistoryExtra - "‘Has the wood age really ended?’
‘Well uh I said in the book um only slightly tongue-in-cheek that the wood age ended in, wood age ended in the year 1779 and and the reason I claim that date that I pluck out of the air is because in that year um a bridge was constructed across the Iron Bridge Gorge. The name is the clue. Made of iron and yet although it was envisaging a new age and a new material that would become the dominant material for the next 100 200 years, all the jointing in the Iron Bridge is carpentry joints, it's all mortise and tenons and all sorts of things. So essentially it is it is a product of the the woodsman's mind’...
‘How did people react to the growth of industrialization? Is that is that why we get things like the Arts and Crafts movement for instance?’...
‘Yes. First of all in the 19th century you see a reaction against uh manufacture, mechanization. Um the the loss of individuality of the crafts person, um from cottage textile weaving to the great cotton mills, um everything is mechanized and there's a reaction against this led by people like um William Morris of course. The the Arts and Crafts movement um who want to go back to an idea of craftsmanship and simplicity and if you like a slightly patronizing false view of the peasant craftsman as hero. And one of the ironies of that movement is that the Arts and Crafts craftsmanship products are almost exclusively patronized by very very wealthy people because craftsmanship is now gone back to being an elite, not the everyday work of farmers who of course still carry on mending their own plows and mending their own cartwheels right through the 19th century into the 20th century and up until the Second World War really...
We also now sentimentalize trees. The idea of cutting a tree down seems to be evil to some people. I cut trees down all the time and they grow again. That's, that's what nature does’"
How FDR transformed the US presidency | HistoryExtra - "'FDR is determined to help the Soviet Union. Now this is a big deal okay. The state department is full of anti Communists who would actually prefer Hitler to defeat the Soviet Union because they saw the Soviet Union as ultimately the greater threat. So Roosevelt has to really crack down on his bureaucracy uh to make sure that the weaponry is being sent to the Soviet Union'"
Weird. I thought the deep state was a paranoid right wing conspiracy theory
