How did medieval people tell the time? | HistoryExtra - "There are various schemes of the ages of the world which were shared among medieval people. Some thought the world was in Three Ages and all thought themselves in the Third Age. Some thought it was in Seven Ages and all thought themselves in either the Sixth or the Seventh Age. But no matter what their system of time reckoning was, everybody thought the world was near its end. And I think that's something that might not always be appreciated about the Middle Ages. We think of it in some ways as a a youthful and and on their best days at least joyous uh time in the in the progress of the world, but people in the Middle Ages thought they were living in very belatedly and in the last age of the world and that time was about to end
Clearly, left wingers are right that we are now in "late capitalism"
Economies in meltdown: lessons from past financial crashes | HistoryExtra - "'At one point Sweden's Riksbank, its Central Bank, they raise their interest rates to, you know, 500 percent. It is possible to maintain a currency peg. The question is the cost'...
‘Why did the U.S banking system recover quicker than those in Europe?’
‘All the banks were forced to take money from the government. And so TARP… the US government forced all the banks, whether they needed it or not, to take government money to build up the capital and their balance sheets. And the reason they had all the banks take the money, so that markets couldn't pick out the weaker banks. And by recapitalizing the banks and actually rescuing quite a few of them um as well, they stabilized the banking system, made sure it was properly capitalized, it had huge amounts of liquidity, because the Fed also injected lots of cash that banks could draw on. And the Central Bank unfroze a number of the credit markets. It's that quick action to shore up the banking system and make it stable. That's why, the US, despite being the epicenter of the global financial crisis, its banking system recovered first’...
‘One bit of advice that economists always give is, you should, you can predict the next thing, or you can predict the time frame, but never both... anytime you have a huge increase of debt on the basis of euphoria, that you know the asset price will only go up, or you make a huge bet using, and this is something that's very that's common to the UK pensions crisis and to the California banking crisis, which is, you know they believe that interest rates you know, wouldn't spike up… anytime you have this kind of um you know belief that this is the, this is how the world is going to be, and there's there's debt hanging around on the back of it, I think that's where you should start to get very nervous’"
Coffee history: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'We have those uh free people of color who often themselves are involved in owning coffee plantations where they would have slave laborers. So for example Toussaint Louverture who's the great leader of Haiti was, had had, or had owned a coffee plantation, leased a coffee plantation I should say, which had slave labor upon it. So it's a complex situation but the, but the bottom line is all your coffee is is grown by enslaved people...
I will have to ask you briefly about the latte because I had an interesting experience with this. Was a few years ago, my wife and I went to Milan and we went to a cafe and I ordered a cappuccino and my wife tried to order a latte and the uh, the woman who was serving looked very confused and then eventually turned up with a cup of milk for her which seemed like something you might serve to a small child. So how, how's the latte come to mean something very different in Italy and then elsewhere in the world?'
‘Right, so this is this is great Rob, because this story exists in apocryphal form since time immemorial and I've waited a long time to reach somebody who actually has said it's happened to them… your wife ordered milk. Latte means milk in Italian...
Cafe latte though is a different thing in Italy. Cafe latte is usually more of a domestic drink and it's usually what was made at breakfast and quite often people would say they're having cafe latto, it meant they'd made a little bit of coffee, they throw some warmed milk in but they also quite often throw in something like a bit of bread or whatever so um it's essentially seen as this domestic drink rather than an espresso based drink… interestingly enough at the beginning of the century when people were talking about cafe latte they were often talking about cafe latte without there being any cafe in it, as it were, because it's sort of that, the kind of breakfast drink that's often be prepared with a surrogate coffee with something made with um acorns or chicory or whatever...
Voltaire who was on 50 cups plus a day. Now they are very small cups but even so that's a hell of a lot of coffee to be getting through. And we had a lot of those French Enlightenment figures were around that. So a lot of cultural figures have very been very associated with coffee in various ways. Mozart was clearly a coffee drinker, wrote the coffee cantata… one of the more interesting ones is Napoleon. Coffee is one of the things that really got Napoleon in a quandary in the sense that Napoleon was a coffee drinker, he was outraged by Haiti declaring independence. He actually lost a lot of troops in Haiti because although the French tried to regain Haiti under Napoleon they failed to do so. And when Napoleon is exiled, he's exiled you know to Saint Helena where coffee is grown in order that he can drink coffee. But so his life is sort of, and he’s said to have been sort of muttering at various times to himself, damn coffee, because he's realized that this has created a problem for him’
How (and how not) to stage a coronation | HistoryExtra - "‘I think George IV’s coronation also probably teaches us a bit of a lesson about how to make sure your loved ones or in perhaps in this case your ex-loved ones, how to make sure they're involved. After all even with spending this eye-watering amount of money he was actually upstaged wasn't he?’
‘He was upstaged and you're absolutely right. You've got to be very careful with that guest list and make no major omissions from it, particularly your own wife. And that's exactly what George did. Now admittedly he was estranged from Carolina Brunswick. It had been a disastrous marriage. They'd managed to stay together just long enough to conceive a child but that was it. Then they lived separate lives. By the time he was crowned he really never wanted to see Caroline again. But, in true fashion she turned up anyway. Uninvited. At Westminster Abbey and she suffered the humiliation of having the doors slammed in her face because George her husband had carefully instructed the staff at the Abbey. But of course that reflected rather badly on the king. It didn't look good that he'd shut his own wife out of his coronation’...
'It slightly flies in the face of of what we think about uh Henry VII but he was absolutely devoted to Catherine of Aragon and it's easy to forget that because we know what happened next um with the other five but I would say it was actually his happiest marriage. She was uh the best match for him of all six and he wanted to celebrate that fact. And also it was a great Union for England with the might of Spain'...
'The Norman Dynasty is here to stay. Christmas Day 1066. And it was all going so well, until, inside the Abbey as tradition dictated. Uh when the congregation were invited to show their approval of the new king. And huge cheers went up around the Abbey. And the guards waiting outside the Abbey, Williams’ guards mistook the this for a riot. So they started torching houses all around London and they went on the rampage. And then the congregation got wind of this and they all fled in terror along with the presiding clergymen. So they kind of hastily put the crown on William's head and then the whole thing just descended into chaos... … William himself, this is, this fearsome warrior king. He has been a warrior since he was a child and yet it really rattled him. One chronicler said that uh the new Norman King was left trembling from head to foot. Oh dear, clearly quite panicked'...
‘As well as the wrong monarchs, as well as the uncrowned monarchs, there are also those that are so young that they probably don't even remember their own coronation’...
‘I think the cutest coronation in history has to be that of Mary Queen of Scots. So she became Queen when she was, you know just a few days old. She was very very young indeed. And she was crowned when she was still just nine months old, in September 1543. So she had to be kind of enrobed in in all of the finery even though she was this little baby. Um and throughout the proceedings you can see how the dignitaries and the officials, sort of improvised. So one of them kind of had to hold Mary up because you know she could have just slumped off the chair and fallen and then probably done herself a bit of a mischief. And so they went through pretty much every required element of the ceremony with this little baby sitting there in enormous robes being held up by one of the officials but then came a bit of a mishap with the disrobing for the anointing and as soon as these kind of warm robes in chilly Scotland were taken off then poor Mary started to cry, as any baby would. And so she had to be distracted by the Earl of Lennox whose son Henry by the way later became Mary's second husband. Not a great match there. The Earl of Lennox offered Mary the scepter and she grasped it like a kind of rattle and that kept her quiet for the rest of the ceremony’...
'Elizabeth I… this is one of the clearest demonstrations we have of Elizabeth's loyalty to her late mother Anne Boleyn because she modeled her coronation on Anne's. She even used some of the same designers. She adopted the same classical theme. She even had Anne Boleyn on display. A life-sized model of Anne Boleyn with Henry VII, the first time Anne had really been seen or displayed in public since her execution. So that was a big statement to make...
An ideal monarch should be always changing, always the same. In other words they should keep up with the times but they should also uphold traditions'"
The myth and memory of Waterloo | HistoryExtra - "'There are absolutely people who are picking over this battlefield finding valuable pieces. And there are tourists who are looking, and there are also tourists who are picking up discarded bits of armor and weapons and things like that, because they know this is going to be big. And they want their souvenirs. Performative tourism and the relic trade becomes an enormous part of this. And relics from Waterloo get into such high demand that by the time we get to the 20s and 30s and into the 40s, false relics are being manufactured in Britain in the height of the Industrial Revolution, shipped to Waterloo, buried briefly, dug up and sold back to British tourists… before it is sort of this tiny rundown village and it's made by this battle. It becomes a very successful uh small town that runs off battlefield tourism… those first tourists that is, it's absolutely dark and it's actually darker than you think because not only is there the battlefield, but the road that they take to get to the battlefield, the Brussels to Namo [sp?] road which Waterloo is on, they're coming down from Brussels at the same time that road is chock full of wounded soldiers trying to make their way back to Brussels to get medical treatment.'"
Plato: the world’s greatest philosopher? | HistoryExtra - "'The portraits that Xenophon and Plato give of Socrates are extremely different. They can't both be right. So I think it's probably fair to say that neither of them was writing history, neither of them was trying to give us accurate portrait of Socrates... Neither Plato nor Xenophon were hedonists… but another of the Socratics a man called Aristippus did. He developed a mildly hedonistic philosophy while still calling himself a Socratic. Plato is so famous that we think of him as being the only true Socratic but there were a lot of true socratics, a lot of true socratics in the group... Plato's two longest works, Republic and Laws, both of them by far his longest works, are works of political philosophy. And so are a number of other not short works. Gorgias, Statesmen. Political philosophy was absolutely central, I mean it's something like 40 percent let's say of Plato's writings are political writings. So, you know, to think of him just as a metaphysician, of somebody who developed the theory of forms, and an ethical philosophy and so on and so forth, is well wrong. Political thought was absolutely central to what he was doing... I would say that was his legacy to, his broadest legacy to all of us: to go on questioning, to go on questing, to keep looking, to see life as a as an ongoing search'"
How germs shaped human history | HistoryExtra - "‘Probably the main one is help us digesting food. So it's a symbiotic relationship. We, we provide the bacteria with a a warm, relatively safe environment in our stomachs, with a hopefully constant supply of food and nutrients, and they help us to digest these nutrients in the way that we can process. But this this study looked at, looked at the bacteria that was in the, the feces of about 2,000 Belgians and it found that 90% of the strains they looked at were capable of producing neurotransmitters. So these are basically, chemical messengers that can impact our brains. So things like serotonin and dopamine. And so this, this seems to suggest that these bacteria have evolved over millions of years to communicate with our bodies, and there's various theories as to why they they would do this. But one, one theory is that if they're producing neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin that make us happy and make us want to socialize, this creates opportunities for, for the bacteria to spread from one body to another. So it kind of helps it colonize other, other bodies...
The most deadly form of of of malaria even today in West Africa, it kills hundreds of thousands of of young children but um if you're lucky enough to survive, if you're repeatedly exposed to malaria then after a while you develop some kind of resistance. So you know, you don't show such such extreme symptoms. But for the European adults who were arriving in Africa for the first time and being exposed to malaria it was just, you know really really deadly. So even in the 18th 19th century historians have estimated that something like 50 to 70 percent of of would-be settlers were killed by infectious diseases, mainly malaria in the first year in which they lived in in in in West Africa and in fact, um in the early 19th century people talked about West Africa being a white man's, a white man's grave because it killed so many, so many um would-be European settlers. You can really see the impact of this because even if you look at at the African continent in 1870, it's hardly, it's hardly been colonized by by the the Europeans at all. Um at this point South America has been controlled by the by the Spanish and their descendants for for centuries but about 10 percent of the African land mass is under European control, and this is only in the kind of temperate regions in the very south, um the South African provinces and then in the north with Algeria being controlled by the, by the French. The vast majority of the African continent is is impenetrable to to Europeans until the the widespread use of quinine, and then it becomes kind of, kind of bearable but I think this this comparison between on the one hand the Americas and the African continent really kind of illustrates the the role that infectious diseases played in history, the fact that on the one hand in the Americas um diseases like smallpox were unwittingly but still, a very important secret weapon that was, that was carried by the Europeans and if we look at the attempt to, to settle in in Africa you see that diseases like malaria but also we could talk about yellow fever, really create this defensive force field that make the, make the continent more or less inimpenetrable... … Up until about 1500 there was no association between the color of one's skin and one's kind of capability for servitude, for slavery, and this seems to come about as results of a variety of contingent factors including the role of infectious diseases like malaria and yellow fever… up until the completion of the Reconquista, the main source of slave labor in in Spain would have been from captured Muslims, and obviously after 1492 this source of slave labor is no longer available. Southern Europeans might also have looked to the Black Sea slave markets. And this was another major source of slave, slave labor. Um, the capturing of of peoples that were living to the north of the, of the Black Sea. And of course Genovese merchants played a big a big role in this and um you know we shouldn't forget that Columbus was was a Genovese sailor but um with the, with the expansion of the Ottomans in the Eastern Mediterranean, this, this source of slave labor was also drying up. And so the, the Spanish had to, had to look elsewhere for people to work. And so this created a big problem for the Spanish who at the time were colonizing the tropical parts of the, the Americas because they wanted to set up plantations. They found in the Caribbean, soil and a climate that was perfect for growing sugar, which was in massive demand back, back home. But infectious diseases had killed the local population and as we were talking about the, the the regular sources of slave labor had dried up. So what they did was they turned to, um the the slave markets of West Africa’"
Life of the week: Amelia Earhart | HistoryExtra - "She did once say actually that one of her her greatest fears was to grow old slowly, so even where you know her biggest failure in not succeeding and setting that world record, she she achieved still so much"
Living the life of luxury with the Persians & Greeks | HistoryExtra - "‘There's a really interesting quote by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, so this was done in the mid 19th century, but he said that the Battle of Marathon even as an event in British history was more important than the Battle of Hastings. It's an astonishing thing to say but here we are, the natural inheritors of freedom and democracy in the West, but of course we're looking at the otherness in the East, the fickleness and the fecklessness of the Oriental despot very much through these Greek eyes so it's a real asymmetry... My favorite part about Alexander is there was something he was not willing to do in his compromising between you know, embracing Persian rulership. And that was trousers. He would not wear trousers. So Persians wore trousers. They're horse riding people, this makes perfect sense for them to have developed trousers. The Greeks found it barbaric for the, for people to be wearing trousers. So Alexander embraces most of the Persian dress or the Persian coat but trousers are a step too far’"
Franco’s Spain: paranoia, conspiracy & antisemitism | HistoryExtra - "'The implication is that there was this link between the Jews, Freemasons and the Communists. This was an idea that was very much propounded by the outfit in Geneva that I mentioned before. But it's common in the writings of Father Tuskegee. So I mentioned before about the policeman Mauricio Carlavilla. It's prominent in the the speeches, the articles and the epic poems written during the war by by José María Pemán. And the idea which is completely crackers is that the Jews were out to destroy World Catholicism and they they had if you like two armies. One was capitalism. And the other was communism. Now obviously the very idea that communism and capitalism, uh you know, you wouldn't think that either capitalists or communist would be sympathetic to this idea. But that that was the basic idea, the Jews being in charge. The other was that the whole thing was run from something called the Masonic super state...
Franco's anti-semitic activities were confined to Spain and Morocco so there was a geographical limit whereas Hitler's anti-semitic activities of course spread all over Continental Europe and and therefore on a much greater scale … there were hardly any Jews against whom to implement anti-Semitic policies. And one another further complication was that those Jews in Spanish Morocco, who were very often very prosperous businessmen, were actually pro-Franco. So there was a, there was an ambiguity there'"
Why Britain fell in love with the NHS | HistoryExtra - "Welfare services are coded with national values. So you know in Britain, British people uh very often in opinion polls uh in in recent years will say that the NHS is the thing that makes them most proud to be British, ahead of the royal family, the Armed Forces. Other examples that you could point to. The BBC… there is this kind of nationalism around it. People think that they uh you know are kind of uniquely blessed with the NHS. And and to some extent you know you often see this for politicians. Even politicians um like you know Tony Blair who has sort of present themselves as these very kind of professional uh even kind of neutral central centrist figures. They will say things, if you look at their speeches, like you know if you go abroad um they they will check your wallet before they check your pulse. Now of course that's not true. There is healthcare in France, there is healthcare in Germany and Japan and the even the United States. It just just works differently and there is this kind of um I don't want to say parochialism but there's a particular way that that the the NHS has thought about in this country where um it seemed to be this kind of unique thing. And that creates particular uh consequences. One is to give the NHS support as this British, British institution. As soon as you start coding something as a National Institution, as a National Treasure, it takes on a kind of prominence in public life which gives it more durability. You know this just didn't exist with Council housing. You know the idea of our NHS, there is no our Council housing, right. So it gives it kind of durability.The other kind of darker side of this though is that welfare nationalism can also be used against marginalized groups within society and one of the things that I talk about in the book in particular is in the post-war decades when um decolonization is is undergoing and and immigrants arrive from the Commonwealth. The idea of the NHS being a British Institution for British people raises questions both about the workers of which there were very many in the NHS who are from overseas, and then also the patients that it treated"
The American Gilded Age: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. It's published in 1888 and it was in that period the second bestseller after Uncle Tom's Cabin. I mean this was an enormously influential novel and it really promoted the nationalization of private property and people had Bellamy clubs… If we continue on the way we are right now with a few wealthy people controlling more and more what will this nation be like? What would it be like if we basically had socialism? So it kind of explores both those, both those avenues. But there were also very influential uh books that were well read at the time. For example Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and this is a novel about some immigrants who come from Lithuania and they work in the Stockyards in Chicago, and it's just one horror story after another about how how terribly things are going and he, he meant it as a um socialist track. He wanted to promote socialism. But instead everybody is so grossed out by what they read about the meat packing industry that consumption of meat in the United States actually goes down for a couple of years and it sort of forces the Pure Food and Drug Act"
British seaside holidays: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "People just didn't really see you in your bathing costume and and they weren't meant to see you in your bathing costume. Whereas when you're trying to get a tan you want to maximize the the amount of flesh that's on display. Then then your bathing costume becomes your your best friend and you have these wonderful designs they're much shorter in the legs. they have these sort of laced up elements in the side sometimes so you get maximized tan ability there... by the 1930s people were wearing a lot less clothes on the beach anyway. Victorians didn't have what we'd consider consider to be leisure wear. They just wore their Sunday Best to go to the seaside because it was an occasion, it was an outing. A day trip. So you wore your best clothes. Of course you didn't have that many clothes anyway to choose from and so they just put them all on. And you see them looking completely covered and you just think how hot they must have been"
Learning disabilities: an overlooked history | HistoryExtra - "I think the most important lesson for us today is that it is possible to have inclusion at a much higher level for people who are stigmatized or or disabled by how society views them, labeled people I've termed them and that's a very useful kind of indeterminate phrase. When people look back at the past they often think that things were really terrible for disabled people and that the history is just a kind of history of shame and and exclusion and pain. But actually I think we can look back at the past and say well things were quite productive for disabled people when they were working very widely in across all these different sectors, and we might ask ourselves and challenge ourselves today: how could we make that possible in the 21st century?"
Did Black Death trigger the rise of Europe? | HistoryExtra - "'Firearms, muskets and their forebears actually came after the Black Death. And the big incentive for turning to muskets was not necessarily that they were any better than bows, but that they took far less time to learn how to use. It took you 10 years to train a longbowman, five years to train a crossbowmen and it took you three months to train a musketeer. So in effect guns were a labor-saving device...
When the Black Death struck it killed people. Not animals, not cash, not barns, not houses. Nothing else. Just people and rats and a few other animals. That didn't really affect useful domestic animals very much at all. And that meant that there was twice as much per head of everything. Although there were far fewer people, a higher proportion of them could get into the market for, exotic luxuries and for comforts such as, furs and cured fish, to eat during Lent so that you didn't further enrage an angry God who had already visited plague upon you. And so the demand for these products. For sugar, for spices, for slaves, for furs, for stockfish, for whale products, increased massively. You can track this quite precisely as these things go, in the depletion of things like herring and cod in the North Sea, and the movement of Northern European fishermen into the North Atlantic and pursuit of further stocks. And you can also track it through an upturn in the penetration of Muslim merchants, into the Southeast Asia for example, uh in the 15th century. Long before Vasco da Gama there was a big Islamic push emanating mainly from Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea. So the Indian Ocean trade was reconfigured before Western Europeans had even arrived, and it was reconfigured largely to deliver more spices like pepper and cloves for which there was now much greater Middle Eastern as well as European demand... It's a terrible human disaster, but the fact is that it hits a society which is undercapitalized, where you know only five percent. a tiny elite uh have surplus income, discretionary income. And when that group of the buying classes that were increases to 15%, even though the population has halved, you've got more buyers in the market. And once people have got over the terrible shock of um traumatic death, of half their loved ones, they adapt with remarkable resilience to the new circumstances. And you start getting to see things like the lower classes for the first time using pepper. And the lower classes for the first time, maybe I should say middle classes, using furs and having stockfish as well as things like more meat in their diets. And the skeletal evidence for this is, is widespread and cumulatively convincing...
A great mystery has long been: why do the Portuguese sailors in Lisbon sail off to the Far East, India and Southeast Asia, when they know full well after the first few years, that they've got at best a one in two chance of getting home alive? One of the factors may be that if they stay in Lisbon they may be struck by plague which repeatedly hit that city and most other port cities... they might also make themselves a fortune and gain standing and status and they might even make it home as well'"