History Extra podcast: The Huxleys: how one family shaped our view of nature on Apple Podcasts - "'One of the things I learned in writing this book was how that caricature of Victorian masculinity that we all have received, didn't fit what I was receiving at all, what I learned in this intimate history of evolution, was the way in which this tight circle of friends, you know the really leading scientists of the mid 19th century, were close is an understatement. They were, they used the word love to one another constantly. And they followed each other's families. When there was a death in the family, a birth in the family, a marriage in the family, this wide and Incredibly significant circle of scientists were writing to one another in very very close and affectionate terms, where, even when they were on the opposing sides of a scientific debate or, more difficult really, uh political debates. This was a highly politicized group. They would say to one another, we are able to be on both sides of this argument and I still love you my friend, they would write to one another. So I learned that that character picture of Victorian repressed masculinity didn't fit this circle at all...
Julian Huxley though is a very complicated eugenicist. On the one hand he was president of the society. He always understood eugenics to be, Progressive. He was a left-wing politician. He understood and aimed for an idea that humankind can be improved, and improve itself in a way that will better everybody. Now how that fits with eugenics is a very very difficult thing to explain. But that's certainly Julian Huxley's own idea of eugenics. The other very difficult thing to reconcile and this needs a kind of a a read of this book and other books on eugenics, is that Julian Huxley was able to be one of the 20th centuries more eminent and prominent anti-racists. An anti-racist, and President of eugenics at the same time'"
Time to queer history. Clearly they were all gay
Disney at 100 | HistoryExtra - "'It gets Disney into increasingly a global marketplace. He's doing that with Mickey Mouse but Snow White continues that and ups that level. I think it's shown in over 40 countries. It it provides total as the quote suggests, a kind of immersion in childlike fantasy. What we might call Disney Magic in a way. Jump into that world and Snow White really does that for the audience. It's also interestingly, an adaptation of a European folk story. It's Disney assimilating somebody else's story, and making it his own, and then everybody loves his version of that story which is an interesting appropriation, but it's something that people already in Europe familiar with that story to a degree. So it's very clever how he does that, and you know in England they love it, so, there's some very funny comments in the British Market. The censors initially worry about it being too scary for British kids and suggest that American kids could cope with it better'"
Who moulded Winston Churchill? | HistoryExtra - "'Gandhi is an offense against Churchill's conceptions of masculinity, of maleness. Here is a man who deliberately dresses in what Churchill sees as feminine dress. He wears a loin cloth. From the early 20s he endorses spinning, for example. He wants, believes in spinning. Craft industries. India should get get away from heavy industry and so on. Spinning for Churchill is a woman's job. It's another if you like aspect of of Gandhi’s feminization of politics. So it's offensive to him at a personal level. It's even more offensive because Churchill's understanding of the Empire is about bringing civilization to backward peoples. So Gandhi had been in his uh youth trained at the Inns of court in London. He dressed as a and you can look at the pictures as a young lawyer in a very dapper way. And then he'd abandoned all that. He'd thrown off the opportunities for civilization in the British Empire and adopted these feminine dresses as part of his campaign against British rule. And then I think the most problematic thing for Churchill is, here is a man who is trained as a soldier, who understands and understands far better than many of his contemporaries the importance of force, say in the relationship with Germany. The need to rearm and all the rest of it. But in the, in the 1930s, you can't really use force to quell a man whose whole approach is passive resistance, peaceful protest. The mobilizing of influence in ways that are not militaristic. And so for Churchill pretty much everything Gandhi does is an anathema to his conceptions of manliness and also a fundamental challenge to the British Empire because it can't be met by force in the way that, in principle Churchill believes you can do with Nazi Germany'"
Disease killers: the black nurses who conquered TB | HistoryExtra - "'There were no antibiotics before 1935, actually 37… People would get staph or strep infections and that was really the, the comorbidities. A lot of them came from from those infections'"
Cat history: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'They're nocturnal, largely or or active at the night. And they and they tend to be active in the night in ways that we can't see. So they kind of leave the home or they leave the domestic space and they go off and do things and who knows what they do. So there's that that kind of sense of an independence in the nighttime that we historically have not been able to have. There's also this kind of sense that they're very different to the dog in that they appear to be disloyal. They appear to want us only when they need us right. So there's that. I think that's important and that kind of sets them apart as something that can't be trusted. But it's also important to note that actually cats are only one type of animal associated with witches actually. We tend to think of the black cat and the contemporary culture has reinforced that like the black cat in Sabrina the Teenage Witch for example, and the black cat in Hocus Pocus. There are so many but actually witch's familiars were also seen as kind of foxes, toads, birds, dogs, rats. Many many different kinds of animals and that's broadly because there was this sense that witches were able to have this uh kind of relationship with the lower creatures of the world in a way that more kind of civilized in inverted commas individuals uh were unable to'...
‘Why was there a Papal order to kill cats?’
‘So I don't think there was actually. I think this is a myth and I think it's a a very popular myth that actually emerges really from the idea or from the history of the church's theological thinking around around cats and around Satan and demons and things like that and I think what it really really reflects is those Christian associations that Satan could take the form of a cat, that demons could take the form of a cat... as we move into the early modern period or if we think about the early modern period, the association of cats with witchcraft and with solitary women in particular. I think also reflects the independent nature of the cat. But also also perhaps some sense that there's an unnatural kind of solitariness to the cat. Especially when you think about humans as social animals. The other animals in our lives which are dogs, social animals.’...
'The earliest record that I think I can find about the use of cats in war is from around 500 BCE. And that's the Battle of Pelusium. And the battle was a decisive Persian victory over Egypt and cats were were used by per, Persians, almost at the front of their line of attack. And they they used them because they knew that Egyptian people recognized a certain divinity within these cats and so the Egyptians didn't want to harm them and so therefore that gave the Persians a particular advantage… catching vermin. That was very useful in warships, it's very useful in the trenches. Very useful wherever people are camping and kind of settling down and where there's food and provisions and things like that, because that's always going to attract pests. In the First World War too they were really important as companions. Actually so in the trenches we do find particular groups of soldiers who have like a pet. Sometimes the pet is a cat, sometimes it's something else entirely but actually it was a really important symbol of home, and a connection to home. And that then links us back to the idea that cats, domesticated cats from the 19th century, maybe a little bit before are these symbols of the safety and the nurturing nature of the home... they were often used to smell out poisonous gases'"
Women’s history: from 1066 to Margaret Thatcher | HistoryExtra - "‘Women and Faith. Tou say that there's a transition in this period where women go from being seen as temptresses connected to Eve to spiritual forces. How does this happen and what ramifications does it have?’
‘It's a huge change, there's a number number of features playing into it. Women are initially regarded as sexually quite voracious, and there are complaints, even as late as the 1500s, of women's appetites, and their lack of self-control, and the inability of men to control them. So that's the sort of the the early medieval view of women, as Eve. Gossipy, unreliable, easily distracted, easily tempted. Then you get the cult of the Virgin Mary which, you know, gives us fantastic cathedrals, in Europe and elsewhere, gives us shrines where the sort of the feminine side of God is explored and magnified and glamorized and glorified. And that's when you have this whole idea that there is a different view of women to Eve. It's, some people later on in the 18th century call the new Eve, which is this new view view of women altogether. Which is of someone so pure that she gives birth without having sex. She is a virgin, she is a mother, she is the source of all goodness. So you get this real idolatry towards a female figure. You see it coming out also in the popularization of courtly love, where the heroine of the courtly love stories and poems and ballads is incredibly, exquisitly, virginal, chaste, in the early stories, active, thoughtful, spiritual woman. In the later stories she becomes a bit more of a sort of object of desire and the story is more about the male activity in seducing or raping her but initially the vision of Lady Mary comes into popular fiction as it were and popular dance and popular poetry and popular music and gives us this other version of of woman who is the the lady in the castle. Elite, aristocratic, beautiful and chaste. And then it all goes to hell, it really does, because you get these two views of women being identified with two different classes of women. So when the 18th century comes to talk about women, and the novels come to talk about women, and then the 19th century doctors come to talk about women, you get this idea that working class women are as it were the old Eve. They're physically robust, they're very strong, they're easily tempted, they're quite feckless. They're terribly talkative and they're sexually free. So if you make a pass at a working class woman it doesn't really matter. There's no moral indignation that anybody could feel about it. And if you rape a working class woman it's only a problem if she's able to bring it to court and then she will be in a court of her betters so there's this absolute class distinction between these two sorts of women. And on the other hand the elite woman becomes the lady, she is expected to be chaste, she is expected to be delicate and that becomes pathologically fragile as the centuries go on until you get to the 19th century where the lives of elite women are expected to lead, make them ill, if they're not ill to start off with. Once they've been strapped into a corset and fed tapeworm eggs to keep them thin. Once they've been encouraged to see someone with consumption as the absolute top level of good looks, you know wastingly thin, white white white skin, flushed cheeks with a fever, that becomes the ideal of beauty and women try and achieve it. In addition to that the elite women are chaste and that is developed over time into a belief that elite women do not experience orgasm, do not experience sexual arousal. And if anybody catches an elite woman, if an elite woman has the misfortune to be caught in masturbation say, or in any evidence of her having sexual arousal, that's treated as mental illness. So that's treated as a symptom of hysteria and more than one doctor performs clitorectomies'"
Is black history still being overlooked? | HistoryExtra - "'This was a question that was pretty live in the history teacher community at least a few, a couple of years ago about whether if you kind of focused on Black History Month in your school did it then mean you weren't going to teach black history at other times? Had Black History Month outlived its kind of course or purpose and should we just be teaching it all year round? And for a while I was very much in the camp of we should get rid of it. If you should just have it all year round. But then I had a discussion with some of my students and we had been teaching black history in September in July and they were like Miss what are we doing for Black History Month and I was like but we we do black history all the time. We're like, we've literally just learned about Mansa Musa in the Kingdom of Mali and they were like yeah but that's different you know. That's like in the classroom. And I think from Black History Month they wanted something that was a bit more celebratory, like a bit more about individuals in history that had achieved kind of really great things'...
‘What people kind of call Black British history I'm not quite sure what that is necessarily but anyway, what what is called, you, that term is used, is generally very poorly taught at University level. There are no degree courses on it. There are one or two people, certainly since 2020 have been employed to teach it, but there actually very very few courses on it. So we generally have this problem. Of course some of those courses that did exist for example the course at Goldsmith’s at the Master's level was closed down. Of course we have very few historians of African and Caribbean Heritage, academic historians I mean, literally a handful. That's the sort of context of we could say what's going on. And then we have, obviously we could come to the particular problem that we have at at Chichester at the moment where we we established the course in 2018, specifically to address these problems, to encourage black students to come back into education, to study the history and to begin research in the subject. And uh we've run that course for 5 years, we produced, you know seven PhD students in that time. Six of them at the University of Chichester. And now the course is threatened with termination. And the person who teaches the course, being myself, is also threatened with, some people say termination, not quite the right word in the sense that the university are not trying to assassinate me, but they are trying to terminate the post and put the research and careers of all the students I have, about 16 black postgraduate history students at the present time the biggest cohort in the country. So we're facing that kind of problem that, a university in which of course has been established has been run successfully, that has a the first person in this country of African Heritage to become a professor of History, being threatened with redundancy. So it it suggests that the sector as a whole, as well as the specific University are not very very very concerned, about this kind of history, and I think everybody should be concerned about that.'...
'University of Chichester spokesperson told the media that this was a wider problem of funding across several postgraduate courses'"
Let’s say it again... Studying history will sometimes disturb you. Studying history will sometimes upset you. Studying history will sometimes make you furious. If studying history always makes you feel proud and happy, you probably aren’t studying history.
Interestingly, he doesn't know what Black British history is, yet he complains it's not prominent. Apparently there is a necessary and sufficient relationship between Black history and Black people - of course, in other contexts this can be considered racist.
Universities need to provide positions that satisfy left wing politics (rather than what is good for the discipline), or this is racist. Of course, the humanities are not in enough trouble as it is
Books and war: from James Bond to leaflet bombing | HistoryExtra - "He sometimes sent them specific questions to answer, as they did, on how much do you read and and it was a picture of a topsy turvy world where people who read a lot sometimes read very little in wartime and people who had scarcely read read a very great deal. To give you some examples, those of our troops and those of troops of other nations who captured and put in prison of war camps, they read an awful lot. And many people who had not been habitual readers, these were after all mostly young men, men in young adulthood. But they read a great deal. And among the books which are extremely popular were all the classics. The war was a time where you really could read a long book. So Charles Dickens was very popular. Also Anthony Trollope, he was extremely well read. And people could actually get their way through War and Peace. So there was a point at which in the Second World War because paper was short… when people couldn't get new copies of the War and Peace, it was out of print in Great Britain. Those are people who read more. People who are reading less, often female readers. There was a sharp downturn in reading during the Blitz when people were just too anxious to read, although many took books with them down into the shelters. And there were many women who were either called up for war work, or in the middle classes, lost their maid or cook and found themselves doing housework for the first time in their lives, and this took up as one diarist said, when we lost the maid, all the time I had for reading has been lost in sand. When you add to that voluntary work on behalf of the war and the queueing for food, you get a situation where particularly many women had much less time for reading than they had before the war... It's amazing how many bombers at the beginning of the Second World War were equipped not with bombs and incendiaries but with leaflets which were dropped down on the populations of Germany and then from 1940 onwards the occupied powers saying: we are not your enemy, your enemy is the Nazis. We understand the German people are a good people, it's just that you need to get rid of them. And that even went down to the Battalion level. In what became the the sort of fixed line at Monte Casino in Italy, troops are sort of bogged down for several months in in brutal fighting. So they occupy the days in which they're not attempting an assault by taking the explosives out of a shell, stuffing in 200 or so leaflets and firing them over to the opposite side. On the English side, trying to persuade the Germans that while they're here, there were wives and girlfriends are being ravished by foreign workers in Germany. And the Germans then fired back ones aimed at for instance the Indian forces in front line, say, why are you fighting with the war for Britain? Don't you realize that they're putting you in the front line all the time while they're hanging back? Unfortunately, because the detachments changed around so quickly, this was fired over and was retrieved by one of the English County regiments. So I mean not all of it gets right. Then was sort of replies to replies when the Germans sent back a leaflet saying thanks for sending all these leaflets over. You know the paratroopers are pretty tough but we, we're running out of toilet paper so they've come in very handy. So there was a strong sense that this didn't work. Nevertheless, right up till 1945, and this is of course more more sinister and deadly, the Allies were dropping these leaflets on towns which are about to be bombed, to say to anyone still there, you've got 12 hours to get out of town because otherwise you, you'll be in danger. And of course many of the people weren't free to move because of the troops who were guarding them. The Allies had more success with a daily German language newspaper which was dropped on German lines after the invasion of Normandy and it was quite obvious that this did have some impact because a lot of those who surrendered had copies of these leaflets or newspapers in their pocket. Apparently one surrendered German went up to his captors and said have you got the latest issue of this, as if he was a sort of subscriber to it. So a lot of effort is given into this. And it's often materials that we wouldn't necessarily think of immediately as books, which is printed leaflets, printed pamphlets and printed broadsheets which could just fly down. And this continued in the Cold War, probs not so successfully when the West tried to send Bibles behind the Iron Curtain attached to balloons so when the balloons ran out of puff they would just sort of come down wherever, but this simply littered the Czech countryside with Bibles which the shepherds minding their sheep were utterly baffled by. So the Czech government just said, wrote and said will you stop this, you know there's a real litter problem here. And they did...
Mein Kampf was a recommended book in all of the British army camp libraries. Now think about that. They clearly think that the more people are acquainted with this sometimes bizarre and certainly malignant book that the more persuaded they will be of the need to fight against Germany. And it seems to have worked. Whereas on the other side prisoner of war camps in Germany Winston Churchill's books were banned so there is a very interesting contrast there'"
The Pre-Raphaelites: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘Rossetti’s peculiarities. So his wife dies, he's distraught. And when she's buried he places the manuscript of his poems on the lid of her coffin and she is buried with this manuscript book. Seven years later he realizes he really needs those, he really really needs those poems back. He hasn't got copies of a lot of them and he needs to publish them, you know he's got to a point where he needs to boost his reputation as a poet again. So he arranges for Elizabeth Siddal to be dug up, to be exhumed… he retrieves the manuscript and it's not in great shape and and it has to be disinfected and it's got holes in it. But also as on the back of that there becomes this urban myth that Elizabeth Siddal’s body had not decomposed, that her hair was still growing, that she was still as beautiful as she ever was. And these things kind of get out of hand and become uh really quite unpleasantly associated with vampirism at the end of the century. So someone like Bram Stoker who's writing about Dracula and writing about sort of the femme fatale and the and the vampire women, there seems to be quite a lot of overlap with discussions of what Elizabeth Siddal looked like after death and the fact that she was sort of undead‘"
Weimar Germany: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'The inflation took off exponentially if you like in 1923. Prices went up. Um you know things like a cup of coffee, you know a cup of coffee could cost 6, 600 marks when you picked it up. By the time you pay for it was 900 marks. There's a famous story about a woman who took a a a suitcase full of marks to the butcher’s. She put them outside, went in to get her meat, came out. The suitcase had gone but all the currency was there because it because, it was worthless. People made wallpaper out of the the worthless German marks and on the front of my book you can see kids playing with the German marks. They were so worthless at that time...
Stresemann, he decides passive resistance should be over… he gradually realized the best thing for Germany to do is to come to terms with France, try and reconciliate with France. And in that way Germany can probably settle down and maybe then get revisions of the Treaty of Versailles. So he was very farsighted and look at all the things that he did. He got out of passive resistance. He negotiated the end eventually of the occupation by the French and Belgians in in in 1930.'...
'Mostly when we talk about culture and Cabaret environment we're talking about Berlin. It, it's a bit like, um remember in the 1960s people talked about the summer of love. And uh, I remember George Harrison saying the Summer of Love only existed down Carnaby street. Around all the people I went to clubs with at that time. The rest of it, nobody was involved in the Summer of Love...
Germany was still predominantly a rural area, there were no cabaret clubs in rural areas come on. There were no art galleries. You know there was none of this going on there so you've got a whole part of society that's not getting any of this Weimar culture. I think it's one of these myths that we need to explode really, you know, the Weimar culture was pervading the whole of society and Hitler mainly stamped down on Weimar culture no he didn't. He mainly stamped down on Weimar political system...
It was mainly Berlin. So to some extent there was some of it in in the Rhineland, but as I said before in most of the rest of Germany they never saw a naked dancer, they never saw a nightclub'"
Traitor! Stresemann didn't realise that his Duty was Resistance by All Means Necessary for 76 years, or forever if needed
The Cultural Revolution: a Chinese catastrophe | HistoryExtra - "‘The 5th of August incident, in which a teacher was beaten to death’...
‘Bian Zhongyun was actually the first victim of the cultural revolution in Beijing we believe. She was the vice principal of a very prestigious girls school attended by the daughters of several senior leaders and party figures. And she was beaten to death by her pupils. And that was really the start of what's since become known as Red August, which was this cataclysm really. This wave of violence that spread first through Beijing and and then across the country from August 1966. And as I said I mean she was beaten to death by teenage girls, she'd come under fire for being essentially bourgeois and revisionist and the accusations made against her were things like being disloyal to Chairman Mao essentially now by this she'd been asked whether if there was a disaster, a fire for example in the school, should people stop to take the picture of Chairman Mao to safety out of the building and in fact it says a lot about this time she was wise enough, enough not to even answer that question directly, but just to say well obviously it's important to leave quickly, but even that was one of the accusations thrown against her, that she obviously had insufficient reverence for Mao, and that really gives you a sense of the politics of the time. But nobody has ever been held responsible for her death and that's very typical of most of the violence we saw. So even though after the Cultural Revolution uh she and many others were rehabilitated, it was made clear that they'd been innocent victims, nobody was ever charged or prosecuted let alone taken to court or jailed for what happened...
This was what was so interesting about the wave of apologies and discussion around that time which, that's began around a decade ago. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution there had been this outburst of what was called scar literature. People talking about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. But in general it was more about what had been done to them than what they had done to others. And what was really different about what happened around sort of 2011, 2012 was that people began to come forward and talk about what they had done. That wasn't completely unknown before but it had been much more sort of piecemeal I suppose. And that really did feel like a turning point. As I said there was a real question over how sincere people were, but of course these are the people who chose to come forward when most people simply didn't want to acknowledge what happened at all. Or speak about it, at all. And I think that what many other people felt was well at least these people are coming forward to talk about it, and even if their apologies are not as wholehearted, even if they're not as complete as we might have hoped, they are willing to come forward and say what they did. It's clear that so many people are carrying this immense burden of guilt. And I think for a lot of reasons as they've got older, uh it's become perhaps harder to live with. One is simply that we know as we get older we tend to think think more about what happened in our late adolescence, early 20s. It's a time in our lives when our memories sort of tend to be very strong. So it's quite natural for anybody to return to that time and obviously for them it's such a formative event. For people coming to the ends of their lives perhaps thinking about what they've done in their lives, perhaps looking at themselves for the first time realizing that they're the same age as perhaps their victims were, in many cases. Perhaps thinking about their children and their grandchildren and the relationship with they have with them and and what to tell them about their lives. And then I think as these people began to speak, others were more willing to come forward, but it's, it's very contested and in many cases it's the people who didn't do the worst things that are the ones who are willing to come forward and talk, because of course, if you had done the worst, you know how do you live with the knowledge that you beat an innocent person to death I mean I, it's it seems to me perhaps unsurprising that people would still be repressing those memories. But I think what was important to say as well is that, it's a time that was simply very confusing, for people as well. So alongside this immense guilt is this confusion. How could we do this? In the case of one of the people I first interviewed what was really striking to me was that alongside her guilt was this real sense that she had simply hadn't known what was right or wrong. So in her case she actually shied away from violence and from beating people'...
'He really thought the good people were just the ones that didn't participate in beating him and berating him at these struggle sessions, cos he said you know well, nobody could try and stop it. Because obviously they couldn't in the the mood of the time. So for him even just sort of closing your eyes or turning away, actually that struck him as being a good person in those circumstances. It was just a time of such impossible moral choices...
Xi Zhongxun who is the father of the current leader of China Xi Jinping. He was one of many people who thought, well we really need to collectivize leadership, we need to put these norms in place around term limits and things like that. And of course that's something that has gone by the wayside with his son'"
Britain's long love affair with sport | HistoryExtra - "'War, precisely, it's to do with the origins of international sport... as well as the idea that you could have these rivalries that went almost as far as proper hostility and war, but not quite, and that gets you to the great phrase of George Orwell, who wasn't very keen on sport and called it war minus the shooting'...
'Military men back in the middle men actually learned lessons from tournaments and applied them to the battlefield'...
'Some rulers were very nervous about tournaments... that was quite often something that the kings used to bear down on and forbid because... the idea of getting together a whole load of heavily armed showoffs and getting them all excited and then reminding them that they weren't very happy with their ruler could end up in a very bad situation for that ruler'"
