Chaos & violence in country houses | HistoryExtra - "'A lot of the stone for monasteries which I think is something else we forget about them. is imported from France. It's this incredibly expensive good stone and so that stone is recycled into other houses and you can go all over England today and see little bits of stone that were taken from monasteries, see little archways and things...
People go to Sissinghurst today because it has the most famous garden, you know one of the most famous gardens in England. It's beautiful, it's lovely but you know there's sort of a house missing. I mean there's a tower but there's not really much else there. And and it's a house you know where the family has really struggled since the Civil War to have the money to fund the house properly and I think that's something that I was looking at in the book is these kind of long lingering echoes of the Civil War I mean there's a house called Little Morton Hall in Cheshire that is, this, it's a half timbered you know quintessentially English looking house, it's kind of wonky right. It's very picturesque. Again one of the most visited National Trust properties. And the thing about Little Morton Hall is we look at oh that's lovely and it's picturesque. Well the reason it's lovely and picturesque is because the family couldn't afford to rebuild it after the Civil War because they backed the wrong side. And that happens over and over again, the people who back the Royal side and heaven forbid if you back the Royal side and you happen to be Catholic or even if you happened to be Catholic at that time and didn't back the royalist side you probably were accused of backing the royalist side anyway. That these families were heavily fined. They were, they were sent, you know plunged into bankruptcy when the Parliamentary side emerges victorious and and many of them never recover… These things aren't old because England has always valued its past and has valued continuity and stability, right. They're they're sitting there in their old form exactly because of this sort of violence and chaos in English history. They represent that more than they represent the kind of stability and continuity...
England is now this dominant power in the world which really is in place after the Seven Years War ends in in 1763 and so country houses become sort of symbolic of that transition. So we start to see the English past being reinterpreted. So instead of this tumultuous Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, the 16th century becomes the point at which protestantism triumphs… England is now stable and powerful and so these sites can be reinterpreted as where that triumph took place. this is where that victory was won and so they can be now celebrated, they're not embarrassments that need to be converted to something else or hidden away. The sites can now be you know kind of taken out of the closet and and put on display as you know look this is the battle that we won in order to make England as great as it is in the present… the big point of transition though is the French Revolution, we all think about the storming of the Bastille right but the French Revolution is incredibly destructive of old buildings in lots of ways. There's this idea behind the French Revolution that we're going to literally remake the world, going to destroy the old world and make a new world. And so medieval buildings in particular all over France get destroyed. Well people in England are horrified about that. The kind of transition in attitude towards the French Revolution in England is initially people go oh this is great, right. France is going to become more like us. They're going to get away from this absolute monarchy which is bad right? They're going to create a parliament that is much more like our system and it'll be great. France will be more like us. And then the French Revolution starts to get more radical and then people in England are horrified by this and so in terms of country houses the form that this takes is people in England still literally kind of rebuilding castles right as castles are being destroyed in France, in England you see this surge of castellated Gothic architecture right. So so Gothic style houses that literally look like castles… it's difficult to quantify cultural history sometimes but you find ways to do it and one way I did this was by plotting the number of castellated Gothic houses that were built and I thought when I was doing this that when I got to the 1790s when the French Revolution you know becomes the the more radical French Revolution that you would see maybe a gentle little bump. Well no I mean I saw a dramatic spike in the number of castellated houses, like one that is just impossible to miss on any kind of chart... There is no such thing as a British country house, right… there are English country houses, there are Scottish country houses. There aren't really Welsh country houses in sense of a distinctive architectural style and I start thinking: why isn't that? Why did a not hybrid sort of architecture emerge in the UK in terms of country houses? And my argument about that is that it's it's because of the uniqueness of the border zones between the various parts of the British Isles which remain fortified and defended for a very long time... You can't really have this kind of hearkening back to the Welsh past because the Welsh past is very much complicated by the fact that that medieval style architecture in Wales is sort of tainted by its associations with the medieval conquest of of Wales by Edward I...
There's this really interesting moment at the end of the 18th century when they think, huh, maybe we maybe we shouldn't try to rule this Empire by force. Right, we've learned from America that that doesn't really work. There's an interesting example of when they get Quebec at the end of the Seven Years War. The British decide to let Quebec be Quebec, right, they don't try to force the French there to speak French (sic), they don't try to change their religion, they basically leave Quebec ,alone which is why Quebec remains distinctively French to this very day and it's a kind of interesting experiment in Imperial governance, and I think they they think about trying that in India right as as they get to grips with ruling the Indian subcontinent and it's, it's you know a very different place from Britain itself and so you see for the first time houses popping up in Britain itself which have a strong Imperial architectural influence, it is a brief and fleeting and very limited moment but it does happen. And and the best example of that is a country house called Sezincote which is in Gloucestershire in the Cotswalds so if you're in the Cotswalds go see it because it's it's one of the most interesting country houses in Britain… it is the only fully Indian style Country House in Britain. It looks like a little miniature Taj Mahal… it's a, at this moment when the British are thinking maybe the way to rule our Empire is through understanding, through trying to find points of shared cultural similarity and if we get to know the people who we’re ruling and we and we sort of respect the people who were ruling then maybe that's the way to go. But that moment doesn't last. By 1800 that sort of fleeing moment is gone'"
The Habsburgs: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The Empire the Habsburgs developed not because they were terribly nice but because they really had to, a form of tolerance that accepted for example the fact that there were 10, 11, 12 languages in use in their states. They didn't impose one language. Joseph II at the end of the 1700s imposes German as a language of administration, but not because he wants people to become German but because he thinks that German is the most modern and technologically advanced language for the bureaucracy to use, let's say. But still for like local decrees they use local languages. So they develop in a very different way from the other states of Europe that are becoming, I mean if you think even of the United Kingdom, which is really at least four nations and has many different languages, but there it develops much differently. Or France where at the beginning of the 19th century only about 20 to 25% of the population actually knew French. So they develop in the area of nationalization, one language. But in the Habsburg monarchy they develop in the direction of an acceptance of all these languages and in the 19th century in the 1848 and then in the 1860s this is put into the constitution of the country. There's also a kind of equality, there's a civil code that's imposed at the beginning of the 1800s that gives technically equality to all the citizens. Now it doesn't mean that in society the nobility stopped having its cultural privileges but it's an interesting and little known fact, I think, and it's done again because the Habsburgs want to have the peasantry and the middle class on their side. And for most peasants in the 19th century, they loved the Dynasty and it wasn't because they were illiterate and they didn't know better or they thought the emperor was some God or something like that. It's because they understood that the Habsburgs were ruling in their interests, that the local nobles for example, who were oppressing the peasants, that the Habsburgs were fighting the local nobles to try to free the peasants. So there's a strong loyalty there. The Habsburgs did something else, which was they created a real meritocracy of a bureaucracy. A system that was supposed to rule fairly and which employed the sons and later the daughters of the educated middle classes. That made the middle classes also quite loyal to the dynasty, because they saw opportunity and social mobility in the state itself’
‘Where did it all go wrong because of another question submitted on social media which is how did Emperor France Joseph's Reign impact the fall of the Habsburg Empire and was the Empire on the path to disintegration by the end of the 19th century?’
‘So I will give an answer that may sound unfamiliar and strange to most people but today I think most historians of the empire would agree with me and that is this: the empire was not on its way to disaster in the late 19th century and that is in a sense a myth that was promulgated but also really pushed by the states that succeeded the Empire after the First World War, that they saw their legitimacy in looking at the Empire as a sort of ramshackle. Now Emperor Franz Joseph is an interesting case. At the beginning of his reign, the Revolutions of 1848, everybody hated him. He was so unpopular especially the Hungarians because he had a lot of them executed after the revolution, but by the time we get to the late 19th century he's one of the most popular people in Europe. He's everybody's grandfather. And in one sense he was very good at the end of not expressing any opinions. So that when there was political conflict as there was quite a bit, all european states had that, he didn't express the, an opinion the way he had at the beginning of his reign so he was seen as sort of everybody's father or grandfather. But he did, in his 80s, he was part of the decision to take Austria-Hungary into World War I. And here I would like to stress that Austria-Hungary did start that war. I mean it had a lot of help from other countries but it's Austria-Hungary that I think bears the main responsibility. Why did the empire fall? It fell because of the war. And I don't think people realize today just how dangerous the war was for every European state that fought it. For example we think of a nationality conflict in Austria-Hungary but if if you look at the war there is no rebellion in Austria-Hungary whereas there is a rebellion in the British Empire, in Ireland for nationalist reasons. So it's the war that weakens it...
Almost no one wanted out of the Empire and that's something we need to remember. The other thing is the Empire actually facilitated the rise of these nationalist groups by giving a lot of rights based on language use and practice of religion… by the end, the Austrian half of the empire was quite federalized and there was a lot of autonomous regions. The Hungarian half acted like a nation state. More like the states that replaced the Empire after the war. The problem is, after the war, the new states were all states that had considerable minorities within their populations and when I say considerable I mean like 30 to 40%. But they acted like nation states and I would say those new states, successor states, ended up oppressing their national minorities in ways that had never been the case in the Empire...
It's fascinating that in all of the successor states, states which in the 1920s rejected the Habsburgs, including Austria and Hungary, now the Habsburgs are sort of a symbol of a kind of period of nostalgia in the past that was kind of a golden age, of a certain kind of unity and maybe tolerance and also a great flowering of the arts, literature, music, the sciences.’"
The Silk Road: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'If you go to the Forbidden City in Beijing now... there's a hall of clocks. The one thing that did go in the other direction was automata, and clockmaking. So the Europeans are better at that than everyone else. So it's not just a one way process of paper and arithmetic and gunpowder coming from East to West'"
Horror films: a chilling cultural history | HistoryExtra - "'Some films look like they are kind of nasty misogynistic things. And some of them are. But actually there's lots of diversity in there. I always say actually it's interesting to discover that Halloween, which is one seen as one of the first slasher genres, was actually explicitly written to appeal to young women it was written, co-written by Deborah Hill who was a partner of John Carpenter the director and they looked at lots of kind of teen girl films and it's trying appeal to an audience and that's not something you'd necessarily expect from what is a profoundly anti feminine figure in the monster of Michael Myers who's out there to slaughter every woman that he he can find... There was a strange loophole in the law which meant that films that were put direct onto video weren't classified by the British Board of Film Censors... there was this very big moral panic around films with delightful titles like Cannibal Holocaust which is not one I recommend actually. And the Driller Killer. Things like this. The Last House on the Left which famously has a very prolonged and difficult rape scene in it...
' The vampire films’ resurgence in the 1980s. What is the vampire after? Blood. What's the key anxiety in terms of sexual politics at the time? It's this new disease which became known as AIDS and that sense of blood transfer and anxieties around invasion from foreign viruses as it was told in the 1980s. AIDS was coming from Africa, it was coming from the Caribbean, it was coming from all these dangerous places in the world and infecting America or Europe'"
Conspiracy: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion | HistoryExtra - "'I think that the Jews are really at the heart of so many conspiracy theories and they remain there because of this millennia-old hatred of the Jews and this fear that the Jews are enemies of Christendom, that goes back to Christianity and this fear that anyone's opponents are the Jews. There's a very important book by a scholar named David Nuremberg, Western Anti-Semitism where he shows how intellectuals across European history, from antiquity. He stops shortly before the French Revolution. How they always called their enemies Jews. Like if their enemies embraced a particular idea, they derided it as a Jewish idea. And he argues that one of the things that sits at the core of Western civilisation is this argument about the Jews. Now, we do need to remember, the word anti-Semitism is not coined until 1879. It's a new term and it's a term that's there... it's developed in Germany by a man named Wilhelm Marr. He popularises it because the problems that they're seeing with the Jews are not the problems of traditional Christianity, because the Jews have been theoretically emancipated, they've been made equal citizens, and so he needs a new way of explaining Jewish distinctiveness. And so he uses anti-Semitism to designate that the Jews are racially different and racially distinct.'"
Ploughman's for the people: a culinary history of Britain | HistoryExtra - "'The ploughman's lunch came out of a sort of marketing idea in the sort of 60s and 70s from this sort of cheese marketing boards or whatever they were at the time, the cheese bureau, to get people to eat more cheese in pubs with some pickle and beer and bread and all the rest of it...
Yorkshire Pudding was invented to fill up the kids so that the man of the house could have the roast beef...
When American people are asked to boycott tea... it was fine for the men, because they would go off to the pub but the women, their social lives revolved around tea, and that was actually quite a big thing to ask them to do, to change what they were drinking, because they copied the same British habits of tea drinking and chatting...
Turnips were viewed... as a sort of viagra for people... turnips would make you virile and healthy, that was in the 16th century. Then they became a sort of fodder'"
Ancient Egyptian pyramids: everything you wanted to know | Listen Notes - "'There's no doubt from ancient sources texts that they would capture people and put them to work on the pyramids. And not just in the Old Kingdom which is the pyramid age. 1,200 years later, in the New Kingdom the time of Tutankhamun and the builders of the great temples at Luxor, they would do the same...
People of the court would build small pyramids above their tombs, but the Kings now of course are buried in the Valley of the Kings and you know it's said that the pointed mountain above the Valley of the Kings was a natural pyramid for these communal burials, and there are more pyramids in Nubia than there are in all of Egypt. I think something like 180...
One of the things we’re missing, especially a lot of my colleagues who theorize about the elite, and the manipulation of the elite, and you know, strategy, is a lot of this, we find evidence in the lost city site, the city of the workers as it's called, of really huge quantities of meat that are being consumed. Because we save every scrap of animal bone. And after 37 years of this we have Big Data. And the Big Data says they're feeding their workforce Prime Beef. We find enough meat with some statistics and calculations to feed 6 and 7,000 people if they ate meat every day. But I think what we see in traditional cultures worldwide, is that these huge labor projects are feasts. They're celebrations. And that's why I say you know like the Amish here in the United States. And back to the question about slavery and obligatory labor. If you're, traditionally, if you were a young Amish person and there was a barn raising, it was a community event. It was a religious event. There were prayers. It was a feast. It was a social event. You might, might meet a fiance if you're a young person. And you don't really say, no I don't want to do that, you know I'm going to play video games. You know it's expected. You do this. So there's a whole continuum because the Great Pyramid is one hell of a barn, you know...
One egyptologist said we tend to think of pyramids as gigantic pyramids with temples incidentally attached. He said if you look at the ancient Egyptian sources they thought of a pyramid as temples with a huge pyramid incidentally attached'...
‘Why do they attract so many conspiracy theories?’...
‘There's a certain inclination to to rebel and to to look for to be iconoclastic, you know an anti-establishment, as I was in my youth. It's almost as though people are interested in a Lost Civilization, maybe because they feel lost in this civilization and they're looking to the past for answers... we dig in the dirt for everyday structures that made pyramid building possible and if it demystifies the pyramids for some perhaps that makes them angry or adversarial’"
Stalingrad: WW2's greatest battles | HistoryExtra - "'The idea the Baku which was the largest part of the um Soviet oil fields was going to still be intact when they got there is just ludicrous. And even if they did get there and the Soviet Union you know the Red Army soldiers didn't burn all these oil fields, how are they going to transport all this oil? You know there were no pipelines then. I mean there were but they were going backwards to the Urals. There was no pipeline back to Germany. There wasn't the railway capacity to do it. I mean the idea of we'll get to the Caucasus oil fields and you know all our dreams will come true and everything will be fine and dandy and we'll kind of win the war is just absurd.'"
Battle of Britain: WW2's greatest battles | HistoryExtra - "‘They were so far off winning. What would have happened if it had gone the other way, if if the Germans had succeeded in their plans?’...
‘Had they destroyed the RAF very quickly then they probably would have tried to launch an invasion. They wouldn't have got very far because as I say the the Royal Navy was the world's largest and just you know the plans for Operation Sealion as it was called was so awful and so underprepared, I mean you think about the jeopardy of Normandy and D-Day in 1944, and that's where we have total command of the skies, total command of the seas, overwhelming forces, and we've won the intelligence War as well. And we've got 4,127 landing craft for D-Day. Well you consider that for the Germans. You know they're they're sort of you know they're taking Rhine river barges, they haven't got any purpose-built assault craft whatsoever really apart from a kind of few little square ferries which don't really count. Absolutely couldn't cope with any kind of rough weather whatsoever. I mean it's absolutely hopeless. So I can't see any circumstances in which they could have got across. There is a circumstance in which which Britain sues for peace and that comes on Monday the 27th of May 1940 but that's before the Battle of Britain and that's where there's an internal split in the war cabinet where Churchill who's only 17 days into the job as prime minister has an argument with his foreign secretary Lord Halifax who at the time is the most respected man in Britain. Certainly the most respected politician... Halifax threatens to resign over with this argument and had he done so I think it might well have brought down the government and that could have been it’"
Magic books: a global history | HistoryExtra - "‘I was personally really surprised to read read in your book that in medieval Europe, the performance of ritual magic was sometimes within the framework of the Seven Liberal Arts that underpinned education at the time’...
It's a big debate people quite, probably don't realize. They might they might think that magic was all forbidden but there was a big debate between some of the well well-known theologians of the time because magic is essentially in a learned way is being mostly practiced by the clergy because they're the ones who can read them and the you know the Elite aristocracy are the only ones who can really read at this period. So the debate is very much between theologians um and some clergy are and are using various what we call magical techniques through ritual invocations and through powers of concentration and things like this and the use of images and they're saying well we're doing this because we're trying to either get kind of spiritual wonders or we're trying to contact the angels cuz we want to know more about God's secrets in a divine way. So there are those those who are arguing that all this is legitimate and a part of you know cross between philosophy and religion and everything else because it's about, it's about getting to know God's world more. But of course there are, there are the critics who are basically saying, ah yes but you think you might be uh getting a touch with the angels, but in fact it's the devil who's always stepping. And therefore if you're going to practice this magic um or these techniques which is outside the the the Catholic liturgy or the Orthodox liturgy in the east then you're essentially blaspheming. Um, because you are allowing entry to to devils and demons’...
‘Are there any common symbols that appear in these texts?’...
’Sometimes the symbols have meaning, uh can represent the Sun or stars for example. Astrological significance of things. Some of the depictions are of literal depictions of demons and things like that… you get ones which we can't decipher simply. And so the debate is did they ever have meaning or were they just meant to look magical? This is a key thing. There's a whole long history of of symbols and pseudo scripts which are meant to look magical, for your client. They can't understand it. In fact it is meaningless but it looks magical’"
Resistance in the Second World War - History Extra podcast | Listen Notes - "‘Your book takes a chronological look at it it goes from the start to the end of the war and why did you want to take this approach with it? Why did you want to tell it in order?’
‘Well I felt that when people hear the word resistance they automatically assume armed resistance. And that only comes in the latter third of the war. And so I would want to know and to explain what happened in the earlier part. And so it's divided into three parts asking questions. Why resist? In the second part, who was the enemy? Because once the Communists become involved It all becomes more complex. And the last part is looking at what role did the Resistance play in the Allied Victory... At the beginning of the war Allied defeat were so complete and so total and the fighting performance had been so poor that it made no sense to resist, really. You might as well learn to live with the German occupation. It was different in Poland… but in the west, there was no urgency to armed resistance and indeed collaboration was actually encouraged. Marshall Petain was in favor of collaboration. Even in the Czech protectorate the leader there Hácha called for collaboration... once the Communists become involved it becomes a whole long war and it's the German policies such as the Holocaust and most particularly forced labor that actually inspires the resistance. And so finally as the course of the war changes and it looks as though the Allied Victory is more likely then of course resistance starts to develop because they want to play their part in the Liberation… very irritatingly enough the people who did resist from the start are totally hopeless at explaining why they did’...
‘What role did women play in resistance movements? How significant was their contribution?’
‘Their significance was tremendous because particularly in once forced labor was brought in, a man to travel around had to carry with him a document showing he’d been legitimately discharged from the Army he'd been in and that he was exempt from forced labor. Women didn't need that. They could move around much more freely and arouse less suspicion. And that meant they were very important in the clandestine press, not only in distribution but actually in writing the things. I think it was estimated on the comet escape line, that's the longest lasting and longest in length line, 65% at least of the helpers were women. Women could also carry identity cards to people in hiding. They even carried weapons. Most Germans are not going to look under of the dirty baby's clothing but there could be explosives underneath...
Even if people were anti-German they might be more anti-Communist and see the Germans as protectors against Communist’"
Chanel: glamour and controversy on the Riviera | HistoryExtra - "‘She was what they call a horizontal collaborator’
‘So how did this aspect of her legacy then come to be more forgotten or how how did she escape persecution as an Nazi collaborator after the war?’
‘After the liberation the immediate reaction of the French was something called the épuration sauvage, the sort of savage cleansing and the first people to suffer in this were the women. Any woman who'd been suspected of sleeping with a German was, usually had her head shaved. An American soldier who landed in France after liberation when somebody said what was your main impression of the liberation, he said the hair in the streets. And when I say that 880,000 Franco German babies were born by the end of the war it meant an awful lot of women did go to bed with Germans. Anyway they were the ones who suffered. Usually but not always but very often, these women were women whose husbands had been captured or killed and who had really no means of support, perhaps they had small children. And I often think I had been in that position and some German soldier had said if you're nice to me I'll see your children fed, what would one have done? Anyway Chanel did not have that excuse at all but she was one of those women who was accustomed always to have a man in her bed. There was this handsome German Baron who clearly adored her, much younger than her. For both of them it was rather a trophy match. Anyway immediately after the war she was whisked off by a couple of resistance fighters I think it was, the FFI. She was taken away but she returned after a few hours. They obviously decided not to do anything. She was I should say a tremendous friend of Winston Churchill who she admired enormously. Before the war every time he went to Paris he would go and see Chanel and he would take his son Randolph quite often. There was one wonderful account of Winston weeping on Chanel's shoulder after the abdication, he was so shattered. But they were great friends and that was probably known and I think they thought it might be too risky to do anything to Chanel and also, the other thing, again, this is her being brilliant at opportunity. The first thing she did when Paris was liberated was to put forward the announcement that every single American soldier could go to her boutique, and have a free bottle of Chanel number five, for his wife or his girlfriend. So the huge long queue went there. And if they couldn't talk French they would just hold up five fingers. And I think if anything had happened to her, quite possibly the whole of the American Army would have had something to say’"
Ireland's tangled relationship with empire | HistoryExtra - "‘Would it be fair for us then to compare these perceptions of the Irish people to perceptions of other colonized people around the world at this time?’
‘Yes. So the Irish are regarded as if you want barbaric, subhuman, uncivil, as of course are the indigenous populations of the Americas. And you see those explicit comparisons.'"