History Extra podcast: Norse myths: everything you wanted to know on Apple Podcasts - "‘The nine worlds, the nine homes, they do appear or at least that term appears in I think it's at least two of the mythological poems in the poetic Edda. And I think once in Snorri’s prose Edda as well. But the problem is that that term is never followed with a nice neat list of nine worlds in any certainty. Attempts have been made to categorize them. So sort of obvious possibilities would be Asgar or Asgard which is the home of the gods. And then we have Midgard, I'm doing it with my fingers because we'll get up to nine quite quickly and still have some left over, that's the part of the problem. So Midgard is the home of the humans. Jotunheimr, which is the home of giants. Vanaheimr which is the home of a subsection of gods called the Vanir and actually the Vanir, how do I put it. There seems to be some sort of cosmic war between these two groups of Gods. The Aesir and that's the Asgard, Asgard is named for and they're like people like Odin and Thor. And then the Vanir like Freya and Frey the sibling god and goddess. So possibly there's a home there. Alfheimr, which would be the home of the elves, the light elves. Svartalfheimr, which might be the home of the Dark Elves. Nidavellir, which would be sort of the plane of the dwarves, essentially. And then we've got Muspelheimr, that realm of fire to the south of *something*. Niflheimr, which is that realm of ice but then we could also say well maybe that's another world would be hell, the realm of the dead. So then we've got up to nine quite quickly. And nine is a very important number sort of mythologically speaking, not just for the Norse, and so whether that does actually map onto what we know about mythology and the texts that are written and survive, and that's part of the thing and it's worth saying this kind of up top as it were that it's not a perfect science. We have to reconstruct our ideas of what Norse mythology are from, texts. And the really important point here is these texts are written down after, Christianity has come to Scandinavia and the sort of broadened Norse diaspora, they're written down in Iceland which is settled by the Norse predominantly in the 9th century, but they're not written down till the 13th century. So if you're using texts that were essentially created, partly, sure from oral memories that have been passed down the generations, possibly from beliefs that continue to exist in the corners and underground, you're not necessarily going to get a perfect science and you're not necessarily going to get a sense of how the people who really believed in these gods and had rituals surrounding them actually understood this mythology at the time...
[On Ragnarok] This ship… it's made from the nails of corpses and so Snorri has this point which is always cut the nails of the dead because if the nails are too long that ship will go faster because there will be more nails to build it and Ragnarok will come sooner'"
Astronomy history: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "' The signs of the zodiac, they were set 2,000 years ago by the Babylonians, adopted by the Greeks, but since then the Earth's axis has wobbled by a fair amount and that means that the position of the sun that determines your sun sign relative to the background of the stars has changed or the time of year has changed. It's changed by a few weeks actually and that means it's, if you think your sun sign is a Virgo because that's what you've always been told it's actually much more likely you're a Leo and that the sun was in a sign of Leo when you were born. I'll leave it up to you to decide what that says about the accuracy of astrology...
historians now would say that the Catholic church was both help and a hindrance to astronomy. Through much of the Middle Ages the church encouraged astronomy, it was as interested in the calendar as anybody else and astronomy was one of the subjects that was compulsory at the medieval universities, which began to be founded in the 11th century. And if you wanted to go on and do a theology degree for instance at a a university like Oxford or Paris, you first had to be an undergraduate and you had to master the basics of astronomy as they'd been inherited from the Greeks. And if you're an advanced student you had to read and understand Ptolemy although not many people managed that because it's, it's difficult stuff. And some of what we hear about the Catholic church in the Middle Ages is sort of a 19th century myth. For instance in Europe we inherited the Greek model of the universe so, during the Middle Ages no educated person thought that the Earth was flat they had the works of Aristotle they knew the evidence for the Earth being a sphere, and that was completely accepted. And actually in the 16th century Pope Gregory XIII put together a fairly crack team of astronomers in order to help reform the calendar, because they'd been using the same calendar since the Roman era and it had got out of kilter with the movements of the Sun by well 10 days...
it wasn't really until the 17th century that we start to see the Catholic Church beginning to make mistakes when it came to astronomy and obviously the biggest mistake it made was in 1616 when it banned heliocentricism, the idea that the earth goes around the sun which Copernicus had taught in his book the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres which came out in 1543'"
The Britons who rebuilt postwar Germany | HistoryExtra - "‘Would I be right in saying that the British presence in Germany contributed to the invention of Currywurst?’
‘It did. Well this is the story and there's lots of different stories. Of course it's something of such repute there's always lots of different stories about the origins but yeah the, if anyone have been to Berlin, the currywurst with the fries, the sausage, tomato ketchup and curry powder, you know, if you think about it it's very much kind of indicative of the occupation. So you've got the ketchup and the fries is very much this kind of American introduction. The the wurst or sausage is the the sort of German element. And the curry powder was of course the British kind of contribution to this. And the story goes that some British soldiers in Berlin were looking to trade their resources for some extra alcohol supplies which is a very very believable story and they traded their packs of curry powder with a woman named Herta Huewig (sic - it’s actually Herta Heuwer) and she crafted the first ever currywurst’"
The Chinese migrants chasing an American dream | HistoryExtra - "'Starting from the 17th century, every place where there's been mass migration of Chinese, there's also been mass massacres, and that's that's actually a scary thing to say. But it started in the Philippines in the 17th century, then it happened in Peru, and other countries in in South America. Then it happened in America in the United States, then it happened in Mexico and then more recently in the 20th century it happened in Southeast Asia, in places like Malaysia or or Indonesia. So everywhere there has been mass migration of Chinese those have been followed by massacres and riots. And obviously there are lots of explanations for that but it's a point worth making. The other side of the coin is obviously integration and fusion between China and the West... the founder of modern China, the founder of of the Chinese Republic is Sun Yat Sen. And Sun Yat Sen himself was an overseas Chinese'"
Every. Single. Time. Everyberg Singlestein Timeowitz. It's almost as if people get jealous of successful minorities and the Jews are not uniquely evil and conniving and subversive, which is why at the same time, it didn't happen and they deserved it
Lord Byron: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "'There are lots of accounts of Byron's funeral as being a real moment for a lot of writers particularly. That no one could really believe he'd been such a huge figure that. There was a lot of disbelief that he could have died. His body went back to England in an iron coffin and even though he had actually wanted to be buried in Greece, but there was a sense from his friends that he should be buried in England and John Cam Hobhouse his best friend tried to get him buried in Westminster Abbey but he was considered too scandalous for that honor and so he ended up being buried in Hucknall Torkard in Nottinghamshire near his family seat and there was a ticketed event to go and see his grave and before he was interred… the funeral procession should I say the streets were lined with people… it was just ordinary people wanting to pay respects to him... it's funny because you know I think not many British people can actually quote any of his poetry and he hasn't been studied in British schools. You know he hasn't been on the curriculum and so people don't know him in the way that they know for example Keats. His poetry doesn't lend itself necessarily to being studied that way because so much of it is so long, so political, often mentioning people of the time that you know don't have relevance now... the Byronic hero has become such a staple of popular culture that the misunderstood outsider, we all know that character'"
Shardlake: bringing the Tudor murder mystery to the screen | HistoryExtra - "‘What is the fascination with the codpiece?’...
‘It just strikes us as so silly. It's I think one of the few hangovers from a medieval style which we find fascinating. I do get asked a lot why are there so many Tudor dramas and not very much older medieval drama. And my theory is that the Tudor era is old enough for it to be sort of distant and fascinating and interesting. But not so old and so far away that it's really alien. So I think the codpiece strikes us as odd because it's one of the few things which is completely far removed from anything that we would have today. Back then, yeah, it was a peculiar fashion and status symbol which, yeah, I don't think we'll ever really fully appreciate’"
Forging first editions: a 1930s crime caper | HistoryExtra - "‘Some people today actively collect forgeries, some of which now are as valuable as priginals’...
‘An authentic wise forgery is now more valuable than it would have been if it was just the authentic pamphlet. The kind of romance of the story has actually pushed the prices of these pamphlets up’"
War, peace & cherry trees: finding hope after WW2 | HistoryExtra - "‘There were too many clouds and they missed the target which is the Mitusbishi Heavy Industries Factory and instead it was dropped almost directly onto the biggest cathedral in Asia and that's where all the Japanese Catholics were living. So 8,500 out of 12,000 Catholics were wiped out, and you know that's where all the former hidden Christians were living and that was all unintentional and ironically the pilot was Catholic. And they, plane and the bomb were you know, it took off from Tinian, island of Tinian in the Pacific and before taking off, the bomb and the plane were blessed by a Catholic priest’"
Invisible ink & toad poison: tools of Elizabethan spycraft | HistoryExtra - "‘This is about the control of information, it's all about who controls the flow of information and it's it's no surprise that when Cromwell inculcates the what comes the Black Chamber he calls it the general post office. So fundamentally the post office which we all think about, well I mean we used to of course not anymore, but we think about as a as, a an institution designed to deliver letters was in fact originally an institution designed to arrest them and to to surveil them. It was it was designed for surveillance not for distribution of letters’...
'One of my favorite techniques would be crossdressing. You have all this, man uh turning up in woman's clothes to escape the Tower of London or another prison because women were kind of unsuspected in this period but so some of them were better at it than others. One of them forgot to shave his beard for instance and was caught'"
How Stalin ran rings round the west | HistoryExtra - "‘The dynamics between the three are really interesting and they were a course of complete surprise to me. Actually that I'm not sure Stalin so much was driving a wedge between Churchill and Roosevelt but Roosevelt himself was driving a wedge between him and Churchill. Both Churchill and Roosevelt had this bizarre desire to be close friends of Stalin. They genuinely wanted to carve out a warm personal relationship with Stalin and they saw that the best way to do this was to show visibly to Stalin that they didn't like each other and didn't get on and didn't see eye to eye with each other. So you've got Roosevelt is making jibes about Churchill to Stalin and Churchill is making jibes about Roosevelt to Stalin and Stalin all the all the while is sort of rather enjoying this and looking on rather amused by the fact that these two partners really genuinely don't seem to get on. And you know this was quite serious to the point where Roosevelt takes Stalin aside at one point and says you know don't worry we'll deal with the question of British India just the two of us. But then Churchill himself is trying to do the same when he's dealing with Stalin. So famously or maybe infamously he travels to Moscow in the autumn of 1944 to try and carve out a separate post-war deal with Stalin without Roosevelt's involvement. He presents Stalin with what became known as the naughty document where basically on a piece of paper he scrawls out who's going to get what at the end of the war and it's entirely divided between Britain and the Soviet Union. Roosevelt and America doesn't get a look in’"
Stealing the Mona Lisa | HistoryExtra - "‘Art crime isn't just theft is it? What actually is art crime and how prevalent is it now?’
‘It's a great question and it's much more common than people realize. When most of us think of art crime we think of a few cinematic heists that we read about in newspapers from museums. But in in fact there are tens of thousands of reported art thefts every year. In Italy alone there's 10 to 20,000 reported every year and it's been ranked among the highest grossing criminal trades worldwide. You know up there with the drug and arms trades, trade in cultural heritage… most of it, the largest amount, maybe 80%, I just making up that number but something like that, is illicit trade in looted antiquities, and those antiquities usually come directly from illicit archaeological sites, so they're not even archaeological excavations but they're tomb raiders... in Italy's National stolen art database which is called Leonardo there are over 5 million objects and those are objects that are still missing... it's also a funding source for terrorist groups. We've seen that with ISIS, we've seen it with Al-Qaeda, we've seen it even with the IRA’"
The far right in Britain: history behind the headlines - History Extra podcast | Podcast on Spotify - "‘When we're using this term far right we we have to make sure that we're, we're clear that we're talking about not only a traditional racist hardcore white racial nationalist extreme right, but also a radical right as well, and that radical right may be skeptical towards or be concerned about immigration, might have deep reservations about multiculturalism, but does not subscribe to violence and would be very hostile towards those people who are engaging in violence as well. I think yes we are right to call out such activity or violence as being far right, but at the same time we need to nuance that and break it down and acknowledge that what do we mean by the far right because, the issue really that we've got is that amongst the public if you like, the far right carries a stigma and is, when we think of the far right we think of violence, neonazis. If you like the old neonazis, skinheads, boneheads etc etc right. That's still there when we use that term. And I think that's that's the problem we've got at the moment I guess. And that we what we need to do is actually say well the far right is much broader than this, it's changed’"
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again. The "far right" is basically everything left wingers hate and is not racist, extreme or bigoted
Marshal Pétain: Vichy France in the dock | HistoryExtra - "' The president of France Emanuel Macron reprimanded his own prime minister, a woman called Élisabeth Borne and it's interesting to know that Élisabeth Borne’s father was a Holocaust victim… she had made a a speech comparing the ideas and philosophy of the Rassemblement National which is the extreme right party in France, used to be called the the National Front, the Front National and she said that the leader of that party Marine Le Pen was a Petainist. Right, so she made the link to the war and Macron reprimanded her and said the way to fight the Front National is not through historical and moral arguments, it's it's it's fighting them on what they believe today… the issue is terribly present in French politics...
It was very difficult in 1945 to find magistrates, judges, lawyers who'd not been in some way tarred by the Vichy regime, because every single judge under Vichy had to take and most, Vichy inherited most of the judges of the prior regime. It couldn't just suddenly spit out new judges but every judge had to take an oath of personal loyalty to Petain… you can't sack every judge otherwise you just how can you carry out any kind of legal process? So necessarily all the three judges… had sworn the oath of loyalty to Petain, but that was inevitable I suppose. But the view of the liberation authorities was in itself swearing the oath to Petain was unavoidable in a way and the judges who had used the cover of continuing to be a judge to in some way mitigate the worst effects of the Vichy regime, who were not as it, were being very repressive uh could be allowed to continue. Others were purged… the public prosecutor had not sworn the oath of loyalty to Petain but only because he had taken his retirement in July 1940 just before the oath was imposed so therefore he was always boasting: I didn't take the oath of loyalty to Petain so I'm unblemished… but in fact lots of people knew that that that same man, although he'd retired from the judiciary, had sat on a commission set up by Vichy, committee, commission set up by Vichy uh in 1940, July 1940 to advise on the denaturalization of French citizens who had been naturalized French in the 1930s. What does that mean? It means Jewish refugees who arrived in France and got citizenship...
The official line of the French government since 1945, 44, 45 has been that Vichy in some sense didn't exist… the real France, the real patriotic France, the real France, the Eternal France, whatever you want to call it, was in London. With the goal that there's a continuity that runs from the Democratic Republic in 1940 through De Gaulle in London to the new Democratic Republic after 1945. So in some kind of way France is not guilty'"
Isambard Kingdom Brunel: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "'Many people have seen a conjuring trick where you can seem to bring a coin out of your ear and put it in your mouth. Brunell did that with a half sovereign except that he managed to swallow the half sovereign and it was lodged in his windpipe. Now it dropped a fair way and was not easily extractable. It took almost a month to actually get rid of this coin. Brunell invented in typical fashion a platform which he could be strapped to which meant that he could be tipped upside down and then people would tap him on the back and eventually the coin fell out and it made the national papers it was such a big event Mr Brunel the coin is gone. So again it tells you something about the the way in which Engineers were actually seen. Nowadays people have got very blasé about engineers and engineering and the wonders of it is easily forgotten, maybe we're less impressed. But in those days Engineers were heroic figures because they were changing the world. Uh when they were working on his bridge over the river Tamar at Saltash 100,000 people at least came out to watch some of the operations as they floated some of these bits of the bridge into the river. Can you imagine people now going to watch some big operation for a tunnel or a bridge?'"
Amazing Grace: a story of salvation and slavery | HistoryExtra - "'How could a man who was steeped in the violence of the slave trade in the Atlantic be a good devout Christian? The truth is of course people didn't see the kind of contrast at the time we now look back on slavery as something that is irreligious unchristian immoral wrong. That's not how 18th century people saw it. John Newton was one of tens of thousands both at sea and on land who saw nothing incongruous between being a slave trader or involved in slavery in some way and being a devout Christian... Christianity didn't turn against slavery until really quite late in the 18th century. There are Christian voices against it there's no doubt about that but they are a minority… that was true of other religions as well'"
Druids: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘What are some of the most popular misconceptions people have about the Druids?’
‘It's very difficult to say what are misconceptions and what's the truth about the Druids because all our information upon them doesn't come from Druids. It comes from people who are around when they were around, but generally didn't like them, mostly the Greeks and Romans. Or it comes from people whose societies had once had Druids but that was hundreds of years before. And so they were trying to remember what they were like or perhaps reinventing what they were like. So none of the information is reliable. On the whole, views of Druids stretch between two extremes. One is that of wise, kindly, peaceloving, benevolent figures who put in long periods of training and act as guides to often much less intelligent rulers. And the other extreme is of priests of a bloodthirsty, barbaric and savage religion, steeped in gloom and gore and ignorance and tyranny. And some accounts mix the two up’"
Medieval popes: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'The Papal Dark Age... The Rule of the Harlots... The Pornocracy'...
'The whole idea... It's too good to let go of, in some ways... the popes of Rome in the 900s are probably at one of the most limited points of their influence over wider European affairs… that's when you see these popes getting put in who are really part of these power squabbles amongst these Roman aristocratic families and yeah you know that's when it gets into these popes that we might find a little questionable in terms of their qualifications for the office, having like debauched parties in in the Lateran church and assassinating their rivals or being assassinated. So everywhere in Europe is having a kind of a period of downgrading around the 10th century and the papacy's no, no exception... another famous moment is the Cadaver Synod. The, again, very late 800s, you have a pope Formosus who is elected Pope and then is tossed out right, and after he dies some of his political enemies basically who were already opposed to him when he was Pope, they exhume his body and put it on trial for a bunch of sins and crimes that he had supposedly committed and so the idea is that you have his corpse actually like in a court room in the Lateran church being put on trial and supposedly there was like a deacon behind him saying the words that the pope would be responding to questioning by the lawyers and eventually his body is like thrown in the Tiber and uh it's a sensational story but also I think is indicative right of the kind of nasty local politics that were going on at the, at the time'"
Boston Tea Party | 4. The crackdown | HistoryExtra - "One of the myths about the Boston Tea Party is that it was such a galvanizing act of Civil Disobedience that it immediately inspired American colonists throughout the Eastern Seaboard to rally toward Independence, but that's really not true. It is Parliament's reaction to the Boston Tea Party that will later galvanize a lot of Americans. Because what Parliament does is it passes a series of what are called the coercive acts. Later on in textbooks they'll be called The Intolerable Acts"
Boston Tea Party | 5. A complex legacy | HistoryExtra - "‘King George III, then. He's often characterized as a bit of a a tyrant in this story. How true is this do you think in your opinion?’
‘I think Americans actually come to that idea quite late. For most of the pre-revolutionary period the Americans’ grievances with Parliament are certain of the king's ministers who they think you know have been overly influential or who have become corrupt. And they blame you know the various placemen or Customs officials or you know and other kinds of officials that have been sent to America. They do not blame the king himself as late as 1774. But there's a transition that happens between 1774 and 1776 where the king does become their focus, I mean one of the things that the king does I believe in November of 1775 is he puts the colonies out from under his protection. So at that point, yes, okay. Now their grievance is with King George, not just Parliament. It is clear that it was not just the king getting bad advice and Parliament being corrupt but that the king actually is standing behind what the Empire has been trying to do to its colonies and so therefore the king becomes the source of protest as well and and in early 1776 you have Thomas Payne writing, hey, we don't really need monarchs. Maybe we should get rid of the whole idea of monarchs and so yeah when the Americans establish the United States they say okay we're not going to have titles of nobility, we're going to have a republic instead’"
'Madness' and the supernatural | HistoryExtra - "‘There was a big debate in in the history of Psychiatry, um history of medicine years ago, which was the whole idea that the whole idea that these asylums were some sort of police state, you know, and it was about controlling the population. It's much more ground up than that. People are using this as a as a as a Health Service for people with mental health issues. What do they expect when they go into the sun (sic) to heal? I don't think they're not quite sure what goes goes on in the Asylum, but we obviously we can read what what treatments are there, and sometimes the the best treatment was just peace and quiet, literally that was that was get them away from their environment, right... Straitjackets aren't actually used that much, it's a big icon of you know of how you represent you know 19th century asylums, but actually they were very sparingly used and often they were only on for a couple of hours. You didn't have people left for days in straitjackets here and it was only for violent patients... Early Psychiatry and the asylum movement is happening at the same time as industrialization and urbanization and and technological advance and we can see through studying Asylum patient case notes, how some people are responding to this this technology advances in technology… they're using a telephone right, they're using a telephone against me or they're they're using the telegraph against me… I'm being persecuted by these people… people are, essentially treat some of these things as though they're a new form of witchcraft these supernatural powers. This is particularly so with electricity and batteries. You get lots of cases where people are going: my neighbor is using a battery against me, I feel strange at times, I feel all all all strange and queasy and the only explanation is not a witch but it's they're using a battery, you know invisible battery down on the other farm’"
Love: a weird & wonderful history | HistoryExtra - "‘There's a really striking double page showing this array of a Georgian fashion for presenting your lover with a miniature painting of your eye that they could secretly carry around with them or wear proudly on their chest. And that supposedly started with George IV when he was Prince of Wales and obsessed with Maria Fitzherbert and he sort of pursued her and pursued her and she'd been twice married, she wasn't interested, she was older. He proposed, she fled the country and he writes her a letter and encloses his portrait, little portrait of his eye and she returns home and they marry'...
'At a sort of rural Austrian dances in the 19th century women would put a slice of apple under their armpit, dance away until it was good and moist, and then they would present it to the fellow that they had their eye on and if he reciprocated he would pop that sweaty bit of apple into his mouth, delighted at being afforded the opportunity to share in her personal fragrance and if he had no interest then back into the baster through it went for another round of dancing and she'd give it to someone else... in Hindu Balinese Society there's a tradition of when you reach marrying age you file, men and women file down several of their teeth to sort of flag that up their availability… 18th century the editor of this German paper had holidayed in Corsica and he recorded this tradition of when a husband dies a Corsican widow places his corpse on a blanket and fills it with heavy objects and tools and then she gathers the other women from the village and together they toss his body up and down on this blanket to see if it will revive him because apparently men were always faking death to get out of marriages and it did happen and if he did miraculously regain his senses then he was left to the mercy of his former widow’"