JFK: The Path To Power | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘It's clear that voters take to this guy. There's something about him even as a young politician, that voters just like. There is a certain reticence, a certain shyness, but also a charisma and a charm that comes through even in these halting speeches. And it may be notable that female voters in particular, even in that first race in 1946, are drawn to his candidacy and he gets a lot of support from female voters...
[On his being a womanizer] I think it becomes reckless, at least to a degree... something that we see in John F. Kennedy from an early age. A deep interest in, in girls and women. And he I think, is taught by, maybe that's the wrong word. His father strongly says to both of his older sons, to Joe Jr, and to Jack in effect, I expect you to follow in my footsteps here, to view women as objects to be conquered. And, you know, Joe, when the boys were young, Joe would even bring mistresses home, which must have been so confusing to them, to see their father bring a woman into the house, who's not their mother, who's also there. That must have been confusing. And I say that not to excuse what goes on because if I'm going to argue on the one hand that Jack Kennedy is his own man, when it comes to politics, and his career, he could certainly also be his own man when it comes to how to treat women. So I can't have it both ways. But the father's example, certainly, certainly, certainly matters.’"
Toussaint Louverture's Extraordinary Life | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Prior to the revolution, and after he had been emancipated... he himself, briefly was a slave owner? And should that in any way affect our judgment of him?’
‘One of the few documents that have survived indeed, from the, I think it's the early, it's either the late 1770s, or the early 1780s, is exactly a kind of title deed, which shows that for a relatively brief period of time, Toussaint Louverture owned, or at least, managed about a dozen slaves. It's also come to light recently, or at least a possible fact has come to light that one of them may have been someone called Jacques Dessaline, who actually went on to become one of the great generals of the of the Saint Domingue revolution, and after Toussaint died, he becomes one of the leaders of the new Haitian Republic. So and Toussaint always had a rather complicated relationship with this. I mean, of course, this would have certainly have added to the complexity of their relationship. If, if it turned out to be true, that Toussaint had for a brief moment, owned him as a slave. I think, I don't know that it should necessarily change our view of Toussaint himself, because I think he was, as I say, part of a structure in pre revolutionary Saint Domingue, where slavery was not just the norm, but it was the only form of, it was the only mode of production, the only form of social relations that were imagined. And so if you wanted, if he Toussaint wanted to move forward, this was the only way in which he could advance his own interests. I guess the question that one should ask that point is how did he treat his slaves?... by the time of the Revolution, and when Toussaint becomes a leading figure in the revolution in the 1790s, there is no evidence that his slave ownership is something that is held against him by his his loyal and devoted followers'...
‘What were, as far as we know, Toussaint’s views on race and racial equality?’
‘Well, I think what's really interesting about him on that front is that he is not someone who, to use contemporary language, he's not really interested in identity politics. He's not someone who defines himself primarily, through with ethnicity. He's someone who believes that ethnicity matters only, insofar as it is needed to underline the importance of equality. So he’s a republican. He’s a classical republican in that sense. And, and I suppose, ultimately, I mean, if it doesn't sound too paradoxical, his view was that race should not matter. His view was that what he wanted to do was to build a political community in which people treated each other as human beings, as human beings who possess certain basic rights, and those rights had to be upheld for everybody. And that's, and so race only comes into the picture, when those rights are being infringed upon’"
Of course, only white people get judged harshly by SJWs
Ken Follett’s Anglo-Saxon adventure - HistoryExtra - "‘Talking about the end of the 10th century, beginning of the 11th century, true England is being ruled as a single country, theoretically. And, but this is a relatively new thing. It certainly hasn't settled down. And quite what people, how people identified is not clear to me. I'm not sure that we have a real concept of England until we get to the 16th century. And then Shakespeare, of course, articulates it with his usual verve and brilliance. But I don't recall, before that I don't recall any, anything much about, you know, we are English, England is our country, and all that. So, I think at this time, people probably still identified more with their county, or city or region, or even just the hundred in which their village was located. It's a, it's a jolly interesting question. I think, you know, what if, what would, what would those dark ages Anglo-Saxons say now, if you said to them, what group do you belong to? But I don't think there's yet any evidence that they say England.’...
‘A young Norman woman called Emma of Normandy, came to England and married the king, married, Ethelred, Ethelred the unræd. She was, she was, I think, 18 when she married him, and she appears in the book... Emma was a very interesting woman, she married Ethelred when, when he died, she married the next king of England, who was Canute. And then one of her children was Edward the Confessor, who was the next king of England. So there was a Norman woman who was absolutely at the heart of English politics for a very long period of time. And I would guess, was extremely powerful. I mean, you can't, you know, it's not very likely that somebody who lived that life was a shrinking violet, I imagine ,that I certainly imagine her as being a woman of power and influence in the English court. So it's, she is an example of how, despite the rhetoric of the time, which is all about women being inferior, and overemotional and feeble, and all that, despite all that sort of thing, even in the Dark Ages, women could become very powerful people... I suspect it, basically it has always been acceptable, because we are constantly reading about princesses and countesses, abesses, you know, the nun who was ruler of a convent might be extremely rich and, and employ many people and have tremendous influence in in the area, which she owned or the convent owned, but she certainly had the rights of ownership. So, and it was commonplace, I think every, when a Lord, when a nobleman went to war, somebody had to mind the shop. And most of the time that would have been his wife. That would be who he trusted, that would be who knew the territory, who knew who the reliable people were and who the dishonest people were, and all that sort of thing. So I, it seems to me that, that women have, have always played that kind of role, even though it wasn't always acknowledged...
By this point, slavery had died out in Normandy, pretty much. That there might have been a few slaves left, but it was very uncommon by this time, if not completely stamped out. And in England, it was commonplace and and if we're to believe the Domesday Book, 10% of the English population was slaves. That's a big percentage, and it's a proper slave society. And, and the Normans were past that stage. Probably. This is something that historians speculate about, but it seems plausible to me. The church was against slavery, not on human rights grounds, but because slaves are always used for prostitution. And the church was certainly against that’"
Kate Summerscale On A 1930s Ghost Hunt | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘We don't really think of the 20th century as a type of paranormal activity and the supernatural because it seems too modern for that almost. What can you tell us about the world of paranormal investigation in the 1930s, and why the 30s was such a key time for this?’
‘Well, there was a huge rise in spiritualism after the First World War, which was a belief that the dead could communicate with the living, principally through seances. And at the same time, there was a kind of parallel science of the spiritual and the people who worked in Psychical Research, the ghost hunters, some of them were very serious about really finding scientific explanations for paranormal events. And there was a lot of overlap between the Psychical Research and psychoanalysis, for example. All these sort of experimental sciences that were partly to do with physics in some cases, and partly to do with psychology. So there was a lot of sort of fringe work, and they were all sort of equally mistrusted and fascinating to the public. And the newspapers were full of reports about experiments in telepathy and astral projection, and fortune telling, and astrology. And so it was, it was a fringe science, but very much aspiring to be a science, and taken seriously by many, including the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle. And Sir Oliver Lodge, who was a great pioneer of radio waves. And I suppose it was a time when there was, people started to have radios in their homes, when most people did, and telephones and even televisions, and all of these devices had some kind of almost supernatural quality to the way you could, your voice could be disembodied and transported across continents. And so there was some sort of plausibility to the idea that the ghosts might exist and we just hadn't discovered the method of transmission, the way in which the dead were able to speak to us and convey their messages.’"
Medieval turning points - HistoryExtra - "‘Historical periods are made by historians… some historians have argued quite powerfully that Gregory the Great, he's not really part of the medieval world. He's really part of the kind of antique world, kind of prolongation of the ancient world, which is called late antiquity. And that's because his mindset is really still Imperial. He still thinks in terms of Roman Empire'...
‘What is the difference between the late antique and the and the early medieval? What's what's the, how did the mindsets alter?’...
‘Different historians will give you different answers to that. And I think lots of it really depends where you're looking at Gregory from, so I think it makes a lot of sense to look at Gregory from the perspective of you know, of Christian Rome, the kinds of the Rome of Constantine the Great and so on thinking forwards. If you are looking at him backwards, it becomes more early medieval. He really sits on the cusp, okay, he can be thought of as both… it's really about his conceptual frame of reference… his missions to the English is critical part of that. The English were not, the people he thought of as English, were not really in the Empire anymore… the person who actually receives the mission... probably wouldn't have thought of themselves as English at all... Gregory the Great by sending missions to the English actually kind of promotes and to some extent, creates an English identity’...
‘The distinction we need to make those between societies with slaves and slave societies... medieval Europe is not a slave society. In that, while there are kind of people who are chattel slaves, especially by the way, I might add, women. So women seem to have been disproportionately affected by this kind of slaving. That is not the main form that unfreedom takes. In most of Europe, most people were unfree to some extent, but it was a very fluid concept, and they weren't, they were not slaves in the sense of which you've been talking about.’"
Claudio Saunt On The Dispossession Of Native Americans | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘The stated reason… was that this was the actually the best thing for the victims of the policy. of the subjects of the policy, that if, if they were not moved, they would not survive. And they had these metaphors that they repeated over and over again, that Indians, indigenous Americans were like, a bank of sand on the ocean shore being worn away by the waves, or, similarly, they said, they were like a mountain of snow in the sun melting away, and if they weren't moved, that they were just going to vanish and disappear. So it was done for their own good... You know, if you if you take them at at their word, sure, you might believe that but if you if you listen to the folks who were the who were the victims of the policy, they that they pushed back… they insisted we are not vanishing, they said we, we are in fact thriving... the best demographic evidence available suggests that the populations, indigenous populations, though clearly they had declined. But by the 1820s, 1830s, the populations were largely stable, if not actually increasing’"
So much for the myth of Native American genocide
Black radical: William Monroe Trotter | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Some of his methods sound surprisingly modern. Can you tell us how you protested the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation?’...
‘Trotter was really somebody who believed in mass protest. So that meant getting as many people as you could to confront seats of power… he stages protests in Boston, he, you know, confronts the mayor of Boston at the time, Boston was known as a pretty puritanical city, in terms of banning lots of things. So they would ban you know, one play because the woman showed her ankles on the stage, all these sorts of things. And so Trotter was pointing out if anything should be banned is this film, which has sort of racial and political repercussions, and this sort of led to countless protests at the theaters in Boston. Eventually the mayor did end up staying the showing of the film, and other cities across the United States followed suit, but Trotter, what made him distinct was his focus on the fact that this was a lie, right? That the way the film portrayed black people had no basis in fact, whereas other people who argued against the film, namely the NAACP, argued that well, it was an opinion, right. You know, censorship should probably happen, but why don't we just find another film by black people to counter the truth of this film, and Trotter very astutely pointed out that there is no basis for saying the Klan is a good organization, and that that's the way the film should be attacked, not as a work of art that is being censored but as a work of propaganda that was leading to further racial violence and political division.’"
The First Amendment wasn't always that powerful, it seems
Ancient Wisdom With Neil Oliver | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘The human race has been through the same sort of problems again, and again, and again, you know, human populations have been invaded by strangers, or they in turn, have invaded the neighbors. They've had wars, they've had outbreaks of pestilence and plague, you know, they've had tyrannies, they've had benign kingship, they've had democracies, the whole thing just keeps on coming around and around and around. If you don't pay attention to history, it can be even more stressful, because you might think that what's happening to us in the 21st century is unique, and especially bad. If you look back at history, you see it, it's happened to people before us many, many, many times. And I feel that if you look back at other times, and see how people coped with situations, there's just a reassurance to be had from knowing there is nothing new. Our species has been dealing with the same big challenges again, and again and again. And here we are... We have conquered so many diseases. We have lifted billions of people out of poverty. Here in much of Western Europe, we have lived in what is by comparison to others, a very tolerant and peaceful society. And yet, even given all of those incredible gifts, so many people it seems to me are depressed, are on antidepressants and beta blockers, and they're finding it hard to cope with a daily reality’"
Yet, humans like to feel special. So this might not be comforting after all
Vincent Brown On Tacky's Slave Revolt | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "1761. And it was at the time Jamaica, Britain's most profitable, most militarily significant, and best politically connected colony in the Americas. One often thinks of the 13 British colonies in North America that broke away from the British Empire and the American Revolution, without remembering that on the eve of the revolution, Britain actually had 26 colonies in America. And by far, the most profitable and politically significant of them were those colonies in the Caribbean, with Jamaica being foremost among them. So this revolt by enslaved Africans, at the very heart of the British Empire in America was a serious event. And it also occurred during the Seven Years War"
