The KGB’s secret war on the west | HistoryExtra - "‘I think you have to go back historically in terms of Labour MPs’ relationship with the Soviet Union because the 1930s, before Stalin's crimes and Lenin's crimes were really fully exposed and known, a lot of Labour MPS were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. They didn't know the full horror of uh the crimes of Stalin particularly and also at the time and obviously during the Second World War the Soviet Union was an ally and so there were a number of Labor MPs who were sympathetic to the Communist cause and they weren't necessarily Communists but some of them were kind of secret Communists and so when they uh embraced Marxist views it wasn't necessarily such a controversial view at the time. It became later when um Soviet Union, you know invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 and then the full crimes of Stalin emerged. So that's the background to Labuor MPs’ involvement with the KGB. And so when later in the 1950s 60s and 70s they cultivated a certain number of Labour MPs those Labour MPs, you know, they couldn't bring themselves to admit that their life's political work was, you know, how it could be sort of not destroyed but undermined by the realities of life uh in the Soviet Union where basically the Communist economic model wasn't working, a lot of the money was was taken out of the country into KGB accounts and so, way up, 1950s 60s and 70s these Labour MPs still spoke to the KGB. You can get into a sort of semantic argument about whether they were spies, I don't think they were actual KGB agents. But they were certainly helping the KGB in terms of giving him information, uh, providing introductions, helping them with background information. So in that sense they were agents of influence in the sense of informally helping the KGB really way up until the 1980s’"
This is an elaborate way to excuse Labour MPs' collaborating with the Soviets
Science & religion: a story of war or harmony? | HistoryExtra - "‘Where did this idea first come from then?’
‘It really originates at the end of the 19th century, the last third of the 19th century. Um if you go before then quite apart from the fact that science and religion aren't the kind of things that they are today, those words change shift in meanings. Before then what was science, so natural philosophy. And what was religion, there were various different words for that. They were pretty harmonious. There are certainly points of tension, I'm sure we'll talk about some of them, but by and large there was no sense that the two were in in any substantive way at odds with one another. But for various reasons in the 19th century that narrative began to emerge and just to pick up a couple of them one was that the beginning of the 19th century, if you wanted to just go to somebody who was doing science or natural philosophy in England, so you'd go to a cleric you go to an Anglican cleric. By the end of the century science has become professionalized and there is a significant loss of that kind of intellectual Authority in the 19th century for the church. And that provoked a certain reaction. Second very important trend was the way in which science came to claim a full and complete and comprehensive understanding of the human. Which was sometimes in tension with, views of religion'...
‘Isaac Newton. Looking back I think there's a real tendency for people to think that he was a scientific thinker and to really overlook his religious interests because he's a really, he's really invested in theology isn't he? Can you tell us a bit about that?’
‘Massively, massively. And he writes far more about theology than he ever does about science but you wouldn't know because he doesn't publish it and the reason doesn't publish it is because it's not particularly Orthodox, he's basically an Aryan’...
‘Is it fair to say that up until this point theology has been largely supporting science but now that dial is beginning to creep the other way and science might be supporting theology instead?’
‘Wow okay so there's so much in that. So first part of that, yes. Um so just to give one specific example, two specific examples. Science is predicated on the idea that the Universe creation is lawful. It obeys laws. That's an idea that's imported into this, into the scientific worldview really from Christian theology. The God of the Old Testament is a law giver, he gives moral laws. Well how much more then is he a law giver for creation? Creation is trustworthy because it's lawful and it's lawful because of God. Second example, which I think is critically important and I owe this to a really brilliant Australian scholar called Peter Harrison, the experiment, if you were to talk about experiments in the 17th century, more likely you'd be talking about experimental prayer, that was how the phrase was used. Experiment, feeling your way to the truth. And you have to feel your way to the truth because humans were Fallen. Not just morally Fallen but also intellectually Fallen. The alternative view which is the view that got associated with Aristotle was effectively you could think your way to Natural philosophical truths. And Francis Bacon in the beginning of the 17th century and others think no no why do you think you can trust your mind to be perfect any more than you can trust your morals to be perfect? You can't think you way to truth, you've got to feel, experience or experiment your way to the truth...
There were some absolutely hideous experiments when you're pulling live animals apart see how they worked. Why would you do that? And the answer that late 17th century theologians gave was that you did it to understand the glory of God. I mean they even said that you could do this on a Sabbath, which for a Protestant society is remarkable. Sabbath was for rest, for contemplating God, but this was a way of contemplating God. Boyle suggested science might be an activity in heaven because it was about recognizing the beauty of what God was capable of doing, his creation... by the time we get to 1900, science is independent, has its own institutions and organizations and objectives and so on and so forth and religion has morphed into something slightly different’"
Medieval women: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The standard medieval woman is a peasant, right. So we estimate that about 80 to 85 percent of the European population in the medieval period are peasants. Uh contrary to popular opinion that doesn't mean that they are necessarily, poor what it means is that they are farmers... you're going to start your day with drinking lots of low alcohol beer. Not, underlined, because the water is unsafe to drink but because it is the equivalent of like an energy drink. So you know it's got lots of calories’...
‘A lot of people don't get the chance to sit down and learn about medieval history and that means that they fall back on myths that are popularized in varying things. So one thing I have to really fight against for example is the idea that in the Middle Ages women were constantly being accused of witchcraft, which is, um an early modern thing, it's not medieval at all. Now people thought women did magic and there would be a lot of concern about this. You get um for example in penitentials which are a kind of guidebook that priests use in order to say, well this is how many uh days of penance you should give for varying sins or here's varying questions you can ask when people come in to confess. You will have all these questions for women specifically about doing kind of love magic. So are you kneading bread down your body and then feeding it to your husband to make him fall more in love with you, you know. And you'll get in trouble for that. Um or you know are you chanting things while you weave cloth so that it will intentionally mess the cloth up. You know and you can get in trouble for that. So there is an idea that women are doing magic but you just kind of get this slap on the wrist where it's like well stop doing that, stop doing love magic to your to your husband, things like this. Um and it's not until much much much later in the medieval period and then really in the early modern period that the idea of the witch as we kind of know her in popular culture comes about. And so this is an example where things get a lot worse for women in the medieval period’...
‘There's a huge difference in terms of strands of society and we actually find that the lower you are probably the more agency you have, right? Um so when you are a peasant no one particularly cares who it is you're going to marry, for example. So you know the lower rungs of society you are much more likely to be able to marry the person of your choosing. Because you know, well, yeah, you're a peasant, sure and and yeah if you're a very wealthy peasant probably your mom's not going to be super pleased if you decide to marry a poorer peasant but there's just a lot more leeway and these sort of things are really, you know, common. Then in the middle classes, you know, there is going to be, there will be some pressure probably for you to marry, you know within the guild but you know maybe you can marry somebody you know slightly akin, uh so that basically your skills aren't lost. And that is kind of seen as like well we want you to kind of take your skills and be able to apply them in the best way possible. It's the higher echelons of society where you start to really lose uh your ability to make certain decisions. So for example marriage is pretty much out of your hands um in the noble and Royal circles. Now, not entirely. You know, we we know for example if there is a match that is going to be made, oftentimes your parents will sort of introduce you and you can kind of have a look at each other and you know try to have a conversation and you do oftentimes have a right to say Dad I'm sorry he's just, there's no way. But there's a lot of pressure in that situation as well and pretty much for royalty that's gone, entirely. Um, but this is true of men as well. You know, they really don't get a whole lot of say in who it is they're going to marry. You marry for the good of the realm, um and that's just kind of how things are...
Having said that one big way that women kind of get their agency back, um, it surrounds romance more particularly. And we learn a lot about this from what is called the courtly love genre. Courtly love, you know you kind of think oh yeah knights, damsels in distress, this sort of thing. Yes that's true but more particularly it's an entire genre of literature that is about married women getting together with the single men in their husbands’ retinue, essentially. And there's this huge kind of underground thing, and everybody knows that people conduct romance affairs with other people and it's even considered oftentimes that you can't possibly be in love, with the people that you are married to. So women will kind of like have romantic poetry read to them and they're having these whole full-blown affairs and everyone is sort of like well, you know, that's courtly love baby. You know, it's kind of it's just sort of seen as one of these things that happens. So you kind of strip things back in that way’...
‘They loved to remove body hair. This is a medieval obsession, and they remove a lot more body hair than we do because one of the big beauty standards in the medieval period is having a really high forehead. So they're constantly kind of moving their hairline back and back and back really up their skull because that's what's considered quite sexy. So you see a lot of depilation in that area. You see a lot of plucking of the eyebrows because they want to have really arched eyebrows and they want to make sure that they don't have monobrows. And there is a concern there. Um they do remove hair from their legs and sometimes also from their genitals. And this is especially prevalent among higher class ladies. And they do it in all kinds of different ways. You know sometimes they do shave but we've got lots of recipe books.’...
‘There is a bit of a moral Panic about perfume specifically in the Islamic world and well and there are kind of these judgments about how much perfume one can wear and it's decided that it's okay for women to wear perfume but not so much that someone can smell her from far away, because it's just too enticing and if you know a man kind of across the room can smell your perfume then you're being way too flirtatious so it needs to be you know you have to be up really really close to someone. So which is to say already an intimate relationship with them for them to be able to smell you um… people will say that it makes you a jezebel if you wear makeup and you're misleading men so similarly uh there is a court case that we have uh where a man brings a sex worker in and says well she was wearing makeup and I don't feel like I should have to pay her because she tricked me into thinking that she uh looked a particular way and the court sides with the man… I think that people would be surprised by how much freedom women actually have in the medieval period. I think that we would be really surprised to see how women are kind of thought of and able to navigate their world with a certain level of agency.’"
British castles: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘They are there to be lived in and 99.9% of the time they have to function as residences and not just residences but aristocratic residences. This is one of the things that gets my goat whenever I go to a castle and often with school groups because um you know the person leading the group has to project their voice and you get to hear their, their take on it. And they'll, you know they'll be saying think how miserable it was and look out how you know how dark it would be inside the castle and it's like well yeah it's miserable now. My house is nice now, it'd be miserable if I sort of ripped the roof off and took the floors out and left it for 700 years, you know. Um because it's, everything, all the things that make it livable have been have been lost. Whereas if you put the um the floors back in and you put the roof back on and you re-glazed the windows and you plastered the walls again and hung the tapestries and put you know rugs on the floor etc it would be a lot more livable. Um and really that technology doesn't change, what, until the 19th century, until you get the introduction of the gas lamp. Pretty much the level of creature comfort you can imagine existing in say a 12th century Castle is going to be much the same as it would be in an 18th century aristocratic pad. So you're going to have, uh in the best pointed castles, the best designed castles, you might have a well running up through the center, so you've got running water inside the building and perhaps on all the levels. You might have water coming from a tank on the roof which is piped into rooms below so to some extent you've got you've got fresh water, you know on demand. Not so much toilets at first initially, you know I, I think there are toilets in the Tower of London which is built from the late 11th century but in general you struggle to find toilets, at least you know lots of toilets As you move into the later Middle Ages you will see toilets in every room. So you, I mean if you go somewhere very late like Bodiam which is built in the late 14th century, this is one of the things that sort of differentiates later castles from earlier castles is precisely the level of creature comforts or the the extent of Creature Comforts... you will find with later medieval castles that every room has a fireplace, has a window with a window seat so you can sit and embroider or read in good natural light and another door off to the side which leads to a private space which is you know it has a chute and a toilet effectively’... ‘The walls, whitewashed or plastered and whitewashed. So you don't have kind of um you know bare masonry… in lots of cases the fashion in the 12th and 13th century certainly was to um trace or paint red lines on the whitewashed walls, as if it were made of large blocks about the size of, about the size of my laptop screen or bigger. Um, uh, so it looked like blocks of cut ashlar, you know finally finished up. So even if the walls themselves were built of sort of higgledy-piggledy ragstone, you you wipe, what, you plaster it, you whitewash it and then you paint it as if it is made of these monumental finely cut blocks… it's primary colors, primary colors. Color itself is is very highly prized. And you know we get used to an idea because we go around, say even 18th or 19th century houses and we think oh how subtle it all is. How understated the blues are and how subtle the reds. And of course that's only because they've faded for 200 years… English Heritage spent a fortune on Dover Castle about 12 years ago um redecorating it as it would have been in the late 12th century when it was newly built by Henry II. And, I mean, you know I still take people around there today and they’re struck by the vividness of the primary colors because it looks like kind of like the children's section of Ikea/ You know it's all reds and blues and greens. And it's like, well, they didn't, you know they they wanted this color in their lives because these these pigments were hugely expensive... 25 years ago at the Tower of London they got hold of um uh Saint Thomas's Tower… they represented one half of it as it looks now, so they stripped it back to sort of its original 13th century trappings. And in the other room the other half of the chamber or the other half of the tower is a separate chamber they redecorated that chamber as it would have been and the primary colors were so stark that they were positively offensive to visitors who refused to believe that anything in the Middle Ages could have looked that pristine and so they sort of dirtied it up a bit’"
Goths: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘They have a kind of a metaphorical or symbolic Legacy in the sense that they are the archetype of anti-classicalism and you know Alaric sacks Rome in 410. This is the, and he's the leader of the visigothic, emerging Visigothic Confederation. This is the first sack of Rome since the Celts did it in 200 and something BC. So it's a symbolic moment in the fall of the classical world. And although we're used to the sort of Victorian or partly Victorian and indeed earlier conception of everything classical being fabulous, you know, this is what we should go for, there have been moments when classical has not been in vogue. When its associations either with paganism or with autocratic monarchy have meant that people want an alternative to classical as a frame of reference. So the houses of Parliament are built in a deliberately non-classical architecture which they think is, Victorians called Gothic, because classical architecture is associated not with democracy and with responsive answerable government but with, uh, autocratic, dominant monarchy. So Palladian architecture, classical architecture that's the architecture of autocracy. And we don't want that. It's a deliberate choice to build it that way. And again when we get these extraordinary Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages, that's because they're not Romanesque they're not, which had been the previous architectural style. They're non-classical. Got nothing to do with Goths. We don't think, you know Goths didn’t built anything that wasn't of wood, that we know about. But it becomes a convenient label for the non-classical, when the non-classical is being viewed positively which which it is from time to time even despite the largely classical dominance of the other large large-scale dominance, the classical frame of reference within Western Civilization, it's not completely predominant’"
He forgot about Spain and Portugal's Visigothic churches
Nuclear apocalypse in Britain | HistoryExtra - "'Even if you did survive nuclear war there is the awful question, well would you want to? I think it was Khruschev who said that um if it did happen, the survivors would envy the dead... One of my favorite examples of the absurdity of British nuclear war planning is to do with the lemon drops and sweets. Um when we were thinking of building fallout shelters, the Civil Service wondered what do we stock them with? What type of rations? And a good example was err boiled sweets. Because they're of course easy to stack, you know just boxes and boxes of boiled sweets. And the, they'll be a good source of energy you know it's sugar. It's a carbohydrate hit. So let's stock them high with boiled sweets but then one civil servant said uh well excuse me but if we're all sucking permanently on boiled sweets, wouldn't that hurt the roof of the mouth?'... ‘There's so many incidents in the Cold War where we seem to have got through and avoided nuclear war just down to luck and the most famous is probably the incident in the early 80s with Stanislav Petrov who's known as the man who saved the world and uh working in defense over in the Soviet Union and one night he saw well the computer told him there was an incoming American missile attack and of course procedure uh said he should have immediately alerted everyone else in the chain of command, incoming missile attack. You know go go go let's get them. But he decided to hold back because he thought well if the Americans were going to launch an out of the blue attack they would throw everything at us because the idea is if you're going to launch first you have to uh knock out as much of your enemies weapons as you can so that they can't retaliate or at least can't retaliate… so he thought no one were to hold back, that's what he did. And then the computer again says oh another one and this time here… the full attack. But by this point he thought I don't trust the computer, I just don't trust it. So that was just luck.’"
Shipwreck, scurvy & mutiny: the gruelling tale of HMS Wager | HistoryExtra - "‘Britain at that point did not have conscription and it had exhausted its supply of volunteers for the Navy. So desperate for men to man these ships they send out uh press gangs to round up many of them. And these people are kind of, you know if they had any telltale signs of a mariner, if they had kind of the trousers or the round hat or the checkered shirts or if they had even tar smeared on their fingertips because tar was used on ships, to say, oh that's a mariner. They would seize them and they would force them to go. So many of the men were pressed and then they were still short of men and the ability went so far as to round up soldiers from uh from a basically a pension home, a retirement home. Many of them were missing an assortment of limbs, some of them were so sick they had to be, lifted onto the ships in uh stretchers. They literally were lifted. So they were essentially sailing to death’"
Everyday life in East Germany | HistoryExtra - "‘People said in our village the last GP had gone and we didn't have any medical care anymore and so they were relieved when the war was put up and it kept you know these kind of mostly middle class skilled people like medical personnel, engineers, um you know kind of skilled tradesmen, people like that who who were most likely to leave, it forced them to stay in. So there were also people who said they were kind of relief that suddenly the situation had been resolved that that had been worrying a lot of people for a long time as well. So it's once again a story that's a lot more complex than than you'd think to start with’...
[On the 1953 uprising] Russia was actually taking a lot of reparations out of its zone… the West had decided not to do that so West Germany didn't pay any reparations um or hardly any. Um whilst East Germany had 60 percent of its ongoing production, so this is literally people putting stuff onto assembly lines and then the Russians standing at the, Soviet standing at the end of the assembly line and taking the stuff away from it. It was hugely frustrating for people"
Century of chaos: people & power in the 1600s | HistoryExtra - "'There are more people who are more aggressively at the start of the period saying that actually power comes from God but over the course of the 17th century that argument is settled in favor of sovereignty, power coming from the people. And the people are represented in Parliament. They're not very well represented of course and and the people don't get to vote, well most of the people don't get to vote, virtually no women get to vote but if we were to permit ourselves a small, a small tidbit of the sin of whiggery, of whig history, you know the idea that history is moving forward, it's Progressive, we're going towards liberal democracy by the end, if we permit ourselves a small morsel of that sin then what we can say is that if we needed, if we want to get to a democracy we need to have this, the, we need to have popular sovereignty first and that's what's get, that's what gets settled in the 17th century. And it partly gets settled by the Civil War. You know the regicide kind of shows that ultimately if the king really really messes up then um, he can be, uh he's subject to the law and that's a really important thing to to um to establish. As I say it's not 100% new but it's it's it's you know it's much more carefully much more clearly established. And then of course the Glorious Revolution which um has the added bonus of of not, you know not alienating a large proportion of the population, I mean does alienate large, but not because they're, not because of the the murder of a royal martyr as they would say with Charles I. It's a lot less, it's controversial but it's a lot less controversial than the regicide but what it again it shows is that ultimately if a if a king breaks the law then the king can be um can be um you know can be fired can be cashiered that's the word that they would use for basically fire. And then of course the Act of Succession um which says that which uses Parliament and Parliament says uh this in 1701. Parliament says that actually it doesn't matter where you are in the line of succession, if you're of the wrong religion, in this case Catholic, then we as Parliament can say that you forfeit the crown and we're going to give it to this guy who's sort of you know 50 places down the royal succession, becomes George I. And that moment of course which is you know is the sort of you know it's the logical conclusion if you like of what's going on before. It is this, it really kind of confirms this this point, that the monarchy is there on sufferance. It's not there from God, it's basically there because the people tolerate it. And in a way I mean that's still with us today’"
This finally gives a good summary of steps by which the British Monarchy lost its power (at least till 1701)
Amazing archaeological discoveries that trounce Indiana Jones | HistoryExtra - "'If we think about uh Machu Picchu in the 60s and 70s it became the ultimate hippie traveler destination, right? You know this was the place that you would go to to get away from the world, to get away from modernization and to commune back with uh kind of the Elementals of nature etc. And to a certain extent Machu Picchu has retained that that reputation all the way through today. At the same time in Peru itself Machu Picchu has gone through an extraordinary journey of, initially at the time it was discovered back in 1913 the Peruvian government really wasn't interested in it at all. They didn't want the symbol and identifying cultural remnant of their Modern Nation to be a ancient indigenous site. They wanted it to be the new modern trading capital of Lima. And so actually Machu Picchu kind of within Peru has been at the center of this big tussle over what do we want to be known for as a nation? And it's only again since the sort of end of the the very end of the 40s, 1948 uh it was a key date in sort of Machu Picchu's story in in this regard and and through that uh Machu Picchu has been recognized actually as a kind of proper cultural symbol for the identity of Peru as a modern nation and been accepted and embraced as such going forward and today we now have Peruvian presidents who take their oaths of office standing in front of Machu Picchu'"
Pregnancy & childbirth in the 19th century | HistoryExtra - "'There's a irony though in that for many women, Queen Victoria included, um and possibly Catherine Dickens as well, that the heavy restrictions that were placed on women in the postnatal period actually contributed in some ways to the onset of postnatal depression. So you know the fact that they had barely any contact with other people, they weren't allowed to even read a book, to write. But simply to be confined in a room alone or perhaps with a servant and not even necessarily with, with much contact with the child. You often would have servants looking after the baby and perhaps just bringing the baby to feed and so forth. And certainly Victoria always writes of her relief once that period is over and that she's able to go out of the house again and see people and experience fresh air and so forth'"
Fight like a man? Masculinity in WW2 | HistoryExtra - "‘Do you think that our failure to sort of fully engage with the complexity and the diversity of some of the stories we talked about today has repercussions in the present?’
‘I think it does because it allows a very narrow interpretation of the second world war that it was a sort of jingoistic, Britain first, bold Britain pluckily going alone. Which then obviously fed very much into the Brexit narrative that Britain was better off outside the EU. Um and a lot of War rhetoric was used by the people who wanted to leave the EU... It's become a myth that has endured and been exploited by the right wing uh since. And the same went for covid... I just got very frustrated with this sort of narrowing of perception of the people who'd served in the war… very narrow interpretation of the war that was then able to be used by the right or more reactionary political groupings or forces’"
Amazing segue, pretending that history is only invalid when used by the right (considering that the left likes to cosplay as D Day soldiers fighting Nazism...)
What did the Tudors wear? | HistoryExtra - "'Queen Elizabeth the First's account books, the extraordinary number of garments like gowns, curtains, petticoats, loose gowns, fitted gowns, Dutch gowns, round gowns, all kinds of different styles of gown inspired by what were thought to be the quintessential styles of other countries. But one of the the peculiarities of what might be called a Spanish gown or an Italian gown is that the Italians were not necessarily wearing an Italian gown. They might have been wearing what they called an English gown. So these were not necessarily fashions that would help you pinpoint a person as being from that country, it was simply a way of describing a style that was worn all over Europe. For lower class people. it was true to say that they that they would have alternatives of the same garment for their, most of their wardrobe, but they would not have huge numbers of clothes. And it's quite rare in wills and inventories to find people having multiple items except for example women's headwear, where they have enormous numbers, in some cases of linen squares, linen triangles, linen quarters, linen forehead cloths. All kinds of different ways of arranging linen on your head to make interesting headdresses'...
‘Very very few people lived entirely on their own. Even what we would think of as humble people had servants. So to say someone was a servant could mean they were a well-born, gentlemanly person serving at court. Or it could mean that you were a maidservant to a husbandman, who made his living essentially as a small farmer’...
‘Codpieces… they probably survived because they were regarded as indecent and cut off and hidden away. Whereas whatever they came from may very well have been on display but we we don't know what's happened to the rest of the hose, which is a great shame’...
‘Most people did not make their own clothes. It wasn't the sort of Tudor ideal we sometimes imagine with everyone being self-sufficient on their little farm. There were lots of artisans who were specialists in particular crafts and you would go to those artisans to get specific things made by an expert, not try and make it at home. So yeah most people would go to a tailor and that tailor might be someone who specializes in lower class dress and in fact some tailors specialized in particular garments. So men who made hose were hosiers and they didn't make doublets and sometimes tailors graduated from their training with permission to make particular garments and not others which recognized what they had been trained to do... If somebody is leaving their worst petticoat to a friend or neighbor, it doesn't suggest any disrespect to that person. It means that your, even your worst petticoat has value, either to be worn by that person or to be sold on for the monetary value it it holds... The expectation was that these clothes would be taken apart and remade either for the same owner or made perhaps for a child or a smaller person. So you can imagine a large over gown for a tall man. Once he's worn that and it's no longer serviceable for him that's a lot of fabric that you can turn into britches for his children or a shorter coat for his manservant or even maybe a skirt for a gown for his wife’"
