Living the life of luxury with the Persians & Greeks | HistoryExtra - "‘There's a really interesting quote by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, so this was done in the mid 19th century, but he said that the Battle of Marathon even as an event in British history was more important than the Battle of Hastings. It's an astonishing thing to say but here we are, the natural inheritors of freedom and democracy in the West, but of course we're looking at the otherness in the East, the fickleness and the fecklessness of the Oriental despot very much through these Greek eyes so it's a real asymmetry... My favorite part about Alexander is there was something he was not willing to do in his compromising between you know, embracing Persian rulership. And that was trousers. He would not wear trousers. So Persians wore trousers. They're horse riding people, this makes perfect sense for them to have developed trousers. The Greeks found it barbaric for the, for people to be wearing trousers. So Alexander embraces most of the Persian dress or the Persian coat but trousers are a step too far’"
Franco’s Spain: paranoia, conspiracy & antisemitism | HistoryExtra - "'The implication is that there was this link between the Jews, Freemasons and the Communists. This was an idea that was very much propounded by the outfit in Geneva that I mentioned before. But it's common in the writings of Father Tuskegee. So I mentioned before about the policeman Mauricio Carlavilla. It's prominent in the the speeches, the articles and the epic poems written during the war by by José María Pemán. And the idea which is completely crackers is that the Jews were out to destroy World Catholicism and they they had if you like two armies. One was capitalism. And the other was communism. Now obviously the very idea that communism and capitalism, uh you know, you wouldn't think that either capitalists or communist would be sympathetic to this idea. But that that was the basic idea, the Jews being in charge. The other was that the whole thing was run from something called the Masonic super state...
Franco's anti-semitic activities were confined to Spain and Morocco so there was a geographical limit whereas Hitler's anti-semitic activities of course spread all over Continental Europe and and therefore on a much greater scale … there were hardly any Jews against whom to implement anti-Semitic policies. And one another further complication was that those Jews in Spanish Morocco, who were very often very prosperous businessmen, were actually pro-Franco. So there was a, there was an ambiguity there'"
Why Britain fell in love with the NHS | HistoryExtra - "Welfare services are coded with national values. So you know in Britain, British people uh very often in opinion polls uh in in recent years will say that the NHS is the thing that makes them most proud to be British, ahead of the royal family, the Armed Forces. Other examples that you could point to. The BBC… there is this kind of nationalism around it. People think that they uh you know are kind of uniquely blessed with the NHS. And and to some extent you know you often see this for politicians. Even politicians um like you know Tony Blair who has sort of present themselves as these very kind of professional uh even kind of neutral central centrist figures. They will say things, if you look at their speeches, like you know if you go abroad um they they will check your wallet before they check your pulse. Now of course that's not true. There is healthcare in France, there is healthcare in Germany and Japan and the even the United States. It just just works differently and there is this kind of um I don't want to say parochialism but there's a particular way that that the the NHS has thought about in this country where um it seemed to be this kind of unique thing. And that creates particular uh consequences. One is to give the NHS support as this British, British institution. As soon as you start coding something as a National Institution, as a National Treasure, it takes on a kind of prominence in public life which gives it more durability. You know this just didn't exist with Council housing. You know the idea of our NHS, there is no our Council housing, right. So it gives it kind of durability.The other kind of darker side of this though is that welfare nationalism can also be used against marginalized groups within society and one of the things that I talk about in the book in particular is in the post-war decades when um decolonization is is undergoing and and immigrants arrive from the Commonwealth. The idea of the NHS being a British Institution for British people raises questions both about the workers of which there were very many in the NHS who are from overseas, and then also the patients that it treated"
The American Gilded Age: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. It's published in 1888 and it was in that period the second bestseller after Uncle Tom's Cabin. I mean this was an enormously influential novel and it really promoted the nationalization of private property and people had Bellamy clubs… If we continue on the way we are right now with a few wealthy people controlling more and more what will this nation be like? What would it be like if we basically had socialism? So it kind of explores both those, both those avenues. But there were also very influential uh books that were well read at the time. For example Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and this is a novel about some immigrants who come from Lithuania and they work in the Stockyards in Chicago, and it's just one horror story after another about how how terribly things are going and he, he meant it as a um socialist track. He wanted to promote socialism. But instead everybody is so grossed out by what they read about the meat packing industry that consumption of meat in the United States actually goes down for a couple of years and it sort of forces the Pure Food and Drug Act"
How Barbie changed the world | HistoryExtra - "‘Barbie is in many ways um a backward looking behind the times image of womanhood. Can you tell us about some of these debates and and how they've played out down the decades?’
‘Yes so first of all I would say both are true. For the most part the brand - and remember we are talking about a company trying to sell a product, and I think people lose sight of that. Ruth didn't think Barbie, the Barbie doll would last more than three years. That is the life cycle of a toy. And Barbie to her was just a product. And all the cultural Sturm und Drang, you know about is she going to mess with little girls heads and make them feel that they're ugly or you know not not good enough, her response to that was well that's up to parents, in terms of helping their children with their self-image. I just made a toy. That's that's what we do. We're a toy company, we make toys. But in terms of following or leading the culture for the most part, she was not trying to lead the culture. It was little girls who asked for a a boyfriend for Barbie. It was uh the Civil Rights movement of course was happening in the 60s, and so uh there were requests and it made sense and and actually they were a very inclusive company. They were Jewish, Ruth and Elliot Handler. They had experienced anti-Semitism, so they were quite sensitive to the idea of discrimination. And she always ran a company that was very, what we would now call diverse. So I think she was, happy to make of the first black Barbie. But if you look at what was made, and what, when it was made, for the most part there is a lag in terms of the culture... There has been this reach for inclusion in many ways including the types of jobs that women can do. Ken however doesn't seem to do anything... There was a huge debate about whether Ken would have a penis or not, whether he should have a little bulge or not. And of course he doesn't. And her son who is named Ken did get teased about that. He didn't particularly appreciate it at this point...
GI Joe had a very ripped as we would say physique. You can see the muscles you know on his body because he was meant to be a soldier. No one worried about how he would impact little boys’ images of themselves and their bodies. But there was a lot of concern of course about girls and I think that really speaks to the sexism in the culture, that women are valued for you know not for how we think or what we can do but for how we look...
Skipper who was one of Barbie's relatives. I think Skipper might have been a cousin or a friend. Who can keep track of the Barbie tree? She looked adolescent, she didn't have breasts like Barbie but when you pulled her arm up then breasts came out. So she was flatchested but when you moved her… of course there was a talking Barbie who famously said ‘math is tough’ and math being tough played into the worst kind of stereotypes about girls not being good with numbers and with math so that was rather roundly criticized. Of course Ken became, the Ken doll, became a gay symbol, and a gay uh icon I would say. And there were, there was a Ken doll that looked, dare I say, very gay in how he was dressed. There was some outcry about that. And of course this is before gay rights and real, at least here in the United States, real changes in equality...
There was um not a Barbie but one of Barbie's friends that caused a bit of controversy around pregnancy. Pregnancy, yes… you actually could take the little baby out if I remember right… the razor blade theory. So you sell the razor but then you sell razor blades forever. Well the the original Lily doll came with one costume, one outfit and to get another outfit you had to buy another, another doll. And Ruth immediately said that is stupid. Let's just sell the doll and of course they sold a relatively cheap doll. She came with a bathing suit and a couple little, you know, accessories… there was that whole range of clothes and accessories and that's what made it fun... I've had people literally say to me, I became a, whatever it is, a zoologist because I had a Barbie doll. And I could pretend to do that’
I like how sexism in that no one cares about men and their body image is spun as sexism against women
1980s Britain: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - " Don't get me wrong. Thatcher's personality is absolutely fascinating in terms of not just as being the first woman prime minister but what sort of woman she had to be. If you think about the voice, if you think about the dress, if you think about the amount of her ministers who are obsessed with her ankles and write about them in their diaries and memoirs, right. But no individual is an explanation of historical change. Indeed that, none of that explains how people voted for her or why they voted for or continued to vote for her and in some ways I think the opposition's problem, the Labor's problem was that it really did focus on Thatcher and became kind of anti-Thatcherism and there's a bit of a void perhaps in terms of thinking what Labor actually stood for... Labor's never been very good at understanding why people don't vote for them. So they tend to blame stupid selfish people for not voting for them rather than looking at themselves."
History Extra podcast : Introducing HistoryExtra Long Reads sur Apple Podcasts - "'In the long annals of ancient Egyptian history, only one Pharaoh is accorded the epithet the Great. Rameses II... The dead Pharaoh was received with full military honors at Paris's Le Bourget airport. His return journey to Cairo the following year was in a casket draped with a mantle of deep blue velvet adorned with the water lily and papyrus symbolizing Upper and Lower Egypt embroidered in gold thread. Intoxicated with Ramses's legend, the wilder elements of the press ran the story that he had been issued with his own passport listing his occupation as king, deceased'"
Penal transportation to Australia: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘You can imagine the back story that's behind someone stealing honey or potatoes. But there are also lots of women who were transported for stealing clothing. And again you might go, oh the poor thing. You know she's wearing rags, she's cold and she steals a jacket or something. But usually it wasn't like that. These were mainly people who were employed in someone else's house as a servant and who wanted a bit of money, maybe they wanted to go out on a drinking binge and so they needed some money to buy the alcohol and so they would help themselves to a Mistress’s shawl or a pair of gloves or something and sell it in the second hand clothing markets which were you know as big then as they are now, bigger. Um and and just get a little bit of wherewithal to do what they wanted to. So some of the crimes were crimes of absolute need but mainly not. Um and the other one I'd like to talk about is the the crime of uh stealing a handkerchief because I think that's one that again we think, gosh stealing some, how badly off would you have to be, I don't want to take someone else's handkerchief out of their pocket. But this was a crime that that was taken more seriously. So compared to, I mean a lot of shops in those days would have tables down in the front with the goods on display and if someone just walked up and and nicked something off one of those tables in the open street, that would be considered quite a low level crime. But to take a handkerchief from someone's pocket makes it a much more personal crime. So they're actually infiltrating your personal space. That made it a more serious crime. But also handkerchiefs weren't like the direct equivalent of of you know paper tissues these days. They were often made from from Fine Fabrics like linens and silks and they were often, they often had sentimental value as well. That they were given as gifts um to people... it's often stole a handkerchief yes but also stole um you know 30 pounds of lead and candlesticks and you know six other things so it's part of a haul rather than just a one-off...
The convicts were not despised or looked upon as a burden. They were looked upon as an asset. So again, you do not want to waste your asset, in the transportation process. They wanted them to be in a reasonable condition to be able to work on the other end. So convicts were fed the same sort of rations as the military were being given at the time. And that just in round numbers worked out to be about a pound of meat, usually preserved. Either beef or pork. A pound of flour or bread or hard tack, they, you know those ship’s biscuit for each person each day, for each man each day. Lesser, lesser rations for women. So it was a lot more meat and more food than a lot of them would have been getting on a regular basis. And that does not in any way mean that it was a healthy diet but it was better than than some had had. Um they weren't getting fresh fruit and vegetables unless they were in port during the voyage and so many of them did suffer from scurvy as as as many seafarers did in this period. Um the the men were mainly kept below decks and just allowed to come up about once a week to wash the bodies and their clothes. They weren't initially issued with soap but after a few years they said, maybe it'd be a good idea if we isued them with some soap for the washing purposes but there were surgeons assigned to each ship to keep them healthy and the surgeons were provided with all of the latest medicines and special foods and so on that they could give to anyone who was ailing.’...
‘How did the inmates live when they arrived in Australia? *someone* asked were there buildings like the prisons in Europe? But how they managed? How were they kept in check?’
‘So no there weren't prisons like there were in Europe. But in fact there weren't really prisons in Europe during most of the convict transportation period, and that's why they were being transported. So there really wasn't, there weren't the facilities to keep people for long periods of time imprisoned in the UK. And they decided you know that's not how we want to do this, we can get more use out of these people in a different place. So that's what transportation was all about. Over time through the period they did start to experiment with the idea of penitentiaries, places where people would do um regular work and have religious instruction and quiet time for reflection and so on and. And so that's why ultimately transportation does come to an end because we do go into this era that we're still in, where shutting someone up tight in a prison is considered to be the appropriate way to punish them. What was called penal servitude from the mid 19th century. So when they arrived the idea was that it was an open-air prison. The walls of the prison were really you know for Sydney the Pacific Ocean on one side, uh the intimidating bush and the uncertainties of of um what sort of reception you get from Aboriginal people on the other side. So they weren't chained up, they weren't closed in particular places. They had to be mustered several times a day. And so if you didn't turn up for the head count they'd go out looking for you. But yeah generally speaking there was a fair amount of freedom and and trust. And when the convicts were working in the government service they only had to work till 3 pm. And then the rest of the day they could do pretty much what they wanted to. So they, they had their own huts, there'd be six of them living in a hut. They could go back and and just hang out there if they wanted to. They could sit round fires and tell stories. Or if they were industrious they could try to plant a garden, or they could go off foraging in the bush. They could go fishing or collecting shellfish along the harbor. So yeah there was quite a bit of freedom and even an expectation that convicts would continue to use that initiative to try to improve their lives a little bit for themselves and not just be totally dependent on the government.’"
Britain’s love affair with Edward VII | HistoryExtra - "Everybody agreed that his charisma as King was almost palpable and his love of fun and pursuit of pleasure in almost all of its forms really legitimized the pursuit of pleasure for his subjects as well, regardless of their class or background... Lord Glanville I think it was observed that whereas the late Prince Albert had been disliked because he had all the virtues which are often lacking in the Englishman, his son Edward was loved because he had all the vices of which Englishmen are accused"
A ring of poisoners: Hungary’s most notorious murders | HistoryExtra - "‘When we think of midwives today we think oh they deliver babies how sweet you know and that is very sweet and very important. But the midwives in European Villages were extremely extremely important. They didn't just deliver babies, they also were the health care for people. So you can't imagine there's a doctor you know coming around. You can't just you know go over to the doctor's house and say hey Doc, I've got a sore throat. Can you give me something? So they would go to Auntie Susie in this village, so she was an expert herbalist which was typical of midwives. So it's kind of like if you and I go into a forest, we see trees. They go into a forest and they see a pharmacy. And so they healed everything from hernias to headaches and I don't know if Auntie Susie did this but I've heard in some cases tumors, so they were quite powerful. And you can imagine quite powerful and quite useful. So farming community, they also helped deliver, midwife animals sometimes. And they were also the family planners. So they would deliver babies but they would also perform abortions for families to keep for whatever reason was needed, usually to just to not have so many mouths to feed’"
Life in a WW2 tank regiment | HistoryExtra -"‘Was being in a tank regimen maybe seen as more of less desirable than being part of the Infantry or artillery?’
‘By the people in the tanks, yes. Not by the people in the infantry, artillery no. The people in tanks are proud of their role, proud of the Royal Armored Corp which they're part of, proud of their tanks, proud of their unit, proud of British army, proud of everything, if you know what I mean. Infantry, I mean some, they didn't mind a lift from a tank. Some wouldn't get in one. Even when they were wounded they wouldn't get in a tank. They regarded it as being trapped in basically a something that could catch fire and explode at any moment and they preferred to take their chances in a hole in the ground. And that that this is a very strong perception amongst infantry. So the Infantry liked the mobility and they used to love getting a lift and towards the end of the war there'd be 6, 10 of them on the back of a tank as they trundled into Germany. But if things started firing they tended to get away from it. The Royal artillery is supremely proud of being Royal artillery, the Infantry regiments are proud, the Durham light infantry are proud of being Durham’s. Everybody else is useless. And the five and four *something* thought everybody else was useless as well, it's just the way of the British army. It's all based around competition...
If you volunteered for the TA, you didn't have to be called up. If you were called up you were in the infantry. If you volunteered you could pick a unit, to some extent. And so people were very keen to volunteer for the, a mobile unit'"
US Civil Rights | The March on Washington | HistoryExtra - "'King poses a threat to the status quo, to the white power structure… even when it becomes clear that King is not under the influence of Communists, that he's not trying to spread Communism around the country, far from it - he's the one of the great Patriots in American history. Even then, Hoover can't tolerate this this threat to his way of life, to what he perceives as the American way. And that's when they begin using King's personal life, his life to try to undermine him… He is behaving badly in personal ways and and that becomes an affront to J Edgar Hoover, that that becomes that really offensive to him and he becomes determined to destroy King's reputation, because he thinks of King as a hypocrite'"
Since hypocrisy is bad, people should cheer MLK Jr's personal life being exposed
How forgers helped rescue Holocaust victims | HistoryExtra - "‘A strange legalism of the Nazis’...
‘When we when we think about the Holocaust we imagine that it was sort of a, in a sense a sort of frenzy of of wild killing, which to some extent it was, I mean there's a lot of examples of that. But the actual killing phase, this is sounds terrible to sort of use these words, but the killing phase was kind of prefaced by a delegalization process on behalf of the Nazis. So the creation of an, of what we can call an extra legal space, which meant that all of those people, those Jews that they decided to um, to exterminate in various ways and in various places, first had to be sort of put into this extra legal space where they effectively had no rights, no representation, nothing at all. In a sense they had to create a situation where legally, the the German state, the Nazi State could do what it wanted with those people. There was no legal obstacle to them exterminating them. And for the German Jews, the Jews of the Reich for example, when they were deported eastwards to the ghettos, which starts in 1941, one of the paragraphs of law that that that deportation notice was based on, as an example, stated that as soon as they crossed the German frontier and left Germany, their German citizenship lapsed. So effectively they became non-people. Now of course in the chaos of deportation, those German Jews didn't, you know that was the the last thing on their minds precisely what their legal status was, but it was important for the German state, because it did then mean that effectively the German occupation regime then in Poland where a lot of them ended up could do what it wanted with them... They want to use these foreign Jews for political leverage for one point but also to in a sense exchange them for Germans being held abroad so they became they become known as exchange Jews and they're kept, a lot of them are kept in in Bergen Belsen concentration camp for the remainder of the war. So this is not a, it's not a get out of get out of trouble-free card by any means because you know even if you're lucky and it's accepted and so on you become an exchange Jew. You still have to survive Belsen very often for two years which is a difficult thing to do. But it does at least get you out of that mechanism of the Holocaust’"
Renaissance beauty regimes | HistoryExtra - "'You get women coming together you know to have their hair done or to dye their hair or to exchange beauty recipes. And you get the sense that there's a lot of just camaraderie, a lot of invention, a lot of just chatting in, you know a really important part of women's sociability is just just chatting and being in a space that where you know where, where men aren't really allowed or expected. Men don't really understand it, so there's a lot of resentment towards women as well for for these practices of getting together and sharing these recipes… the goal goal of most Renaissance makeup was to look natural… you think of images of Elizabeth I for example or films with her in and she's got loads of like white makeup plastered all over her face. Well that was roundly laughed at in the Renaissance so whether it's accurate or not is a bit of a bone of contention amongst scholars and most women wore makeup that were just aimed to make them look better... Men have this, men in in the Renaissance have this faith in makeup as being completely transformative. So they talk about, oh my God, you wouldn't marry um a horse covered in ornaments. Or you know why, why, I mean this is, they compare women to horses quite a lot. So why do we get a wife when we can't really see what she looks like. They complain about women spending all their money on makeup and um spending all their time locked in their chambers making all these strange and exotic cosmetics. They complain about um, about mainly it's about deception. There's this idea that women are deceiving men and that you might marry a woman thinking that she's beautiful but in fact she is ugly but you can't see that because of her makeup. So they say, if you're going to marry someone you should go to her house really early in the morning, really before she's, before she's had a chance to get made up. But then women kind of respond to this by making makeup that stains the face. So you can wash your face and it looks like you haven't got any makeup on but in fact you have'"
What can we learn from the fall of Rome? | HistoryExtra - "'I once had a conversation with a colleague of mine in the field of development economics and he was very critical of an influential economic paper which had just come out and he said this is a one-size-fits-all approach and it's never going to explain what's happening in my country, my country is unique. And my answer to him is, there was, he was there with another colleague. I said well if I punch you in the face that experience will be unique, it will never be repeated again. But I rather doubt that your neighbor here will say well you better punch me in the face so that I can come to the conclusion as to what's going to happen... the comparisons of the Roman Empire, the fall of the Roman Empire and the decline of the West today always go for the surface, they always go for the obvious things...
We're looking uh at maximum economic domination of the region within which it operates. We start the book with the year 2000. On the modern side of things where the Western domination of global GDP was eighty percent. 80% of all the value of goods and services produced in the entire planet was being consumed in the West, and that is a truly astonishing figure. And we parallel that with about 400 A.D, because the most astonishing fact that's emerged from the last sort of 50 years of work on the Roman Empire is that the old Gibbonian model of Decline and Fall, that everything was great in the second century, then got progressively tatier until a couple of barbarians came in and blew the house down in the fifth century, that has been overturned. We now know that across the vast majority of this extraordinary imperial state which runs from Hadrian's Wall to the Euphrates, the period of maximum prosperity is actually the fourth century, immediately on the eve of 5th century unraveling. You can't go with the Gibbon model anymore. It simply won't work so and certainly as it were Roman Imperial GDP must be at its absolute maximum in the fourth century... The historians who sort of focus on what is happening in Rome proper and they say well there's a clearly a long period of decline from the second century and they were so fixated on the center of Empire they were missing what was happening further out and as Peter points out and is established I think sort of beyond any uh doubt now that it's really in the provinces where the big action is happening at the time of the fall. And so gross Imperial product is at its peak at that time...
We eventually realized that the demographic transition in the 19th century which meant that all the children that people were having in Europe started to survive through better nutrition and inoculation meant that the relative size of the european-derived element of the world population just rose colossally in the course of the 19th century. You know as late as 1830, you've got death rates of about 50% amongst German children. By the 1900s most of them are surviving, but there's a two generation gap before people realize that all their children are surviving. So we suddenly have Europeans breeding like rabbits and spreading right across the planet. So around 1900, Europeans are this astonishing 25 percent of the world population. And that is you know the the background for the emergence of America and Canada and New Zealand and, you know, all these so-called white dominions uh and European, largely European descended Colonial populations across the planet. But that demographic transition, people eventually stopped having so many children and the the sort of European size of the population has gone down to um its more usual about 16%. 12, 16% I think it's the the right figure. It is only now, Iceland and Israel in the developed world where the population is reproducing itself... that same demographic transition is happening in the developing world, and this means that the whole kind of migration discourse that's around in the modern West is completely misplaced. In fact there will not be a supply of immigrants within about 20 years, not a ready supply of immigrants. And our populations are just going to get older and sicker, and the dependency ratios are getting worse and worse. We will actually be queuing up to find immigrants, within 20 years, to maintain the operation and wealth of Western societies. And I see no sign of that actually being discussed, in the kind of public discourses about migration in the west'"
