Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'They vary sometimes from one list to another but the most popular I'll tell you you are the Great Pyramids at Giza, particularly Khufu pyramid which is the biggest and the first, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon which may or may not have existed but we can have a chat about that, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in what is now modern day Turkey, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus which is now called Bodrumbut it was an ancient city again on the coast of Turkey. The Colossus of Rhodes which was this enormous statue that towered above the harbor at Rhodes but only stood for 50 years or so and was was felled by an earthquake and then this is where it gets controversial is that in a lot of the later lists it was the Lighthouse of Alexandria, this extraordinary lighthouse in the city of Alexandria but in a number of the ancient lists that doesn't appear and it's sometimes the walls of Babylon or an obelisk that's in Babylon and in later lists you know people talk about the Colosseum but the Lighthouse of Alexandria is one of the most popular of the seventh. So that's what I've made the Seven Wonders...
Alexandria… loved lists because it was following on from Aristotle's philosophy which is a lot about kind of being rational and having a taxonomy. It was kind of obsessed with to-do lists and lists of the biggest, the best, the oldest, the greatest. So lists were were a thing that Alexandria did and so the earliest surviving examples that we've got of the lists of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World come from the city of Alexandria and they were written on papyrus scrolls and there's the most brilliant bit of detective work that we've had to do to try to find these earliest lists because they were written on papiery [sp?], this was often then reused to mummify animals or humans so to find these lists you have to go to this thing called cartonnage which is what's used to wrap up mummies and kind of read it incredibly carefully. Obviously we can now do this with laser scans and sometimes even with AI...
These ancient tourists who went. Pliny the Elder who's you know a very famous Roman author who sadly was killed with the eruption of Vesuvius but he was a kind of general, a scientist um, a traveler, he writes about the the wonders. Alexander the Great almost certainly visited all of them apart from the Lighthouse of Alexandria which was built after he died… These Seven Wonders lists were often written as a kind of you know guide book… people in times which are really tough, you know that disease and famine and military attack is often just around the corner, but people take time out of their busy, ,difficult dangerous lives to go and literally go and sightsee'
'Water engineering is the kind of new buzzword around around the pyramid itself and for instance there must have been some incredible pulley system in Ephesus when when the Temple of Artemis was built, because the lintel was so heavy, the the you know the sort of top bit of stone that people said it couldn't have been done by humans and the goddess herself lifted it up overnight, so you know even then they were going: like how did they do that, you know, that's amazing. So we're pretty certain that that was a sophisticated series of pulley systems'"
Damn racism! They wouldn't have said that Artemis lifted the lintel if the temple had been built by white people!
Stonewall: the 1969 fight for gay rights | HistoryExtra - "‘The first real evidence of a backlash to the Stonewall riots came from other gay people. It came from the more conservative elements in LGBT activism at the time, the homophile movement who saw this as a disaster. They were horrified at a riot breaking out that queer people had rioted, they had thrown bottles at the police, that the rioters themselves had been people that these homophile activists didn't want associated with them. They were drag queens, they were, they were street kids, they were transvestites. They were the people that were so lacking in dignity and in respect in polite society, that the calls that they were making, the homophile activists were making, for greater respect for homosexual people, it would never gain them respectability if these calls for homosexual rights were associated with these terribly disrespectful drag queens and and flame queens’"
Victorian death rituals | HistoryExtra - "‘One of the things that we've forgotten with the huge advances of Medical Science in the 20th century is that you could be dying. Ongoing process for a very long time, for years potentially. Whereas now we think of it as: you're well, you're ill, you're dead. Those are three stages and they're all relatively swiftly followed one on the other. Whereas in the pre-antibiotic, premedical science age you could say have scarlet fever as a child, and recover from it. Except that before antibiotic scarlet fever badly damaged people's hearts. So 40 years later you could die, having been very ill often all the way through those 40 years. Or, you could be diagnosed with tuberculosis. There was basically no cure for tuberculosis some people recovered but that was fortuitous, it wasn't a cure. So you knew you were going to die. But it might take years'...
‘For many years there was this theory amongst historians who one can only imagine had never lost a child or knew anyone who had lost a child that because children died so frequently and so young, their parents didn't care about them. That they did not invest emotion into these very small lives that might soon be lost. And I think that if you actually read the few scraps we have of the working classes and their response to the death of their children this is so evidently not true. While it's also so evidently so silly I mean it's just absurd, we see silence. we see parents reusing the same names again and again of children who had died for the newer children who are born. And previously this has been interpreted as simply not caring. But it seems to me so obvious that particularly for the most impoverished in a society, particularly in the earlier 19th century where permanent gravestones were not common amongst the poor, this is a memorial. This is the only way they can memorialize their lost children, who they loved, because people do love their babies. We don't actually have to be terribly smart to know that. And so what you see is very often a silence because they couldn't bear to talk about it’...
‘Photography in particular brought around this idea of taking photos of people either in their last days or on their deathbed which to us again can seem creepy or unexpected’...
’Well it was creepy and unexpected but that's because we have all lived a lifetime of having our pictures taken. So, when, particularly in the early days of photography, very often there would be no photograph. So if you had to have a photograph of the person taken on their deathbed or occasionally, not often, but occasionally after death, then you would do that because that was all there was. If you had to save up to have a photograph taken, you know, and your child died at two or three, you almost certainly would not have a photograph of them. Particularly in the early days of photography when long exposure times meant that it was almost impossible to take a photograph of a very young child, because they couldn't sit still for long enough. So there would be no image there's one photograph that a historian found that is just heartbreaking. It's a photograph of a little straw hat and it's got a name and some dates on a band around it and on the back it says, that this child died aged five and because his parents had no photograph of him they had a photograph taken of his hat’...
‘The two most important things to say about Victoria and her mourning were that today I think many people think that it was the norm and many people think that the rest of society approved of her mourning. Neither of those things are true... I actually talked to a specialist in grief and mourning that Victoria suffered from what was what is today called disordered mourning or grief, that she was psychologically destroyed by this death... more than 30 years after Albert's death… Victoria would not allow the young women of the household to wear lavender because she thought lavender was too close to pink and pink is too cheerful... there was this discussion of her photographing and cataloging everything in their home so that it could be kind of frozen in time. She had this very strange fixation on things she liked, things and over the years after Albert's death certainly anything that he had done or anything that he had touched could not be touched and anything that was fragile, so if he had overseen the decor of a room it was photographed, it was catalogued, everything had to be kept exactly the way it was but also things like curtains and carpets and upholstery which ultimately would fade and wear, they had duplicates made so that when the curtains faded they could be replaced with the identical curtains. Nothing could be altered... Victoria came to the throne in 1837, coronation’s 1838. She dies in 1901, the next coronation is 1902. No one could remember what had been done in 1838. I mean everyone was long dead, no one had any idea. So basically In 1902 everything is made up’"
Joan of Arc: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "‘It's a burning… It's linked you know to the sort of purging of the soul and all that kind of thing but there is another element for women. It's interesting that it's a way of, no person kills her, if you think about. It, it's the smoke and the flames that kill her. So there's a respect for women ironically in some of this as well. There was also the idea of the destruction of the body of the heretic and also they were trying to avoid any idea of sort of relics and things of this sort and therefore the body is disposed or was probably thrown in the river’"
Tying the knot: 500 years of wedded bliss and marital misery | HistoryExtra - "‘Lots of people think that the first person to get a divorce was Henry VII and in fact, he doesn't get a divorce in the modern sense at all. All of what are usually referred to as his divorces were annulments. But there is a sort of change in ideas about marriage at this particular time, so the Protestant Reformation has kind of thrown up a whole ferment of ideas about marriage and divorce, and across Europe, every country that adopts the Protestant Faith also introduces divorce in the 16th century apart from England and Wales... Be very careful in interpretating comments in the past, because you have people in the 1790s complaining that divorce is so common these days. You can still count the number of divorces on your fingers, but it's all relative to them’"
Saladin: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "‘Saladin’s legacy in the West is quite interesting because as the man who recovered Jerusalem in the short term, he is held out as as the son of Satan, there's a wonderful image of the seven-headed beast of the apocalypse and Saladin is head number six... This man and I think his brother a bit blended in comes across with all the qualities that Western Europeans like about themselves. Chivalry is the great cultural driver of the 12th century... you’ve got people calling their son Saladin in Oxfordshire in the 1240s… you've got him also taking a place in romantic literature… he can disguise himself and come to the West, seduces Western women. He auto baptized himself on his deathbed which is complete nonsense of course… while he was very generous was personally quite austere, he was not somebody who who luxuriated in personal wealth and that's held up as an example of the transience of worldly wealth in sermons in England in the 17th century...
I was talking in Detroit where there's a big Syrian refugee population and this young woman came up and said I'm from Hama and you need to know that Saladin was the screen saver on all our mobile phones’"
Slavic myths: vampires, werewolves – and cabbages | HistoryExtra - "‘A lot of your book is dedicated to vampires and werewolves and I just wondered if that was because they are predominant in modern frames of reference as well as in Slavic myth or if they're actually the most important in Slavic folklore’
‘I think that's really the first two things that come to mind that the general public is aware of but doesn't probably know that they're of Slavic origin… what's interesting is in historical Slavic sources they're actually one and the same creature called a vukodlak but vukodlak was a word that was so scary that you weren't supposed to say. It it was a bit like Voldemort in Harry Potter. So instead you could say vampir. And the stories behind vampires and werewolves split only much later, it's really in the 19th century imagination that they split into two separate creatures whereas historically they're melded into one super monster if you will’...
‘The definition of folktales that Marina Warner uses that I think is apt is, stories for whom there's no author given, so they emerge to us, we don't know where they come from and they're passed down usually in a spoken manner and usually from women to women. For example the Brothers Grimm actually hired a little girl to listen to stories told by an old woman who would only tell them to children, and then she passed on the stories to them so that they could write them down. So what are the original stories we really don't know. What we have in almost every case is a 19th century, codified version of them, they become fairy tales or myths if they have to do with explaining the natural world and origins and have have a component linked to religion whereas fairy tales are usually not based on a specific religious practice, and we have them written down in a context of two things that are completely different from what their origins would have been. One is Christianity, so they're they've been Christianized or rather they've been told within a Christianized context and two we have the Spring of Nations, we have the 19th century time where the Slavic Nations which were previously functioning under the auspices of larger Empires particularly the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire are starting to say we want independence, and a lot of their independence was based on language, that we don't speak German at home, we speak our local Slavic language and that's what unites us as a people, and trying to put into context these ancient stories that were Christianized and then made to seem like origin stories that would provide a foundation for these new nations to go independent. And we have examples like the story of Libuše who is a queen who has a foundation story for the city of Prague... my guess is it wasn't important in the ancient world or it wasn't particularly important but it became so because it was effectively assigned the origin story role for why Prague is the capital of the Czech people’"
Rudyard Kipling: life of the week | HistoryExtra - "‘When Disney made the second film of the Jungle Books, the one that came out in 2016, do you know it broke all box office records in Mumbaim even for Bollywood? I think quite a lot of Indians don't even know that it's by Kipling. I think that's the ultimate compliment’...
‘His reputation grew among critics during the 60s, they tended to concentrate on his fiction. It's very interesting actually. Up to about 1940 if anybody writes anything about Kiping it’s usually about the poetry. After about 1960 it's almost always about the fiction, his reputation is still ambivalent’"
The Roman army: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘A mark of how strong the Roman army and the Roman Empire is is that they can, this for 250 years before it goes really really bad and they lose the Western Empire, but there's an irony in those later periods that for a Roman army you're more likely to fight a big battle against another Roman army than you are against a foreign opponent, so that tends to dominate how it's organized, how it's deployed’...
‘You know on any documentary about the Romans in any period you will have reenactors with the segmented armor… marching up and down in the background because that's what most reenactment groups do. That stuff, there seem to be some people still making it in Spain but not very well in the 4th Century but was gone long ago and was never universal in the first place but it's something that we think of as that's a Roman soldier, you know jumps out straight away, has gone. On the other hand there's probably a lot of tradition… at the end of the 6th Century AD we have a manual that's known as Maurice’s Strategikon, produced by the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantines, and it's nearly all about cavalry tactics and all the things we don't associate with the Romans but they're doing now, and it's also written in Greek because Greek is the language of the Eastern Empire but the words of command are in transliterated Latin. So you're still telling people to, you don't tell them to turn left, you tell them to turn towards their shield or right, they turn towards their spear because they think in a slightly different way, but you're doing it in a language that nobody speaks anymore because that's how the Army's always done it but there's that sense of continuity in the same way you've got Emperors who are still calling themselves Caesars and Romans even though they don't control Rome anymore’...
'The great melting pot… Rome is the only Empire that goes out and does that to the people they occupy so every Roman army at any period is never more than 50% Roman and Roman gets defined pretty broadly as time goes on'"
Plague, leprosy & murder: unlocking the secrets of medieval bones | HistoryExtra - "‘The Fish Event Horizon. It's basically about the amount of fish that people were eating in the first millennium and we can use different isotopes to look at people's diet, and we can use isotopes of carbon and nitrogen to, and and this is from the bones this time, to look at the levels for instance of the cereal plants that people were eating versus other kind of plants, and then also um terrestrial versus marine protein. And when you say marine protein most of the time you're talking about fish. So interestingly what you can do is see a difference or you you can detect a difference between populations who are largely kind of Scandinavian in origin and eat quite a bit of fish, I mean it's just sort of Viking thing to eat fish, and I got slightly obsessed with Vikings and fish, um in that chapter actually, because you can pretty much match the Viking diaspora onto the distribution of cod in the North Atlantic, to the extent that I think that probably the Viking diaspora is about, is almost driven by cod, in a strange way in that I think you've got the development of deep sea fishing techniques and boats that will take you to those particular fisheries that is helping to drive that migration. Also the development of preservation techniques particularly drying fish to make it into stockfish because then you've got something which you can take with you on long sea Journeys so you've not only got the boats that will carry you there, but you've got the the food that will stay preserved on those on those long voyages. So there's a really interesting story to be told about cod and Vikings. Anyway so we can see a difference between Anglo-Saxons in Britain and Vikings in terms of fish eating up until the Fish Event Horizon. And then at the Fish Event Horizon the Anglo-Saxons start eating fish as well, so then you can't do it anymore’...
'I'm slightly allergic to that that whole kind of description of what people thought in the past when it's just one thing. You know the Romans believed in this or the Anglo-Saxons thought this and it's like, come on, people are diverse. We don't, you know, across Britain today, we don't all believe in the same thing or react in the same way to to different challenges in our own lives or or to other people, so I think it's always diverse. And what's interesting when you start reading the literature is that you you do see a range of opinions about leprosy. You do see it being described as a scourge and a punishment for sins, but you also see it being described as something which is bringing the sufferer closer to God and therefore there's an idea that the the sufferer of leprosy is is somehow holy. You also see doctors being very very careful about diagnosing leprosy and one physician in particular who who says you know he's very very careful about diagnosing someone with leprosy because he knows there's a stigma associated with it’"
WW1's eastern front: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The Hapsburg Empire has been you know largely written off as this kind of power that that's really useless. It's it's its Army is undoubtedly weak, there's no doubt about that. It's weak in firepower, as I mentioned its artillery is is very light compared to other ,armies they don't have that many guns and so it goes into battle largely based on infantry firepower, rifles. It is also the most fragmented ethnically so you know you have all different types of speakers in the Empire and I think that gives it a fragility and a lack of commonality, now there's the the language of the officers of the, across the Empire should be either Hungarian or German but obviously once those officers get killed or wounded which they do quite rapidly when the war breaks out, you you have that breaking of those bonds between the men and the officers and often you get replacements who maybe don't speak the regimental language of that unit, and so Austria is fragile and and very quickly Austria, it struggles to coordinate operations to attack properly and you know they have places where they perform very well, they perform quite well on the Italian front against the Italians because they're they're in good defensive positions and they show a kind of cohesion and a a kind of fighting spirit that's often lacking in other places but really by 1915, 1916 the Austrians are increasingly indebted to the Germans who are, who are beginning to take over that army so they occupy key positions across the Army usually the chief of staff of any major unit, and they begin to filter in selected German officers and NCOs, German equipment into those divisions which only becomes more prominent as the war goes on and so by 1916 you have kind of unified command where the Austrians have basically you know been taken over by the Germans. If we look at the Germans you know the Germans have by common consent the best army in the world in 1914’"
British Redcoats: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'For most of this period right up until 1870 when it was abolished there was something known as the purchase system which effectively meant you had to buy your commission and that ensured that only people with a vested interest in the status quo, people of property and people of wealth, could become officers and this was felt to be, you know, not only would you get the right educated capable people into the Armed Forces as officers, they would also have an interest in as I say keeping the status quo so you would have political stability as well. I mean remember all through this period one of the big fears of the governing classes is that the military might try to take over as of course they had done with Cromwell during the dictatorship of the 1650s so there was a determination that the Army would remain outside politics and one of the ways to do that was by making sure that the officers the leaders of the army came as I say from this class that had a vested interest in the status quo… You would have very wealthy people able to buy commissions and there were a lot of scandals actually and you get this extraordinary situation where even some of the very capable commanders like Wolfe would become Battalion commanders in their young 20s and this was felt that if you're just going to allow people with wealth and interest to get to these relatively high positions it was a bit of a problem. Well there were a couple of safeguards against that. One of them was that you couldn't buy a commission beyond Lieutenant Colonel so as soon as you went to you know Brigadier or Major General status that had to be a selection process. Now admittedly it was often based on how long you'd serve for but nevertheless there was an opportunity to get the right people into the right positions for senior command. And slowly but surely during this period there were some reforms that made the system a little bit more meritocratic'...
‘The Royal Navy played a absolutely vital role as we know during the whole of this period. It of course protected sea lanes, it helped to launch amphibious attacks and it opened up new areas of trade. But you also needed the Army to fight on land. Only a land force as professional, flexible and effective as the British army could have won these three great conflicts’"
The EU: from Maastricht to Brexit | HistoryExtra - "‘The European Coal and Steel Community… this was a very narrow area of cooperation, establishing a common market for coal and steel. Now the focus on those sectors is very deliberate because the idea was that it was going to take the ingredients of warfare and put them under common governance. It would be next to impossible for France and Germany to go to war with each other if they were governing their coal and steel sectors collectively’...
‘People like Goldsmith described the European Union as a vehicle for globalization that was going to destroy national identity and leave the EU vulnerable to global competition, to movements of migrants and unable to protect its own borders. So that sort of discourse is new in the 1990s and it takes off very rapidly’"
History Behind the Headlines: ageing politicians & new names for the London Overground | HistoryExtra - "‘It might be interesting to reflect on the age of politicians… in a lot of cultures, certainly you know China in the premodern era, you know going way way back centuries but also actually I think in the the wider European context too, it's relatively recently that tends to make this sort of fetish of youth. The idea that being young, frosty, vigorous and all of that is something that is to be praised. So the Confucian tradition… always made a great virtue of those in charge being older. There's a a famous part of the Analects, one of the writings of, set down of thoughts attributed to Confucius, which argues that you know when you're in your 20s you really don't know much, when you come to 30, you can make your stand and it's only by the time you're about 60 or so that you can begin to have the kind of wisdom that will make you into a proper sage, a philosophical sage and although that's a very long time ago, it's worth noting that well into the 19th century, even the the early 20th you find in China the idea that looking after older people and making sure that you attest to the wisdom of older people is really something that should be valued. It's really only the early 20th century that in China you get this new idea that actually thrusting youth is something that is to be to be valued and that comes partly because the influence of certain strands of Western thought in particular Social Darwinism, the idea that human beings are in sense in competition with each other… it's worth noting that the US Constitution does prescribe minimum ages for how old politicians should be'...
‘I'm sitting right now in St John's in Oxford which was founded in 1555 and before that it was the Hall of St Bernard so was a Cistercian house. Um and and we have that sense of of sort of different ways in which this space has been used over the centuries, kind of emerging as you as you walk through the college and you have a really kind of clear consciousness of the ways in which the functions obviously have changed but they don't erase one another they're all there as we move through, in St John's one of the most amusing examples of that is that when it was refounded as the College of St John the Baptist, it was decided not to get rid of the Statue of St Bernard over the front of the college from when it been the Hall of St Bernard but simply to give it a loin cloth and a beard and that way it could become St John the Baptist a bit of money saving but also a nice sense that places evolve, you don't erase what happened before... There's at least one example from the old Soviet Union of I think the designers trying to make absolutely sure that no one could could forget what uh was being commemorated and that was the full name of the Leningrad Metro which I think officially was called the Leningrad VI Lenin Metropolitan Railway system named after VI Lenin… these days I don't think he's actually named there at all so it shows how quickly memory can fade’"
