History Cafe

Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe

2 Creators

True history storytelling at the History Café. Join BBC Historian Jon Rosebank & HBO, BBC & C4 script and series editor Penelope Middelboe as we give history a new take. Drop in to the History Café weekly on Wednesdays to give old stories a refreshing new brew. 90+ ever-green stand-alone episodes and building...

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Top 10 History Cafe Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best History Cafe episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to History Cafe for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite History Cafe episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

#69 Who exactly was a heretic? - Ep 2 Bloody Mary Tudor?

History Cafe

09/08/23 • 38 min

England in the mid-1550s was being governed by a joint monarchy: Philip and Mary and a select council of extremely able English politicians. Almost all of them had experience in government stretching back through the violently protestant regime of Edward VI. To all appearances they had for years been living as active protestants. And yet here they were in a government that was conducting a campaign against religious heresy that we have always understood to be a Catholic campaign to stamp out Protestantism.

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#19 Bicycling holidays along the French-Belgian border - Ep 3 WW1: how much was it Britain's fault?

History Cafe

09/25/24 • 29 min

How did what friendly chats between British and French generals since 1905 turn into a commitment to send a small British Expeditionary Force to France at the start of a war with Germany? A commitment that had not been agreed by Cabinet, Parliament or the Navy? (R)

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#55 The woman behind the abolition of slavery - Ep 2 Slavery

History Cafe

03/22/23 • 35 min

Before we get down to the hard facts of whether or not British enslavement ended because the slave economy no longer worked, we should take a closer look at the moral campaign for its abolition. It turns out to be intriguing, though it was a very different campaign from what we’ve all been told (and many students are apparently still being taught). Credit for the campaign’s success should go to an enormous number of people who aren’t much remembered now. Not just William Wilberforce. We're thinking in particular about Margaret Middleton. The campaign of course stretches from the 1780s to the 1830s.

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#73 Stronger than the ox he rode Ep 1 'Dr Livingstone, I presume'

History Cafe

09/28/22 • 37 min

Exploration changed in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Henry Morton Stanley met Dr David Livingstone. We discover that Livingstone isn’t remembered for anything he achieved. A missionary and medical doctor from a poor Scottish background – and an indestructible traveller - he learned to make accurate geographical calculations and used them to map a small part of Africa. Amazingly he did most of his successful exploration with an African team and backed by African funds. So why did he become an international sensation?

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#23 The Last Million Men - Ep 7 WW1: how much was it Britain's fault?

History Cafe

10/23/24 • 36 min

One day after Britain goes to war - ‘at sea’ - on 4 August 1914 the first War Council unceremoniously throws out the army’s secret plan to send a few divisions to meet the Germans head on and win quick, painless glory fighting alongside the French. Only then do the four men who had single-handedly thrown away the chance of avoiding a general European war, understand what Britain’s most prestigious soldier, Kitchener, has been warning since 1911. That a war with Germany would last at least 3 years and it would come down to ‘the last million men’ Britain could send. (R)

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#47 The Law-less Frontier - Ep 1 Was the Wild West wild?

History Cafe

05/01/24 • 42 min

A series of land grabs and cruel clearances by the Federal government from 1781 triggered a crazy, barely-contained movement west, spearheaded by gold prospectors, cattle ranchers, homesteaders and the railroads. By 1892 it was generally agreed that the American character was forged in the violence of the shifting frontier. We look at the popular fiction and entertainment that helped create this belief: Deadwood Dick, Buffalo Bill, Calamity Jane, Mark Twain’s Six-fingered Pete and many others. And we examine what really went on!

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#53 '1066 And All That' - really serious nonsense

History Cafe

05/25/21 • 37 min

Published in 1930 by Methuen and never out of print since, this isn’t (as everyone has always supposed) just an innocent laugh at kids’ mistakes. It is a laugh, and we explore many of the jokes. But 1066 And All That is suffused with subversive subtexts. Our original research reveals its origins back in the academic infighting and socialism young authors Sellar and Yeatman experienced studying history in 1919 Oxford. Both had fought and been wounded in the war.

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#48 'Gunsmoke and Mirrors' - Ep 2 Was the Wild West wild?

History Cafe

01/11/23 • 36 min

What was the driving force behind the settlement of the American west? Was it the so-called ‘anarchocapitalism’ so admired by the Hoover Institution and some of the followers of President Trump? The violence they fetishize turns out to have been only in those places populated by young men – we’re talking not just cowpokes or gold and silver prospectors, but also vigilantes in the towns back east. The majority frontiers-people were peaceful American homesteaders. But they’ve even been written out of US school history books.

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#76 Twelve reckless Americans - Ep 4 Dr Livingstone, I presume?

History Cafe

10/19/22 • 31 min

Henry Morton Stanley, the New York-born journalist who was actually born in Wales, ‘finds’ Livingstone, although everyone knows he’s not lost. Stanley’s employer Gordon Bennett Jr of the daily New York Herald has spotted a fantastic money-making enterprise, pedalling fictitious stories of the romantic failures of the British explorer, Dr Livingstone. It was time for the Americans to take over the exploration of Africa. The British had bogged themselves down with ‘too many theodolites, barometers, sextants’. Stanley and other ‘energetic... reckless Americans’ would ‘command ... an expedition more numerous and better appointed than any that has ever entered Africa’ and infinitely more ruthless.

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#56 The Empire strikes back - Ep 3 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

History Cafe

02/26/25 • 36 min

We look at a map of the British Caribbean to understand why losing the British north American colonies after 1783 mattered to British enslavement. We explore how the trade winds had helped create the four-cornered ‘triangle’ of the British slave trade involving North America, Africa, England and the British Caribbean – and how this doesn't work once this section of the 'Empire' - the North American States - strikes back and becomes 'out of bounds' for British trade. And we begin to see why the British government, having fought at great expense to protect the British Caribbean in the American War of Independence, began to isolate the British planters in the Caribbean and favour the East India Company instead. (R)

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