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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#12 in the Top 100 Indie history Weekly chart

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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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#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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#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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#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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#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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Ep 7 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #43 The Suffragettes did not win the vote

History Cafe

03/08/24 • 41 min

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY Suddenly, after 1913 votes for women looks inevitable. Not through the chaotic, dying campaign of the suffragettes. But through the political brilliance of Millicent Fawcett and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Their 1913 alliance with the Labour Party changes the whole political balance. Now Liberal Prime Minister HH Asquith’s blockheaded intransigence over women’s votes is costing his party dearly and letting the Tories in. At the 1915 election all three parties will be vying to give women the vote. But then... war breaks out.

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Ep 6 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #42 The violence backfired

History Cafe

03/08/24 • 37 min

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY November 1912 sees the first defeat for women’s votes since 1891. The government has been struggling with law and order after two years of mass strikes. That year even school children go on strike. The violence of the suffragettes is barely noticed and can definitely not be rewarded. For the first time in a generation, Parliament turns against women’s votes. What little sympathy there was for women’s suffrage among the wider public ebbs away. But Christabel Pankhurst, from her cosy Paris apartment, is enjoying the fight.

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Ep 3 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #36 The Pankhursts didn’t want the poor to get the vote

History Cafe

03/08/24 • 30 min

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY The WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - begin in the Manchester Labour Party in the 1890s and learn their publicity-grabbing tactics from Labour. But these tactics turn out to have the worst possible effect – making women’s votes even less likely than before. They are so bad, in fact, it makes you wonder whether the Suffragette leadership had some other agenda.

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Ep 5 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #41 The violence the Suffragettes wouldn’t admit to

History Cafe

03/08/24 • 37 min

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY From 1912 the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes – are out of control and dangerous. But that is not how they're remembered. Anyone who disagrees with the violence either leaves or is thrown out. Whatever they later claim about their ‘wonderful leadership’, it is their young, poor members who are inventing new and increasingly dangerous ways of intimidating the government. The WSPU leadership claims it never threatened life, only property, but this is manifestly not true. Axes are thrown, full theatres set on fire, bombs put on trains, acid poured into mail-boxes and the leaders do nothing to contain this ‘terrorism’ with deadly intent.

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