PODCAST · history
History Cafe
by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe
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... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episodes
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#42 The violence backfired - Ep 6 The Secret History of the Suffragettes
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...
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#41 The Violence the Suffragettes wouldn't admit to - Ep 5 The Secret History of the Suffragettes
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...
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#37 Hunger strikes and forced feeding - Ep 4 The Secret History of the Suffragettes
The militant strategy of the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - is delivering them headlines. It gets them nowhere with the government but it makes enormous sums of advertising revenue from fancy retailers, and funds Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s society lifestyle. Rich London ladies in...
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#36 The Pankhursts didn't want the poor to get the vote - Ep 3 The Secret History of the Suffragettes
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…
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#35 Most women didn't want the vote - Ep 2 The Secret History of the Suffragettes
We go back to the great number of unsung women and men who made great strides towards women’s votes and female emancipation by 1900. Emmeline Pankhurst sets up her Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 as a pressure group for votes for poor working-women in the cotton mills. By then a…
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#34 Getting the vote in 1918: 'marvellous leadership' - Ep 1 The Secret History of the Suffragettes
Mrs Pankhurst claims she won women the vote through ‘marvellous leadership.’ An all-male conference of MPs counters that it gifted women the vote. We reveal that neither is true. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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#130 'The real mystery of 1492' - Ep 7 Columbus - legend and loser
European sailors in Columbus’s time had only rudimentary instruments, with no means of measuring longitude, and only a vague idea of how far north-south they were. So how on earth did they find the island of Hispaniola, over and over again, after weeks out of sight of land? There are some...
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#129 ‘It’s a joke’ - Ep 6 Columbus - legend and loser
Columbus may now be dressing up like a friar and searching for the Garden of Eden but he and his brother are still cutting off the Arawaks’ hands if they fail to deliver a monthly quantity of gold. Horrified, Ferdinand and Isabella send a judge to bring the Admiral of the Ocean Sea and his…
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#128 No more Mr Nice Guy - Ep 5 Columbus - legend and loser
When Columbus’s second voyage - the showy Armada of 1493 - reaches Hispaniola they find that the Arawak, including the chief who rescued Columbus from the shipwrecked Santa Maria on Christmas Eve 1492, have had enough. The avaricious, raping crew left behind at fort Navidad are now a pile of...
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#127 'They eat human flesh' - Ep 4 Columbus - legend and loser
Columbus is told where to find ‘pieces of gold as big as the ship’s great stern post.’ And that where the gold is, there are people called ‘Caribs’ who not only have bows and arrows, but also eat human flesh. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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#126 'Seven head of women' - Ep 3 Columbus - legend and loser
Within two days of Columbus making first landfall on an island he named San Salvador after his God, Columbus had kidnapped several men to take to Spain to train as interpreters. To prevent them escaping, he then rounded up ‘seven head of women,’ along with three children. Hosted on Acast. See...
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#125 The torrid affair - Ep 2 Columbus - legend and loser
Nobody believed Columbus could reach the Indies (Asia, home to the Grand Khan). So why did Ferdinand and Isabella back him? The answer is all tied up with a torrid affair. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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#124 Columbus was invented in 1777 - Ep 1 Columbus - legend and loser
Columbus the romantic hero is a myth created in 1777 by the Scottish historian Revd William Robertson. It hit the big time with Washington Irving’s biography 50 years later. Tales of lone scientific geniuses were becoming popular and Columbus had been snapped up by rebellious American colonists...
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# 40 Henry VIII: Pope Clement, Katherine, Anne and Florence
After years of negotiation and confrontation, Pope Clement VII was heard swearing unpapally over Henry VIII’s divorce. And no wonder. The history of Henry’s pope is a murky tale of code-breaking and ruthless sieges that involves Michelangelo and Machiavelli and a great deal of double-dealing.…
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# 52 Anne Boleyn - Henry VIII's MacGuffin
Most of what we think we know about Anne Boleyn turns out to be later invention, with no historical basis. We argue that she was a MacGuffin: she was necessary to the way things turned out for Henry, but unimportant in herself. We’re not even sure he was in love with her. Hosted on Acast. See...
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# 51 Marrying Anne Boleyn, the best of a bad job - Ep 6 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French
The Ambassadors painting by Hans Holbein reveals the French horror at Henry’s decision in January 1533 to defy the pope and get remarried to a pregnant Anne Boleyn. But since Henry couldn't get an annulment he had no choice. No big-time European princess would marry him. With the Spanish…
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# 50 No more menage à trois - Ep 5 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French
In a dynamite French document from August 1530, still overlooked by historians, the King of France offers to send troops to England to defend Henry VIII against the Spanish. No French government before or since has ever promised to send troops to defend England. Does this explain Henry’s sudden...
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# 49 Like an episode of the Borgias - Ep 4 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French
31 May 1529: Faced with France and Spain doing a deal and leaving England in the lurch, Henry races against time to begin his divorce trial in London, and then pulls the plug just before a verdict is reached. Meanwhile the pope and his cardinals are double-crossing each other. Hosted on Acast.…
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# 46 Missions Impossible - Ep 3 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French
1527: The pope is a prisoner of the marauding Spanish in Rome and yet Henry sends his man Knight on a madcap mission to ask Pope Clement VII for permission to marry a young woman he is already sleeping with. It’s the first of a whole series of crazy errands, asking the pope for the impossible.…
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# 45 The Jilting of Princess Mary - Ep 2 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French
Did Henry break with Rome in order to seize power over the wealthy, ubiquitous church in England? We find that the dates don’t add up. Instead we look at why in June 1525 Henry promoted his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy over the head of his heir Mary. And why Charles V broke off his engagement...
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#44 Anne Boleyn did not hold out on Henry - Ep 1 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French
In 2010 a document from 1527 was found in which Henry VIII admits to the pope that he is sleeping with the woman he wishes to marry instead of, or as well as, his Spanish wife Katherine. Very little of the traditional story can be believed. It’s Katherine who matters in the story of Henry’s...
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#39 Newton and the Occult - Ep 2 Was Newton the last of the magicians?
Having considered the arguments in favour of defining Sir Isaac Newton as an early 'scientist', we now consider the other side of the coin. Newton’s best-known breakthrough – the identification of gravity – belonged not to the latest tradition of European Cartesian rationalism, but to a very...
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#38 Newton the Alchemist - Ep 1 Was Newton the last of the magicians?
The short answer to the question, ‘was Newton the last of the magicians?’ is, yes …. And also … no. Newton and alchemy turn out to be ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ We toss a coin and take a heads-and-tails approach. In this podcast we argue that the alchemical experiments he...
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#123 Pissing on bagpipes - Ep 5 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
Was Shakespeare a Catholic? We examine the evidence and then ask whether his audience would have compartmentalised the world into Protestant, Catholic or alchemical. Wasn’t their world full of magic? In his last solo play, The Tempest, a white magus, Prospero, tells the audience that it’s up to...
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#122 Queen Elizabeth's Toyboy - Ep 4 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
The Earl of Essex, it always used to be said, was an airhead. Elizabeth’s swaggering toyboy who posed as a military genius. And yet Shakespeare took the young Earl of Essex seriously, portraying him as Henry V in early performances in 1595. It riled Essex’s rival at court, the Queen’s Chief...
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#121 The naked King Lear - Ep 3 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
Shakespeare confronts homelessness with his aging king, reduced to beggary. He makes the audience ask what it would be like if it was you who found yourself out of house and home, shivering and hoping someone would give you their cloak. Is it not, Shakespeare asks, an outrage to blame the poor…
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#120 'Hang, beg, starve' - Ep 2 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
We reveal the real-life factional feud that inspired the Montagues v Capulets and which makes the groundling audience so angry. It’s London. 1595. Life is tough. It’s wet and cold and only three years ago 20% of the population died of the plague. And it’s not fair. The rich can commit murder,...
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#119 'Fair is foul and foul is fair' - Ep 1 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
Nothing is what it seems? We, poor Londoners, paying our penny to stand at the Globe in 1606 would agree with that. With Robert Cecil’s government relentlessly pumping out fake news around the Gunpowder Plot, it’s not at all clear who the real criminals are. As Macbeth, murderer of a Scottish…
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#96 Extortioners and hatchet men - Ep 5 What Wars? What Roses?
Henry VII invented the idea of the Wars of the Roses and the notion that he alone could end them. With a comparatively weak claim to the throne he found a novel way to deal with the nobility - through extortioners and hatchet men. He could only get away with this because the Black Death had…
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#95 Murder in the Tower - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?
One common-girl-denies-king-until-he-marries-her, two kings, three royal murders in the Tower, and the Queen's mother accused of witchcraft. Just about standard for late 15th Century England and Wales. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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#94 'Political gangsterdom' - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?
By the time Henry VI finally lost the last bit of England's French Empire in 1453 he could no longer go to war in France to occupy and enrich his nobility. This small, interrelated and bickering group, cooped up in England with an agricultural depression settling in, now resorted to what the...
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#93 'A plague on both your houses' - Ep 2 What Wars? What Roses?
Why was the 15th century in England and Wales so violent? It certainly wasn’t York v Lancaster, white-rose v red-rose rivalry. Monarchs were useless but that’s not unique to the 15th century. So what was it that defined this period? It has everything to do with the plague… (R) Hosted on Acast.…
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#92 'Welcome traitor!' - Ep 1 What Wars? What Roses?
Why do we know so little about medieval history? About England and Wales in the fifteenth century? The Wars of the Roses (Lancaster v York) lasted 4 months not the traditional 85 years. Even the roses were (mostly) inventions. And was it even medieval? The execution of the King’s chief minister…
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#107 This is Armageddon - Ep 7 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum - Neoliberalism uncut
We present the final, damming evidence that the neoliberal case for freedom from all government regulation was always a dangerous deceit. It was always intended to make us prisoners of the unaccountable rich, as we are today. This is not liberty. It is not even the twilight of sovereignty. This…
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#106 Dark make-believe - Ep 6 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum - Neoliberalism uncut
Unbelievable, sinister. Milton Friedman advises apartheid South Africa that neoliberal free-market economics can solve the problems of the Soweto riots, in the same way it delivered a ‘miracle’ of liberty under the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile. (R) Hosted on Acast. See...
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#105 Smears, imprisonment, assassination - Ep 5 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum - Neoliberalism uncut
Neoliberalism was welcomed, finally, as a way to tackle what seemed to be a breakdown in American society in the late 1960s. Big business and FBI under J Edgar Hoover felt threatened by Keynsian consensus on welfare and the eradication of poverty. They had plenty to gain by provoking the…
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#104 Catch 22 - Ep 4 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut
The breakdown of American post-war consensus in the 60s calls for desperate measures on all sides: a government war in Vietnam, inner-city rioting, sex, drugs and rock and roll. Alarmed, US businesses seek salvation from the previously dismissed economic theory of neoliberal free-market…
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#103 Disinformation didn't start with Donald Trump - Ep 3 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut
We look at the roots of free market Neoliberalism and discover that big business in the US has been championing freedom from regulation since 1895, even claiming in 1923 that the anti-child labour movement in America was secretly being run from Moscow… (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy…
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#102 'The cuckoo in the Nobel nest' - Ep 2 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut
How did less welfare, less government regulation of business (aka neoliberalism free market) become a global ‘fashion’ without any evidence of its benefits? Something to do with an imposter ‘Nobel’ prize and a PBS TV series funded by American big business? (R) Hosted on Acast. See…
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#101 'everything absolutely maxed out' - Ep 1 Lunatics Take Over The Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut
Civil liberty is different from individual liberty. Philosophers have known this since at least the 17th Century. We explore the two fundamental fallacies of neoliberalism to show why neoliberal economics can only bring prosperity to the few, and is incapable of predicting financial crashes.…
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#32 The curious case of inventing Scottishness
In 1983 Professor Hugh Trevor Roper claimed that Scottishness had been invented. We enjoyably demolish Trevor Roper’s theory and reveal that the commercialisation of romantic Scottishness in the nineteenth century had far deeper and darker roots than the manufacture of tartan and romantic…
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#06 London fires were visible from France - Ep 6 Who really won the Battle of Britain?
Who won the Battle of Britain? For good strategic reasons Churchill claimed victory. But the Germans, who saw the eight months of the Blitz as part of the same campaign, achieved much of what they intended. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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#05 Forcing Britain 'to her knees' - Ep 5 Who really won the Battle of Britain?
The Battle of Britain was never as close as the popular story has it. The RAF was too well organised and supplied. But is that why the Luftwaffe switched to bombing London? Or was there another reason? (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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#4 More than a double bluff - Ep 4 Who really won the Battle of Britain?
Churchill talks up the threat of invasion, even though it looks impossible. ‘I might as well send my men straight into a sausage machine,’ writes the German Chief of Staff. But invasion preparations still go on. Who is bluffing who? (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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#03 'Always carry pepper to throw in their eyes' - Ep 3 Who Really won the Battle of Britain?
Britain is gripped by fear of invasion. Government leaflet 'If the Invader Comes' calls for pepper and ‘a sharp knife to kill them if necessary.’ Churchill goes on BBC and says ‘we await undismayed by the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight.’ So why in private is Churchill saying he...
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#02 A battle for air superiority? - Ep 2 Who really won the Battle of Britain?
Was the Battle of Britain a fight for Luftwaffe air superiority in order to enable an invasion? The Luftwaffe itself did not think so. It had another agenda altogether. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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#01 Waterworld Flotilla - Ep 1 Who really won the Battle of Britain?
The Germans make extraordinary preparations for the immense task of invading Britain in 1940. Why bother when neither Hitler nor any senior German officer wanted to do it or thought it was possible? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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#118 'She will be called a man' (Jerome) - Ep 6 The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church
Church Father, Jerome, wrote this about women who took vows of chastity for God. ‘When she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called a man.’ What now survives from the Roman Empire – and the Church in particular - only tells one, heavily...
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#117 The Rich man and Melania - Ep 5 The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church
By AD400 all it took to be bishop was to be stratospherically wealthy. There was no demand that bishops even knew their bible until AD787. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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#116 Chariot races in church - Ep 4 The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church
Chariot races in church. How did we get there? 3rd Century climate change. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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...
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
HOSTED BY
Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does History Cafe have?
History Cafe currently has 348 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is History Cafe about?
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...
How often does History Cafe release new episodes?
History Cafe publishes regularly with 348 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to History Cafe?
You can listen to History Cafe on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts History Cafe?
History Cafe is created and hosted by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe.
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