History Cafe

Our second ever podcast. Re-released for our new audience who haven't found it yet. Each episode in the series is an enjoyable listen on its own.Synopsis: Head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, was jealous of the man who was pushing for an invasion of Britain - former British ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop. If the Luftwaffe could bomb Britain out of the war, there'd be no need for a risky invasion, and he could get back into favour with Herr Hitler.

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We're putting this podcast out again because it's by far our most popular and yet if you've found us recently you may never have discovered it.Synopsis: 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?

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We don't apologise for repeating this broadcast made for last year's Remembrance Day. The story is so important it's worth telling again and again.At least 50% of deaths from war in the last three centuries were civilians. In 2001 the International Red Cross calculated that in modern warfare ten civilians die for every member of the military killed in battle. In the two World Wars the vast majority of soldiers were "civilians in uniform" - conscripts or volunteers. But do the military remember them?

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BEFORE you light your bonfire and set off your fireworks on November 5, why not ‘spare a thought’ for Guy Fawkes, who we’re still sending up in flames, more than 400 years after the crime he’s SUPPOSED to have committed. Look for our playlist here with 7 episodes, called Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot. It's a grisly story with shady characters, state torture, spies including Shakespeare's rival Ben Jonson, and a network of men skilled at framing enemies particularly Catholics who sent Mary Queen of Scots to her death - this was called practicing or entrapment. Here is the soundtrack from a short YouTube promo. We recorded in one take in our study so we've left the hesitations in for you here. We wouldn't usually!

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Celebrating our 60th episode of well-researched reinterpretations of history using the latest academic research but brought to you in an accessible format.

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The reason we all believe Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst achieved women’s votes in Britain is because that’s the narrative created in the 20s and 30s by former suffragettes. The reality of what Emmeline and Christabel got up to post 1918 is shocking. Suffice it to say it involves racial purity and telling working women they can buy silk underwear, shapely shoes and fur hats, not by improving their working conditions but by giving into the feminine desire for shopping. What?

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By 1832 it was clear to both the House of Lords and the Commons that the British planters in the Caribbean were dragging the British economy into a credit crash. It looks to us very like the crash of 2008. The Jamaican Rebellion of 1831 and the vicious retaliation by the white supremacist Colonial Church Union in 1832 was the final nail in the coffin of British enslavement. The CCU showed beyond doubt that the Jamaican planters, who had always dominated the West Indian planters lobby in London, were a breed of racist thug who flatly refused to make conditions tolerable on their plantations. But the result was that they would never be commercially viable. Abolition became the obvious solution.

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When the HMS Lutine went down, 9 October 1799 off the Dutch coast, carrying a million pounds of gold and silver, it led to the collapse of the Hamburg sugar market and within a few years the banning of the slave trade.

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An accessible podcast on Jon’s academic book Partisan Politics – looking for consensus in Eighteenth-Century Towns (Exeter University Press 2021). See Publications page on this website for 45% discount.It is still wrongly but commonly thought that in the 18th Century the gentry bought their way into a parliamentary seat, mainly by purchasing land, or by gaining the approval of some unrepresentative local patron who had the borough in his pocket. You've heard of pocket boroughs, and rotten boroughs? Well, Jon's 1985 doctoral thesis, researched entirely from local documents rescued from mouldy parish chests and corporation vaults, contradicted so many of the leading historians of the day so baldly that although Jon was awarded his doctorate he could never publish. But NOW that the old orthodoxy has collapsed and everyone agrees with Jon, he’s been able to bring out his book updated with all the latest scholarship. It’s a world of lively – not to say riotous, overheated, rumbustious, often embittered, endlessly partisan, endlessly changing and challenging - local politics. What reading the local records tells us is that it was a world of lively local democracy. Enjoy!

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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.

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