Open Book

Open Book episodes:

• 04.05.2023

  700 Years of the Declaration of Arbroath, with Dr Alan Borthwick

  The Declaration of Arbroath will be displayed at the National Museum of Scotland from 3 June this year, but you can find out more about it now. In this talk, recorded on the Declaration’s 700th anniversary in 2020, archivist Dr...

  
• 04.06.2020

  1320-2020 – 700 Years of the Declaration of Arbroath, by Dr Alan Borthwick

  6 April 2020 is the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath - perhaps the most famous and important of Scotland's historic documents. Drafted in 1320, the Declaration is a powerful call for recognition of the Kingdom of Scotland's sovereign...

  
• 11.14.2018

  A Very Arduous Period – The Register Houses During WWI, with Dr Tristram Clarke

  In the last of our three World War One podcasts, NRS Head of Outreach Dr Tristram Clarke looks at the forgotten stories of the men who exchanged their pens and desks in Edinburgh's Register Houses for rifles and helmets in France, Flanders and...

  
• 11.07.2018

  Behind The Wire: Scottish POWs 1914-1918, with Dr Tristram Clarke

  In this week's Open Book podcast Dr Tristram Clarke, Head of Outreach at NRS, looks in detail at the people, the items and the stories that inspired our current exhibition, For You The War Is Over: Scottish POWs 1914-1918. Each soldier tells...

  
• 10.30.2018

  “I Am What You Would Call Done” – Lynn Bruce & Olivia Howarth on the Scottish Pension Appeals Tribunal Records

  We're now approaching the centenary of Armistice Day in 1918, so this seems like an appropriate time to take stock of the cost of World War I for Scots who fought in it. In this week's podcast, we hear from...

  
• 08.24.2018

  No Vote, No Census – Ruth Boreham on the 1911 Census suffrage protests

  …I begged her not to interfere with me in the performance of my duty and told her I would listen only to her father, and that I would go whenever he asked me. Then she ran off to another room...

  
• 05.16.2018

  A Private Matter? Robert Burns, Agnes Maclehose & the Court of Session, by Professor Hector MacQueen

  We head back to the law courts this week for a nineteenth century court case with some surprisingly modern themes about privacy and the public interest. On Valentine’s Day this year, Professor Hector MacQueen of the University of Edinburgh joined...

  
• 05.01.2018

  From Disorder to Order: Cataloguing the 19th Century Criminal Case Papers of the High Court of Justiciary, with Simon Johnson

  Have you ever wondered what an archivist does? In this week’s podcast, NRS archivist Simon Johnson opens up the case papers of Scotland’s supreme criminal court in the early 19th Century. Case papers from the High Court of Justiciary provide...

  
• 04.09.2018

  Trailblazers: The world’s first football club, with John Hutchinson & Andy Mitchell

  Long before there was an Edinburgh derby; before the offside rule and the Wembley Wizards or pies and Bovril there was the Football Club, founded in Edinburgh by John Hope in 1824. It was the world’s first dedicated football organisation,...

  
• 03.19.2018

  St Kilda: The Edge of the World, with Dr Alison Rosie

  This is the third episode of Open Book, a Podcast by National Records of Scotland dedicated to preserving Scotland’s past, recording its present and informing our future. This week, we’re off to the lonely isle of St Kilda in the Outer...

  
• 03.02.2018

  Podcast: Inspiration from the Archives, with ES Thomson

  Crime and Punishment: How Archives Can Inspire Fiction, with Dr Elaine Thomson. In this week’s Open Book Podcast ES Thomson, author of “The Peachgrowers’ Almanac”, “Beloved Poison”, “Dark Asylum” and others, tells us how archives have inspired her and how...

  
• 02.16.2018

  Open Book Podcast – Episode One

  In the first Open Book Podcast, Professor Gerard Carruthers looks at the radicalism of Robert Burns and what newly-discovered documents reveal about his working and artistic life during the turbulent 1790s.