History Cafe

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 campaig...

Bloody Queen Mary? 313 people died for their beliefs 1555-58. We owe it to the victims to get the story right. In 2020 historian Alexander Samson said about the reign of Mary Tudor ‘it feels as if we are at the start.’ So dismiss everything you thought you knew and be prepared to be amazed. Ever since Mary died childless, at the age of just 42 in 1558, the history of her reign was written almost e...

Within days of 28 October 1962 two journalists publish the official but untruthful White House account, as instructed and edited by the President. They also call-out a political enemy for daring to consider a humiliating missile swap with the Soviets. But we show how the Kennedys had already suggested this very missile swap to Khrushchev via private backchannels, on condition he kept it secret. Wh...

28 October 1962: by holding his nerve Kennedy defuses the crisis in just 13 days. He says it’s over although he’s unable to verify whether Khrushchev ever withdraws his missiles or not. The last missiles do indeed leave Cuba on day 48 of the crisis but for very different reasons. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

22 October 1962: President Kennedy goes on prime-time TV and announces a blockade around Cuba to prevent more Soviet missiles reaching the island. But US sailors call the so-called ‘quarantine’ nothing but ‘grand theatrics.’ Not a single Soviet ship is stopped by the US Navy. What was going on? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

15 October 1962: Soviet nuclear missile sites are discovered. It’s only three weeks before the mid-term elections. Kennedy decides that to negotiate publicly with Khrushchev would be a disaster at the polls; as would ignoring them which is what his allies advise him to do. So, as Noam Chomsky puts it, the President chooses ‘to play Russian Roulette with nuclear missiles.’ Hosted on Acast. See acas...

The Cuban Missile Crisis begins not because Castro is a dangerous communist but because he is NOT. Khrushchev tells his ruling council: ‘The only way to save Cuba is to put missiles there’ - not only to prevent an American invasion, but also to keep Fidel Castro sweet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Synopsis: 1959: The first country the new revolutionary president of Cuba visits is the United States of America. And he’s a big hit. The students at Princeton carry him on their shoulders. Castro wants a trade deal with the American government. So why does Kennedy fight the presidential election of 1960 on getting tougher than the Republicans with Cuba? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for...

We have the memo to President Kennedy dated Day 2 of the crisis with his own security chiefs clarifying that 'these missiles do not significantly alter the balance of power.' So why does October 1962 develop into the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The events that followed Livingstone’s funeral are perhaps important for the light they shed on everything that Livingstone was not. Stanley, having declared that he would complete what Livingstone had begun, undertook three ‘momentous’ journeys. Whatever the cover stories he created, Stanley’s expeditions were intended to grab and occupy African lands, sometimes through fake treaties he claimed t...

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...

The British audience for Livingstone’s book 'Missionary Travels' can’t get enough of his ‘manly’ and ‘forcible’ style. He brings a very personal mix of far-away adventure and science to his stories. His account of being mauled by a lion – shaken like ‘a terrier dog does a rat’ and how the tartan jacket saves his life – are still vivid reading. But had he not glossed over the danger of malaria and...

Livingstone was the first European to record his visit to Smoke that Thunders on the Zambezi river. 100 metres of plummeting water, across the entire kilometre of the Zambezi’s width. He promptly named it after his queen, Victoria Falls. His ambition was to find a navigable river from the east coast of Africa inland. Although it was clear that Smoke that Thunders would put a stop to any trade boat...

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...

Their Finest Hour is a University of Oxford project that aims to collect and digitally archive the everyday stories and objects of the Second World War that have been passed down from generation to generation in the UK and Commonwealth. Closing date July 2024.We interview project manager Dr Matthew Kidd and reflect on the evidential issues this online collection raises about memory and myth. websi...

The coronation of King Charles III on 6 May 2023 has prompted this humorous historical look at the British coronations. Since 1902, when Edward VII and his queen were crowned, the religious ceremony itself has drawn upon rites going back to the crowning of Anglo-Saxon kings. But reviving these old rites just belongs to an Edwardian fascination with a mythical Merrie England. And once you step outs...

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 par...

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 his...

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 d...

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 America...

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...

We start this 5-part series by trying to give a factual outline of the experience of being transported in horrendous conditions from Africa to the British Caribbean against your will. And we open up the debate started in 1938 by the brilliant young Trinidadian historian Eric Williams as to whether it was money or morality that ended British enslavement? The trade in the enslaved was banned in 1807...

The coronation of King Charles III has prompted this humorous historical look at the British coronations. Since 1902, when Edward VII and his queen were crowned, the religious ceremony itself has drawn upon rites going back to the crowning of Anglo-Saxon kings. But reviving these old rites just belongs to an Edwardian fascination with a mythical Merrie England. And once you step outside all the so...

Were Scottish clan tartans nothing more than clever marketing? With an eye on the forthcoming coronation of King Charles III we re-release this wry look at the invention of tradition in Scotland – which had a whole lot to do with the hunting, shooting, fishing Royals at their Scottish castle, Balmoral. There they famously adopt a Scottish style of dress complete with royal tartans, kilts for all,...