Dublin Festival of History Podcast

Historian Fergus Whelan will discuss the life of writer, philosopher, and advocate of women’s rights Mary Wollstonecraft, her impact on the life of Margaret King of 15 Henrietta Street, and the links that bound the two women, even after Wollstonecraft’s untimely death. This talk is a collaboration between 14 Henrietta Street and Na Píobairí Uilleann. The Dublin Festival of History is brought to yo...

Dublin City Library and Archive hosts a lecture with David Dickson, titled ‘Dublin v. Cork: A Tale of Two Eighteenth-Century Cities’ To citizens of Dublin, their city has always been unquestionably the most important urban centre in the country. To citizens of Cork, this has never been entirely accepted. In the eighteenth century both cities far outgrew their medieval shells to become major Europe...

Welcome to the Dublin Festival of History Podcast, brought to you by Dublin City Council. In this episode from the 2021 Dublin Festival of History, we hear from practitioners who have worked on LGBTQ+ in public history, from grassroots projects to archives and museums. The speakers are Richard O’Leary, Maurice J Casey and Kate Drinane. The moderator is Sara Phillips. The episode was recorded at Th...

Donal Fallon speaks to two writers who have written recent books on the history of Dublin. In O’Connell Street: The History and Life of Dublin’s Iconic Street , Nicola Pierce explores the people, the history, the buildings and the stories behind the main street in our capital. Kathryn Milligan’s Painting Dublin, 1886-1949: Visualising a Changing City represents the first detailed study of the depi...

George III, Britain’s longest-reigning king, has gone down in history as ‘the cruellest tyrant of this age’. Andrew Roberts’s new biography takes entirely the opposite view. It portrays George as intelligent, benevolent, scrupulously devoted to the constitution of his country and (as head of government as well as head of state) navigating the turbulence of eighteenth-century politics with a strong...

On a sunlit evening in 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were carried out by the Invincibles, a militant faction of republicans armed with specially-made surgeon’s blades. The murders ended what should have been a turning point in Anglo-Irish...

Twenty years on from her critically acclaimed book, ‘Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People’, Susan McKay talks again to the Protestant community in Northern Ireland. The book contains interviews with politicians, former paramilitaries, victims and survivors, business people, religious leaders, community workers, young people, writers and others.  It tackles controversial issues, such as B...

Myles Dungan’s family was involved in four violent deaths between 1915 and 1922. Jack Clinton, an immigrant small farmer from County Meath, was murdered in the remote and lawless Arizona territory by a powerful rancher’s hired assassin; three more died in Ireland, and each death is compellingly reconstructed in this extraordinary book. Mark Clinton was murdered by a group of agrarian ‘bandits’ who...

At the end of the Irish War of Independence, Dublin signed an unsatisfactory treaty with London, that amongst other things, required oaths of allegiance to the British Empire. To many this was a price worth paying, but for others it was impossible. Very quickly, in 1922 the country collapsed into a cruel civil war that split organisations like Sinn Fein and the IRA, local communities, and families...

Before 1871, Germany was not a nation but an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser, convincing proud Prussians, Bavarians and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France – all without destroy...

Iain McGregor’s book is a powerful, fascinating, and groundbreaking history of Checkpoint Charlie, the famous military gate on the border of East and West Berlin. East Germany committed a billion dollars to the creation of the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s, an eleven-foot-high barrier that consisted of seventy-nine miles of fencing, 300 watchtowers, 250 guard dog runs, twenty bunkers, and was ope...

When Dubliner Derek Scally goes to Christmas Eve Mass on a visit home from Berlin, he finds more memories than congregants in the church where he was once an altar boy. Not for the first time, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland brings to mind the fall of another powerful ideology – East German communism. While Germans are engaging earnestly with their past, Scally sees nothing comparab...

In 2020, statues across the world were pulled down in an extraordinary wave of global iconoclasm. From the United States and the United Kingdom to Canada, South Africa, the Caribbean, India, Bangladesh, and New Zealand, Black Lives Matter protests defaced and hauled down statues of slaveholders, Confederates, and imperialists. Edward Colston was hurled into the harbour in Bristol, England. Robert...

Ireland is a nation obsessed with death. We find a thrill in the moribund, a strange enchantment in the drama of our dark past. It’s everywhere we look and in all of our beloved myths, songs and stories that have helped to form our cultural identity. Our wakes and ballads, our plays and famine sites, all of them and more come together to tell ourselves and the world who we are and what we have suf...

In the annals of the Third Reich, little has been said about the role played by the German nobility in the Nazis’ rise to power. Nazis and Nobles now fills this gap, providing the first systematic investigation of the role played by the nobility in German political life between Germany’s defeat in the First World War in 1918 and the consolidation of Nazi power in the 1930s. As Stephan Malinowski s...

The 1921 partition of Ireland had huge ramifications for almost all aspects of Irish life and was directly responsible for hundreds of deaths and injuries, with thousands displaced from their homes and many more forced from their jobs. Two new justice systems were created; the effects on the major religions were profound, with both jurisdictions adopting wholly different approaches; and major disr...

Celebrity, with its neon glow and selfie pout, strikes us as hypermodern. But the famous and infamous have been thrilling, titillating, and outraging us for much longer than we might realise. In this ambitious history, that spans the Bronze Age to the coming of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Greg Jenner assembles a vibrant cast of over 125 actors, singers, dancers, sportspeople, freaks, demigods, ruffian...

On the brink of defeat, Hitler commissioned 10,000 V2s - ballistic rockets that carried a one-ton warhead at three times the speed of sound, which he believed would win the war. Dr Rudi Graf who, along with his friend Werner von Braun, had once dreamt of sending a rocket to the moon, now finds himself in November 1944 in a bleak seaside town in Occupied Holland, launching V2s against London. Kay C...

After her grandmother died, Hadley Freeman travelled to her apartment to try and make sense of a woman she’d never really known. When Hadley found a shoebox filled with her grandmother’s treasured belongings, it started a decade-long quest to find out their haunting significance and to dig deep into the extraordinary lives of Sala Glass and her three brothers. The search takes Hadley from Picasso’...

In the years just before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people from across the political spectrum in Europe and America celebrated a great achievement, felt a common purpose and, very often, forged personal friendships. Yet over the following decades the euphoria evaporated, the common purpose and centre ground gradually disappeared, extremism rose once more and eventually - as this book c...

At the beginning of 1940 Germany was at the pinnacle of its power. By May 1945 Hitler was dead and Germany had suffered a disastrous defeat. Hitler had failed to achieve his aim of making Germany a super power and had left her people to cope with the endless shame of the Holocaust. In  The Hitler Years ~ Disaster 1940-1945 , Professor Frank McDonough charts the dramatic change of fortune for...

In The Ratline, his riveting real-life thriller, Philippe Sands offers a unique account of the daily life of senior Nazi SS Brigadefuhrer Otto Freiherr von Wachter and his wife, Charlotte. Drawing on a remarkable archive of family letters and diaries, he unveils a fascinating insight into life before and during the war, as a fugitive on the run in the Alps and then in Rome, and into the Cold War....

At 9am on the morning of 21 November 1920, Michael Collins’ IRA gunmen killed 15 suspected British intelligence officers at various sites across Dublin City. In the afternoon Crown forces opened fire on the crowd at a Dublin v Tipperary Gaelic football match in Croke Park killing 14 people, including 3 children and a Tipperary player. John Borgonovo and Michael Foley discuss the events of a day th...

In 1914 a civilization that had blandly assumed itself to be a model for the rest of the world had collapsed into a savagery beyond any comparison. In 1939 Europeans initiated a second conflict that managed to be even worse, a war in which the killing of civilians was central and which culminated in the Holocaust. We are delighted to welcome one of Britain’s greatest historians to discuss what it...

The battered and exhausted Britain of 1945 was desperate for workers – to rebuild, to fill the factories, to make the new NHS work. From all over the world, thousands of individuals – including many Irish emigrants – took the plunge. Most assumed they would spend just three or four years in the UK, sending much of their pay back home, but instead large numbers stayed and transformed the country. R...