Dublin Festival of History Podcast

The Last of the Tsars is a masterful study of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All the Russias, a man who was almost entirely out of his depth, perhaps even willfully so. It is also a compelling account of the social, economic and political foment in Russia in the aftermath of Alexander Kerensky’s February Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the beginnings of Lenin’s Soviet...

Our expect panel answer questions from the audience on a whole range of historical topics,with Joe Duffy keeping order, recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 1st October 2017. Catriona Crowe is former head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland. In 2016 she presented the RTE documentary Life Before the Rising . Donal Fallon is a Dublin-based historian, publisher of the Three C...

In its centenary year the sheer apocalyptic scale of the Russian Revolution seems almost to defy comprehension. What began as a challenge to the decadence and complacency of the Romanov dynasty ended up in the slaughter of millions and the subjugation of an entire people. History has consigned the revolution to the tomb and celebrated its death but what, if anything, remains of the elevated goals...

The Darkening Age tells the story of how, between the 2nd and 6th centuries AD, the Christians of the late Roman Empire set out deliberately to destroy all the books, knowledge and temples of the ancient Roman and Greek worlds, killing pagan priests, burning libraries and erasing the wisdom of ages. All the great works that survived and prompted the Renaissance had to be translated back into Europ...

Based on her book, The Private Lives of Saints: Power, Passion and Politics in Anglo-Saxon England , Dr Janina Ramirez, Oxford Art Historian and BBC broadcaster, will explore the incredible intellectual, artistic and spiritual results of the influence of Celtic and Roman Christianity on the newly converted Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century. With stunning artworks like the Lindisfarne Gospels, Ru...

In the second volume of his ground-breaking World War 2 trilogy, James Holland describes how the tide of war began to turn against the Axis. Looking at the war from the battle front to the factories and shipyards, he tells the story of how, in the Battle of the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, and in the escalating bombing campaign of Nazi Germany, the Allies finally gained the upper hand. Here is...

When Martin Luther nailed a sheet of paper to the church door of a small university town in 1517, he set off a process that changed the Western world for ever. His attempts to reform Christianity by returning it to its biblical roots split the Western Church, divided Europe and polarised people’s beliefs, leading to religious persecution, social unrest and war; and in the long run his ideas would...

September 1938. Hitler is determined to start a war. Chamberlain is desperate to preserve the peace. The issue is to be decided in a city that will forever afterwards be notorious for what takes place there – Munich. Robert Harris’s spy thriller, Munich , set over the four days of the 1938 Munich Conference, confirms him as the pre-eminent historical novelist of our time. Robert Harris is the auth...

In a long and distinguished career, Chris Patten has been a Westminster MP, a UK Cabinet minister, the last Governor of Hong Kong, Chairman of the BBC and Chancellor of Oxford University. In this frank memoir he uses each phase of his life as a spur to reflect upon education, America, conservatism, Ireland, China, Europe and finally the question of links between violence and religion. Of particula...

The best-known modern Chinese fairy tale is the story of three sisters from Shanghai, who for most of the twentieth century, were at the centre of power in China. It was sometimes said that ‘One loved money, one loved power and one loved her country’, but there was far more to the Soong sisters than these caricatures. As China battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transf...

In April 1919, at a political gathering in the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, India, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer marched his soldiers into a walled garden, filled with thousands of unarmed men, women and children. Then, blocking the only exit and without issuing any order to disperse, he instructed his men to turn their guns on the thickest parts of the crowd. For ten minutes, they continued fi...

The ‘American Dream’ and ‘America First’ are two of the most loaded phrases in America today, and also two of the most misunderstood. The American Dream began as a pledge for equality rather than as a dream of supremacy. America First has not just served as an isolationist term, but as an early slogan of the Ku Klux Klan with surprising links to the present. In 1927, a KKK riot led to the arrest o...

For some commentators, ‘fake-history films’ are the new threat to truth, arguing that artistic licence is no excuse for distorting historical facts and yet contemporary movies change history all the time (Mary Queen of Scots meeting Queen Elizabeth on the big screen!). Film-makers, on the other hand, claim they are artists, not journalists or historians, and are not in the business of providing do...

Nine-year-old Patrick Rooney loved horror movies and Hallowe’en and wanted to be a priest when he grew up. Instead, on 15th August 1969, he became the first child killed as a result of the ‘Troubles’ - one of approximately 190 children who would die in the conflict in Northern Ireland. In their book, Children of the Troubles , broadcaster Joe Duffy and journalist Freya McClements tell the previous...

Christianity is the most enduring legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history. Even the increasing number in the West today who have abandoned the faith of their forebears, and dismiss all religion as pointless superstition, remain recognisably its heirs. Seen close-up, the division between a sceptic and a believer may seem unbridgea...

Between January and July 1919, after the war to end all wars of 1914–18, men and women from all over the world converged on Paris for the Peace Conference. For six extraordinary months the city was effectively the centre of world government as the peacemakers wound up bankrupt empires and created new countries. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China and dismissed the Arabs, struggled...

When Mikhail Gorbachëv introduced perestroika in the mid-1980s, the USSR went through a springtime of growth and change. The Soviet order collapsed in 1991, and Boris Yeltsin initiated a summer of transformation as Russia acquired a market economy and aspired to a new place in the world community. It was a season of achievement but also of disappointment, leading Yeltsin to relinquish the Russian...

In this episode from the 2019 Festival, historians Catriona Crowe and Donal Fallon present a selection of Great Irish Speeches , all of which have had a remarkable impact on the course of Irish and world history. The speeches are performed by actors Cathy Belton and Bryan Murray. Recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 19th October 2019. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informatio...

The Crusades - the sequence of religious wars fought between the late eleventh century and late medieval periods. Crusading armies from European Christian states attempted to wrest the Holy Land from Islamic rule in wars which have left an enduring imprint on relations between the Muslim world and the West to this day. Hear tales soaked in Islamic, Christian and Jewish blood, peopled by extraordin...

Until recently, the Catholic Church, in concert with the Irish state, operated a network of institutions for the concealment, punishment and exploitation of ‘fallen women’. In the Magdalene laundries, girls and women were incarcerated and condemned to servitude. And in the mother-and-baby homes, women who had become pregnant out of wedlock were hidden from view, and in most cases their babies were...

In 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the German Chancellor of a coalition government. In a few months he installed a dictatorship, jailing and killing his left-wing opponents, terrorising the rest of the population and driving Jews out of public life. After the grim years of the Great Depression, Germany was reborn as a brutal and determined European power intent on avenging the mythical ‘stab in t...

On 21st January 1919, the Soloheadbeg ambush in Tipperary set in train the Irish War of Independence which would lead in July 1921 to the Truce and then the Treaty setting up the Irish Free State. The actions of the poorly armed IRA succeeded where previous generations had failed in securing the end of British rule, albeit not in all of Ireland. Was the war justified? Could Irish independence have...

In this episode Helen Rappaport talks about The Race to Save the Romanovs , with moderator Zuleika Rodgers, recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 7th October 2018. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode historians Donal O Drisceoil, Helene O’Keeffe and John Borgonovo discuss the bestseller Atlas of the Irish Revolution , with moderator Catriona Crowe, recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 7th October 2018. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode Richard Grayson talks about his book Dublin’s Great Wars: The First World War, the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution, with moderator Ronán MacGreevey, recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 6th October 2018. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.