History Cafe

Rereleasing our most popular series for those who can't find our playlists for each series on their podcast platforms:Synopsis: Who won the Battle of Britain? For good strategic reasons Churchill claimed victory. But the Germans, who saw the eight months of the Blitz as part of the same campaign, achieved much of what they intended. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Re-releasing our most popular series for those who struggle to find it without playlist functions on their podcast platforms:Synopsis: The Battle of Britain was never as close as the popular story has it. The RAF was too well organised and supplied. But is that why the Luftwaffe switched to bombing London? Or was there another reason? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our most popular series being re-released in broadcast order for those who can't find it! Synopsis: Churchill talks up the threat of invasion, even though it looks impossible. ‘I might as well send my men straight into a sausage machine,’ writes the German Chief of Staff. But invasion preparations still go on. Who is bluffing who? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our most popular series re-released here in order, especially but not exclusively (!) for Apple podcast listeners because Apple don't do playlists:Synopsis: Britain is gripped by fear of invasion. Government leaflet 'If the Invader Comes' calls for pepper and ‘a sharp knife to kill them if necessary.’ Churchill goes on BBC and says ‘we await undismayed by the impending assault. Perhaps it will com...

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 inva...

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

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 majori...

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...

Celebrating our 60th episode of well-researched reinterpretations of history using the latest academic research but brought to you in an accessible format. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 th...

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.

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 unrepresentati...

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...

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...

Most of what we think we know about Anne Boleyn turns out to be later invention, with no historical basis. We argue that she was a MacGuffin: she was necessary to the way things turned out for Henry, but unimportant in herself. We’re not even sure he was in love with her. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Ambassadors painting by Hans Holbein reveals the French horror at Henry’s decision in January 1533 to defy the pope and get remarried to a pregnant Anne Boleyn. But since Henry couldn't get an annulment he had no choice. No big-time European princess would marry him. With the Spanish seriously weakened by war, Turkish invasion and protestant revolt in Germany, and Henry’s French allies now nee...

In a dynamite French document from August 1530, still overlooked by historians, the King of France offers to send troops to England to defend Henry VIII against the Spanish. No French government before or since has ever promised to send troops to defend England. Does this explain Henry’s sudden move in August 1530 to go on the offensive against Rome and the clergy in England and end the comfortabl...

31 May 1529: Faced with France and Spain doing a deal and leaving England in the lurch, Henry races against time to begin his divorce trial in London, and then pulls the plug just before a verdict is reached. Meanwhile the pope and his cardinals are double-crossing each other. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What was the driving force behind the settlement of the American west? Was it the so-called ‘anarchocapitalism’ so admired by the Hoover Institution and some of the followers of President Trump? The violence they fetishize turns out to have been only in those places populated by young men – we’re talking not just cowpokes or gold and silver prospectors, but also vigilantes in the towns back east....

A series of land grabs and cruel clearances by the Federal government from 1781 triggered a crazy, barely-contained movement west, spearheaded by gold prospectors, cattle ranchers, homesteaders and the railroads. By 1892 it was generally agreed that the American character was forged in the violence of the shifting frontier. We look at the popular fiction and entertainment that helped create this b...

1527: The pope is a prisoner of the marauding Spanish in Rome and yet Henry sends his man Knight on a madcap mission to ask Pope Clement VII for permission to marry a young woman he is already sleeping with. It’s the first of a whole series of crazy errands, asking the pope for the impossible. Does Henry have a hidden agenda? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Did Henry break with Rome in order to seize power over the wealthy, ubiquitous church in England? We find that the dates don’t add up. Instead we look at why in June 1525 Henry promoted his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy over the head of his heir Mary. And why Charles V broke off his engagement with 9 year old Mary to marry a Portuguese princess instead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for...