Time Travels

The female is more deadly than the male. History enthusiast Susan Morrison interviews Dr Nadine Akkerman of Leiden University about her new book 'Invisible Agents. Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain' where we'll be finding out the fieldcraft used by women spies and hearing the story of one of the Scottish spies Ann Murray, Lady Halkett who pulled a Flora Macdonald-style rescue long...

Was it a dog’s life in 17th century Scotland? Susan Morrison talks to historian of animal-human relationships, Laura Moffat of the University of Strathclyde about her pet subject. Find out what you were supposed to do if you were bitten by a mad dog back in the day (clue - it involves the worst smoothie in the world), and why James VI shouldn’t have let his wife Anne of Denmark out with his dogs....

Rev Dr Nikki Macdonald on flyting and scolding before the Kirk Sessions - the Scottish church courts - including the amazing range of insults people used. Top up your vocabulary with 'lukenbrowit witch' (having a mono brow!) mensworn dog (perjured) and having the grandgore (syphillis). Early modern Scots could give modern day rappers a run for their money with their disses and burns. Jeni Park (Hu...

Burning questions of the day - racism, heresy and witchcraft. Pioneering pan-Africanist Dr James Africanus Beale Horton came to Edinburgh from Sierra Leone for his qualifications only to find the famous university town was a hot bed of a new kind of racism - Dr Henry Dee and Dr James Kennaway take us into that world. Moving back in time: you’ve heard of Henry VIII but how much do you know about th...

Susan Morrison explores the rich and sometimes murky depths of Scotland's past.

1968 - the summer of love, youth unrest in Paris, London, Chicago, Falkirk… wait, Falkirk? Well, it was hardly major rioting but the letters page of the local paper was ablaze about underage sex and drugs - something had to be done! Dr Charlie Lynch of Glasgow University tells us about Falkirk’s moral panic as the permissive society reached the Forth Valley. But we’ve a stranger darker story to te...

The predacious great diving beetle of Fife - a beastie the world is not yet ready for (or at least Susan Morrison isn’t ready for it) - we’ll be exploring its role in pointing to the Kingdom’s history of general sogginess and water bodies with entomologist Dr Jack Maclachlan of the University of Maine who’s in pursuit of Fife’s lost lochs. Then to Sierra Leone to find out what a Scottish qualified...

From the 17th century to the 1970s, sex and the single girl has always caused anxieties. Trouble brewed in the 1970s when unmarried women started to ask for the pill. Oral historian, Kristin Hay of Strathclyde University has been interviewing folk to find out what it was like. She’s on kristin.hay@strath.ac.uk if you want to join her project on contraception use in Scotland. But it was always the...

It took more than chutzpah to open a contraceptive clinic in 1920s Aberdeen. Family planning pioneer, Fenella Paton had money, connections and courage. Dr Alison McCall shows us why the clinic was needed and how it made a difference. Dr Christine Whyte of Glasgow University takes us far out to sea where terrified children were rescued from enslavers, but what happened to them next? Humanitarian in...

Susan Morrison finds out from Dr Valerie Wright of Glasgow University about how the city sought to house its single working women after WW2 - and did it in style in Crathie Court nicknamed ‘The Spinster Flats’. Moving to Ayrshire, witchcraft historians Dr Lizanne Henderson of Glasgow and Laura Moffat of Strathclyde University introduce us to the strange 16th century case of Bessie Dunlop who alleg...

Dr Michelle Brock on repentance in the face of the plague in Ayr. When the Bubonic Plague bore down on the town in the 17th century, the inhabitants looked not so much to the doctors, but to the minister for a plan to stop it. He had one - every occupational group in the town should get together, work out what their sins were that had angered God, and publicly confess to turn God's wrath away. Ama...

Dr Allan Kennedy on Gilderoy the Highland bandit and the truth behind Highland outlaws, not the handsome bare-chested warriors of the covers of romance novels but actually more like Begbie from 'Trainspotting' in a kilt. Ally Heather on Andy Coogan his grandad who was a POW in Japan working in a forced labour camp thirty miles from Nagasaki when the second atom bomb dropped and his experiences whe...

In winter when the nights were fair drawing in and the wind and rain howling outside, there was nothing Scots of yesteryear liked better than to gather round the fire with their pals and tell tales of devils and warlocks and ghosts and ghouls. We don't have a crackling fire for our spooky supernatural special, but we do have Susan Morrison's front room and a posse of historians on the couch to tel...

Susan Morrison and Louise Welsh swap tales of Scotland's darker history in a spooky special, finding out who gets buried in a bog and getting up close and personal with an accused witch from the early 1700s - Lilias Adie. Susan heads to Dundee University to reconstruct Lilias’ face while Louise Welsh goes to visit what remains of a person who became a bog body, to look at the reality behind one of...

cott Carballo of Stirling University on the pirates of the late 16th century Irish Sea. You might think Port Royal and the Carribean when you think pirates, but maybe you should think Kirkcudbright and Ailsa Craig. Macdonald pirates were roaming the north channel of the Irish Sea using 'Lord of the Rings' style beacon chains to alert them to a fight, meanwhile the south west of Scotland contained...

Dr Yvonne McFadden and Susan’s mum Peggy Morrison on the history of the kitchen and especially the post war Glasgow kitchen - as Peggy had in the 1950s. Cat Irving, Human Remains Conservator Surgeons’ Hall Museums on being a human remains conservator and the story of Charles Anderson a 19th century sailor with a badly broken leg who resisted amputation by putting a plug in it and draining it every...

Susan Morrison chats to Dr Nicky Small of the Perthshire duo Plaidsong who combines being a Jacobite historian with singing Jacobite songs. You’ve probably heard of songs like Land o the Leal, Will Ye No Come Back Again, Wi' a hundred pipers an' a', but you maybe don’t know the name Carolina Lady Nairne. Nicky sings her songs and tells her story. Then it’s off to the 17th century and the time of t...

Alistair Heather, Scots writer and presenter of BBC documentary The Rebel Tongue on Charlie Leslie, the Jacobite Minstrel who travelled the North East selling and singing Jacobite ballads; Dr Nikki Macdonald - false tongue you lied - the unique way to make up for your slander in 17th century Scotland and how an accusation of slander could stop you being tried as a witch. Dr Hannah Telling on the u...

If you like a cracking story and know that history is as much about the present as the past, then this is the podcast for you. Comedian Susan Morrison and producer/historian Louise Yeoman zip through the centuries exploring the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people. With the help of a team of ‘history detectives’, they tune into cutting edge research and look at familiar things again. There a...