What do your hands reveal about you? Historian Alison Bashford joins Elinor Evans to explore the extraordinary history of how people have interpreted the human hand. From ancient divination to…
Queen Victoria was – so legend has it – famously 'not amused'. But, as Dr Bob Nicholson reveals in this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, the long-lived queen did have…
In 1895, when the National Trust was founded, homosexual acts of ‘gross indecency’ were still illegal in Britain. And yet, as Michael Hall reveals in his new book, A Queer…
Strikes and unions may seem like modern inventions, but they’ve existed for much longer than many of us realise. Historian Sarah E Bond talks to Jon Bauckham about how people…
Why is a small observatory in south east London so important to the story of how we tell the time? Speaking to Elinor Evans, Emily Akkermans, Curator of Time at the…
In this episode of her series on Tudor Life, Ruth Goodman explains how no two weeks of the Tudor diet were ever the same. Each food source had its own…
He led one of history's most celebrated guerrilla campaigns, showed remarkable political acumen, and drove aristocratic English women wild. Is it any wonder that Giuseppe Garibaldi is one of the…
The chaos of the Spanish conquest, the humiliation of military defeat to the United States, the disruption of the revolution… Mexican history is often viewed through the lens of trauma…
When an elderly man with a battered suitcase walked into the British embassy in Vilnius in 1992, few could have guessed what he was about to hand over. Gordon Corera…
When did poo become a problem? Why was manure so important in the medieval economy? And why don't we have vacuum-powered sewers? All these questions – and more – are…