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Georgian Musings on Homosexuality Feb 20, 2020

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Eamonn O'Keeffe is a young Oxford Researcher in the midst of a PhD. He stopped off in Wakefield Library to look at a journal Yorkshire farmer Matthew Tomlinson to see if the author had any opinions on the subject of his research: military music. Tomlinson did not. However what O'Keeffe found in the diary proved of infinitely greater interest to the general public than a passion for marching bands. In an entry for 1810 Tomlinson argues that homosexuality is natural. He therefore questioned the death penalty’s application for homosexual activity and sodomy. How can man punish what God has ordained? The announcement of the discovery went viral and I had to get him on the podcast. By chance I am also a big fan of 18th and early 19th Century military music so I got two for the price of one.

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The Boundless Sea Feb 19, 2020

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We are a land animal. But millions of us have taken to the sea to live, fight, travel, eat, escape and seek fame and fortune. I am obsessed with the sea. On how humans have built ever more efficient and capable ships to exploit its riches and opportunities. This is an conversation I’ve been longing to have. David Abulafia has written massive, beautiful, scholarly books about the oceans and his most recent, The Boundless Sea, is a masterpiece.

He and I chatted about why and how humans have taken to the sea in ships and why what happens on the water affects politics, economics and societies on the land.

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The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz Feb 17, 2020

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This is the most remarkable father and son story I have ever come across.

We are still marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz here at History Hit and this time I am talking to historian Jeremy Dronfield about an astonishing true story of horror, love and impossible survival. In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was arrested by the Nazis. Along with his sixteen-year-old son Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany, where a new concentration camp was being built.

They helped build Buchenwald, young Fritz learning construction skills which would help preserve him from extermination in the coming years. But it was his bond with his father that would ultimately keep them both alive. When the fifty-year-old Gustav was transferred to Auschwitz--a certain death sentence--Fritz was determined to go with him. His wiser friends tried to dissuade him--"If you want to keep living, you have to forget your father," one said. Instead Fritz pleaded for a place on the Auschwitz transport. "He is a true comrade," Gustav wrote in his secret diary, "always at my side. The boy is my greatest joy. We are inseparable."

Gustav kept his diary hidden throughout his six years in the death camps--even Fritz knew nothing of it.

We talked about this very rare diary, Fritz's own accounts, and other eyewitness testimony, and built a picture of this extraordinary father and son team.

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West Africa before the Europeans Feb 16, 2020

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Toby Green has been fascinated by the history of West Africa for decades after he visited as a student and heard whispers of history that didn’t appear in text books. Years later he wrote ‘Fistful of Shells,’ a survey of West Africa and West-Central Africa before the slave trade, and the effect the arrival of Europeans had on those societies. I asked him about what we know about that history and how integrated this region was into the global economy. We also explored the impact of the slave trade on West Africa itself, how it turned the ruling elites against their populations which they now saw as fodder for slave traders.

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Suicide at the Fall of Nazi Germany Feb 13, 2020

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There is almost no end to the dark secrets that emerge from the smashed ruins of 1945 Europe. Dr Florian Huber has spent years researching the fascinating story of the epidemic of suicide that spread through Germany as they faced certain defeat in 1945. Some people committed suicide after suffering atrocities at the hands of the soviets, others because of the trauma of allied bombing and the destruction of the conflict around them. But many did so because they did not wish to live in a world without Nazism. Dr Huber has even interviewed people whose parents tried to kill them as young children. It is a dark secret in modern German society and his book provoked an outpouring of similar stories when it was published.

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The Adventuress Feb 12, 2020

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In the 1930s Lady Lucy Houston was one of the richest women in England and a household name, notorious for her virulent criticisms of the government, but politics had been far from her mind when, as young Fanny Radmall, she had set out to conquer the world. Armed with only looks and self-confidence, she exploited the wealth and status of successive lovers to push her way into high society. Seeking influence in national politics, Lady Houston financed the first flight over Mount Everest, backed secret military research, and facilitated the development of the Spitfire aircraft. She even purchased a newspaper. Seeking to expose the Prime Minister as a Soviet agent and promote Edward VIII as England's dictator, Lucy was loved as a patriot but loathed as a troublemaker. Historian Teresa Crompton talks Dan through the life of a once famous woman, now totally forgotten.

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A Very Stable Genius Feb 10, 2020

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Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig are both Pulitzer Prize winning journalists at the Washington Post.

They've written a new book with yet more revelations from inside the Trump White House so Dan seized the opportunity to ask just how insane the whole thing is.

That's it really.

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Dresden. 75 years on. Feb 09, 2020

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75 years ago this week Dresden, in Saxony, known as the ‘jewel box’ because of its stunning architecture was obliterated by British and American bombers. The flames reached almost a mile high. Around 25,000 people were thought to have been killed. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut was there. It was he who wrote that the smouldering landscape was like walking on the surface of the moon. Even in the immediate aftermath it was controversial. Churchill instantly appeared to regret it. The Nazi government dramatically inflated the death toll to cast themselves as much the victims of monstrous violence as the Jews, Slavs, Poles, Romany and other groups they had murdered on an industrial scale.

In this podcast Dan talks to Sinclair McKay about his new book about Dresden. They met in Coventry. A city also infamous for destruction from above during the Second World War. Today the two cities are twinned, united by the shock of firestorms delivered from above.

Was it a war crime? Was it necessary? Why did it happen? Dan asks Sinclair about one of the Second World War's most controversial moments.

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The British Republic Feb 06, 2020

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Paul Lay, editor of History Today, has written a great book about the rise and fall of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate (1653–1659), England's sole experiment in republican government – and one of the most extraordinary but neglected periods in British history. Having won two civil wars, conquered Ireland and Scotland and seen off Charles II, in 1653 Oliver Cromwell assumed the title of 'Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. But, as Paul explained to Dan, crafting a lasting, stable and legitimate alternative to monarchy was a lot more complicated....

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Flu pandemics. Then and Now. Feb 05, 2020

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'We are very very vulnerable' says the brilliant science author and journalist Laura Spinney.

Her fantastic book 'Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World' is a shocking account of the flu pandemic that killed tens of millions of people a century ago.

What was Spanish Flu and what lessons are there for us today? As the coronavirus sweeps across China this is a really important conversation about flu, anti-microbial resistance and whether we should be scared.

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