The (surprisingly) modern Middle Ages. From climate change to pandemics, Dan Jones looks at the issues that preoccupied our medieval ancestors and keep us awake at night today. Climate change, migration, populism and protest, globalization, technology.
What is history in 2021?
Suzannah Lipscomb and Helen Carr consider how we should tell the story of the past in the 21st century.
Royals in the trenches.
The British royal family emerged from the First World War stronger than ever. Heather Jones explains why.
The radical Wedgwood
Tristram Hunt reveals how an English potter embedded activism into his celebrated earthenware.
Romancing the Tudors
Sarah Gristwood chronicles how Henry VIll and Elizabeth I used courtly love to further their agendas,
In the shadow of 9/11
David Reynolds (emeritus professor of international history at Cambridge University) asks if the events of 11 September 2001 really were a turning point in world history.
“How will 9/11 be regarded at the 50th anniversary in 2051? Will it be seen as having led America, fatally, to ignore the resurgenceof China? Or as exacerbating the toxic cocktail of the Middle East, with its unresolved problems going back to the fall of the Ottoman empire in 1918? Perhaps, by 2051, 9/11 will seem far less important than Covid 19 – the onset of an era of zoonotic diseases, passing from animals to humans, which affected daily life across the world much more profoundly?Or maybe, by mid-century, the climate emergencywill dwarf all other issues, and our grandchil dren will point to a crucial tipping point in climate change that this generation failed to address. I’d put my money on climate, not Covid or China.”
The future for the past
Four historians discuss the issues shaping the study of history in universities, from Covid-19 to calls to decolonise the curriculum.
Some of these items are on the History Extra podcast.