Showing results by publisher "audible originals" in History

Perhaps thanks to TV period dramas, the popular imagination may picture the Edwardian era as an idyllic window between the wars, a time of manners and tea on the lawn. But below the surface lies a frenetic and often bizarre age where scientific leaps forward went hand in hand with belief in fairies, and secrets of sex, lies and murder simmered. Across 12 episodes, in this sequel to his Victorian Secrets, Stephen Fry uncovers some of the startling and unexpected hidden histories of the Edwardians.

On the surface, the Victorian age is one of propriety, industry, prudishness and piety. But scratch the surface and you'll find scandal, sadism, sex, madness, malice and murder.

Flappers, ‘It’ girls, confidence tricksters, drug dealers, spies, jazz musicians. This wide ranging series about the first ever modern decade is full of colourful characters, dark deeds, strange beliefs and crazy predictions. Join Stephen Fry as he relishes secrets sexual, political and financial, observes the emergence of the first ever youth cult and reveals the secrets of this roaring decade.

From the bedrooms of powerful men, we're bringing you the secret histories of their mistresses, concubines and courtesans. In this funny, fascinating, and scandal-filled podcast, Jameela Jamil and historian Dr Kate Lister pore over the stories of six astonishing "other women". Women who have been shamed, disparaged and underestimated. Some have been cheated out of the history books altogether. Now Jameela and Kate are placing their stories in the spotlight – to see what history looks like through the eyes of the so-called side-chick.

The finest fighting force in the world. Escape. Evade. Survive. Repeat. Seven gripping tales of overcoming the impossible. Arguably the finest special forces troops of the Second World War, the SAS was the jewel in the British military crown. But the near-impossible nature of their heroic missions sometimes left them trapped behind enemy lines, the enemy closing and forced to endure the unendurable. But the unendurable is all in a day’s work for these magnificent seven. Incredible odds. Outstanding bravery. Real adventure.

Yes, it's a strange kind of history. And that’s the way Public Historian Greg Jenner likes it. Because, he says, how we sit, where we sit, what we do when we sit and what happens as a result of all that sitting says a lot about humans past and present. This study means we can link a royal throne with a 2000-year-old toilet. It shows how the language and culture of sitting is deep seated in all of us. It sits listeners down in classrooms, parliaments, sports grounds, protests and in the penitentiary death chamber.

Andy Zaltzman attempts to reclaim the much-misused term ‘Greatest Of All Time’ by using all of time...and delving through the, what is it now, 13 billion years of archival material knocking around the universe. Joined each episode by a comedian, an expert guest and his ever improving robotic assistant, Andy rummages through the history-est history books to find the champion of champions in ever more specific categories. Download to find out who will win the coveted golden GOAT trophy and become the greatest of all time.

In 1984, as a New York City subway train made its way downtown, a white man named Bernhard Goetz shot four unarmed Black teenagers he believed were going to rob him.

From the birth of hip-hop in the 1970s to today, women have been just as integral to the growth and development of the rap game as their male counterparts. Nonetheless, they’re consistently shortchanged as artists, creators, renegades, and cultural visionaries in prevailing histories of the genre. The Motherlode changes that.

An audio dramatisation of July 1914 Countdown to War by Sean McMeekin.

Welcome to the era of true marriages of convenience. Discover the reality of trading someone’s hand in marriage, such as an American heiress, in exchange for money, power, or political clout through compelling history lectures. Showcased in novels such as Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and in present day pop culture through works like Downtown Abbey, the Gilded Age was an era of contradictions. Life on both sides of the Atlantic was grimy and glamorous, prosperous and impoverished, traditional and revolutionary.

We’ve all heard of fake news, but what about fake history? Dominic Sandbrook explores two and a half millennia of human history, traveling from the American Deep South to the air raid shelters of wartime Britain, to discover how the past has constantly been manipulated, rewritten and reshaped. It turns out that when it comes to history, separating fact from fiction isn’t always easy. Many of the widely held beliefs about our past are based on a web of lies.

From the founding of the United States to the aftermath of the Civil War, sex scandals made headlines and influenced politics across the country. In the six lectures of Early American Sex Scandals, Dr. Cassandra Good of Marymount University will take you on a revealing journey through some of the most influential and notorious scandals of America’s first century.

The Roman gladiator has long been a figure of fascination. Portrayed frequently in fine art and popular culture alike, the gladiator is both a real part of history and a legend of a romanticized past. We know that these men entertained Roman audiences by fighting in dangerous and often deadly games. But who were the gladiators? What were their lives like? And why do they continue to have such a strong hold on our imagination, centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire?

Why did a remote police station, built to combat pirates, find itself at the centre of a murder-suicide after a constable went on the rampage? How did Chinese gangsters avoid conviction after serving a deadly dinner to Frenchtown’s elite? And why is the Foreign Office still withholding a key document to solving a murder that took place in the Gobi desert in 1935? By delving deep into 12 of China’s most fascinating murder cases, Murders of Old China delivers a fast-paced journey through China’s early 20th-century history - including its criminal underbelly.

The Berlin Wall is perhaps modern history’s most infamous edifice. The Berlin Wall: A World Divided is more than just the story of brick, concrete, and barbed wire. It’s the story of a city, a country, and a world - all of them divided. To hear how the Berlin Wall exemplified this division is to gain insights into a central tension of world history: between the human drive for freedom and the political will that would control and repress that drive.

Without John C. Houbolt, a mid-level engineer at NASA, Apollo 11 would never have made it to the moon. Top NASA engineers on the project, including Werner Von Braun, strongly advocated for a single, huge spacecraft to travel to the moon, land, and return to Earth. It's the scenario used in 1950s cartoons and horror movies about traveling to outer space. Houbolt had another idea: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. LOR would link two spacecraft in orbit while the crafts were travelling at 3,600 miles an hour around the moon. His plan was ridiculed and considered unthinkable.

Since its rise to the highest ranks of power in Renaissance Europe, the Borgia family has developed a scandalous reputation. While they were indeed ostentatious, calculating, worldly, cruel - and even, occasionally, murderous - you may be surprised to find that the Borgias were not terribly different from other powerful and ambitious families of their day. So why has history set them apart as one of the most corrupt and reviled families in history?

What is power and who is allowed to wield it? Why is female power so rare and, often, so feared? What can the women who gained power in the ancient world teach us about the contemporary world and our modern ideas of gender, authority, and equality? Listeners will explore these and other questions as you travel back to the ancient world and uncover the stories of remarkable women who overcame a host of barriers to wield power in a male-dominated world.

Throughout history, women have played integral roles in family, society, religion, government, war - in short, in all aspects of human civilization. Their contributions have often shaped history and shifted the axis of power for later generations of women. And yet, unearthing their stories from the historical record has often been a challenge. In Powerful Women of the Medieval World, Professor Dorsey Armstrong will introduce you to 10 amazing women who played vital roles in the Middle Ages.