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In this special guest episode, we chat to Mallory James - a historian of the 19th Century, specialising in etiquette. We discuss everything from paying calls, leaving cards, greeting people and dressing appropriately. Enjoy!โดย Benjamin Fox

In this, our third special guest edition, we talk to Hannah Pringle, a historian of witchcraft and folklore. We talk the infamous Pendle Witch Trials, how people were accused and what happened to those found guilty...โดย Benjamin Fox

In this special guest episode, we speak with historian Nick Kevern about how the East German secret police - the Stasi - infiltrated the beautiful game. We talk Dynamo Berlin's 10 league wins in a row, the strange case of Lutz Eigendoff, and how the Stasi filled a stadium with informants during Dynamo's match against Hamburg. You won't want to miss…

In this, the first special guest episode of The Historical Oracle Guide To...Podcast, I am joined by Royal Navy historian Will Manthorp. We discuss life for a sailor at the time, followed by an intricate look at the voyage of the Dolphin and the Swallow as they circumnavigate the globe. Enjoy!โดย Benjamin Fox

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890), was an English explorer, scholar, poet, translator, and diplomat and played a part in discovering the source of the River Nile. He is also credited with introducing the West to the Kama Sutra.โดย Benjamin Fox

Airey Neave, British spy turned politician, was killed with Irish republicans with a car bomb in 1979. This is the story...โดย Benjamin Fox

In the latest edition of The Historical Oracle Guide To... podcast, Ben takes you through the story of Jack the Ripper, and his infamous murders in the East End of London in 1888.โดย Benjamin Fox

Did you know that the Jules Rimet World Cup trophy was stolen in 1966? Do you know who found it? Find out all here...โดย Benjamin Fox

Did you know the Nazi army was heavily reliant on drugs to get them through battle? Listen to the full story here or on any good podcast app...โดย Benjamin Fox

Your daily dose of History. 24 March. The true history behind The Great Escape.โดย Benjamin Fox

Peaky Blinders has captivated audiences across the globe... but who were the Brummie criminals?The gangsters on whom the show is based were an urban youth gang located in Birmingham in the late 19th century. Here's the lowdown on them.โดย Benjamin Fox

Nothing can eclipse the 2005 fight for the Ashes as simply the grandest sporting occasion of recent times. Affectionatley, it is still known as the greatest Test series of all time. No contest was ever so unreadable and so suffocatingly tense for so long. It offered everything; five dazzling matches, no-quarter-asked-or-given combat but heartwarmin…

Almost 50 years ago, five men broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington DC in a botched operation that would spark a chain of events that two years later would see Richard Nixon resign as the 37th president of the United States.The Watergate scandal is widely considered to be the biggest…

On the 16th of August 1819 the huge open area around what's now St Peter's Square, Manchester, played host to an outrage against over 60,000 peaceful pro-democracy and anti-poverty protesters; an event which became known as The Peterloo Massacre.An estimated 18 people, including four women and a child, died from sabre cuts and trampling. Nearly 700…

In this episode, we interview Royal Navy and D-Day veteran Eric Gelder. He takes us through his experiences of the Second World War which included serving on the fleet minesweeper HMS Rifleman during D-day before spending the rest of the war in the Far East.โดย Benjamin Fox

He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. During …

In this podcast, Historical Oracle discusses 13 of the most remarkable moments from the history of the Academy Awards (The Oscars).โดย Benjamin Fox

Listen to the story of how American Football came into being and how the sporting phenomenon that is the Superbowl started.โดย Benjamin Fox

It was a turning point in the Second World War. As the Allies prepared to invade Sicily in 1943, they wanted to dupe the Germans into thinking that their attack would be aimed elsewhere.To carry out the deception, a plan was concocted in which a body was dumped in the sea, to be discovered by Axis forces, carrying fake 'secret documents' suggesting…

In this special three-part series, Historical Oracle takes you through the History of Britain's relationship with the EU from the end of the Second World War until Brexit.Part 2 focuses on Britain's accession to the EU in 1972 under Edward Heath, the 1975 EU Referendum and Thatcher's uneasy relationship with the Union.…

In this special three-part series, Historical Oracle takes you through the History of Britain's relationship with the EU from the end of the Second World War until Brexit. Part 1 focuses on the end of the Second World War when Winston Churchill called for a 'United States of Europe' up until Britain is about to apply for the third time to join the …

From a murder with missing body to the development of finger-printing techniques, we cover five crimes that have changed the process of law enforcement in Britain.โดย Benjamin Fox

The Fifties began in austerity. King George VI was on the throne, Clement Attlee was Prime Minister, Harry Truman was in the White House, the world was scared of the atom bomb. The decade ended with Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace, General Eisenhower as American President, the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan telling people they’d never had it …

From a misguided act of chivalry on an Essex field to the rescheduling of a television programme during a general election, sometimes it’s a small moment that changes the course of history. Here we discuss 6 seemingly inconsequential decisions that changed British History...โดย Benjamin Fox

The Troubles refers to a violent thirty-year conflict framed by a civil rights march in Londonderry on 5 October 1968 and the the Good Friday Agreement on 10 April 1998. At the heart of the conflict lay the constitutional status of Northern Ireland.The goal of the unionist and overwhelmingly Protestant majority was to remain part of the United King…

The Troubles refers to a violent thirty-year conflict framed by a civil rights march in Londonderry on 5 October 1968 and the the Good Friday Agreement on 10 April 1998. At the heart of the conflict lay the constitutional status of Northern Ireland.The goal of the unionist and overwhelmingly Protestant majority was to remain part of the United King…

The Kray twins were East End born and bred. They became the dominant criminal family in the area during the 1950s and 1960s running a gang known as “The Firm”.Their story remains popular because they combined gangland activities with the kind of glamorous life that we associate with entertainment stars.Like many gangland mobsters, the Krays’ focus …

When William the Conqueror built a mighty stone tower at the centre of his London fortress in the 1070s, defeated Londoners must have looked on in awe. Now nearly 1000 years later, the Tower still has the capacity to fascinate and horrify.As the most secure castle in the land, the Tower guarded royal possessions and even the royal family in times o…

When William the Conqueror built a mighty stone tower at the centre of his London fortress in the 1070s, defeated Londoners must have looked on in awe. Now nearly 1000 years later, the Tower still has the capacity to fascinate and horrify.As the most secure castle in the land, the Tower guarded royal possessions and even the royal family in times o…

One sport which seems to have some sort of major controversy or scandal almost every year is Formula 1. With such intense pressure on drivers and teams, both on and off the track, it likely doesn’t surprise many that this sport sees a fair share of tabloid topping stories.The following list looks at 15 of the biggest scandals and controversies to h…

Who really was the 'Newgate monster'? Who was the person that actually organised the Great Train Robbery? Could Jack the Ripper have actually been a woman? What happened to the two princes that were help captive in the Tower of London? These are just some of the biggest mysteries from British History.…

On 2 April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a remote UK colony in the South Atlantic. The move led to a brief, but bitter war.Argentina's military junta hoped to restore its support at a time of economic crisis, by reclaiming sovereignty of the islands. It said it had inherited them from Spain in the 1800s and they were close to South …

It is almost a century since Colonel Percy Fawcett lost contact with the world. One of Britain’s greatest explorers, Fawcett’s life is defined by a near-lifelong obsession – that an unknown, ancient civilisation lay lost in the Amazon: “the Lost City of Z”. But in 1925, he vanished, along with eldest son Jack, 22, taking any trace of Z with them.It…

When it comes to discussing the biggest cheating scandals in world sport, Lance Armstrong's doping normally makes it on the list. However, since beginning in 1903, the Tour de France has had its fair share of strange cheating. Here is the story of some of the biggest.โดย Benjamin Fox

Professor Stephen Hawking was a British scientist and was famed for his work with black holes and relativity, and several popular science books including A Brief History of Time.At the age of 22 Prof Hawking was given only a few years to live after being diagnosed with a rare form of motor neurone disease.The illness left him in a wheelchair and la…

Margaret Thatcher's political career has been one of the most remarkable of modern times. Born in October 1925 at Grantham, a small market town in eastern England, she rose to become the first (and for two decades the only) woman to lead a major Western democracy. She won three successive General Elections and served as British Prime Minister for m…

After World War II drew to a close in the mid-20th century, a new conflict began. Known as the Cold War, this battle pitted the world’s two great powers–the democratic, capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union–against each other. Beginning in the late 1950s, space would become another dramatic arena for this competition, as each side…

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection made us rethink our place in the world. The idea that humans shared a common ancestor with apes was a challenge to the foundations of western civilisation.Darwin kept silent for 20 years before going public and was only half joking when he described writing his book 'On the Origin of Species…

Not many people know the name Max Woosnam - but the man from Liverpool won tennis gold and silver medals at the 1920 Olympics, was a Wimbledon doubles champion, hit a century at Lords and played football for Manchester City and Chelsea. He is arguably Britain's greatest sportsman.โดย Benjamin Fox

On 28 March 1942, British forces launched one of the most daring operations of the Second World War. Now known as “The Greatest Raid of All”, Operation Chariot was an attack on the docks at St Nazaire in German-occupied France. It was a feat of cunning and daring that helped to shape the war at sea.โดย Benjamin Fox

London used to be filled with coffeehouses where residents of all kinds who meet and debate the latest politics and literature. Listen here to a forgotten piece of London's history.โดย Benjamin Fox

In Oxford, England, 25-year-old medical student Roger Bannister cracks track and field’s most notorious barrier, a barrier that people at the time thought impossible: the four-minute mile. Bannister, who was running for the Amateur Athletic Association against his alma mater, Oxford University, won the mile race with a time of 3 minutes and 59.4 se…

For any maritime nation, investment in long distance trade, outposts and settlements overseas made navigation, including the ability to determine a ship’s longitude, increasingly important. As nations including Spain, the Netherlands and France, sought to dominate the world’s oceans, each offered rewards for solving the longitude problem. But it wa…

The London Underground is a system of electric trains which are in London, United Kingdom. It is the oldest underground railway in the world. It started running in 1863 as the Metropolitan Railway. After the opening the system was copied in many other cities, for example New York and Madrid.โดย Benjamin Fox

The Berlin Wall was built by the communist government of East Berlin in 1961. The wall separated East Berlin and West Berlin. It was built in order to prevent people from fleeing East Berlin. In many ways it was the perfect symbol of the "Iron Curtain" that separated the democratic western countries and the communist countries of Eastern Europe thr…

The Battle of the Somme started on July 1st 1916. It lasted until November 1916. For many people, the Battle of the Somme was the battle that symbolised the horrors of warfare in First World War; this one battle had a marked effect on overall casualty figures and seemed to epitomise the futility of trench warfare.…

Pub signs are collectively a unique record of Britain's history -- religious, industrious and scandalous. Many are also beautifully-crafted works of art on public view. There's a world of stories hanging over your head.Here's a potted history of some of Britain's most famous pub names...โดย Benjamin Fox

London – the largest and most influential city in the country – provided a grand backdrop for some of the most famous executions in history. With large crowds often gathering to watch these gruesome spectacles, the state used these events to publicly wield its power and to ultimately dissuade others from taking their first steps into less than salu…

The Irish Civil War followed the War of Independence and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and lasted from June 1922 to May 1923. It was the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that triggered the war – the Provisional Government supported the Treaty whilst the anti-treaty faction believed the Treaty was a betrayal of the Irish Republic.…

After nearly 700 years of being controlled by Britain, Ireland, in the early 20th-century, decided it was ready to rule itself. In this lesson, we'll check out the Irish War of Independence and see how Ireland managed to separate itself from the UK.This episode looks at the war with the British, the IRA, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the war in the…