Our History Podcast

This one must have landed as a bit of a surprise for anyone out there still subscribed to the podcast. It might be our last but it sounds good thanks to a little help from a friend. This episode is about the kinds of spies we are used to seeing in the movies and so on: WWII and of course the Cold War. 

Bletchley Park. We visited the legendary "Home of the Codebreakers", where Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and an assorted cast broke the German Enigma code machine during WWII. This is another of our intrepid and and about recordings. Hopefully what it loses in sound quality it makes up in atmosphere. Please visit our website https://ourhistorypodcast.com/ where I will be posting pictures and references.

N.B. Technical hitch: an abbreviated, 12 minute, version went out. You won't get away that easily! The final version should be 50 minutes! More Espionage! I still can't say the word without putting on a silly voice! This episode is a little longer than we generally aim for. We also didn't cover as much as we had wanted - no Ninjas. But we really did a lot on all the plots and spying going on around the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The main focus is Francis Walsingham, who was known as Elizabeth's Spy Master. Please visit https://ourhistorypodcast.com/ to see the ciphers we mention.

This is just an introduction for what will be a multi-part series on Espionage. In this episode we discuss some of the key elements to spying across the ages whether you are Alfred the Great pretending to be a lute player infiltrating a viking encampment or a modern day drone operative. We see how military intelligence can help decide when to [audio src="https://ourhistorypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/011-the-history-of-espionage-part-1.mp3"][/audio]attack and when to RUN AWAY!!!! We were trying to keep it short but as ever, we do ramble a little. 

This is a rather special episode for us. We were invited to do a guest episode by lovely David Crowther for his most magnificent History of England podcast. If you do not already subscribe to it, I urge you to do so - it is wonderful.

In this episode rather than exploring a topic as we have before, we look at one of the most fascinating characters from medieval history: Joan of Arc. We visited the site of her greatest triumph - Orléans on our holidays and we recorded some content while we were there. We discuss how this teenage peasant girl led the armies of France to an improbable victory that started to push the English out of France.

Over the summer we have not been able to stick to our fortnightly podcast schedule but hopefully we will back on track soon.

Please visit our website to see some lovely pics to accompany this episode taken by the official podcast photographer - AKA Otto's Mum: https://ourhistorypodcast.com/  

In this episode we pick up the history of medicine just when it begins to get more scientific. This is great for the general health of humanity but less good for us as we are frequently out of our depths. We soldier gamely on through the discovery of the circulation of blood, the founding of hospitals, germ theory and vaccinations. Otto does a great solo slot on penicillin and we even discuss the heart-lung machine, see image below. We make a couple of references to Otto's sister Ava-Jane who is a one-person history of medicine.

We had to have two goes at this episode. When we started recording we realised that we did not know an awful lot about the history of medicine, so we had to go away and do some research. But then we got into the swing of things and we cover the history of medicine from Hippocrates to the renaissance.

In part 2 we continue talking about the impact of gunpowder on warfare. We also go back in time to discuss stirrups and then jump forward to talk about nuclear warfare.

In this episode we cover the history of weaponry and warfare from the stone age to the dawn of the age of gunpowder via the sausage. We discuss the little recognised role of leopards as throwing weapons, Snakes on a Ship, the prequel to Snakes on a Plane and how early chariots were probably drawn by donkeys.