Making History

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Could a listener's hotel in North Wales once have been the court of the 13th-century Welsh leader Llewellyn the Great? Plus listeners caught up in the expulsions from Idi Amin's Uganda in 1972 revisit their personal experiences, and medicine historian Dr Elizabeth Hurren lifts the lid on the grim history of the undertaker.

Could a listener's hotel in North Wales once have been the court of Llewellyn the Great?

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Listener Bridget Long sets out to confirm a family story - that her late father played oboe in the premiere of a piece of work by Benjamin Britten while being held in a German POW camp.

Archaeologists at the University of Liverpool reveal how they know what Britons ate before the introduction of farming.

Bridget Long tries to confirm a family story about her late father during World War Two.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Military historian Professor Richard Holmes explains how the militia worked in the 18th century, Andy Cassell reports from Scotland on Britain's only private army, Dr Samantha Letters explains how prisoners in Oflag 7B would have received musical instruments and Dr Martin Johnes corrects an historical stereotype about pigeon racing.

Historian Professor Richard Holmes explains how the militia worked in the 18th century.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

How the experiences of a painter and decorator from Sale in 19th-century China reveals more about the spread of religion in that period. Plus the remarkable story of the listener who witnessed the German surrender at Monte Cassino.

The experiences of a painter and decorator from Sale in 19th-century China.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Residents of Mildenhall remember the aviators who took part in an air race in 1934.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

The different histories of marriage and divorce in England and Scotland; a listener's ground-breaking research into a placename that's linked to the Welsh cattle drovers, a new archive which explains the natural origins of Yorkshire Chemicals.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Investigating the impact of racial segregation in the US armed forces in Britain in WWII.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

This episode features the nineteenth-century Somerset boot-maker who helped improve the lives of millions of amputees and changed the course of medical history; and in the North West a literary scheme that is using historical fiction to help readers unlock the past. But is there a temptation for a good story to get in the way of historical facts?

You can send us questions or an outline of your own research.

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website - www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

With Vanessa Collingridge. Including the Somerset bootmaker who changed medical history.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Vanessa Collingridge presents the popular history programme in which listeners' questions and research help offer new insights into the past.

You can send us questions or an outline of your own research.

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

The history of lager and how a new philosophy changed Edinburgh. With Vanessa Collingridge

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Meanwhile in Cornwall we unpack the story of a medicine chest that was used in the exploration of Africa.

Vanessa Collingridge presents the popular history programme in which listeners' questions and research help offer new insights into the past.

You can send us questions or an outline of your own research.

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Strange marks on the moors near Sheffield reveal a hidden military history.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Vanessa is in Lincolnshire finding out more about one of our most unusual spa towns and hearing from locals who think the preservation of buildings in England is too focussed on architecture, and not the wider heritage of the place that the building is in.

Richard Daniel visits Essex and Edinburgh to hear how Viking settlement was encouraged by global warming. We also revisit some of the epic moments in the history of the British cavalry on the Continent and ask: how did the horses get there?

You can send us questions or an outline of your own research.

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

When it comes to the preservation of buildings, is history losing out to architecture?

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

The diary of a listener's great grandfather sheds light on the often cruel methods used to transport horses overseas by the British army.

Time Team regular Stewart Ainsworth explains how the Romans got their roads so straight and why the people responsible were far removed from our modern surveyor - and more on a par with scribes and religious prophets.

We're in Bristol hunting down 'ghost-signs' - faded painted adverts from decades past. Find out how you can help in a nationwide audit of them.

And another listener's diary reveals more about the Belgian experience during the evacuation of Dunkirk.

You can send us questions or an outline of your own research.

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Vanessa Collingridge follows up more stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Listener Alan Quinn forwarded a photograph of a faded slogan on the side of a house in the Norfolk market town of Aylsham. It reads 'Stand By The King' and Alan thinks that it recalls the abdication crisis of 1936. But why, he asks, and why here in Norfolk?

Vanessa talks to Dr Stephen Cullen at the University of Warwick who has written extensively on the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. He reveals the links between East Anglia and Mosley's 'Black Shirts'.

Dylan Winter goes to Devon to see a newly restored 1940s ghost train, and reporter Caz Graham catches up with Professor Vanessa Toulmin at the National Fairground Archive, who tells her about the origins of ghost trains here in Britain.

There's also news of a new scheme in Lincolnshire which encourages local people to help save the county's threatened building heritage.

And Vanessa travels to the Isle of Bute to see a religious object that's been photographed and uploaded to the A History of the World website, to reveal how the church policed its congregation in the early eighteenth century.

You can send us questions or an outline of your own research.

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website:

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Producer: Nick Patrick

Vanessa Collingridge follows up more stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

So are we at the end of what Tony Blair once described as a 'golden age for museums', or will digital technology - like that used so successfully by the BBC and British Museum in the A History of the World project - come to the rescue?

In this special programme Vanessa Collingridge hears what the public thinks about our museums, what people in the sector feel and, perhaps most importantly, what the new Minister for Culture Ed Vaizey believes is the way forward for our museums.

Taking part in the programme is Dr Sam Alberti from the University of Manchester, Dr Brian Kelly - a digital heritage specialist from UKOLN at the University of Bath, and Christopher Kirby at the award-winning Herbert Museum in Coventry.

We go to Croydon to hear how our big, national museums are trying to help smaller museums, and we'll be visiting Aberdeen to find out how our past was presented way back in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Send us your views:

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website: www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Presenter: Vanessa Collingridge

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Vanessa Collingridge follows up more stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today, the little known secret army of 'coders' who were trained to listen to Russian military radio communications. Such was the secrecy surrounding these operations that those taking part had little idea just how big an operation they were involved in and that it was all organised by the fledgling GCHQ.

We travel back to 16th century Warwickshire and the weeks after the birth of world-famous playwright William Shakespeare to ask why his mother didn't attend his christening and what this tells us about the place of women and their role in the family at this time.

We continue our journey to Cresswell Crags near Worksop in Nottinghamshire to find out how to identify flint tools and there's news of a new on-line archive which wants people to submit material they might have on Anglo-Saxon Britain.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

The little known story of a Cold War secret army.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today, Vanessa travels to Musselburgh to find out more about the first modern battle on British soil and the first modern map that depicted it. On 10th September 1547 the English and Scottish armies faced each other just a few miles to the east of Edinburgh in one of the key moments of what's become known as the War of the 'Rough Wooing'.

The English were using new, European-influenced, fighting techniques that included artillery; the Scots, however, relied on the medieval duality of man and horse. They were dealt a heavy defeat. However, despite this being: the last battle between Scots and English and the first 'modern' battle, there is little locally that commemorates it and few know much about it.

Vanessa talks with historian Dr Fiona Watson and then travels to the British Library in London to look at a map of the Battle of Pinkie that librarian Peter Barber believes is our first 'modern' map.

Also in the programme, listeners in a small town on the Essex/Suffolk border have got together for a community performance of song and speech which recalls bitter rural unrest in East Anglia in 1816 when the cry went up: 'bread or blood'. We hear how an economic downturn, new technology and the return of thousands of farm-workers from the Napoleonic wars pushed this sleepy part of the world into open revolt.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for Radio 4.

Vanessa Collingridge presents the series exploring ordinary people's links with the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Vanessa Collingridge discovers Charlotte's father the Reverend Patrick Bronte was undergoing cutting-edge eye surgery to rid him of cataracts that left him almost blind. The surgery appears almost brutal, with the patient being held by two of the surgeon's assistants, but it was very effective and the only drawback seemed to be the month-long recovery process during which Reverend Bronte had to lie still on a bed whilst his eyes healed.

Charlotte used this time well to start writing her book, but what was this part of Manchester like just two years after the city influenced Engels to write The Condition of the English Working Classes, his often grim description of the world's first modern city? Vanessa meets up with Professor Alan Kidd to explore 1840's Manchester and talks to a leading eye surgeon about the treatment Charlotte's father received.

How did royalty help ordinary people secure divorce? A listener's family history research reveals the divorce of a poor couple in Sheffield in the 1920's when separation was almost unheard of for all but the very wealthy. Dr Caitriona Beaumont of London South Bank University takes Vanessa through a brief history of divorce from the mid-nineteenth century when it was the prerogative of rich men to the years after the abdication crisis involving Edward and Mrs Simpson which inadvertently allowed anyone to separate.

He crowned 3 monarchs and was in post for 32 difficult years during the fifteenth century when England was split between Lancastrians and Yorkists- so why do we know so little about Archbishop Thomas Bourchier? That's the question asked by a Making History listener after seeing the Archbishop's tomb in Canterbury Cathedral but failing to find out more about the man. Making History's Lizz Pearson pieces together Bouchier's career and asks whether he was a brilliant politician or just someone who managed to keep his head down.

Contact:

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website: www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Presenter: Vanessa Collingridge

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

The link between Charlotte Bronte and a medical revolution in Manchester.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today, 'hard graft'- how labour camps were used to deal with unemployment in the 1930s; how walking became a Victorian entertainment; and celebrating our oldest cinema.

You can send us questions or an outline of your own research.

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website: www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Vanessa Collingridge examines the labour camps used to deal with unemployment in the 1930s

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

We head for Suffolk to find out more about Medieval Deer Parks and discover that they were in existence in earlier Roman times.

In Manchester a listeners family history reveals a link to the man who led a Jacobite mob in an attack on a chapel in the city in 1715. Vanessa travels north to find out why Jacobite's were active in north west England.

You can send us questions or an outline of your own research.

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website: www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Vanessa Collingridge follows up more stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A new acquisition by the British Library appears to show plans for an invasion of England and its overseas territories by the French during, and after, the Seven Years War. Or does it? Vanessa asks whether these plans were ever likely to be put into action is this new manuscript evidence of eighteenth century French deception?

A diary found by a listener in Norwich tells us more about the activities of the River Emergency Service on the River Thames during the Second World War, in particular how it ferried in nurses and other emergency workers into London's Docklands during the Blitz.

Another diary that a listener came across in the Lincolnshire Archives, shines a light on the new, professional world of midwifery in the late eighteenth century. The diarist is a Matthew Flinders, one of the growing numbers of men who took over this traditionally female role in the 150 years up until the beginning of the twentieth century.

And, in Paris, Dr John Mullen needs listeners help in researching the British music hall during the First World War.

You can send us questions or an outline of your own research.

Contact:

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Presenter: Vanessa Collingridge

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Vanessa Collingridge investigates the French invasion that never was.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

It was Making History listener Anthony Wilson who encouraged Making History to explore this topic as his grandfather was the radical Liberal politician Henry Wilson who published his own minority report after the Commission failed to stamp out what he, and many others, felt was a morally unacceptable trade. But, was opium as badly misused as those like Wilson thought and what did India think of the trade?

A listener's family research takes us to Dorset just after the Napoleonic Wars where it appears that a large number of Catholics fled overseas from the area around Lulworth which was, and still is, home to one of our long-established Catholic families - the Welds. But, why did they leave, were they persecuted or was there another reason for this mass flight?

Could it be true that a Sheffield teenager gave Harry Houdini his most famous trick and why have so few people heard of Randini?

You can send us questions or an outline of your own research.

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Presenter: Vanessa Collingridge

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Vanessa Collingridge follows up more stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Some flimsy pieces of paper lovingly preserved by a listener in Kent tell the story of her parents and hundreds of other British civilians who were interned by the Japanese during the Second World War - even though they were living in Chinese Shanghai. Professor Robert Bickers of the University of Bristol explains how a century of Britain's involvement in China and a decade of military tension between Japan and China led to these wartime camps.

A seventeenth century map which apparently marks the spot where two Saxon kings lie buried near Stonehenge prompts a listener to ask whether there are many high status burials close to this iconic archaeological site in Wiltshire. Andrew Fitzpatrick of Wessex Archaeology takes Making History's Richard Daniel on a walk in the landscape around Stonehenge to reveal how nearby burial sites seem to reveal that it was a visitor attraction thousands of years ago as well as today.

Whilst on holiday on the Adriatic coast in Italy a listener spotted a statue to Garibaldi which mention the name of one 'Ugo' or Hugh Forbes, who was this man and what was he doing fighting in the wars of Italian unification he asks? Vanessa talks to Dr David Laven from the University of Manchester who explains that Forbes was one of many Britons who went to fight in Italy. Forbes became a close compatriot of Garibaldi and was even captured by the Austrians defending the great man's retreat. A heavy drinker, Dr Laven explains how, although revered in Italy, Forbes is remembered differently in America where it is said that he was prepared to betray the abolitionist John Brown after training some of his troops.

Finally, Vanessa travels to Tameside near Manchester where a Making History listener has volunteered to transcribe the handwritten records of a local hospital. After several weeks working on the entries for the 1860's she is amazed at the amount of alcohol that the Matron bought. Workhouse historian Peter Higginbotham and Dr Patricia Barton of the University of Strathclyde explain the changing relationship between drink and medicine in Victorian Britain.

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Presenter: Vanessa Collingridge

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

British civilians held captive by the Japanese and booze in the Victorian hospital.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Why are veterans of the American Civil War buried in a North London cemetery? Historians Michael Hammerson and Dr Adam Smith explain all and ask for listeners' help in logging more of these graves around the country.

Whilst researching her Great Aunt Ida's music hall career, a listener uncovers an old Pathe News film marking her feat of becoming the World Punch Ball Champion in 1933. Vanessa talks to Professor Vanessa Toulmin about the history of female pugilists.

One hundred and seventy years on from his death, historian David Affleck marks the contribution of the man who some call the 'father of statistics' - Sir John Sinclair MP for Caithness.

You can send us questions or an outline of your own research.

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website: www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Presenter: Vanessa Collingridge

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Vanessa and her invited guests discuss the legacy of the A History of the World project.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today, a poem found amongst the personal papers of a listener's father reveals world-wide admiration for an Italian fascist whose death raises questions about his relationship with Mussolini.

Fiona Watson heads for a deserted Scottish island to uncover the 7th century equivalent of photo-journalism.

Tom Holland marks the 250th anniversary of the bloodiest riot outside of London in the 18th century.

And a listener's photograph of her father in the First World War brings to life the moment when motorised horsepower took over from the real thing.

Presenter: Helen Castor

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor presents the popular history magazine.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor visits the V&A in London where they are preparing for a new exhibition called the Cult of Beauty which celebrates the Aesthetic Movement. The work of this artistic movement influenced women's fashions and built on the influence of the Rational Dress Movement which pushed for more practical women's clothing. Helen is joined by Curator Stephen Calloway and Fashion Historian Amber Butchart.

What happened to early man during the ice age? Tom Holland talks to archaeologist Dr Paul Pettitt about how early man responded to climate change and how it affected evidence for human settlement.

Lizz Pearson visits Sennen in Cornwall where local people are marking the 150th anniversary of a wreck which led to the founding of the local lifeboat.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland with your stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today: How enlightened were they in the age of the enlightenment?

Lucy Worsley, Curator at the Royal Historic Palaces, explores the story of Peter the Wild Boy, a feral dumb child who was found in the woods near Hamburg and brought to the court of King George in the 1720's as an object of fascination. How did Peter's experience differ to others who were 'different' in the age of the enlightenment.

Bristol's links with the slave trade are well known... or are they? Tom Holland explores the little-known history of slavery in medieval England.

We assess the impact of the Marshall Plan on post-war reconstruction and Helen Castor discovers more about the personal sacrifices made to feed Britain during the Second World War.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland presents the programme that reflects listener's passion for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

In this episode we visit the Cheshire/North Wales borders to hear how Iron Age people might have communicated with one another.

Fiona Watson is on the banks of the Forth in Edinburgh learning about a sixteenth century Scottish warship that was never used by them in anger but changed the face of naval strategy.

Tom Holland hears about the life - and death - of a forgotten pioneer of early cinema Louis Le Prince.

Finally, in Yorkshire, we find out how the local community are adding to the history of Britain's bloodiest battle in 1461 and protecting the site of it at Towton near York.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland presents the programme that reflects listener's passion for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today: a listener's research into his grandfather's involvement in the Boer War reveals an incident which he had referred to as 'genocide' and caused him much distress throughout his life. Helen castor talks to Professor Franjohan Pretorious and Professor Denis Judd to find out whether such a term can be used.

Tom Holland visits Larkhill on Salisbury Plain to see the site of a former airfield and aviation test centre which was home to Britain's early military flyers.

How did our ancestors react to natural disasters? Helen castor talks to professor Frank Furedi at the University of Kent and professor John Dickie at University College London.

In Cumbria, Caz Graham meets up with drainage historians Ted and Stella Davies to find out more about the Johnby Tilery near Penrith and speaks to historian Tony Philips at the University of Keele about the impact of agricultural drainage in the nineteenth century.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor with your stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today: a piece of iron 1400 years old which was found near Folkestone in Kent provides even more evidence that the 7th century was far from dark. It's a 'coulter', an attachment to a plough which helped it cultivate heavy land. Thought to have disappeared at the end of Roman occupation this is evidence of a boom time in English agriculture.

From America we receive an image of a chicken, the Stars and Stripes and the legend 'I've got a chicken in France'. Evidence of a wartime romantic assignation? Sadly not. Actually a leading historian and a respected virologist believe it could be evidence of a sponsorship scheme that fuelled the world's most deadly pandemic.

Back home in 'blighty' a leading historian from the University of Essex is travelling around England trying to track down examples of a 'protestation' or oath which he argues was at the heart of divisions during the Civil War.

Finally, to Suffolk where we try to help a band of volunteers at a former American airbase who have found a reel of film which they think may well bring to life its role in the wartime air bombardment of Europe.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor with your stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Professor Roey Sweet from the University of Leicester and Associate Professor Nicola McLelland join Helen to take a closer look at the Grand Tour of Italy. In particular, did women take part in this eighteenth-century equivalent of our gap year and did the Italians return the favour and come to Britain?

Closer to home, in Brighton, the West Pier Trust which has fought for years to restore this iconic seaside structure, is auctioning off tonnes of architectural salvage. Martin Ellis from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery travels to the South Coast to find out more about a scheme which would appear to fly in the face of everything conservation stands for but is actually having considerable success in preserving what is left of the West Pier.

Lizz Pearson in Bristol reports on the burial of John Harwood who was hanged for murder in 1821, his body dissected and the skin used to bind books. The family of Harwood have fought for this since first hearing of his case on Making History in 2009.

Finally, Professor Mark Stoyle from the University of Southampton talks to Helen about the role of Prince Rupert's dog 'Boy' in the English Civil War. Mark has researched the Royalist propaganda surrounding the dog which many suspected of having super-natural powers - not least in protecting leading supporters of King Charles 1st from musket shot. Mark thinks that these stories were circulated by Royalists to ridicule Parliamentarian belief in the super-natural. However, such tales were also believed by the wider populace and therefore this became something of a propaganda own goal.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor presents the programme with a passion for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today: a listener's interest in the forthcoming referendum on electoral reform has sparked an interest in why Australia had universal suffrage much earlier than Britain. Conversations with a friend who lives in Australia raised the influence of Chartists who were deported from Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century. Fiona Watson talks to Professor Malcolm Chase at the University of Leeds who is an authority on the chartist movement and who explains that the influence of Chartism in Australia is often overplayed and argues that a fairer voting system came about because British elites found it harder to retain the status quo over thousands of miles.

Kate Strasdin at the University of Southampton has been studying the costumes and objects left by Princess Alexandra of Denmark who married Queen Victoria's heir Albert - the future Edward the 7th, - in 1863. This was a very private ceremony, but the papers were still hot on their heels. Alexandra was just 18 and wasn't an obvious choice of bride - but it was hoped that she could have a positive influence on her husband, who was already known for a scandalous affair. She would be Princess of Wales for nearly forty years, and in that time became perhaps the first modern media royal - a nineteenth century Diana even. Making History's Lizz Pearson went to Kensington Palace to meet Kate and Alexandra Kim, Curator of the Royal Dress collection...

In Scotland, Abigail Burnyeat at the Centre for Celtic and Scottish studies at the University of Edinburgh has been working on some early textbooks in the National Archives of Scotland which show that as early as the 7th Century children 'north of the border' were learning Latin. Abigail tells Fiona Watson that she thinks that this was the case for most children in education throughout the British Isles at this time.

What is it to be a 'freeman'? That's the question posed by two Making History listeners whose ancestors were made Freemen on Gloucester and Pevensey in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Helen Castor travelled to Norwich to meet up with Professor Mark Bailey at the University of East Anglia who explained that the origins of 'freemen' goes right back to the 10th and 11th centuries.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Fiona Watson presents the programme with a passion for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

It's thought that twenty thousand people died as the Allied push to Berlin stalled in the south of the country.

In Wales a listener has a family story about his grandfather and a sit-in staged by miners in 1935. These 'stay-down' strikes were a tactic used by men of the Mineworker's Federation who were fighting inroads made on their membership by another union that had the support of the pit owners.

This Saturday sees the start of the Giro d'Italia, the cycling race that serves as a tough appetiser to the Tour de France in July. Helen Castor meets up with Professor John Foot from University College London who has just written a book on the history of cycling a sport which he argues did as much to create modern Italy as any politician did.

Finally, in East Anglia's Breckland, Professor Tom Williamson from the University of East Anglia takes Making History's Richard Daniel on a road-trip to discover the origins of a landscape feature that defines the area - pine rows. Tom Williamson argues that these lines of Scots Pine were planted as hedging in the early decades of the nineteenth century and have subsequently grown out into old, individual trees.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor with your stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

8,000 years ago a day trip to the Isle of Wight would have been a healthy walk from Lymington to Yarmouth. Today's ferry journey takes passengers over a submerged landscape, flooded by a steady inundation as the ice sheets retreated. Incredibly, marine archaeologists working off the coast of the Isle of Wight have found pieces of wood that were worked by the people who lived in this landscape. Tom Holland takes the ferry to find out more about one of Europe's most important Mesolithic sites.

Following on from last week's assertion by Professor Tom Williamson that lines of Scots Pines in the sandy East Anglian 'Brecks' could be remnants of hedges planted to prevent soil erosion, David Harvey at the University of Exeter discusses similar landscape features in West Country.

He played host to the King but helped a servant ride for the Parliamentarians, how did Thomas Appletree survive the English Civil War? Making History listener Anne Heyman is an ancestor of Appletree and she went to Deddington in Oxfordshire to discover just how families managed to negotiate the politics that split a nation.

Who were the Gepids? A listener's question takes us to Central and Eastern Europe in the third century AD and a race of people who fail to make much of a mark on history because they were at arms' length from Rome.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland with your stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland talks to Sally Pearce a university lecturer who was involved in the BBC's original Domesday Project and a leading figure in trying find ways of accessing data that had been stored on laser discs which had become obsolete.

In Scotland, Fiona Watson talks to medieval historian Professor Dauvit Brown at the University of Glasgow about how historians north of the border cope after missing out on the original Domesday Book in 1086.

Professor Hugh Pyper at the University of Sheffield talks to Tom Holland about the Roman census which forced Mary and Joseph and King David's census around a thousand years earlier which the book of Chronicles tells us was met with the wrath of God.

Gardening historian Marion Marko takes up the challenge of 'double-top Domesday' and Professor Eddy Higgs at the University of Essex head to the problems the internet age might bring to future historical researchers.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland with your stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

In Scotland we get a sneak preview of Historic Scotland's makeover of the royal apartments at Stirling Castle - a sixteenth century renaissance gem which was built to show-off the Stuart's place in European politics.

In London, a grubby identity card, which was found by a listener in her grandfather's personal possessions, reveals a forgotten moment of civil unrest in 1887 when the East End poor clashed with police in troops in Trafalgar Square. Tom Holland meets nineteenth century historian and Labour MP Tristram Hunt to find out more about a little-remembered 'bloody Sunday'.

~Making History's game of historical chance, 'double-top Domesday' ends up in the village of Sturton by Stow in North West Lincolnshire thanks to the dart-throwing skills of Dr Richard Jones at the University of Leicester.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Fiona Watson presents the programme that reflects listeners' passion for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

In our game of geographical chance and historical skill, 'Double Top Domesday', Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe - arguably Britain's leading historian - takes aim with a dart at a map of central Southern England and ends up in a farmyard not far from Basingstoke.

Tom Holland considers what that, and the rest of Britain's landscape actually looked like 4,500 years ago in response to a listener's question about what the area around Stonehenge looked like when it was being built. Tom talks to Professor Tom Williamson at the University of East Anglia who explores the current debate about the so-called, pre-historic 'wildwood'.

Finally, in Bridlington, Martin Ellis - Curator at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery - views an exhibition of holiday snaps taken between 1920 and 1960 by a company that employed cameramen to take pictures of holidaymakers. Their legacy is now a fabulous social history resource.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland with your stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Reporter Lizz Pearson meets listener Eileen Fardon who has come across letters from the Bloomfield family in Coney Weston in Suffolk to a son serving in France in 1918. Within the letters is the revelation that the boys' mother travels to Abbeyville in France by herself after receiving a telegram that says he's been wounded.

When was the last trial of a witch in England?

Professor Owen Davies tells Helen Castor about the trial of Jane Wenham in 1712 and how a belief in witchcraft continued for more than 200 years despite laws that outlawed and further prosecutions.

In our 'Double Top Domesday' series, Professor Ian Rotherham at the University of Sheffield Hallam throws a dart and ends up near Barnsley where his reading of the local vegetation reveals a surprisingly wet landscape history.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor presents the programme that reflects listeners' passion for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A listener's visit to a town in Kent leads us to the remarkable story of the Barbary Corsairs - but not the one we'd envisaged! The town in question is Faversham and it's there that a plaque to a local sailor rescued from pirates was spotted. But, the link between the Barbary Corsairs and Faversham is much more than a rescued sailor. One of the most feared pirates in the seventeenth century came from Faversham. Helen Castor spoke with the author Adrian Tinniswood who explained the background to this story: how peace with Spain in the early 1600's threw thousands of mercenaries out of work and how many moved to North Africa to join with the pirates we know as the Barbary Corsairs. There was no one more infamous than Issouf Reis who converted to Islam and made so much money that he lived in Tunis in a house made out of Marble and Alabaster.

Foreign correspondent Tom Gibb follows up last week's story about the Civil War 'Commissions of Array' which were used by the king to recruit followers in the fight with parliament. He likens events in the seventeenth century in England to what he saw in Central America in the 1980's where most people simply didn't want anything to do with the conflict.

In Ipswich, Making History reporter Joanna Pinnock discovers a little-known side to the life of Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor Cardinal Wolsey. Retired headteacher, John Blatchly has led a campaign to commemorate Wolsey in his home town with a statue. Whilst raising funds, local people have been researching the life of Wolsey and have found that he was an important influence on England's fledgling education system - even proposing his own national curriculum.

In this week's edition of 'Double-Top Domesday' Professor Alun Howkins, a social historian from the University of Sussex, is at the oche. His dart lands close to the Norfolk village of Old Buckenham and Alun soon finds evidence for a hidden radical past.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor presents the programme that reflects listeners' passions for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

This week Dr Vanda Wilcox in Rome comes to the aid of a listener whose research into her grandfather's disappearance in Northern Italy during the First World War has hit a brick wall.

Helen Castor is in Bruges with Dr Caroline Bowden of Queen Mary University of London finding out about an English Convent that was established in 1629 and is still open to this day.

Tom Holland talks to Dr Hazel Mackenzie at the University of Buckingham to find out how they are using so-called crowd-sourcing techniques to research the journals of Charles Dickens and whether this might change historical research in the future.

Finally, Professor Ian Rotherham at Sheffield Hallam University takes reporter Joanna Pinnock up onto the moors near Keighley to explain why he feels that conservation may be destroying cultural heritage.

The programme is presented by Tom Holland.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland presents the first in a new series of Radio 4's popular history magazine.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

In today's programme a listener wants to know whether the service his Scottish ancestors gave Nelson's navy was unusual? Helen Castor talks to the maritime historian Dr Eric Graham who explains that Scots seamen were integral to the British and Russian navies.

In Edinburgh Fiona Watson visits Leith Docks one of the many civil engineering features throughout the UK that were masterminded by John Rennie. Born 250 years ago we ask why so few know of his pioneering work today.

Is sexual violence towards women the key to understanding the brutality of witchcraft trials in the early modern period? Helen Castor talks to Dr Alison Rowlands at the University of Essex.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor hosts Radio 4's popular history magazine.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

In today's programme: a listener's family research throws up a link to a forgotten incident on a remote penal colony in the Bay of Bengal. The murder of Lord Mayo the Viceroy of India by a prisoner on the Andaman Islands could well have sparked widespread unrest on mainland India. That it didn't reveals a new approach to the sub-continent from its colonial masters. Fiona talks to Professor Clare Anderson at the University of Leicester who has researched this history.

~Making History listener Sarah Colpus takes us to a small village church on the South Downs where she has found evidence that back in the 16th century her family were involved in a violent neighbourly dispute which ended up before the feared Star Chamber. Helen Castor visits Dr Steven Gunn at Merton College Oxford to find out more about this court and why such a local dispute would have ended up there.

Professor Malcolm Chase at the University of Leeds explains why Rochdale isn't the birthplace of the co-operative divvy and why Brighton's claims to this history are also wide of the mark.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Fiona Watson investigates a forgotten crisis in Britain's colonial past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today, Iain Dryden in south-west France recalls his childhood growing up with the Nandi tribe of Kenya in the 1950's and how their version of fighting British colonialists at the turn of the twentieth century is very different to that told in our history books. Helen talks to Professor David Anderson at the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford who explains the importance of this non-colonial oral history.

At Brunel University Archives in Runnymede south west of London, Making History reporter Joanna Pinnock comes across some remarkable women educationalists who travelled the globe in the early decades of the nineteenth century to start schools. One even beating Livingstone to the heart of Africa. We hear from archivist Dr Phaedra Casey and Dr Christina de Bellaigue, Fellow and Tutor at Exeter College Oxford.

Our series on unsung history heroes throws up the railway contractor who in his lifetime built 1 in 20 of each mile of railway laid throughout the world. A man who employed 80,000 workers and had no administrative help. His name was Thomas Brassey and transport writer Christian Wolman tells Helen more about his remarkable life and why we know so little about him.

On the Norfolk/Suffolk border, reporter Richard Daniel follows in the footsteps of the Iceni as the County Archaeologist for Norfolk, Dr David Gurney, shows him remarkable new evidence for an iron-age roadway.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor with the programme where listeners help re-assess the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Sir Barry has been woking on the island for the past 7 years and he takes Tom to a site in a field on the central plateau where he thinks people were 'worshipping the ancestors' 2,000 years BC. The archaeological team have found coins and axe heads and Sir Barry believes that these confirm his ideas that the island was a scared place in the years before the Roman Empire. Nearby, is the spot where the Sark hoard was discovered in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Philip de Jersey, the archaeologist for Guernsey, explains that by the 1730's the hoard was lost but he has pictures of it and coins that date it to around 32BC. Included in the hoard was material from the Danube which shows how 'connected' the island was then to the rest of Europe.

In the years after the fall of Rome, monks made a home for themselves on the island and in 1066 it became English as it was territory owned by the Duchy of Normandy. Over the next few centuries the island was home to pirates and was caught between the conflicting territorial interests of England and France but the population was all but wiped out by the Black Death. In Elizabethan times efforts were made to re-colonise the island and local historian Richard Axton explained how this came about and how the island's famous feudal system developed.

Producer: Nick Patrick

Tom Holland follows up new archaeological evidence from the island of Sark.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom travels to Winchester to ask Dr Ryan Lavelle from the University of Winchester who Odda of Devon was and whether he should be remembered for helping Alfred defeat the Danes?

Simon Evans visits the now redundant colliery at Snowdown near Dover to hear former miners who want the decaying pit buildings to be restored. Tom talks to Judith Martin, who has been advising local people, about the importance of Kent's coal heritage and the specific local difficulties which conspire to prevent it being preserved.

Dr Andrew Petersen from the University of Wales, Trinity St David, invites Tom to the British Museum to hear about a new exhibition about the Hajj and how Making History listeners might be able to help with information about 3 lost forts which guarded pilgrims on their long trek to Mecca.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland with more stories that are Making History.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Each week, the Making History team: tackles listeners questions; hears about the latest research and puts the Radio 4 audience at the heart of historical debate.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Listeners share their ideas and questions with some of the world's leading historians.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Were King Harold's banners sent by William Duke of Normandy to the Pope? Helen castor talks to Dr Tom Licence at the University of East Anglia about the story that the Pope had sent William a papal banner to carry into battle, signifying his approval of the Conquest. But, was the story invented with a view to legitimizing the Conquest by giving it a stamp of papal authority?

An almost Soviet-styled wall mural has been uncovered and restored at St Crispin's comprehensive school at Wokingham in Berkshire. Painted by Fred Millett and now restored by the Perry Lithgow Partnership it depicts 'summer' and is one of many similar works of art that were incorporated in school designs in the 1950's.

A listener discovered a fence 'tensioner' in a field near Aviemore in Scotland and wonders whether it is an artefact of a little-known Nazi history. Second World War historian James Holland dampens down such claims by explaining that the Nazi's over-engineered and over-designed even the simplest objects - hence their survival even in the most unlikely places!

Dr Nick Lloyd of King's College University of London has just written 'The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day' in which he paints a slightly different picture of events in April 1919 when troops led by Brigadier General Reginald Dyer shot and killed nearly 400 people.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor hears about King Harold's banners and the Amritsar massacre.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor goes to Greenwich to meet Dr John Cooper of the University of York to hear whether a Thomas Appletree really did take pot-shots at Elizabeth 1st in 1579 and why his death sentence was never carried out.

Reporter Caz Graham in in Stockton on Tees where, in 1933, local communists and other anti-fascists took on Moseley's Blackshirts who had been bussed in from throughout the north of England. Why did the violence that followed break out here a full three years before the better known battle in Cable Street, East London.

Finally, a listener in the Scottish Highlands has a passion for the history of an old medieval shield called the 'targe'. About eighteen inches round it was still in use at the Battle of Culloden. Tom Holland talks to Tony Pollard of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Glasgow who explains more about a battle in which new and old military tactics and technologies met head on.

Producer: Nick Patrick

Tom Holland thumbs though the history of English usage guides.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

The Black South African Football Tour of 1899: Making History listener Eryl Freestone has a memoir written by her grandfather which describes a tour of black South African footballers that he helped organise in 1899, just as the South African war was about to start. Eryl meets with Dr Chris Bolsmann at the University of Aston who has been researching the tour and was desperate to find an ancestor of WM Williams' - Ery's grandfather.

Professor Vanessa Toulmin at the National Fairground Archive explains the tour in the wider context of entertainment history in the late Victorian period.

1872 - a peak in republicanism?: Rohan McWilliam at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge goes head to head with Dr Alex Windscheffel at Royal Holloway University of London.

Dr Matt Edgeworth (a Bedford archaeologist and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leicester) explains how aerial photos satellite maps available on the internet and accessible through personal computers can help identify previously hidden archaeological features. He takes us to the River Great Ouse to find out more about a medieval weir he discovered using such a technique.

Producer: Nick Patrick

Helen Castor presents the programme that reflects listeners' passion for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

The case of William Notman: In 1936 a bank clerk with the Commercial Bank of Scotland who was aged 28 asked his boss for permission to marry. He was refused. Notman takes the bank to court and wins compensation of £1,000 which was 5 years salary at the time. The novelist Eric Linklater was one of many commentators who wrote in his support and Fiona Watson met with his son Magnus and Professor Alan McKinley of St Andrew's University to find out more.

Martin's Bank: Do you remember Martin's Bank, maybe you worked for it? Making History listener Jonathan Snowden is building an on-line archive of the bank and he wants Making History listeners' help.

John Hurst: Tom Holland talks to the film-maker and author Colin Thomas the author of Dreaming A City about the life and work of industrialist John Hughes who had a company town named after him in Tsarist Russia.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Featuring the Northern Rebellion of 1569 and unsung history hero John Hughes.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Listener Eileen Scutt came across some photographs some years back taken by her father in China in 1914. He was in China from 1912 to 1915 and Eileen wanted to know more about his war service and what the British were doing there. Helen spoke to Professor Rana Mitter at the University of Oxford who explained that the Germans, like the British, had made every effort to acquire trading status within China towards the end of the nineteenth century. These two powers co-operated during the Boxer Rebellion but in 1914 events in Europe changed their relationship. Tsingtao was a German port and the British and Japanese were intent on forcing them out.

The Selden Map:

A map that's been known about for over 350 years has recently given up startling new information which is transforming our understanding of the Chinese Ming Empire. It was thought that in the early seventeenth century China was turning in on itself; becoming the secret society that many in the West might find familiar today. But, fine lines drawn on the Selden Map connecting China with countries dotted around the South China Sea and further afield which came to light during its restoration, show that Chinese traders still looked outside their own country.

George Manby:

A listener nominates a man who was based in Great Yarmouth in the early years of the nineteenth century and who witnessed several incidents at sea. In one over 100 people died. Manby quickly saw that one of the problems rescuers had was getting a line to stricken vessels to help with the evacuation of crew and passengers. The Manby Mortar did just this and the principles are still in use by the RNLI today around our coasts today.

Many of Manby's inventions are described in plans and correspondence held at the Time and Tide Museum in the town.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor presents the programme that reflects listener's passion for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

TV seems full to bursting with history programmes, the bookshops are stuffed full of historic fact and fiction - and there are few decent radio programmes on the subject too! So, is history in crisis? That was one of the themes up for discussion at a conference organised by History Today and Tom went along to gauge the feeling of students and researchers. Many were worried by perceived cutbacks in the humanities in universities but it was the breadth of teaching that concerned people most. In short: too many Nazis and not enough Magna Carta, English Civil War or understanding of Welsh, Scottish and Irish history.

Unexplained Circles in Ashdown Forest:

A listener in Turkey has spotted 2 unexplained circles in Ashdown Forest whilst looking at satellite mapping (Grid References: TQ 45410 30887, E 545410.5 N 130887). Helen Castor visited the team at the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty where they have been using a new laser technique called LIDAR as part of a community archaeology partnership which might explain more.

Krojanty 1939:

Dr Richard Butterwick from University College London explains how the myth that Polish cavalry charged Nazi tanks in September 1939 took hold and spread.

Bath Pump Room Band:

Lizz Pearson meets up with Robert and Nicola Hyman who have written a history of music at the Pump Room in Bath.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland presents the programme that reflects listeners' passion for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Dr Ward says: People tended to be recruited in congregational groups and often a leading member of the congregation would start the process and would then involve other family members and friends, and their households which included their servants. As a result people within a single church congregation would often migrate literally together.

Dunwich Hedgehogs: Dr Rob Liddiard and a team from the University of East Anglia have unearthed the forgotten remains of a D-Day training area on the Suffolk coast at Dunwich. Built in 1943 they were informed by the failed attack on Dieppe and show the detail of German coastal defences.

SS Cantabria: In November 1938 a Spanish merchant ship was sunk off the Cromer coast by another vessel from Spain. Professor Eric Groves from the University of Salford explained that the Cantabria was a Republican ship which although not engaged in trade at the time of her sinking had been used to hold Spanish Nationalist prisoners and had links with the Soviet port of Leningrad. She was sunk by the Nationalist ship Nadir which had access to the German Baltic ports. The Cantabria's sinking revealed how international the Spanish Civil War was and how involved Soviets and Nazis were in it.

Glasgow Silversmith: Chris Warhurst is Professor of Work & Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney in Australia and is alarmed by the death of historic crafts in Scotland where he once worked. He took Fiona Watson to meet a silversmith who is soon to shut up shop because he cannot find an apprentice to take over his 500 year old business.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor presents the programme that reflects listener's passion for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

From Stirling to Southampton, Oxford to Orleans, the Making History team have been out and about in the last few weeks chasing down answers to questions posed in the emails and letters sent in by the Radio 4 audience: family research, forgotten diaries, architectural oddities, unexplained features in the landscape... all these, and more, add to a 'must-listen mix' of topics that range from the Aztecs to the obsession of a French railway enthusiast in Amersham.

In this week's programme: Helen meets two listeners who are about to embark on a journey of a lifetime to see for themselves the exact spot in the icy waters of the North Atlantic where a relative died on a British ship sunk by a British minefield in a little-known accident during the Second World War; fellow presenter Tom Holland heads down Route 66 to discover that mediaeval Native Americans loved the city-life just as much as their twenty-first century cousins; and a professional map-maker puzzles over some unexplained symbols that are making horticultural history in the Surrey countryside.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Two listeners head to the spot in the North Atlantic where a relative died in World War II

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today, the programme marks the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic by looking into our understanding of icebergs 100 years ago and asking whether the ship's designers can really be blamed for not knowing what we know now. Helen Castor is in Exeter at the home of the Met Office to uncover the tragic and little-known story of the men who manned the Atlantic weather ships in wartime. And a listener in Dorset needs your help with a project which marks the impact of Black American GI's during the Second World War.

Producer: Nick Patrick

Presented by Tom Holland. Marking the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today: the brutality of war and revolution in Russia - but what was a man from the East Midlands doing there? Is the name Wessex as old as we think it is? Did Aztecs and North American Indians ever meet? And the serious politics that was behind fun and games in fifteenth century Scotland.

Join in by contacting the programme:

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website - www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor with more of your stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today - refugee camps in seventeenth century London; the introductions of Scots Pine to England; help needed on the lives of Black American servicemen in wartime Dorset; and back to the future on the French Aerotrain.

Join in by contacting the programme:

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website - www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Producer: Nick Patrick

Refugee camps in 17th Century London, back to the future on the French Aerotrain, and more

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today: the origins of May Day and why a pagan festival was adopted by nineteenth century socialists; how the people of Plymouth survived a royalist siege; Quaker relief in revolutionary Russia; and the desperate war of attrition between Italy and Austria in the Dolomites.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor presents the popular history magazine. In this edition, the origin of May Day

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today: Tom Holland visits Stonehenge to look back on hundreds of years of tourism and assess the pull of the stones in the future. He is joined by archaeologist Mike Pitts who has put together a new exhibition for English Heritage called Monumental Journey which opens on Wednesday May 9th.

At the Wellcome Library in London, Helen Castor comes across the work of a Henry Bradbury who, in the 1850's, tried to exploit the Victorian fern craze with a book using a new printing technique he had brought to England from Austria. Tom Holland talks to the bio-geographer Professor Philip Stott about the then passion for ferns and what it says about the Victorian interest in popular science.

Jo Pinnock travels to the deserted village of Houghton on the Hill in West Norfolk to meet octogenarian Bob Davey who, with his late wife, stumbled across a ruined church 20 years ago which he has has fought to preserve. His passion was a spiritual one but, unknowingly, he was also saving some of most important wall paintings.

~Making History listener Hilda Rodgers tells us about her grandfather's experiences during WW1 when he served in one of the 'kilted regiments' on the Western Front. The wet and cold made their kilts as sharp as knives, but commanding officers wouldn't allow the troops to do anything to stop the pain.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland presents the popular history magazine programme.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today:

The forgotten war of 1812:

Listener Michael Dun has been researching the merchant seamen caught up in the war with the United States and come across the term 'privateers'. Helen Castor talks to Professor Andrew Lambert at King's College London about the activities of what were effectively freelance ships which were used by both sides but more predominantly by the Americans to raid British convoys.

West Indian Cricket:

Is the recent decline in popularity of cricket in the Caribbean a sign that Britain no longer has an economic or cultural hold? Tom Holland discusses the colonial history of cricket with Anthony Bateman at De Montfort University, Leicester and Professor Clem Seecharan at London Metropolitan University.

Three cheers for Tamworth!:

Archaeologist Marion Blockley wants us to reconsider the history of the West Midlands, in particular the town of Tamworth and its place as the capital of Mercia in the 7th and 8th centuries.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor on the forgotten war of 1812, West Indian cricket and the history of Tamworth

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today: the evacuees who didn't go home. Making History listener Barbara Jones brings us the story of her mother who was evacuated from Birkenhead to Wales and didn't return. Tom talks to the author of When the Children Came Home Julie Summers.

Cade's Rebellion: Helen Castor joins Dr John Watts of Oxford University on a stroll over London Bridge to find out more about the Occupy movement of 1450 - John Cade's Kentish Rebellion.

Convoys: Listener Jonathan Bridge picks up on last week's story about the Atlantic convoys of 1812 and asks whether the Admiralty forgot the lessons of the war with the United States in the years leading up to the First World War? Pieter van der Merwe, General Editor at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich explains all.

Synchronised swimming: Professor Fred Gray joins Tom on Brighton sea-front to explain the unlikely beginnings of an unlikely Olympic sport.

Lilly Parr: Dr Jean Williams shines a light on some forgotten sporting women, such as footballer Lilly Parr, who the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are to feature in this Olympic year.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland presents the popular history magazine.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Oak Apple Day: Professor Mark Stoyle from the University of Southampton explains the origins of Oak Apple Day, the day that marks the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. In Fowey in Cornwall listener David Ruffer wants to find out more about the regicide Hugh Peter. Meanwhile in Sweden, listener Peter Henriksson wants to know what happened to foreign treaties during the Long Parliament and the Restoration that followed. Helen speaks to Dr Toby Osborne at the University of Durham.

Much Wenlock: In the week that the Olympic flame is carried through the Shropshire town of Much Wenlock, the BBC School Report team help local youngsters research the local man who was a huge influence on the modern games.

The Fall of Constantinople: Tom Holland marks the anniversary of the Fall of Constantinople in May 1453 by talking to Professor Jonathan Harris at Royal Holloway University of London to discover whether it was indeed a clash of two religious empires.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor is in the chair as listeners and researchers share their passion for the past

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Irish Deserters in the British Army: Making History listener Paddy Reid from County Dublin in the Irish Republic wrote to the programme with the story of his father who, aged 17, deserted from the Irish Army to fight for the British during the Second World War. Having served in India and Burma Paddy's father returned home to Ireland in 1946 and was then effectively barred from employment for the best part of 16 years because many regarded him as a traitor. As the debate about amnesty for these men goes on in Dublin, Tom Holland talks to Paddy and to Professor Brian Girvin who is the Co-Director of the Volunteers Project at University College Cork.

Chalk: Patricia Nash in Basingstoke is working on a project to ensure that every public right of way in Hampshire is marked on a definitive map. Her research has meant that she has looked at hundreds of old maps and she is amazed at the number of chalk workings that are shown. 'What were they for', she asks? Making History's Simon Evans joined archaeologist Dr Matt Pope on the South Downs to find out more.

Richard Cromwell: Den Cartlidge heard our recent programme about the English Civil War and the Long Parliament. He asks why Richard Cromwell's short tenure as Lord Protector is so often ignored? Tom Holland talks to Professor Ronald Hutton from the University of Bristol.

Abebe Bikali: Helen Castor talks to the author Simon Martin about the Ethiopian runner whose barefoot victory in the Olympic marathon in Rome in 1960 paved the way for the African domination of distance running that we are familiar with today.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland presents Radio 4's popular history magazine.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Queens of Speed: Making History listener Tony Allen is related to a pioneer motoring ace from the Edwardian period. Between 1906 and 1910 Dorothy Levitt took on the best drivers in the world at endurance, speed and hill-climb events - and often won. But little is known of her life after 1910. Helen talks to historian Dr Stephen Cullen from the University of Warwick about Dorothy's career and what might have happened to her.

Dr Cullen is researching a book about sportswomen of the 1920's and 1930's who became known for their right wing views in the lead up to the Second World War. One of these women was a Fay Taylour who became a leading motor-cycle speedway rider until she was prevented from competing against men because of her gender. Taylour was imprisoned for three years during the war because she was seen to be a threat to national security.

Street Dancers: Dr Anne Witchard at the University of Westminster is researching the links between street-dancing, music hall and the ballet in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. She talks to Tom Holland about how the Victorians disapproved of the ballet, how some artists and poets became infatuated with it and how London street-dancing may well have influenced the Parisian 'Can-Can'.

A History of Cancer: Helen talks to Dr Elizabeth Toon at the University of Manchester about past societies dealt with cancer.

Pembroke Dock Explosion: Reporter Lizz Pearson heads for west Wales to find out about an explosion in 1942 which killed 19 trainee bomb disposal officers. The Sunderland Trust which is researching this incident is trying to find relatives of those that died.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor presents Radio 4's popular history magazine.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

The Archaeology of 2012: Nick Bateman from the Museum of London Archaeological Service talks to Tom Holland about the work that's gone at the Olympic Park in Stratford, East London.

Georgian Window Tax: A listener in Edinburgh isn't convinced that the blocked up windows in her Georgian terrace house are evidence of the well-known window-tax of the time. Fiona Watson hears the thoughts of Professor Charles McKean at the University of Dundee.

Irish Deserters: Professor Brian Girvin gives his opinion of what the pardon for those that deserted the Irish army and served in the British forces during World War 2 will do for historians.

Stella Rutter the D-Day Hostess: Helen Castor talks to the remarkable octogenarian Stella Rutter who was the hostess of a party for all the leading commanders involved in Operation Overlord just two days before the invasion.

Martin Shaw: Tom Holland talks to Professor George Odam about the life and work of a forgotten classical war composer, Martin Shaw.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland shares your passion for the past with Radio 4's popular history magazine.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

The Klondike Gold Rush: Listener Mike Rouse wants to know more about the Britons who journeyed out west to make their fortune. Helen Castor talks to Professor Marjory Harper from the University of Aberdeen.

Gibbets: A project at the University of Leicester needs Making History listeners to help with a nationwide survey of gibbet sites. Lizz Pearson talks to Professor Sarah Tarlow to find out more.

1409 the year of three Popes: Helen talks to Professor David D'Avray about a moment in the early years of the fifteenth century when there was not one but three Popes.

Aerofilms: Tom Holland at the offices of English Heritage in Swindon discovers more about a unique archive of aerial photographs which stretch back to 1919 and are now available on-line.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor learns about Britons who journeyed out west for the Klondike Gold Rush.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor is in Lancashire with listener Andrew Livesey and Dr Carl Watkins from the University of Cambridge to hear how ghost stories recorded by folklorists or handed down by oral tradition can help us get into the minds of people living hundreds of years ago.

Museum curator Martin Ellis tests his scepticism of the great British tradition of re-enactment at Battle Abbey where Saxons once again try to defend their kingdom from the invading Normans. Martin asks whether this really helps us to understand the past.

Professor Ronald Hutton is at Raglan Castle in Wales explaining how the power of place got him hooked on history.

Medical historian Dr Elizabeth Hurren from the University of Leicester reviews Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men a new exhibition about nineteenth century so-called 'bodysnatchers' which is being staged by the Museum of London.

Find us on Facebook or Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland is joined by Dr Lucy Worsley and Prof Owen Davies.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

In Birmingham our first British-born black-writer, Norman Smith, takes us back to the West Midlands of the 1970's when a powerful mix of reggae and family testimony fuelled his passion for the past.

Tom Holland is in Ripon discovering the life and times of Saint Wilfrid, the forgotten pioneer of the Roman Catholic Church in Britain. And we catch up on your letters and emails as we highlight the latest happenings in the history community.

Find us on Facebook or Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Producer: Nick Patrick

As Black History Month draws to a close, has the annual celebration served its purpose?

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

This week:

What next for archaeology on TV now that Time Team has been scrapped, and what has the programme achieved? Tony Robinson joins in the discussion with Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe and Marion Blockley.

Phil Harding takes us up onto the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire to the spot where he first realised that he wanted to be an archaeologist.

Tom Holland visits Europe's most important Bronze Age site, Flag Fen near Peterborough, to meet Francis Pryor who discovered this ancient causeway exactly thirty years ago.

And the team at Dig Ventures explain how crowd-funding might well be the way that archaeological digs are financed in the future.

Join in the discussion on Facebook or by emailing making.history@bbc.co.uk

Producer: Nick Patrick

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What next for archaeology on TV? Tony Robinson joins the discussion with Helen Castor.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Listener Caroline Melliar Smith tells the heart-breaking story of how she discovered that her mother's sister had her son taken away from her and was locked up in a mental institution for life in the 1930's. Her aunt was suffering from post natal depression. Is this the tip of a family-history iceberg, or was Alex simply unlucky to miss out on new advances in psychiatry?

In Sussex, Tom Holland joins archaeologists working on what they are describing as a crime scene investigation. Nearly 100 years ago, a skull and jaw bone was found in a gravel pit in the village of Piltdown. The newspapers of the day claimed the discovery as evidence of a Darwinian missing link between apes and humans. By 1953 Piltdown Man was shown to be more of a schoolboy fraud. Dr Matt Pope from University College London sets out the facts of the case while, in Cheltenham, Dr Phil Toms explains how the use of a relatively new technique known as luminescent dating might help to deliver more detail of this ice-age site. Back in the studio, Helen Castor talks to Dr Miles Russell of Bournemouth University who, in a new book called Piltdown Man - Case Closed, points a finger of suspicion at the person he thinks carried out a fraud which, for nearly 40 years, changed the history of human evolution.

Finally, in our regular Making Historians feature, TV's Michael Wood explains how comics, Ladybird books and what he saw as a slight on the reputation of the Anglo Saxons by a Second World War military hero led him into a career as an historian.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor and guests explore listener's links with the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

This week we find out exactly what a Royal Forest is and why it needn't have any trees, a gramophone recording from 1930 reminds us of the diplomatic brinksmanship going on in the inter-war years in an attempt to limit the strength of navies around the globe, and we hear about the power of personal diaries when Dorothy Sheridan from Mass Observation talks about how she became an historian.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Magazine programme in which listeners and researchers share their passion for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor and guests discuss the ideas and events that are Making History.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland will be previewing an exciting new exhibition of early nineteenth century drawings which have never been seen before in public and reveal new insight into pre-independence Greece.

And we'll be hearing about the Asian chronicler of North Norfolk life in the 1890s, Albert Mahomet.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor and guests discuss the history curriculum in Britain's schools.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland is joined by Professor Ted Cowan from the University of Glasgow and Dr Richard Partington from the University of Cambridge.

As the debate about independence hots up, Fiona Watson is in Edinburgh to look at Scotland's most famous document, the Declaration of Arbroath which some look back on as a 14th century precursor to next years' referendum.

Listeners have their say on the teaching of history in our schools and Dr Graham Rowe shows us some gates in Brighton which are all that is left of the city's zoo - one of the earliest in Britain.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

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Tom Holland and guests discuss issues from the past that have been raised by new research.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Among the highlights in this six week series, Tom and his co-presenter Helen Castor will be asking whether the Renaissance began on the 26th April 1336, probably about tea time ... and possibly over a game of cards, investigating how a London conference set up to limit naval fire power in 1930 had the opposite affect, and finding out why you can't necessarily see the wood through the trees in a Royal Forest.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland and guests discuss the ideas and events that are making history.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today: Dr Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage joins Martin Ellis from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery at Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire which was saved for the nation in 1912 and paved the way for the Ancient Monuments Act of 1913.

Helen Castor examines the history of those on the edge of society by spending a Valentine's evening with the Winchester Geese in Southwark, London.

And, this week's 'Making Historians' features the landscape historian Professor Tom Williamson from the University of East Anglia who takes us to Metroland

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland and guests discuss the ideas and events that are making history.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Among the highlights in this series, Tom and his co-presenter Helen Castor will be asking whether the Renaissance began on the 26th April 1336, probably about tea time ... and possibly over a game of cards, investigating how a London conference set up to limit naval fire power in 1930 had the opposite affect, and finding out why you can't necessarily see the wood through the trees in a Royal Forest.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Magazine programme in which listeners and researchers share their passion for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Alongside her is one of Britain's leading historians of the eighteenth century, Professor Jeremy Black from the University of Exeter.

Tom heads to the British Library in London to take a privileged look at a remarkable volume of naval dispatches. Unearthed by naval historian Sam Willis, this beautifully bound book contains first - hand accounts of some of the key sea battles between 1794 and 1805. So why don't we know more about it?

In Warwickshire, archivist Rob Eyre brings us evidence for a unique way of paying for Nelson's navy: a hair-powder tax.

And Helen Castor takes a trip to Watford to meet a Making History listener who can shed new light on the role of toads in pregnancy testing before the DIY kits of today.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

Tom Holland is joined by leading historians to discuss the latest historical research.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Martin Ellis is on the border of England and Wales to celebrate an iconic landscape feature which doesn't attract the attention that its history warrants. He asks who Offa was, and what made him build a dyke which has become the physical border between two nations.

Joining Tom from Ireland is Dr Gillian Kenny from Trinity College in Dublin where she works on research into women in medieval Gaelic society. Remarkably, she has discovered that married women enjoyed a freedom in the Ireland of the middle ages that their English counterparts never had.

And Helen Castor is out on the cut finding out about the women who joined a scheme to keep the canals going during the Second World War. But has this middle-class history eclipsed a longer working-class one?

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland and guests discuss the ideas and events that are making history.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Professor Matthew Cobb joins the discussion to talk about whether or not the Liberation of Paris in 1944 has become forgotten - or at least misunderstood.

Helen Castor meets up with Dr Jonathan Conlin from the University of Southampton, who has written a new Tale of Two Cities - one which highlights the many shared histories of London and Paris.

Finally the author of 'Fire and Steam', railway writer Christian Wolmar, heads for Balcombe in Sussex where the great grandfather of Making History listener John Ireland worked on the London to Brighton Railway shortly after its opening in 1841. He finds out that the HS2 of its day was fought over by local landowners who saw the benefits and not the environmental damage of the railway.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland is joined by leading historians to discuss the latest historical research.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland travels to Enniskillen in Northern Ireland where a road built for the G8 meeting in June sliced the top off a wetland landscape feature known as a crannog. Tom meets with Dr John O'Keeffe and Dr Nora Bermingham who explain how this man-made timber construction was inhabited for over one thousand years from the 7th Century onwards and that the artefacts discovered are changing the way we see Ireland in the early medieval ages.

Back in the studio, Dr Rowena Archer from Christ Church Oxford explains the political significance of a 15th Century child-bride Anne Mowbray who was married to one of the Princes in the Tower and who was at the centre of Edward VI's land-grab. Her remains were discovered by builders working on a bomb site in East London in 1964 at a time when rescue archaeology was unheard of.

Finally, in Edinburgh, Fiona Watson meets up with Dr Alan MacDonald from the University of Dundee who explains the impact on the Scottish Parliament of James 1st's move south to London to become James VI in 1603.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor and guests discuss the ideas and events that are Making History.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

We hear about the conclusion to a four year project which helps us understand just how ordinary people worshipped in the sixteenth century. How did the church maintain its hold over a population that could not read or write and certainly didn't understand Latin?

Burnley may seem an unlikely place in the Lesbian and Gay history of Britain, compared perhaps with more metropolitan areas. However, a new project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund is uncovering some remarkable evidence which shows that East Lancashire was at the forefront of the gay liberation movement in the 1960's and 70's.

And Tom Holland is in the Oxfordshire countryside with a leading classicist and a beekeeper to find out how the Ancient Greeks and Romans would have tackled the decline of the bee population.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor is joined by leading historians to discuss the latest historical research.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom talks to Professor Lisa Brady from Biose State University in the USA to find out what we mean by environmental history and why it seems to be more popular across the Atlantic than it is in Europe. Professor Ian Rotherham takes us on a journey into England's lost fens and Helen Castor is in the wetlands of Somerset with Professor Ronald Hutton to hear Making History listener Steve Pole's theories on why religion and landscape made Bridgwater such a rebellious town.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland and guests discuss the ideas that are Making History.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

With the 500th anniversary of the Scots defeat at Flodden just a few days away, Tom travels to Northumberland to meet Clive Hallam Baker who explains why James VI came a cropper after his invasion.

Back in the studio, journalist Alex Massie joins the discussion as we try and understand why this battle seems so little-remembered.

Another great battle is analysed in a new book by the medieval historian Richard Barber, but Helen Castor wonders whether its title, 'Edward III and the Triumph of England' tells us more about the rise of the English nation in the 14th century than it does about military success on the continent.

Finally, Tom hears from Andrew Nicholl about a new project in Scotland which allows listeners to get their hands on over 400 years of history. Transcribe Scottish Places needs volunteers to type out documents that go back to 1645 and these will then become freely available on-line to users around the world.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland and guests discuss the ideas that are Making History.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

The programme begins with the little acknowledged role that China played in World War 2 and its war with Japan which began in 1937. We hear how a poor and divided country desperately fought off the Japanese and, in so doing, tied up troops which would otherwise have been turned on the Allies in the Pacific theatre of war. Helen asks why this history is so little known.

Fifty years after Martin Luther King made his iconic 'I have a dream speech' speech in front of the Lincoln memorial in Washington, we find out about the black power movement that turned its back on King and the organisation that grew out of this. We may think of the Black Panthers as an American organisation, but a new photography and oral history project in Brixton reveals the story of the British Black Panthers.

Finally, Tom Holland heads off to the beautiful north Somerset coast at the village of Kilve to discover the past use of a decaying brick building. To his surprise, he hears that this might well have become home to the British oil shale industry if prospectors had been successful back in the 1920s.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

Helen Castor and guests discuss the role of China in WWII, and the British Black Panthers.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today's programme has just a touch of Disney. But we're not at the movies - rather under the English Channel, exploring the role played by Dumbo, Bambi and Pluto in the Allied invasion of France in 1944 and finding out that these pipelines might not have been as successful in delivering fuel after the invasion of France than the history books tell us.

We explore the history of milk. It's something that we take for granted but, in fact, the ability to drink milk into adulthood is something that only some 35% of humans possess. Its origins lie in a genetic mutation that first began spreading through Europe some 7,500 years ago. The consequences were far-reaching - Europe's very first revolution. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle that had dominated the continent since the first arrival of Cro-Magnon man was swept away, and an imprint stamped on diet and population that is still evident to this day. Mark Thomas has recently explored this fusion of genetics and archaeology in Nature Magazine.

We head to Wiltshire to study records from nearly two centuries ago which show that, back then even more than today, the debate about welfare was as much about morality as economics.

And we hear about a new project devoted to the First World War, which could give a whole new meaning to bible studies.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Exploring the role Dumbo, Bambi and Pluto played in the Allied invasion of France in 1944.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Over the next five weeks, historians and archaeologists will be helping us to understand more about the origins of the Welsh language, find out how French royalty escaped revolutionary persecution in Aylesbury, discover why the gloves are off in the nation's archives, and hear how some of our leading early socialists thought that the unemployed could do with a spell in a labour camp.

Today, it's science versus history. Tom Holland is on the Wirral to hear a debate that's been rekindled by historian Michael Wood - where is Brunanburh, the site of the Great War of 937? Is it Bromborough near Birkenhead as place-name and DNA evidence might suggest or should we, as Wood argues, trust the historical sources and look across to the Humber and South Yorkshire?

Maritime historian Sam Willis is in Devon to find out how an eighteenth century inventor from Ipswich turned to gambling to finance one of the world's first submarine journeys - to the bottom of Plymouth Sound.

And we look ahead to a remarkable parliamentary anniversary, the Addled Parliament of 1614 - the only English parliament in which nothing got done.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor and guest historians discuss the search for the true home of the Great War.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom is joined by Professor Martin Carver from the University of York and Dr Gareth Williams from the British Museum in a programme that shines a light on the people of the Dark Ages and also tackles an increasingly thorny issue about how to handle rare artefacts and documents.

Dr Fiona Watson is joined by Dr Alex Woolf from the University of St Andrews on a journey to a Pictish monastery in the remote coastal village of Portmahomack, north of Inverness. It's a site which, thanks largely to the work on Martin Carver, tells us a lot about the reach of Christianity and how the east coast of Britain lost its economic and political advantage after the fall of Rome. Oddly, it was Portmahomack's links to the west through the Great Glen which helped its monastery become established during this period.

And at the British Library, the gloves are off as Helen Castor responds to listener's concerns about the way in which she handled rare documents in her recent TV series for BBC 4.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland, guests and listeners visit a holy site in a remote corner of Scotland.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen is joined by Professor Justin Champion from Royal Holloway, University of London and Professor Malcolm Chase from the University of Leeds to shine a light on the ways people of different political persuasions have used land and community to tackle social and economic ills.

Tom Holland visits an occupation at Runnymede, where the name of the seventeenth century Diggers has been taken by protestors closely aligned to the occupy movement. Meanwhile at Carstairs, between Glasgow and Edinburgh, Dr Fiona Watson meets up with Dr John Field from the University of Stirling to look at the site of a 1920's work camp that history has forgotten. Remarkably, it was one of hundreds that were established in Britain from the 1870's through to the Second World War.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

The British work camps that time forgot, and the return of the Diggers to a London suburb.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Nearly 200 years ago, in April 1814, King Louis XVIII of France left Hartwell House near Aylesbury to reclaim the throne of France after more than twenty years in exile. Seven of these were in England, two at Gosfield Hall in Essex and five at Hartwell. The biographer of Napoleon's Josephine, Dr Kate Williams, went to Hartwell to find out more about Louis in England.

As Louis traipsed around Europe, the Continent was in turmoil. Britain had been humbled just a few years earlier in the War of American Independence so how did she reorganise to fight the French?

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland and leading historians discuss the latest historical research.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland is on the coast of North Wales, just south of Anglesey, with Professor John Koch from the University of Wales whose research on the language of the Celts is changing our understanding of how they arrived in Britain.

Dr Fiona Watson heads for Glasgow and a great fire in 1652 which helps us understand Cromwell's relationship with the city during the Civil War.

And in Connemara on the west coast of Ireland, archaeologist Mike Gibbons explains how the recent storms have destroyed and revealed treasures from the past.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor joins guests to discuss the latest historical research from across the UK.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today's programme includes what the French really thought about the Allied bombing raids on their cities, why the Spanish still can't face remembering their civil war, and London to Great Yarmouth in around 10 minutes - 200 years ago.

Contact the programme: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Helen Castor

Produced by Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

In today's programme Tom is joined by archaeologist and landscape historian Professor Francis Pryor and the public engagement specialist, Professor Owen Davies from the University of Hertfordshire.

We hear how ignorance is a defence when it comes to wrecking an internationally important heritage site. The one in question is the 8th century fortification built by a Mercian king that we know as Offa's Dyke. The damage was done in August 2013 when a landowners ripped out 45 metres of it. Police decided not to prosecute because they couldn't prove that the landowner in question knew how historically important the dyke was. So: is this a loophole in the laws which protect our ancient monuments; what's being done to close it; and how widespread a problem is this throughout the United Kingdom?

Archaeologist Dr Matt Pope from University College London takes a trip to the Irish Republic's biggest freshwater lake, Lough Corrib near Galway. There an off-duty ship's captain, Trevor Northage, has spent years mapping the lough bed using high-tech sonar equipment. In the last three years he has discovered 12 boats, vacuum-packed in the silt, which span the period from the Bronze Age to that of the Victorians. Matt meets Trevor and hears about the archaeological importance of these finds to Dr Kahl Brady of the National Monument's Service in Eire.

Finally, we report from what's been called the Glastonbury of history: the Daily Mail Chalke Valley History Festival which culminated last weekend in a riot of re-enactment and historical discussion. Helen Castor was at the festival and she caught up with the writer Charlie Higson who confesses to his fondness for dressing up and acting out the past.

Contact the programme: email making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History, BBC Radio 4, PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

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Producer: Nick Patrick.

A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland and guests discuss the news and research that is making history.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

That's the view of one academic who fears that the volunteering model adopted by many organisations needs to change. Dr Geraint Coles has a long experience of working on restoration projects such as the Chesterfield canal. He fears that changes in our society means that people are retiring much later than they were ten years ago - so finding fit and active volunteers to help run museums, preservation railways and other industrial heritage centres is becoming more and more difficult.

~Making History's Mike Greenwood visits the Bluebell Railway in Sussex to see how they recruit, train and keep their volunteers. Ian Bapty, Industrial Heritage Support Officer for England, and Karen Perkins Director of Arts and Museums at Luton Culture join Helen to discuss the ways they are meeting this challenge

Tom Holland takes the train to Cumbria - or should that be Rheged? He meets historian Tim Clarkson and hears how sixth century poetry has been shaped and re-shaped so that the kingdom it describes is now much, much bigger than it ever was.

Finally, Helen meets Professor Linne Mooney from the University of York to find out how familiarity with the scribes who copied the works of Chaucer as well as government papers, afforded her unique insight into how and why written English begins to supersede French and Latin in the fourteenth century.

Contact the programme:-

Email making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History, BBC Radio 4, PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Producer: Nick Patrick.

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor and her guests discuss the latest research that is making history.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Historian and polar guide Dr Huw Lewis-Jones joins the programme from Truro to explain how the ship's cabin where Sir Ernest Shackleton died in South Georgia ended up in Norway. He and a group of historians and enthusiasts are planning to move it to Shackleton's birthplace in Ireland.

Finally, a student blog from the University of St Andrews leads Helen Castor to Corfe Castle in Dorset to examine the case against England's most notorious Queen Consort, Aelfryth. Did she murder a king so that her son would take the throne back in the 10th century? Dr Ryan Lavelle from the University of Winchester is on hand to explain that all isn't what it seems.

You can contact the programme by emailing making.history@bbc.co.uk - or write to Making History, BBC Radio 4, PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland considers the rise and fall of Britain's empire.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland is in Spain at the World Championships of the International Medieval Combat Federation in Belmonte where fifteenth century combat is acted out under the blistering sun - but how accurate is this display and what does it tell us about knights of old?

We explore another iconic historic figure, the cavalier - and, in particular, Sir Thomas Lunsford, the so-called 'cannibal cavalier'. Did he 'snack' on body parts as the propaganda of the day might have us believe or had the Roundheads fallen for a Royalist joke?

We cross to Dublin to hear from Professor James Kelly about new work that shows just how many 'unwanted' children might have been kidnapped or trafficked. Professor Kelly believes that this little explored topic might well reveal thousands of individuals who were either transported to America or 'used' by street beggars or petty criminals.

Contact the programme by emailing making.history@bbc.co.uk - or write to Making History, BBC Radio 4, PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor and her guests discuss the latest discoveries that are making history.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor joins Des Newell from Oxford Brookes University at the Peacock Gym in Canning Town, East London, to find out more about his work on eighteenth century street-fighting. In the age of the duel, what many might see as random, working-class violence was actually played out under a code of honour and was hugely important in the policing of communities before the formation of the Metropolitan Police Force.

We preview one of the big cultural events of the autumn, the British Library's celebration of the rise of Gothic literature. The exhibition is called Terror and Wonder and ties in with the 250th anniversary of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. But what was it about the 1760's that gave rise to such a powerful and enduring literary genre?

Fiona Watson reports from the Scottish Highlands on why one particular district, Lochaber, was so plagued by bandits between the 15th and 18th centuries. She's joined by Professor Allan McInnes from the University of Strathclyde who explains that the social, cultural and economic make-up of this area - as well as its geography made - for prime cattle-rustling territory.

Contact the programme by emailing making.history@bbc.co.uk, or write to Making History, BBC Radio 4, PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland and his guests discuss honour among 18th century street fighters.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor visits the National Gallery to look at the beautiful 14th century Wilton Diptych, one of two pairings featuring King Richard II. Helen is joined by Curator Susan Foister and Dr Jenny Stratford to explore whether a monarch under pressure and in need of a strong, kingly image, gave rise to our earliest examples of royal portrait.

On the day that Scottish Higher results are published (and a little more than a week before A Levels) we hear from academics at Edgehill University and the University of Roehampton who are working on using social media and on-line activities to help bridge the gap between studying history at school and university.

Down on the Solent, Dr Sam Willis meets up with members of Subterranea Brtiannica who are celebrating 40 years of exploring underground history with a visit to a Palmerston Fort near Portsmouth.

Contact the programme by emailing making.history@bbc.co.uk, or writing to Making History, BBC Radio 4, PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland and his guests discuss an early example of political image management.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor chairs Historian's Question Time at the Chalke Valley History Festival, the now annual event in which Making History listeners can quiz a panel of leading historians, writers and journalists. This year the questions range from the importance of anniversaries to the validity of studying the history of sport, theatre and even gardening.

Joining Helen is the sixteenth century specialist Dr Suzannah Lipscombe; the Professor of International History David Reynolds; the historian of gardening and science Dr Andrea Wulf; and one of our leading foreign correspondents the presenter of Channel 4 News' Jon Snow.

Contact the programme -

Email making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History, BBC Radio 4, PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Find us on Facebook.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor chairs Historians' Question Time at the Chalke Valley History Festival.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

This week, Tom is joined by two of our leading historians/biographers - Jenny Uglow and Andrew Roberts. Dr Kate Williams takes a trip to out of season Torquay to re-live the mad summer days when the Emperor Napoleon came to town and Helen Castor discusses a new series of books which deliver a concise and opinionated history of English kings and queens.

Over the next eight weeks, the team will be criss-crossing the United Kingdom and going further afield to discover more about the stories that are really making history - including looking out for missing pre-Raphaelite paintings in Birmingham, asking whether local government cut-backs are leaving our historic landscape unprotected, learning how heritage is helping build new futures in Stoke-On-Trent and visiting the scene of an early aviators' tragic crash-landing some 300 years ago.

You can contribute news and views by emailing making.history@bbc.co.uk

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland returns with a new series of the programme with a passion for the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

In the studio, Helen Castor and her guests - Professor Richard Overy (University of Exeter) and Dr Astrid Swenson Lecturer in Politics and History at Brunel University - discuss the horror of those nights in February 1945 and how they compared with bombing raids on other European cities such as London, Coventry and Hamburg.

Back in England, Martin Ellis visits Stoke-On-Trent to find out whether history and heritage can replace garden festivals to become a major factor in the social and economic rejuvenation of the Potteries.

Contact the programme by email: making.history@bbc.co.uk - or write to Making History, BBC Radio 4, PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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How did the devastation of Dresden 70 years ago create changing and contested histories?

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Dr Matt Pope reports from Shropshire where land close to Old Oswestry Hillfort might be allocated for housing which archaeologists fear will wreck its landscape context.

Tom talks to Professor Andy Beeby from the University of Durham about new research which is analysing ink on medieval parchments.

And Helen Castor joins food historian Pen Vogler in the kitchen to see how people prepared for Lent in medieval times.

Contact the programme by email: making.history@bbc.co.uk - or write to Making History, BBC Radio 4, PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Archaeologists and planners do battle over an Iron Age stronghold.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Professor Justin Champion visits the Bishopsgate Institute in the City of London to meet with the organisers of the Lilburne 400th, John Lees and Professor Ted Vallance. John Lilburne was possibly the most radical character in the English Civil War - a so-called Leveller who managed to fall out with both Charles 1st and Cromwell but still kept his head.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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How politics was played out through drama at the court of Elizabeth.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Dr Sean Cunningham and Helen Castor are in the National Archives at Kew to explore anti-semitism in the 13th century and the expulsion of the Jews in 1290.

Finally, the historian of the First World War Heather Jones explains why a book on the East German secret police would make ideal reading for any budding history student.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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A great knight, the man behind Magna Carta.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

On the 150th anniversary of his death, has the legacy of the proponent of free-trade, Richard Cobden, been outshone by socialist Friedrich Engels? Professor Martin Hewitt sends a postcard from 1840's Manchester to explain the impact of the Anti-Corn Law League.

Tom Holland is in Stirling to meet the conservation writer Jim Crumley and hear about the last wolf, whilst Professor Ronald Hutton explains why the creature has taken on such a mythical status.

Meanwhile, Dr Sam Willis shares his love of pirates and the question 'What if?'.

You can email the programme at making.history@bbc.co.uk.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Pirates, wolves and Manchester, the city that shaped world politics.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Fiona Watson meets with Professor Daviut Broun from the University of Glasgow to hear how he discovered a new version of a letter from Robert the Bruce to Edward II. Written at the height of the guerrilla war fought by the Scots to rid their country of the English, the tone is conciliatory and very humble. So what was Bruce's game and does it mark a turning point in the years before Bannockburn?

In Dresden, Tom Holland meets with Michael Korey from the Zwinger Museum to see a 16th century version of Germany's infamous Enigma machine.

Finally, Professor Mark Stoyle from the University of Southampton discusses why Rosemary Sutcliff's book about the Civil War, Simon, helped shape his career.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Why was Robert Bruce writing letters to Edward II? Plus Europe's first Enigma machine.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom is joined in the studio by Professor David Abulafia from the University of Cambridge and Professor Justin Champion from Royal Holloway University of London.

David Abulafia leads a new pressure group of historians, called Historians for Britain. Members argue that Britain's history gives it a separate character to the rest of Europe and that this should be taken into consideration if we re-negotiate our relationship with the EU. Justin Champion, on the other hand, is part of a loose coalition of historians called Historians for History who argue that Britain's history is a European one. But, how can history help inform the forthcoming referendum?

In the 3rd Century a leading military man, Carausius, led a break with Europe - the Roman Empire in this case - when he made himself Emperor of Britain. Was this a UKIP-styled revolt or just a simpler way of gaining power while still following Roman ideals? Tom talks to Roman historian Guy de la Bedoyere.

And, in Suffolk, Helen Castor visits the magnificent castle at Orford to hear from the most recent biographer of Henry II, Richard Barber, about how Europe was at the heart of his domestic problems.

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Produced by Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland and guests discuss Emperor Carausius, Henry II and Historians for Britain.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

This week Dr Rachel Hammersley from the University of Newcastle and Professor Robert Gildea from the University of Oxford discuss the Jacobite siege of Carlisle, the French Resistance, the radical history of Britain's only licensed cave and ghostly goings on in Wiltshire.

Listener Barbara Lambert has unearthed over 100 letters hidden away in her attic which were sent to, or written by, Dr John Waugh during the siege of Carlisle in 1745/1746. The letters detail the predicament of the city's population as it was taken over first by Jacobite and then Hanoverian troops. Fiona Watson meets up with Dr Keiran German from the University of Strathclyde to assess the importance of this new archive.

Robert Gildea has just finished a new book on the French Resistance called Fighters in the Shadows. Helen talks to Robert about his work, which is based on oral testimony, and showcases the myths that have grown up around this iconic struggle.

In South Shield,s Professor Ted Vallance from the University of Roehampton fulfils a long-held dream - a visit to Britain's only licensed cave where, it is said, the radical Thomas Spence first scrawled the phrase 'the Rights of Man' on the fireplace of a home blasted out of the cliffs by a husband and wife, forced out of their home after a dispute with their landlord.

Finally, to the dawning of the Enlightenment and a ghostly tale from Tedworth (now Tidworth) in Wiltshire which, as Professor Ronald Hutton explained to Tom Holland, came just at the time when everyday religious believe was being challenged by the rise of science.

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Helen Castor and guests discuss new research on the French Resistance.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor meets up with Professor Tom Williamson in south Norfolk to hear how our understanding of what makes a wood 'ancient' is changing - and why it matters.

Conservationist Graham White is in Dunbar, the home of John Muir - the father of American conservation.

Paul Warde discusses his work on the history of sustainability and Andrea Wulf previews her up-coming biography of Alexander von Humboldt.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Andrea Wulf and Paul Warde discuss Humboldt, John Muir and the history of sustainability.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Dr Ruth Young is just back from the Lebanon where a team from the University of Leicester have been working fruitfully in places that were once thought to have been wiped clean of archaeological significance by the civil war.

Tom Holland is on Dartmoor to look at the first stone circle to be discovered there for over a century and one that, we think, has been untouched for hundreds of years.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor and guests discuss the impact spending cuts have on archaeology.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland travels to St Just in Cornwall to meet theatre producer Will Coleman who has researched the outdoor locations of medieval plays and how they were staged. Using manuscripts from the Bodleian Library in Oxford he suggests that Country theatre in the 14th century was an immersive experience, more like going to Glastonbury than The Globe. Helen Castor talks to Professor Pamela King who believes that what was happening in Cornwall is happening all over Britain at this time

On Wednesday divers and archaeologists from Historic England will try and lift a gun carriage from a 350 year old wreck which lies on the bottom of the Thames estuary having blown up in 1665. The wreck is that of The London, an important ship in Cromwell's Navy. We hear from a diver working on the wreck and Dr James Davey from the National Maritime Museum and Dr Richard Blakemore from Merton College Oxford who explain the importance of this revolutionary navy in the development of the British Navy.

Helen Castor and guests discuss medieval theatre and Cromwell's navy.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor is on the South Downs with geographer Dr Geoffrey Mead who has been researching responses to the housing crisis of the 1920s. Close to Brighton, he has discovered an informal settlement - one that was maybe once described as a 'shanty-town', but was built by the aspirational middle-classes who could find £10 to buy a plot of land. Dr Adrian Green from the University of Durham explains that these communities, built on what geographers describe as marginal or non-productive land, were commonplace right the way back to the middle ages when people would move to be closer to work.

Professor Sharon Ruston from Lancaster University is in Warrington, where she highlights the role of the town's dissenting academy - and the work of Joseph Priestley in particular - in promoting the teaching of science to a community of scholars that were barred from Oxford and Cambridge because of their radical religious beliefs and who, she argues, were the intellectual driving force of the industrial revolution.

Tom Holland visits Sheffield to talk to research student Dr Hannah Probert about the significance of facial hair in Roman times.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland and guests discuss 1920s shanty towns, radical Warrington and Roman beards.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today, Tom Holland is on the Dorset/Wiltshire border where a farmer has dug up a Bronze Age body. Remarkably, as Dr Tom Booth from the University of Sheffield explains, this is far from unique. Indeed, just when the Pharaohs were building the pyramids to house them forever, Bronze Age Britons were busy mummifying their dead too.

With Bridge of Spies and now Deutschland '83, Helen Castor finds out why the Cold War has become such a hot topic with historians as well as TV viewers.

And Dan Snow takes us back to the year when the British Museum opened its doors for the first time, Wedgwood started production, Kew Gardens was founded and Britain swept almost everyone away on battlefields and seas across the globe. Is 1759 the most important date in history?

Producer: Nick Patrick

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A date with Dan Snow, mummies in Wiltshire, and why the Cold War is hotting up.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Dr Naomi Paxton explores how sex trafficking and moral panic thed to the birth of the Women's Police Service in 1914.

Dr Fiona Watson explains why 1302 is her favourite year in history - and, in particular, one day when, at a battle on the Continent, the mounted knight was rumbled.

Helen Castor explores the origins of Marriage Banns and Dr John Gallagher argues that historians should be concerned about style as well as substance.

Producer Nick Patrick

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How sex trafficking and moral panic led to the start of the Women's Police Service in 1914

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

We're in Toxteth, Liverpool, to find out more about the history of the terraced house.

Christian Wolmar joins us from King's Cross railway station where he asks whether the Flying Scotsman deserves to be so famous.

And we explore the history of Easter with the Bishop of Norwich who explains why it moves around the calendar.

Helen Castor catches up with Dr Oleg Benesch at the University of York who argues that the Samurai of the nineteenth century borrowed heavily from the Victorian notion of chivalry.

Finally, the author Jenny Uglow shares with us her favourite year - 1798.

Producer Nick Patrick

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Terraced houses, the fame of the Flying Scotsman, and why Easter is a moveable feast.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Dr Tom Charlton uncovers some surprising evidence that the original Darby and Joan were 17th Century radical pamphleteers. He heads to the first Darby and Joan club, which was opened in 1942 in Streatham, South London, and talks to Professor Ted Vallance at the University of Roehampton.

Maurice Casey joins us from Cambridge to discuss new evidence that Bolsheviks visited the scene of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 to find out more about the Republicans' tactics.

Tom Holland is in Oxford to ask why there are memorials to Nazis in some of the colleges.

And Dominic Sandbrook takes us back to the oil crisis of 1973, which he feels is a pivotal year in history.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Nazi memorials, the real Darby and Joan, and the story of the Bolsheviks in Dublin 1916.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland is in Northern Ireland, close to to the border with the Republic near Enniskillen. There are no customs officials or soldiers these days but will Brexit change that? Tom meets the historian Seamas McCannay and geographer Bryonie Reid to ask whether the 95 year-old history of a border between North and South can help us understand what the future for Britain's only physical connection with Europe might be.

Dr Bob Nicholson of Edge Hill University heads to Liverpool on the lookout for Bosom Caressers, Corpse Revivers and a real Eye Opener. These are all cocktails, described in a Victorian song which Bob has discovered in his research and which has led him to question our perception of the Victorian middle class as abstemious and upright citizens. He spends an afternoon drinking to further his historical research.

There won't be a dry eye in the house as we consider a relatively new sphere of historical endeavour - the history of emotions. Dr Thomas Dixon at Queen Mary University of London kicks off a short series by considering the history of crying and, in particular, the history of men crying.

And which character from the past do you feel that history has forgotten? We ask historians, writers and those in the public eye to suggest the overlooked individuals who really should be on the People's Plinth. Sue MacGregor suggests Ellen Kuzwayo, women's rights activist and president of the African National Congress Youth League.

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Helen Castor and guests with a new series of the topical history programme.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

As combine harvesters tear into Britain's corn crops, David Miles takes us back to the birth of farming and the transformational period that was the Neolithic.

Iszi Lawrence changes into her running gear to recreate the Battle of Marathon - in Salford. Can historians and sports' scientists work together to solve a mystery surrounding this famous victory of the Greeks over the Persians which continues to puzzle historians?

Think British steel and its places such as Middlesborough, Sheffield and Port Talbot that come to mind. So why is Helen Castor in Clerkenwell? Professors Chris Evans and David Green give her a guided tour of one of Britain's earliest and most important centres of steel production.

And Professor Simon Schaffer at the University of Cambridge tells us why the Danish scientist Hans Christian Oersted should really be on the People's Plinth.

Producer Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland and guests with the history that matters to us today.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland takes a ride on Brighton's new attraction, the British Airways i360, and is joined at 450 feet by Professor Fred Gray to gain new insight into the history of seaside attractions. Surprisingly, the new doughnut on a stick (as locals are describing it), offers similar experiences and challenges to those of the West Pier which opened 150 years ago.

In Norfolk, Radio 4's organic gardening legend Bob Flowerdew gets to grips with a character who, on the face of it, is his horticultural opposite. Lancelot 'Capability' Brown was born 300 years ago and Bob visits one of his masterpieces - Kimberley Hall - to ask landscape historian Professor Tom Williamson where the neatness and order of the English country house came from and what it was supposed to do for those who lived with it.

We continue our series of forgotten history heroes as food writer William Sitwell nominates the man who became famous for his pie but who also kept Britain fed during World War 2 - Lord Fred Woolton

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Helen Castor discusses Brighton's latest seaside attraction and its links to the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

On the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London, Dr Tom Charlton heads to St Paul's to learn how preparatory work by Sir Christopher Wren and the storage of printers manuscripts fuelled the inferno. Afterwards, the building lay in ruins and accusations flew freely - many suspecting the destruction of the historic church was the work of Catholics. After an outbreak of the plague and war with the Dutch, these were difficult times for Charles II and the restored monarchy.

Tom Holland visits Glasgow where archaeologists are working on the newly discovered ruins of what they believe to be a twelfth century bishop's palace. The find is shedding more light on the history of the kingdom of Strathclyde, which stretched from the Clyde into modern Cumbria and played a part in fighting Athelstan's attempts to bring all of Britain under his rule in the tenth century. The English king of Wessex and Mercia won the battle against the Scottish kingdoms but was only successful in creating what we now know as England. Alex Woolf explains how long it took for Scotland to become a political entity.

Also, Al Murray nominates Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery for the Making History plinth and Tiffany Watt Smith unpacks the history of anger.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor considers if Wren could have helped destroy St Paul's Cathedral.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor is joined by Stephen Chalke and former Sussex cricket captain John Barclay to discuss the origins and rather odd structure of English (and Welsh) county cricket.

Iszi Lawrence heads to North Yorkshire to hear a story of divorce and betrayal from the 1st century and the forgotten queen who was central to both.

And the former head of Friends of the Earth, Tony Juniper, takes us to South America to remind us of the achievements of the nineteenth century scientist and explorer Johann Baptist von Spix.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland discusses divorce and betrayal in 1st-century Yorkshire.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor meets up with a witness to the Hungarian Revolution of sixty-years ago and we discuss the changing attitudes to refugees.

In London, Dr Tom Charlton is joined by Professor Vanessa Harding and Professor Justin Champion in what became the 17th century equivalent of the Calais 'jungle' - a refugee camp created by the Great Fire of 1666 which was occupied for years.

And Lord Paddy Ashdown makes the case for a forgotten hero to be remembered on the Making History plinth - the wartime SOE's Roger Landes.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland discusses revolution, fire and a secret war.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland is in Lincolnshire where Professor Carenza Lewis explains why pottery is telling us so much more about the Black Death. Her new research, working with volunteers across East Anglia, shows the pan-European epidemic of the mid-fourteenth century had an 'eye-watering impact' with communities losing up to 70% of their population.

Dr Bob Nicholson and former newspaper editor Roy Greenslade leaf through the pages of one of the most scurrilous tabloid publications ever, the tamely titled Illustrated Police News.

And we invite listeners to suggest characters from the past for the Making History plinth.

Producer: Nick Patrick

Helen Castor and guests discuss the Black Death and Victorian tabloids.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

The new series of this long-running programme focuses on lines - historical and historic lines and routes that may be physical or conceptual and that criss-cross our geographical and cultural landscape. It looks at why and how they came about and discusses what they offer us in our understanding of our past and present.

Programme 1. The Prime Meridian - the journey from Stonehenge to Jazz

As it's New Year's Day, it seems the perfect opportunity to explore the history of the Prime Meridian at Greenwich and our relationship with Time. We start at Stonehenge and finish at the National Jazz Archive, located on the meridian at Loughton in Essex. Along the way, Tom and Iszi take in the Romans, French-Anglo rivalry and which animals can hear a beat.

Tom Holland is a writer and historian who has written a number of popular and successful works including Dynasty and Rubicon.

Iszi Lawrence is a comedian and broadcaster who's appeared on Making History as a guest but is now the new co-presenter.

Producer: Alison Vernon-Smith

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Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence consider fascinating aspects of history.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

This week, Tom Holland is hot on the trail of missing frescoes which shed light on Birmingham's artistic heritage and its place at the centre of civic politics before the First World War, and Dr Sam Willis heads for Shrewsbury to explore the history of our 18th century flying men.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor with the programme in which history and historians meet.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

~Making History listener Sue McLaren contacted the programme after discovering that the great antiquarian William Stukely made reference to a village in North Lincolnshire where her ancestors had a substantial home which she has never found.

She told us that her ancestor Admiral Henry Booth built the older part of the Manor at North Killingholme, near the south bank of the river Humber, in about 1482 and the house belonged to the family until it was sold in 1898.

The house is now derelict, despite its grade2* listing. In Stukeley's grand tour of Great Britain, 'Itinerarium Curiosum' published in 1724 he writes: 'A mile east of Thornton are the ruins of another great castle called Kelingholme'. When Sue visited the derelict house that stands on the site of her ancestor's home in 2006 she found that in a wooded area adjacent to it and surrounded by a moat, the ground is very uneven and full of bumps and depressions. Is this Stukeley's castle?

~Making History consulted Dr Kevin Leahy, formerly Archaeologist at the North Lincolnshire Museum in Scunthorpe and now the co-ordinator of the Portable Antiquities Scheme there.

Vanessa Collingridge searches for 'A Great Castle at Killingholme' in North Lincolnshire.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

The Prehistoric Forest at Abermawr

Richard Daniel met up with Nigel Mayling from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Wales. The submerged forest off the coast of Pembrokeshire dates back to around 6,000BC, to the beginning of the Neolithic period when the British Isles were still connected to mainland Europe. It was part of Pembrokeshire's coastal fringe that was flooded at the end of the last ice age. The forest extends out to sea between 1 mile and just a few metres. At low tides the remains of it are revealed. Flints and tools have been found there, so researchers know it was inhabited at this time.

Vanessa Collingridge explores Abermawr, Wales.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

~Making History reporter Hester Cant braves the streets of north London with Fern Riddell to dig into the nasty past of acid attacks on the capital's streets, and a nineteenth century scare that became actor murdering mania.

Iszi Lawrence takes to the jiu jitsu mat with historian Naomi Paxton to discover how and why the suffragettes embraced this martial art.

Tom Holland has a tale that's hot off the historical presses.

And the Cornwall village of Linkinhorne comes under the spotlight when it enters the jeux sans fronti耀res of history competitions, Top Town History.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Actor murdering mania, suffragettes and the martial arts, and Top Town History.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

~Making History listener Monica Yunnie believes that there is a family link to a Princess Evelyn Blucher who was born in Brighton in 1876 and was the daughter of Frederick Stapleton Bretherton. In 1907 she married Prince (then Count) Blucher, an Anglophile whose father had quarrelled with the Austrian-Prussian government and lived on the island of Herm which he leased from Britain. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Evelyn and her husband were forced to leave London and head for Germany where they lived out the war in the Esplanade Hotel.

During these years, Evelyn kept a diary which was published by E P Dutton in 1920 and called An English Wife in Berlin. This, now little-known book reveals much about the life of the aristocracy during the war and sheds some light on the breakdown of society in Germany in 1918. Making History consulted Dr Matthew Stibbe at Sheffield Hallam University.

The Great Thames Disaster

~Making History listener Carole Trowbridge contacted the programme to find out a pleasure boat disaster on the Thames on 3rd September 1878 in which around 600 people died. Her great, great grandfather was the Captain of a paddle steamer the Princess Alice which was returning to central London after taking day trippers down the river to places such as Gravesend. She had almost completed her journey when at 7.40pm the steam collier Bywell Castle collided with her and cut her in two. She sank in minutes.

The tragedy led to changes in navigation laws on Britain's inland waterways, forcing boats to pass each other ‘port to port'. Making History consulted the maritime historian Hannah Cunliffe and Frances Ward of the Greenwich Heritage Centre.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the life of Princess Evelyn Blucher.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

In this New Year's Eve programme, Tom and Iszi look at what history has had to say about the future. They explore when 'the future' emerged as a concept and why some people thought they could foretell it

They look at the time when the future became political and ask what we can know about our ancestors' fears from the science fiction they produced.

Producer: Alison Vernon-Smith

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Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence explore the historical connections to today's big issues.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Presenters: Iszi Lawrence and Tom Holland

Producer: Alison Vernon-Smith

Series Editor: Simon Elmes

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Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence explore stories revealed by history's lines and linkages.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today, testimony about coming out before the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 and what we know about the lives of gay people in Victoria's Britain.

Iszi Lawrence discovers that the 'gig' economy was widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And Tom Holland is on Tyneside to celebrate the history of a building which played host to an almost forgotten intellectual revolution.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor on homosexuality in Victoria's Britain and the history of the 'gig' economy.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Adam Rutherford discusses how DNA testing has informed the study of history and the programme asks if race really is a question of genetics, or a cultural construct.

Producer: Alison Vernon-Smith

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence explore the stories revealed by history's lines and linkages

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom travels to Offa's Dyke to find out how the 176-mile-long, 8th century earthwork divided the Anglian kingdom of Mercia from Powys.

In Belfast, the so-called peace lines are barriers that often cut across streets separating nationalists from unionists. But now a new scheme is under way to neutralise their effect. Making History examines how Belfast is changing.

And, crossing the border - how the development of passports formalised frontier control.

Producer: Alison Vernon-Smith

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Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence explore stories revealed by history's lines and linkages.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Archaeobotanist Professor Dorian Fuller talks about the significance of the recent discovery of the world's oldest bread - which dates back 14,500 years to the time of hunter-gatherers before the beginning of farming.

Producer: Kim Normanton

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Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence look at historical aspects of living on the breadline.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Vanessa Collingridge ivestigates the village stories hidden in bricks in Shearsby.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

~Making History turned to one of Britain's finest archaeologists, Dr Alison Sheridan who is Head of Early Prehistory at the National Museums of Scotland. Alison took Vanessa to a field near Aberdeen.

Vanessa Collingridge investigates the history of carved stone balls in Aberdeenshire.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A listener in Crewkerne, Somerset, was shocked to discover that she may well be liable for repairs to the chancel of the local church because of the location of her 1950's bungalow. She asked Making History to explain why. What is chancel repair liability?

William George Manley

The man who won the Victoria and Iron Cross.

David Harrison in West Norfolk wanted to know whether it is true that William Manley won both these iconic medals. Making History consulted the curator of the Ashcroft Victoria Cross Collection, Michael Naxton.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the past and present of the chancel repair liability clause.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Why would you boast about having a chicken in France, why is a motorcycle gunner wearing spurs and why should we thrilled about graffiti on a medieval church wall in rural East Anglia?

Each week, the Making History team: tackles these and many other questions; here's about the latest research and puts the Radio 4 audience at the heart of historical debate.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland with the first in a new series of Radio 4's popular history magazine.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Enthusiasts for Victorian church architecture are furious that the pews designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott in Bath Abbey have been dismantled and removed and are to be sold. Supporters of the plan say that it will create a huge space which the Abbey can then use for community events. Of course, back in medieval times most churches had no furniture, so why was it introduced and what can it tell us about the people that installed and sat on it? Iszi Lawrence visits Somerset to find out more.

It's the season of village fetes, country fairs, music festivals, cricket and world-class tennis and everyone is more than usually interested in the weather forecast. We think of this as a very modern service and are amazed even at the accuracy of meterologists during the planning of D-Day in 1944. But weather forecasts have been made for centuries and those making them knew more about the science behind them than we may think. Helen Castor visits Merton College Library in Oxford, which in the fourteenth century was the Met Office of its day.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland takes a back-side view of church architecture.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the cultural innovation of church spires.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor is in Great Yarmouth where local people voted overwhelmingly for Brexit. One of their major gripes with Brussels was the detrimental impact they thought EU quotas had on the town's fishing industry. Dr James Barrett is an archaeologist who researches the medieval fishing communities of Britain and he reveals that, 800 years ago, the fishermen of Gt Yarmouth worked closely with their counterparts across the North Sea to bring in unimaginable quantities of herring - along with Britain's main supply of wine.

Earlier this year and just a few miles north of Great Yarmouth, villagers living in chalets on the cliffs at Hemsby were evacuated as the so-called 'Beast from the East' tore into the unstable, sandy cliffs. Several of these properties have since been demolished, while others have been the focus of a frantic attempt to protect them from the unforgiving sea. Such destruction is commonplace in the history of the East Coast. Geographer Sally Brown from the University of Southampton heads to East Yorkshire to meet Marcus Jecock from Historic England and find out how the North Sea has shaped the lives of people living nearby for centuries.

The British seaside resort has been an unloved place ever since package holidays took its clientele to sunnier climes overseas. Now funding bodies such as the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council have been investing in projects that seek to restore some of these places to their former glory. But how effective is this and does one seaside history fit every coastal resort? Guardian writer Tim Burrows goes home to Southend to ponder the death of the seaside.

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Tom Holland discovers when East Coast fishermen were very much a part of Europe.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

It's 140 years since the UK prison system was nationalised and Iszi Lawrence visits Shrewsbury with Professor Alyson Brown from Edge Hill University to discover why a change in organisation was needed. Today, paying customers are experiencing life here at Her Majesty's pleasure - and all over the world people seem to want to visit places which have a grim and troubling past. So what's the appeal and the purpose of so-called 'dark tourism'? Tom Holland talks to Dr Philip Stone from the University of Central Lancashire.

The 2018 World Cup in Russia came at a time when President Putin's stock was high at home, but on the floor abroad. Not for the first time, football was seen as having the potential to offer a political leader a global platform. We go back to France '38 which was held against a backdrop of a growing global diplomatic crisis. Sports writer Julie Welch is joined by Professor Simon Martin and football journalist Jonathan Wilson to explain how, with civil war in Spain, the merging of the Austrian and German teams after the Nazi Anschluss and Mussolini promoting his brand of fascism through football, this really was a tournament with all to play for.

Council budget cuts, E-readers and on-line delivery are all presenting challenges to Britain's library service, and mobile libraries in particular have been badly affected. But when did the library van first start doing its rounds? Author of Mobile Library, David Whitehouse, heads back home to Nuneaton and the mobile library his mother used to clean.

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Helen Castor presents stories from the past with a bearing on issues today.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Are the so-called ‘black Irish' descendants of shipwrecked sailors from the Spanish Armada? Making History listener Martin Hurley is an Irishman living in Saudi Arabia. Like many listeners from Ireland and the Western Isles of Scotland, he is familiar with the story that many of the sailors from the wrecks of the storm-battered Spanish Armada came ashore and made their homes along the Atlantic coast of Britain and Ireland. It is this, so the story goes, that accounts for the high rate of Rhesus negative blood in the population there today (some 3%) - comparable to levels found in the population of the Basque region of Spain where many of the Armada mariners would have come from.

~Making History consulted Pauline Croft, Professor of Early Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London and Dan Bradley, Professor of Molecular Population Genetics at the Smurfit Institute at Trinity College, Dublin.

Heroine of Matagorda

Two Making History listeners contacted the programme about the grave of a little-known heroine in the Southern Necropolis in Glasgow. Her name is Agnes Harkness or Agnes Reston as she was to become known and her gravestone hints at a remarkable stor

Vanessa Collingridge explores the Empire Settlement Act.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A Making History listener in Bodmin, Cornwall has tried to research the story behind a name on a poster found in local pubs and the town museum. The name is Valerie Givanne and 'she' is listed as a sailor who was executed in Bodmin in 1901 for crimes at sea. However, there is nothing in the local archives which describes the execution of a woman sailor!

~Making History's regular maritime researcher, Hannah Cunliffe, looked into the story and with the help of the Cornish Studies Library discovered that 'Valerie' was actually 'Valeri' an Italian, male sailor who had admitted stabbing a colleague to death on a Liverpool sailing barque called the Lorton en-route to Falmouth.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the execution of 'Valerie Givanne'.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

This programme was recorded in Eyemouth, Scotland in October 2008.

Listener Derek Janes wrote to the programme wanting to find out more about some local features and stories which he felt have wider importance: a sixteenth century fort, witchcraft, smuggling and a terrible fishing disaster back in the 1880s.

You can send us questions or an outline of your own research.

Email: making.history@bbc.co.uk

Write to Making History. BBC Radio 4. PO Box 3096. Brighton BN1 1PL

Join the conversation on our Facebook page or find out more from the Radio 4 website: www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/makinghistory

Producer: Nick Patrick

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A listener's letter takes the Making History team to Eyemouth in Scotland.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Hannah Grieg, historical consultant on the Oscar-winning film The Favourite, and the screenwriter of Churchill, Alex von Tunzelmann, discuss the portrayal of history on the big screen.

Tom meets Kevin Brownlow, whose work finding and restoring film from the silent era earned him an Oscar in 2010.

And Matthew Sweet tells the story of Vic Kinson, a bookkeeper from Derbyshire, who created the IMDB of his day.

Produced by Craig Smith

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Tom and Iszi meet the cineasts who help us understand history and the history of cinema.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Feast and Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500 - 1800 at the Fitzwilliam Museum runs until 26th April.

Producer: Craig Smith

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Iszi Lawrence and Tom Holland with the latest research that's Making History.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

As concerns grow about fixed-odds betting machines on our high streets, Matthew Greent takes us back to a gambling crisis over 200 years ago in London.

Dr Rachael Attwood explores the dangerous, de-humanising world of nineteenth century human trafficking and, as the numbers of rough sleepers grows on Britain's streets, we find out about homelessness in the past.

And the last in our challenge to find the place that is top for history in the UK - Top Town History.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor looks back at the gambling crisis of the 18th century.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

The Germans landed on the 1st July 1940 and the islands weren't liberated until 8th May 1945 - nearly a year after D-Day and 7 days even after Hitler's death. Over one thousand British-born civilians (children and adults) were taken to camps in Germany, some of the Jews among them were killed. After June 1944, whilst the Allies fought over and occupied land only a few miles away on the Cherbourg peninsular - the Channel islanders faced starvation as food and other supplies dwindled. A Making History listener wanted to know how the Palace Hotel in St Helier, Jersey burnt down during the German occupation of St Helier, Jersey. Vanessa Collingridge travelled to the island to find the answer to this specific question and ask how easy it is to uncover the hidden histories of an occupied community.

Vanessa Collingridge presents the series exploring ordinary people's links with the past.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

English Civil War specialist John Tincey contacted the programme about a discovery he made in the British Library which finally disproves a local legend in Suffolk. A sign close to six Tudor canon on Gun Hill in Southwold claims that they were a gift to the townspeople from the Duke of Cumberland after his success at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

However, John came across a booklet which shows that the guns were in place at least a century earlier during the reign of Charles 1st (1625-1649). It shows that ‘culverin' (‘long guns') were sent to the towns of Aldeburgh and Southwold to protect the coast from attacks by the pirates of Dunkirk - privateers who enjoyed the support of the Spanish.

The Barbary Corsairs

During the years when the pirates of Dunkirk harried shipping in the English Channel and attacked the merchant fleets of North Sea ports, the Barbary Corsairs were a threat to vessels from Christian states sailing in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Indeed the Corsairs attacked villages in the west of England and in southern Ireland.

Professor Nicholas Rodger from the Centre of Maritime Historical Studies at the University of Exeter told Making History that these pirates operated out of ports in North African states from the time of the Crusades right up until the nineteenth century. They understood the value of people and would kidnap merchants and hold them to ransom. Ordinary seamen would be taken and put to work in galleys and other vessels.

By the eighteenth century the British had agreed a truce with the Corsairs and in return for regular payments our merchants were left alone. This was doubly beneficial because shipping from competing nations was still threatened.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the truth behind the guns of Gun Hill.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

We also take-off for Heathrow to learn about its Iron Age origins and ask if a mound near a car park in Slough could really be a Saxon burial site.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Hadrian's Wall, Iron Age origins of Heathrow Airport and a Saxon Burial mound in Slough.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Students at Hampton School in south west London contacted Making History to help them with something they have discussed in their A-level history classes: the reasons for, and impact of, the Hampton Court Conference in 1604. Making History tuned to Anna Whitelock at Royal Holloway University of London to help supply some analysis.

John Paul Jones

Is the tale of John Paul Jones, the Scottish seaman who was brought up but then attacked the town of Whitehaven on the Cumbrian coast, true? Making History's Caz Graham went to find out from local historian David Bradbury.

Vanessa Collingridge investigates the impact of the Hampton Court Conference in 1604.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A listener's grandmother was kidnapped and then shot in the city of Harbin in North East China in 1932, what was going on there at the time and why would a British citizen have been targeted? Vanessa Collingridge spoke with Dr Rana Mitter at the University of Oxford who explained that this area if China was caught up in the competing aspirations of Imperial Japan, newly nationalistic China and Soviet Russia.

The Dockside Dandies of Lowestoft

London-based artist Peter Wylie is from Lowestoft in Suffolk and he recently came across photographs like the one above which recorded a style of dress that appears to be unique to the fishermen of his home town in the early 1960's. Making History heard from some of the surviving fishermen who wore these flamboyant suits who explained that they could earn up to £30 a week (that's almost £500 in today's money) and could therefore afford to spend up to £25 on them. Chris Breward, Head of Research at the V&A in London, was surprised by the photographs and, although they reminded him of similar styles seen in London at around the same time, could see no direct

Vanessa Collingridge investigates a 1932 murder in East China.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland travels to Thetford, the ancient capital of East Anglia, to hear evidence that the Iceni were speaking a form of English in the years before the Romans arrived. Dr Daphne Nash Briggs and Dr Sam Newton have examined coins of the period to reveal that the people of Norfolk had as strong a relationship with the Continent as they did with the rest of Britain - and, as well as speaking the Celtic Brittonic language, would also have conversed with their trading partners in the Germanic languages that would eventually become English. If true, this thesis completely changes our ideas that our language came with the Anglo-Saxons after the Romans left these shores.

We travel to Liverpool to try out some Victorian jokes. Its all part of research being carried out by Dr Bob Nicholson at Edge Hill University. Stand-up comic Iszi Lawrence finds out more.

This week's favourite year is 1453, put forward by Dr Rory Cox from St Andrews University.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Was English spoken centuries earlier than people thought? Plus a look at Victorian jokes.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

As the first electric commercial aircraft takes flight in Vancouver, Tom and Iszi look at the lengths people have gone to over the past millennium to reach for the skies.

Tom goes to the spot where Eilmer of Malmesbury, an 11th century English monk, made one of the earliest attempts at flight in the British Isles. Inspired by the Greek fable of Daedalus, he strapped wings to his hands and feet and jumped from the abbey tower. He broke both his legs.

And Iszi visits the Science Museum to find out about the first woman in space. At the age of 26, Valentina Tereshkova, orbited the earth 48 times over 3 days and parachuted out of the capsule to land safely in Siberia.

Producer: Kim Normanton

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Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence look at major milestones in flight in the past millennium.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A listener's visit to the Knockan Crag Tourist Information Centre in Ross-shire, Scotland, led to the story of how nineteenth century geologists fought over new theories about how mountains are made. The resulting science was pivotal in our understanding of earth sciences. In short, a Darwinian moment in the study of geology.

~Making History consulted Dr Maarten Krabbendam at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh. Maarten explained that up until the late eighteenth century, the Biblical interpretation of how the earth was made widely accepted by scientists and the educated. But in the 1780's the Scottish geologist James Hutton (now regarded as the father of modern geology) developed his theory of so-called ‘deep time': that the earth was formed and shaped by ongoing processes of erosion and deposition. Addressing the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788 he said: 'we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end`. In short, earth processes are ongoing.

Up until the early years of the nineteenth century, little geological mapping of the British uplands had been undertaken. This is because the rock strata was very confusing with younger rocks buried under older rocks by the violent geological processes of folding and tilting that we recognise today.

Alfred Lucas

A ‘Today' programme debate about the new Tutankhamen exhibition at the 02 Arena in London prompted a Making History listener to ask why her husband's ancestor Alfred Lucas never receives any acknowledgement for the help he gave Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon during their remarkable excavation in the 1920's. Vanessa Collingridge went to meet Dr John Taylor at the British Museum to set the record straight.

Lucas has since been described as Egypt's Sherlock Holmes. Lucas (1867 - 1945) was a chemist and was one of the first to apply new discoveries in chemical science to archaeology, in particular in preserving new finds. Dr Taylor told the programme that he believes that we have a lot to thank Lucas for because he ensured that finds reached the Cairo Museum in the condition in which they had been discovered.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the life of Egypt's real-life Sherlock Holmes; Alfred Lucas.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

As the new HS2 rail link between London and Birmingham begins its first construction phase, Tom joins the railway archaeologists who've been excavating one of London's ancient graveyards along the new line.

And, further down the communications corridor, the programme explores the history of protest in the face of transport progress.

Also, with centuries-old woodlands being displaced by new roads and railways, we look at Britain's ancient sylvan history.

Producer: Alison Vernon-Smith

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Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence explore stories revealed by history's lines and linkages.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

~Making History's Nick Baker reported from Ypres in Belgium where farmland continues to offer up the gruesome reminders of the carnage during four years of fighting during the First World War.

As human survivors of the conflict dwindle in number, local historians and museum workers now regard these human and military remains that act as a silent witness to the war.

Crane Park and the Gunpowder Plot

~Making History listener Alex Robb works for the London Wildlife Trust at its Crane Park nature reserve near Twickenham in South West London. The area was once occupied by the Hounslow Gunpowder Mills but, today, all that remains is a nineteenth century ‘shot tower' where lead shot was made. Alex told the programme that, according to local legend, Guy Fawkes visited the Duke of Northumberland at nearby Syon House on the 4th November 1605.

Furthermore, the gunpowder mills at Crane Park supplied Fawkes and his treacherous band with the explosives that they needed to blow up the Houses of Parliamen

Food blogger Jack Monroe heads for the National Archives to learn how the submarine war in 1917 presented a serious threat to food supplies. She discovers that the rationing put in place then was successfully used again in World War Two.

Tom Holland meets the author of the best-seller Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan, to ask whether China is trying to emulate a centuries old history of trade and influence through its Belt and Road policy.

Fashion historian Amber Butchart marks the passing of author Michael Bond to explain the history of Paddington Bear's iconic duffle coat.

And Sam Willis previews Death in the Ice, a new exhibition on Franklin's ill-fated journey to find the North West passage.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Rationing in 1917, Silk Roads, Franklin's last voyage and the history of the duffle coat.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor meets Dr Michael Hammond, Associate Professor at the University of Southampton, to hear about Blues in the Trenches. Dr Hammond argues that 'the blues' as a musical tradition was brought to the trenches of the Great War by African-American soldiers from all parts of the US and they shared different performance styles and traditions - creating cross-pollinations that foreshadow the country blues recordings of the 1920s and 30s by Charley Patton, Furry Lewis, Bukka White, Geechie Wiley, Ma Rainey, Elvey Thomas, Blind Willie Johnson and notable others.

Closer to home, on the banks of the River Thames, Iszi Lawrence traces the origins of today's craze for tattoos and body art back to the Celts, when she learns to make woad.

On the eve of the Notting Hill Carnival, comic Ava Vidal nominates the activist, feminist, socialist and founder of the Carnival Claudia Jones for the Making History plinth.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Tom Holland considers jazz in the trenches and the women behind the Notting Hill Carnival.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A Making History listener in Brentwood, Essex discovered a letter in a book which appears to give a first hand account of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The author was a John Wells who was serving on Britannia and he was writing to his parents in Hull. But, is the letter genuine? Making History consulted the Maritime Researcher Hannah Cunliffe to help answer this query.

Lost Villages on the South Downs

A Making History listener in Steyning, West Sussex contacted the programme to ask about the fate of two settlements close to Brighton, Balsdean and Standean Bottom. Both have all but disappeared from the Sussex landscape but there is evidence that at least one was in use at the beginning of the Second World War. Making History contacted Geoffrey Mead at the Centre for Continuing Education at the University of Sussex and he took reporter Nick Baker up onto the downs near Brighton.

Vanessa Collingridge explores whether a letter signed by John Wells is genuine.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

As fascination with genealogy and our own family history has become almost a national obsession, this week's programme looks at the historical aspects of what makes up a family and how attitudes to incestuous relationships have shifted over time and throughout cultures. From Ancient Egypt to the nuclear family, from the Victorians and the National Vigilance Association to Jacobean literature, how has incest been defined, discussed, outlawed and - occasionally - even encouraged?

Producer: Alison Vernon-Smith

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Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence explore the historical connections to today's big issues.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Recent political convulsions have revealed a rift between the UK's capital and its regions. So this week Tom and Iszi consider other moments in history when London has been out of sync with the rest of the country - from the Romans to the 1700s. Examining how John Bull came into being and looking at the particular history of Northumbria, they look at the relationship between London and the rest of the UK.

Presenters: Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence

Producer: Alison Vernon-Smith

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Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Alan Wenham contacted Making History after discovering that his grandfather, Leonard, served in the Royal Marines at around the time at around the time of the Murmansk Mutiny of 1919. Could Leonard have been involved? Making History consulted Major (Retired) Mark Bentinck, the Royal Marines historian, at the Naval Historical Branch.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the Murmansk Mutiny with Major Mark Bentinck.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Today - with a resurgence in nationalism from Beijing to Barcelona and with flag-flying dominating the world news, Tom and Iszi look into the origins of this powerful force.

Author, critic and long-time scholar of fairy tales, Marina Warner, recalls regimes who have used them as a political tool for their own sinister ends.

And with the possibility of a second referendum in Scotland being discussed, Tom goes to the spot where Robert the Bruce was buried to consider the challenges of teaching a balanced history curriculum in schools.

Producer: Kim Normanton

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Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence look at the roots of nationalism and how it shaped history.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

~Making History consulted Professor Graham Seal Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Australia, Asia and the Pacific at Curtin University of Technology. Professor Seal explained that Kelly was one of the last bush-rangers, descended from convicts who had escaped into the Outback and who held a grudge against the colonial authorities, not least because of the way that land was distributed among the first settlers.

Vanessa Collingridge investigates the history of a policeman who captured Ned Kelly.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Think of pre-historic art and it's probably the cave drawings in the Ardeche region of France; maybe Lascaux in the Dordogne or Altimira in Spain come to mind. But did you know that here in Britain we have our own, extremely important, examples of what are known as ‘cup and ring' marks? These are concentric rings around one large, cup shaped, indentation picked out of the rock and it was Making History listener Bill Jures from Newhaven in East Sussex that stumbled across them. He was researching his family history in Northumbria and came across the ‘cup and ring' marks of Fowberry Mains to the east of Wooler. His question to Making History was, simply `what are they?` Making History approached Britain's leading experts on the so-called rock-art of Northumbria: Dr Aron Mazel of the University of Newcastle and Stan Beckensall, a former teacher who has devoted forty years of his life to this subject.

According to Stan Beckensall, the rock art of Northumbria is from the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age and unlike the impressive cave art found in France, Spain and South Africa, is entirely abstract.

Lillian Lancaster

Can you help tell us more about a young Victorian cartographer who also had a career on the stage? Peter Barber, the Head of Map Collections at the British Library in London, contacted Making History with a plea for help. Five years ago he bought a collection of political, cartoon maps that had been drawn by someone called Lillian Lancaster. Remarkably, Lillian's first work was published in 1869 when she was only 14 in a book called `Geographical Fun`, published by Hodder and Stoughton and written by William Harvey (who went under the name of Aleph). This was essentially an Atlas, designed in such a way as to encourage youngsters to study and remember maps of the world. Lillian's caricatures include: England in the form of Queen Victoria; Scotland as a gallant Piper struggling through the bogs; Wales in the form of Owen Glendowr; and Russia as a bear. According to Peter Barber, a newspaper cutting describes Lillian as a music-hall artist whose act included sitting on stage and drawing the audience. We also know that her married name was Tennant and for a time she lived in Marine Parade, Brighton. The last record we have for her is in 1912 when she signed her work for someone.

When Did The Great War End?

Tony Green from Ipswich in Suffolk has spent the last few years cycling around the county taking photographs. These are mainly focussed on his passion for beer, but another interest has grown on him through his travels: First World War Memorials. Tony contacted Making History with a question that has puzzled him, `why do some memorials mark the 1914-1918 war and others 1914 - 1919?`

Vanessa Collingridge travelled to Risby in Suffolk (where the memorial marks the 1914-19 war) to meet up with the former County Archivist, Gwyn Thomas, who is an expert on war memorials in Suffolk.

Gwyn Thomas told us that there was no formally agreed plan to the erection of War Memorials. Each community would be honouring their fallen and whereas we think of the 1914-1918 war, their perspective could well have been different. He pointed out that the 11th of November 1918 was the Armistice, the war didn't formally end until the Treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919. Some communities may well have had inhabitants who died of their wounds after November 1918 and the 1919 date was more definite.

Gwyn was the Suffolk co-ordinator for the UK National Inventory of War Memorials which was a project run by the Imperial War Museum. Using its website, you can search the database for all war memorials commemorating all wars throughout the UK.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the Neolithic rock art known as 'cup and ring' marks.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

~Making History listener Janet Bishop contacted the programme to find out more about the circumstances surrounding the death of a great uncle in Hyderabad in 1948. It appears that he was working for a notorious gun runner called Sydney Cotton and got caught up in the Indian invasion code named Operation Polo in September 1948. Making History consulted Dr Taylor Sherman from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Moats

John Murphy runs a successful brewery at St Peter's Hall near Bungay in Suffolk. Like many historic houses in East Anglia, this wonderful 13th century building has a moat. John contacted Making History to find out why? Making History consulted landscape historian Professor Tom Williamson at the University of East Anglia.

Vanessa Collingridge investigates a mysterious death in Hyderabad in 1948.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

As more and more people become interested in making a pilgrimage, Tonderai Munyevu - the star of the play Black Men Walking - joins with members of the British Pilgrimage Trust for a day on the South Downs where they encounter pagans, priests and members of the public. Is a journey into the past a spritual wander or just an excuse for a nice walk?

The cricket season is in full swing and following on from a heavy defeat to the Scots, England now face the Aussies and India in a hectic summer when it seems every cricket playing nation is represented. It's only fifty years since the first overseas players came into the county game and Helen Castor has been meeting with two people who were at the vanguard of this sporting influx - the Barbardian Vanburn Holder and the legendary Indian wicketkeeper Farokh Engineer.

As the longest day passes and the night begin to lengthen again, Tom celebrates the solstice in the most unlikely place and finds out about the role of ancient people in the planning of Milton Keynes.

Producer: Nick Patrick

Tom Holland presents the programme where the past meets the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

This week - power lines. Tom makes a beeline for the Science Museum to find the first ever transatlantic telegraph cable, and discovers a recording of a Paul Robeson concert marking a historic moment in telecommunications.

Iszi goes pylon spotting and hears about a pioneer who helped found the Electrical Association for Women.

Producer: Craig Templeton-Smith

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Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence explore stories revealed by history's lines and linkages.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland visits a fruit-packing factory in Kent where, today, much of the work is done by robots. Their introduction hasn't threatened any jobs yet but, half an hour away, are the villages where, in 1830, rural farmworkers raged against new threshing machines they feared would take away much-needed work in the winter months. Professor Carl Griffin from the University of Sussex explains how the mythical Captain Swing shook the government of the day and terrified landowners in a series of machine-wrecking riots that swept South East England, Wiltshire and East Anglia.

Britain's housing issues have kick-started a boom in a type of home that came to the rescue in the dark days after World War Two, when prefabs offered accommodation for those who were bombed or living in slums. Thanks to a certain Swedish company, we all know about flat-packed furniture but, back in the late 1940s, it was Swedish flat-packed houses that were causing a stir. Architectural writer Jonathan Glancey gives us the low-down on a house that changed lives and is, in some places, still standing.

Producer: Nick Patrick

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Helen Castor on history's forerunners of today's concerns about housing and technology.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A listener thinks that the subject of a famous nineteenth century painting is his ancestor, but what's the painting and what is the story it depicts?

The painting is Remnants of an Army the work of Lady Elizabeth Butler in 1879. It shows an exhausted military surgeon who has just ridden 90 miles through the rough terrain of Afghanistan from the Kabul the Jalalabad - the only British survivor of a terrible defeat for the Empire's army. The surgeon was William Brydon and his was the only first-hand account of a battle in January 1842 at the end of the First Afghan War. Making History consulted the military historian Professor Jeremy Black at Exeter University.

Cornish Coats of Arms

A listener in the Cornish village of Blisland wonders why there is a James I Coat of Arms in his parish church and why there are so many for Charles I and Charles II in the county. Making History asked civil war historian Professor Mark Stoyle from the University of Southampton to become a reporter for the day.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the ancestral history of a famous 19th Century painting.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Could this central figure in Elizabethan politics have been murdered?

A Making History listener notes that Dudley seemed to be alive and busy helping to organise the English land army in preparation from an attack by the Spanish Armada and then suddenly he dies from an illness that no one is quite sure about. Making History turned to our leading authority on Dudley, Dr Simon Adams Reader in History at the University of Strathclyde.

Daniel of Beccles and the Urbanus Magnus

Anne Deed Frith is typical of the many Making History listeners who are absorbed in researching the past of the community in which they live. She lives in Beccles in Suffolk and a couple of years ago whilst reading a book about the Magna Carta she was taken by references to a Daniel of Beccles. No one had heard of him but after a good deal of research she discovered that Daniel was the author of possibly our first book of manners, a twelfth century poem which was quite widely referred to. Four more or less complete Medieval manuscripts survive in Trinity college Dublin, Worcester Cathedral, Gonville and Caius College Cambridge and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

Vanessa Collingridge explores murder within Elizabethan politics.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Where were they, were they ever attacked and who manned them? Vanessa Collingridge travelled to Burgh Castle near Great Yarmouth in Norfolk to talk to Roman historian John Fairclough.

Franco-Prussian War Espionage

Could a listener's ancestor have spied for the British in Paris during the Franco-Prussian war?

Author Terry Crowdy told Making History that the Britsh at the time were not very organised and espionage was something amateurs like Baden-Powell did in their spare time, or while on holiday. It had been that way much since Elizabethan times. Our secret services were not formed until just before WWI, largely as a result of pressure to match the Germans. On the other hand the Prussians (not Germans until after the start of the Franco-Prussian war) were far in advance of anyone else in terms of espionage and had an extensive operation masterminded by Wilhelm Stieber.

Before the war in France kicked off, Stieber had infiltrated the place with thousands of agents. From that point on the German espionage service expanded to the point there was a spy mania in Britain before the Great War. It was well known that Germans worked in hotels all over Europe so they could rifle luggage of important guests. In Berlin, there was even an exclusive brothel where that allowed spies to check out on the clientele.

The level of spying during the Franco-Prussian war impacted on the French relationship with the Germans. In addition to the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, there were stories of atrocities against French partisans. German behaviour in 1914-1918 and 1940-1944 simply reinforced that opinion.

Vanessa Collingridge visits Burgh Castle in Norfolk to talk to historian John Fairclough.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Seventy five years on from the first American bomber raid taking off from British soil to attack targets in Nazi-occupied Europe, poet Sugar Brown hears how the thousands of Yanks who arrived in the UK in 1942 were segregated by race - both when they were in uniform and when they were out on civvy street.

On the eve of the announcement of the Art Fund Museum of the Year, we hear from two retired ladies who, having completed a journey on every London bus route, are now visiting every museum in the capital. Iszi Lawrence asks them what makes a good museum.

Tom Holland meets with the author Peter Frankopan to hear how China's new Belt and Road initiative has its historical roots in the Silk Road which, for a millennium, connected the Korean peninsular and Japan to the Mediterranean Sea.

And as a new TGV line opens to Bordeaux we ask what's 'must-see' in that fabulous city for the historian.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor on race in wartime, China's Belt and Road and what makes a good museum.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

~Making History listener Peter Moore is a member of the Worcester Household, a re-enactment group that focuses on events during the War of the Roses. His character is the 1st Earl of Worcester, Sir John Tiptoft. Tiptoft was a Yorkist, Edward IV's loyal henchman who later earned the title 'butcher of England'. Peter does not deny that Tiptoft was cruel but he points out that he was possibly England's first Renaissance Man, having travelled extensively through Italy. Peter's question for Making History was: 'how could such a cultured man be such a violent one too?'.

William Walker

William Walker, the Winchester Diver.

Bob Rust of Basildon complained that when Making History visited Winchester in October 2007, we didn't talk about William Walker the Winchester Diver. Bob heard the story of how Walker worked underneath Winchester Cathedral shoring up the foundations during the war and he asked us to investigate further.

The Duddeston Viaduct

On Christmas Day 2007, Making History featured Brunel's South Wales Railway to Fishguard. After the programme we were contacted by David Pearson who lives in Birmingham, who told us about the Duddeston Railway Viaduct which spans nearly three quarters of a mile of the area just to the south of the Bull Ring. Built in the 1840's by the Great Western Railway it has never been used and David wanted to know why it was built and why has it remained redundant.

Alison Weir gives some guidance on John Tiptoft to a Midland re-enactment troupe.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

~Making History consulted Dr Elizabeth Hurren, Senior Lecturer in Medicine at Oxford Brookes University. Elizabeth believes that the key to answering this question was the woman's intended destination - York.

Vanessa Collingridge explores 'smothering' with Dr Elizabeth Hurren.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Mark Morris is a member of the Long Compton History Society and he approached Making History to clarify a local rumour. Did Saint Augustine of Canterbury visit the village in the sixth century and if so why?

~Making History consulted the Reverend Professor Matthew Steenberg from Leeds Trinity and All Saints.

The Plague Pits of London

~Making History listener Sally Browne recalls stories from her youth about shrubs marking the spot where plague victims were buried in the City of London. Is this true and what was the extent of the burial sites she asks?

~Making History consulted Justin Champion Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

Vanessa Collingridge investigates the myth of St Augustine at Long Compton, Warwickshire.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

This week - Supply Lines

With supply lines after Brexit so much in the news lately, Tom and Iszi look at historical aspects of getting goods across continents and through barriers, natural and man-made. From Hannibal and his elephants to the surprising origin of just-in-time delivery methods, the programme uncovers the historical origins of modern supply lines.

Presenters: Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence

Producer: Alison Vernon-Smith

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence explore stories revealed by history's lines and linkages.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor heads for Wales and new scientific research telling us much more about what the Romans ate and how far away they had to source their food to feed their armies. Helen's in Newport, not far from Caerleon which was one of only three permanent fortresses in Roman Britain. Here, archaeologists and scientists from Cardiff University are using dental palaeopathology to discover where the animals that were slaughtered for their meat came from. The results suggest that so-called supply chains were as long and involved as they are today.

Also, we cross the Bristol Channel for more food history as reporter Hester Cant tastes the city's vibrant street food culture and discovers just how long its been established in the UK.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland on how Romans fed their legions, and the history of street food.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Former mill workers and members of the Tean and Checkley Historical Society contacted Making History to highlight the discovery of a remarkable architectural feature discovered during the re-development of an old weaving mill. Described as a 'breast hole' it was a crude device to allow women to feed their babies whilst still doing a days work in the mill.

Narbonne 1907

Bill Cronin was surprised by a plaque he saw whilst visiting Narbonne for a short break. It recalls a riot by wine-growers in May 1907 in which 5 people died. The suggestion is that the protest was about the importing of Algerian wine and it laid the foundations for the Appellation system found in France.

~Making History consulted Billy Kay the co-author of Knee Deep in Claret and the author of The Scottish World. He explained that the disturbances in Narbonne came at the end of a period in which the French wine industry, particularly in the Languedoc, had grown considerably.

Vanessa Collingridge explores how working women fed their babies in 1823.

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We travel to Durham to examine the world's oldest piece of environmental legislation, the Charter of the Forest which was made law 800 years ago in 1217.

Tom reveals how travellers from Heathrow may well be taking off from one of the most important Iron Age sites in the UK.

We also hear memories of family holidays from a unique collection in Leicester and reveal how key figures in Russia's October revolution of 1917 met in the East End of London 10 years earlier.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland on the world's oldest environmental charter and Iron Age Heathrow.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland and Dr Matthew Green take a trip down the Thames to Thamesmead, an overspill 'new town' that received its first inhabitants fifty years ago this month, but which is better known as the location used by Stanley Kubrick in his dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange. But was this brutalist solution to London's slum housing doomed from the start, or were some of the ideas of Le Corbusier and those who influenced the design of this place fairly similar to the better accepted work of Ebeneezer Howard and the Garden City movement?

Iszi Lawrence is in Fitzrovia with writer, broadcaster and Victorian historian Kathryn Hughes to find out why the lack of public toilets meant women were so inconvenienced in the Victorian and Edwardian period. What lay behind the then-accepted notion that women shouldn't 'go' in public?

Monks in Leicestershire are brewing up a storm, the first batch of a new Trappist ale. But what's the historic connection between abbeys and brewing?

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor discusses dystopia in Thamesmead and Trappist ale from Leicestershire.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Britain's retreat from Dunkirk in 1940 was a precursor to the fall of France and a summer in which it looked like Britain too would be be overwhelmed by the Nazi war machine. The evacuation of thousands of troops from the beaches of Northern France in an armada of boats of all shapes and sizes has been spun into a defining moment when the plucky Brits snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. But Dunkirk was a disaster. So why don't we remember it as one? As a new film explores this moment of history, we explore the 'Dunkirk spirit' and whether it really existed.

Helen Castor is in Norwich which, it was once said, had a pub for every day of the year and a church for every Sunday. In the Middle Ages, it also seemed to be teeming with anchoresses, anchorites and hermits - people who, with the blessing of the church, withdrew from everyday life but were still on hand to dish out advice to those who wanted it. How important were these people in medieval society and why are we less comfortable with loners and recluses today? Helen is joined at St Julian's in Norwich by Professor Carole Rawcliffe and Dr Tom Licence from the University of East Anglia.

There are archaeological artefacts from all eras. In Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, it is the sweet-wrappers, marbles and toy figures discarded by children in the 1950s and 60s that are adding to our knowledge of the past. In a housing estate that was designed by planners influenced by American ideas from the 1920's, a team from the University of Lincoln is working with the local community to see whether ideas about encouraging play in British housing estates really worked.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Dunkirk, Churchill, hermits and the archaeology of play.

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In Britain's recent past, a long hot summer has often coincided with racial unrest on our streets - 1981 is perhaps the most notable example. But while we remember events in Brixton, Toxteth and Tottenham, have we forgotten the tensions in Southall during the 1960s and 70s which, some argue, paved the way for better race relations in the UK? Lovejit Dhaliwal visits a Heritge Lottery project in Southall re-examining the importance of the town's Youth Movement.

King Edmund of East Anglia lost his life in a period of our history when the country we now know as England was still being defined. He was our patron saint until the 14th century but now he's largely forgotten - and so his is resting place. Historian Dr Francis Young has a hunch that he's still in Bury St Edmunds, not in a church but under a tennis court.

Fifty years ago, a programme that some know as 'dieselisation' reached its climax on Britain's railways and saw the end of steam in public service. Many mourn the passing of steam trains but, as Helen Castor found out on a trip to Swindon, keeping these beasts going was dirty, dangerous and laborious.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland asks if St Edmund is under a tennis court and hears about the end of steam.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

The Dutch Are Coming!

350 years on from a daring Dutch mission up the Thames estuary, in which the flagship of the English fleet was taken and Sheerness captured, we ask whether this was the pinnacle of power for the Netherlands navy and how the international ambitions of both countries in the 17th century may also have helped shaped their response to globalisation today.

Domesday Uncovered.

Helen Castor is deep in the archives at Exeter Cathedral to find out how new research is unravelling some of the mysteries of one of the most famous documents in English and Welsh history, the Domesday Survey of 1086. Remarkably, this priceless historic gem was discovered by historian Stephen Baxter in a dreadful condition a few years ago. Now, splendidly restored, its able to shed some light on how William's great survey was actually achieved and why he did it.

The History of Political Constituencies.

As voters across the United Kingdom prepare to go to the polls, Iszi Lawrence asks Dr Paul Seaward and the team at the History of Parliament to explain the history of our political constituencies, how and why they have changed, and some of the shenanigans that went on in them throughout our electoral past.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland on the 350th anniversary of the Medway Raid and Domesday uncovered.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor visits Coventry where, in 1957, one of the last polio epidemics hit the city. Local people were furious that widespread vaccination wasn't brought in, but the fledgling NHS simply didn't have enough stocks and medical experts were concerned about an American trial that had gone wrong. We learn that the government of the day were worried that Britain was entering a high-tech world without the skills that other countries had and was reluctant to bring in costly medicines from overseas, preferring that we develop our own.

The last time Parliament sat outside Westminster was in 1681, when it went to Oxford for a week. Today, with the government yet to finalise plans for the restoration and repair of the Palace of Westminster, we ask whether history might be made and a decision taken to move the engine of our democracy out to the shires once again, on a temporary basis. What can we learn from that short relocation over 300 years ago.

Top Town History features the home of Magna Carta, Egham, and the former-industrial powerhouse of Bury in Lancashire.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Tom Holland on the Coventry polio epidemic, and when Parliament left Westminster.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

In this programme - The First Draft? After the most tumultuous parliamentary session many can remember, Tom and Iszi meet top journalists to ask whether they consider they are history's first chroniclers. From Today programme newsgatherers to ancient Greek historian Herodotus, the team discuss who really 'makes history'.

Producer: Craig Templeton-Smith

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Tom Holland and Iszi Lawrence are back to explore more historical connections.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Thirty years ago Making History listener Richard Dunning bought a crater in northern France. It had been formed by a huge explosion from an underground mine that heralded the beginning of the Battle of the Somme on July 1st 1916.

Richard has been told that the blast was, at the time, the biggest ever and shook the windows in Downing Street. Making History travelled to France to find out more and consulted the Royal Logistics Museum at Deepcut Barracks in Surrey and the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh. According to records held in Edinburgh the blast at Lochnagar was not measured. However, the one a year later at Messines Ridge was.

Halls of Science

Vanessa Collingridge spoke to Professor Edward Royle from the University of York about the ‘Halls of Science', what he describes as the Wikipedia of the 1830's and 1840's.

Vanessa Collingridge investigates the history of a crater created by an explosion.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A new exhibition at the Barbican in London features the photography of Dorothea Lange who is best known for her coverage of the dust-bowl depression of mid-west America in the 1930s. Many of her now iconic images were actually staged - but does that alter their historical importance? Helen takes in the exhibition with the historian of race in modern America, Dr Melissa Milewski.

The 70th anniversary of the NHS at 70 is being marked across the BBC. In one of the more unusual ideas, Radio 3 are creating a symphony from the sounds that are commonplace in the health service. The inspiration for the piece comes from the 'radio ballads' back in the late fifties and early sixties, produced by Charles Parker and featuring the music of Ewan McColl. Olivette Otele is a French-African historian who had never come across these radio programmes - so what can she glean about life in Britain sixty years ago by listening to them again?

And Tom Holland has a song of the road too. He's in Cambridgeshire, in the middle of Britain's biggest archaeological dig, where the A14 meets the A1 and a new historic landscape is being revealed.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Helen Castor on the photography of Dorothea Lange and the radio ballads of Charles Parker.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A listener asks why the story of a Naval accident in 1782 which resulted in maybe over one thousand people drowning, isn't well known. Making History consulted maritime historian Hannah Cunliffe. She told us that HMS Royal George was the Ark Royal of her day. Built a couple of decades before HMS Victory she was a huge ship for the mid eighteenth century - the biggest the Royal Navy had ever built.

Much Wenlock

Much Wenlock is concidered home of the Modern Olympics. Emma-Kate Lanyon is Curator of Archaeology and Social History at Shropshire County Council and she contacted the programme for help in finding descendents of athletes who performed at the Much Wenlock or Shropshire games in the nineteenth century. Incredibly, it is these games that provided the inspiration for Baron Coubertin to revive the Olympic Games at Athens in 1896.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the sinking of the HMS Royal George.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

~Making History listener Ian Barrett got in touch to question the received story of England's fight with the Spanish Armada. Not least because of the death rate amongst the sailors who fought and how they were neglected when the Spanish fleet had been defeated.

Lord Howard writing to William Cecil in August 1588; ' ... It is a most pitiful sight to see, here at Margate, how the men, having no place to receive them into here, die in the streets. I am driven myself, of force, to come a-land, to see them bestowed in some lodging; and the best I can get is barns and outhouses. It would grieve any man's heart to see them that have served so valiantly to die so miserably...'.

Professor Pauline Croft at Royal Holloway, University of London directly answered Ian's question. Despite the work of Howard and Drake in ensuring that ships were clean and sailors looked after, only half of the casualties were a direct result of combat. However, this was the same in any conflict right up until the nineteenth century, particularly one where men were at sea and away from fresh food for weeks at a time.

Aristotle's Midwife's Vademecum

~Making History listener Rowena Rowling has a copy of this small book which appears to borrow from the work of Aristotle in its advice for midwives in the nineteenth century. However it was probably a so-called 'reproduction'. Many 19th century manuals claimed to have found lost knowledge, adding to our

knowledge of classical texts. Lots were printed in the 19th century for a quick profit. They were very popular in America and this led to them being criticised as being pornographic.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the cleanliness of the Spanish Armada.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor travels to Salisbury Plain to hear more about a growing row between archaeologists and our leading heritage organisations about plans to build a tunnel under Stonehenge. She discovers how, increasingly, it isn't iconic Stonehenge that is at the centre of researchers' thinking but the wider and even more historic landscape.

In Lincolnshire, Carenza Lewis and a team from the University of Lincoln are using archaeology for what some might describe as more pressing questions - how we can tackle the housing crisis and provide green space and places to play. A community project in Gainsborough has been evaluating the success of the 20th Century Garden City Movement by analysing artefacts from a post-war housing estate, to see if people actually exploited the space provided by urban planners.

Chinese President Xi Jinping's Belt and Road initiative is a multi-billion dollar infrastructure project that looks set to transform large swaths of Asia and the world beyond. But, as Tom Holland discovers from Silk Road historian Peter Frankopan, British explorers were eying up the economic possibilities of the isolated frontier near Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan more than 150 years ago.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Digging under Stonehenge, the archaeology of a 1960s estate and China's Belt and Road.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

~Making History listener Sam Wade lives in the Yarrow Valley, south west of Selkirk in the Scottish Borders. Nearby are some standing stones and one in particular intrigues him - could it be the site of one of Britain's earliest Christian burials?

~Making History consulted Rory MacDonald, the archaeologist at Scottish Borders Council, and Dr Dave Petts at the University of Durham.

The Royal Schools of Ulster

Students at the Royal School, Portora in Enniskillen, contacted Making History after they completed a project on the founding of theirs and five other schools by James 1st's Charter in 1608. They wanted more information about how the founding of their school fits in with the history of the Plantation of Ulster and whether or not Catholic children as well as Protestant were allowed to attend.

Dr Jonathan Bardon explained the background to the establishment of the Royal Schools and how they were meant to provide a kind of social cement for the newly arrived 'planters' from England, Scotland and the Isle of Man. They were not intended for Catholic children, just the children of the 'planters'.

Vanessa Collingridge investigates the standing stones in the Yarrow Valley.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

With Syria in turmoil and its largest city battered, Tom Holland is joined by Philip Mansel and Professor Jerry Brotton to discover an age when this place was a cosmopolitan cornerstone of the Middle East.

Helen Castor treks west to find out how men and women tamed the wilderness of North America both on the ground and in popular culture. She talks to Dr Karen Jones from the University of Kent.

Social historian Juliet Gardiner shares her favourite year from history - 1936.

And Dr Catherine Fletcher from the University of Swansea discusses the new breed of 'hashtag historians'.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

The rise and fall of Syria's largest city, Aleppo, and how the Wild West was tamed.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

With the BBC's iconic wartime comedy Dad's Army entertaining cinema goers, Helen Castor sets out to find if this view of a rather amateurish war effort, in which the British won through against the odds, is really true. She's joined by historian James Holland who argues that Britain's military victory came about through science and industrial expertise that was actually well ahead of the Nazi's. She's also joined by Dr Chris Smith from the University of Kent who claims this is true also in the rigorous approach used by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.

In Cambridge, Professor Mary Beard settles by the fire to tell us about the year she thinks is the most important in history - 212AD, a year in which everyone who wasn't a slave received citizenship across the Roman Empire.

In Birmingham, musician David Hinds from the band Steel Pulse is taken back to the streets he grew up on, by the remarkable photographic archive of Janet Mendelssohn. Through her lens, we can see just what it was like to live in one of the new, immigrant communities in places such as Balsall Heath and Handsworth. David is joined by Dr Kieran Connell from Queen's University Belfast who has helped put together a new exhibition at the Ikon gallery in Birmingham.

And - quiet please - is the role of the library about to be shelved in this digital age? Young historian and BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Tom Charlton thinks not. He argues that, for the historian, the library will remain the 'go to' place for new research - however tempting doing it online might become.

Producer: Nick Patrick

Mary Beard's big date, Dad's Army debunked, Black Birmingham on film and library revival.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Brendan and Cathleen Meehan live at Thingwall on the Wirral and they wanted Making History to confirm that the village takes its name from the Viking for a parliament ( a ‘thing'). Making History consulted the biologist Professor Stephen Harding at the University of Nottingham who has just finished a DNA project on the blood lines of old, established families on the Wirral and throughout North West England. He explained that parts of the Wirral were settled by Scandinavian Vikings who were expelled from Dublin in 902AD. He confirmed that Thingwall was indeed a place where elders met to discuss the issues of the day and even suggested where this might have been.

The Woking Invalid Prison

Janice Jelley in Billericay has discovered that two members of her family ended up in the Woking Invalid Prison in the 1870's after being convicted of starving one of their wives to death. Janice wanted to know what an Invalid Prison was?

Vanessa Collingridge investigates Viking history on the Wirral.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

On this feast of Stephen, Tom visits Norwich to find out more about the character who met a violent death and became the first christian martyr. He talks to the choristers who will be singing Good King Wenceslas in the city's grand Norman cathedral over Christmas and the Bishop of Norwich the Rt Reverend Graham James.

Dr Hugh Doherty from the University of East Anglia takes the story of martyrdom on to the 12th century. In Norwich, a city which had no saint, a twelve year old boy called William was found dead just before the feast of Passover. Some pointed the finger of blame for this death at the city's growing Jewish community, accusing them of a ritual murder. Was William a martyr as some in Norwich tried to make him, or was this nothing more than a nasty anti-semitic medieval marketing campaign.

Boxing Day is a time for games and a feast of sport. A football match will be on many people's festive agenda. Journalist Paul Brown has traced festive football back to its Victorian and Edwardian roots and discovered that Everton FC once played no fewer than three games on Christmas Day and Boxing Day!

Finally, a new game - Top Town History. Two Making History listeners go head to head to prove that where they live is best for history. Today, Fort William meets Reading in a battle for the past.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Saint Stephen, martyrdom and an Edwardian feast of festive football.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A Making History listener has noticed differences in the finish to stonework close to the base of the tower of Winchester Cathedral. She contacted Making History to find out whether the finer of the two styles marked the work done after the tower collapsed in 1107?

Vanessa Collingridge met up with Richard Plant from Christie's Education, one of our leading experts on Norman architecture. He explained the background to the Norman Cathedral, how in 1070 a Norman Bishop replaced the Saxon one and the existing Saxon Cathedral was demolished to make way for a building that was to be the biggest in Europe for over one thousand years. Work started in 1079 using stone from the Isle of Wight and it is thought that the bulk of the work was finished by 1093.

Rotuli Hundredorum

Laura Bradd in North Devon came across some Medieval manuscripts called Rotuli Hundredorum from Suffolk which included references to someone who shared her surname. Laura wanted to know what these documents were, who was behind them and what why was this Robert Bradd mentioned?

~Making History consulted Dr David Roffe the co-director of the Sheffield Rolls project. He explained that these documents were Hunderd Rolls from 1275 and that they were part of an inquiry into the abuses of royal and seigneurial bailiffs and officers in the previous ten year or so. Following the civil war in the mid 1260s, central government lost control of local administration and there had been a degree of chaos with officials of all kinds abusing their powers.

The pressure to do something came from below - we have evidence that the inquiry was the result of popular pressure, just about the first indication of a popular political movement. The hundred rolls of 1275 record the complaints made. They are often some of the most colourful records that survive from medieval England.

Robert Bradd was a sub-bailiff in Baberge Hundred in Suffolk. He, with other bailiffs, arrested a certain Coleman le Hen of Stoke by Nayland who was accused of robbery in the view of ‘frankpledge'. Coleman was bound and taken along with two of his cows, a bullock, a mare, and several measures of corn to the house of Robert Langley. Subsequently he was acquitted of the crime but the bailiffs did not return his livestock and grain.

The Women's Timber Corp

James MacDougal from Forestry Commission, Scotland, contacted the programme asking for anyone who either served or had a family member who served in the Women's Timber Corp during the Second World War. These women, known as the ‘Lumber Jills', worked on forestry projects and were part of the bigger Women's Land Army.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the stonework of Winchester Cathedral.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

~Making History consulted the journalist and former Chair of the Women Pilot's Association, Clare Walker who is writing a history of early women pilots `Women with Altitude`; and the author Mary Cadogan.

Winifred Spooner was born in 1900 and didn't get a pilot's licence until 1927. In 1928 she became the first woman to compete in the King's Cup Air Race and in 1929 the first woman to take part in the first International Challenge de Tourisme air race in which 55 aircraft from six countries competed. She won the following awards:

Winner of the Siddeley Trophy for becoming the first aeroplane club aviator to cross the line in the King's Cup Air Race

Winner of the Harmon Trophy as the world's outstanding aviatrix

Vanessa Collingridge finds out who Winifred Spooner was.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Historian Tom Charlton travels to Manningtree in North Essex - the scene, in the 17th century, of a series of witch-trials instigated by the so-called Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins. Hopkins has gained notoriety for these and other brutal acts against women but he is the one who is always remembered - not the victims. Now a local woman, Grace Carter, wants a #MeToo moment so that the women are not forgotten. Professor Alison Rowlands, who studies witchcraft across Europe, joins Tom to help Grace sort out fact from fiction as she plans a monument to this painful past.

The poison attack on the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury caused consternation around the world. Skripal and his daughter were in hospital for weeks and were lucky not to have been killed by the nerve agent used against them. Poisoning seems a very underhand act today but, back in the Middle Ages when knowledge of the natural world was more instinctive, it was commonplace. Indeed, as Iszi Lawrence found out, natural poisons were at the root of medieval medicine.

Our modern world, with its fast roads and industrial farmland, is no place for hedgehogs and their numbers are in serious decline. Perhaps it's the threat to their numbers or the affectionate portrayal of Mrs Tiggy Winkle by Beatrix Potter, but we seem to be very fond of this prickly mammal. Four hundred years ago, things were very different. Hedgehog numbers were healthy but people thought they were witches and hunted them. To find out why, Tom Holland has been spending the night spotting hedgehogs in an Oxfordshire garden with natural history writer Hugh Warwick.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

A #metoo moment for 17th-century witches?

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Tom Holland travels to North Yorkshire and the deserted medieval village at Wharram Percy which archaeologists now believe was the site of a gruesome practice of mutilation in the middle ages. Dr Simon Mays is a human skeletal biologist for Historic England and he noticed some odd marks on human bones recovered at Wharram Percy in the sixties. These bones were found in the middle of the deserted village - not in the churchyard. Simon thinks the marks on them were caused by severe blows made shortly after death - maybe to stop disruptive souls from tormenting villagers again.

Whisky writer Rachel McCormack takes us to another remote and deserted location, the Cabrach between Aberdeen and Inverness. This was the centre of a well-developed, but illegal, whisky distilling industry in the eighteenth century. Although the remote location kept these stills hidden from the revenue men it also made them commercially unviable when whisky production was licensed in the 1820s. The ruined farmsteads in this otherwise untouched environment are the only clues to this tumultuous past.

Dr Vanessa King and Dr Matthew Green show Helen a seedy and brutal history of a night out on London's South Bank, and Dr John McNabb responds to news that Homo Sapiens may be 100,000 older than we once thought.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Medieval mutilation, whisky smuggling and whether humans are getting older.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Vanessa Collingridge visits the North Norfolk coast to find out how a chance find of a hand axe by local beachcomber Mike Chambers could completely change our understanding of when the first Britons roamed our lands.

Cro-Magnon Man

Vanessa Collingridge talks to Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum about evidence for the origins of Cro-Magnon man.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the historical tresures of North Norfolk coast.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

In September 1939 Poland was invaded twice - once by the Nazis and then a few days later by Stalin's Soviet army from the East. Eastern Poland was effectively cleansed and its peoples deported to a life of hard labour in Russia. However, when Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941 their situation changed. Released from the labour camps, over 100,000 half-starved men women and children made the journey south eventually crossing into Persia where those who were fit enough joined up with the Allied armies.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the hisoric Polish walk through wartime Soviet Russia.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Nick Baker put this question to Petra-utta Rau of Portsmouth University.

Germany was an important holiday destination in the thirties. Much cheaper than the UK and easily accessible by boat from Harwich, it was a place that many middle class and a few working class people could afford to visit. So, as well as the well-documented fascination with Nazi Germany in certain quarters of the British aristocracy, there was also a more innocent tourist trade which was heavily exploited by the German propaganda machine. Petra-utta Rau says that Thomas Cook received payments from Goebbels' propaganda ministry from 1934-1937 to help advertise trips to Germany and that in 1937 the 'contribution' was as high as 50,000 Reichsmark to produce a brochure advertising the beauty of the German landscape with seemingly depoliticised images.

Whether or not Mary Johnson's father was aware of the true extent of the Nazi's excesses at this time, though, is difficult to establish. Petra-utta Rau reminded the programme that the Dachau concentration camp was opened in 1933 and in 1937 anyone with just a little understanding of the German language would have understood the signs outside many German towns and cities discouraging Jews from entering.

Vanessa Collingridge explores how Germany was a key holiday destination in the thirties.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

On March 25th, 1911, Baden Powell wrote a letter to the Admiralty asking for permission to establish Sea Scouts as Seamen, and Coast Watchers. Approval was given. Coast Watching was, as far as Baden Powell was concerned, not a 'time-filling' activity, but a real need.

Baden Powell wrote in 1911:

The general scheme of Sea Scouting for Boy Scouts was outlined by my brother Warington Baden-Powell, who although a King's Counsel in Law, is also an old sailor, and has kept up his interest in the sea by spending most of his time sailing when he is not at work in the Admiralty Court. As he possesses the heart of a boy, he is well fitted to explain the aim of Sea Scouting.

Sea Scouting is not necessarily a scheme for turning out a boy as a ready-made sailor with a view to his going to sea. But rather to teach him, by means which attracts him, to be handy, quick and disciplined man, able to look after himself and to help others in danger.

Boat handling, swimming, and saving life in the water can be taught to inland troops just as well as those belonging to the coast...

'When it is possible to get a floating club house ... the sea spirit enters still more into the boy's mind...'

The duties of Sea Scouts were supposed to be non-military - patrolling bridges and telegraph lines against enemy spies, delivering notices/billeting, relief work, guarding estuaries and assisting coast guards. Eventually honours were meted out to scouts injured in the line of duty, which suggests there was some risk involved.

The Reverend Michael Foster is Chair. Of the Scout History Association he argues that the scout movement was militarized at this time, but that we need to see this in the context of the increased militarization of the whole of society, and the pushing of the ethos that it was the duty of every citizen to defend his country.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the role of Sea Scouts in a scheme known as Coastal Watch.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

~Making History listener Martin Coates contacted the programme to ask about a violent crime wave in West Yorkshire in the autumn of 1938. Who was the so-called `Halifax slasher` he asks?

~Making History consulted local historian John Hargreaves who took reporter Nick Baker on a tour of the town to show him where the attacks happened. A number of attacks on men and women by a person with a knife or razor were reported in late November 1938. This how the Halifax Courier reported the case: `Halifax has certainly never had such a manhunt in its history and the hunt, generally is probably unparalleled since the days of the Jack the Ripper scare in Londo

The village of Heacham near King's Lynn in Norfolk has long been associated with the legend of Pocahontas and the first English colony in America, Jamestown Virginia. The story goes that Pocahontas married a Heacham man, John Rolfe, who sailed to the New World a couple of years after the first wave of colonisation in 1607. Some years later, after their marriage, Rolfe brought Pocahontas to Heacham to visit his family and this is recalled by a plaque in the village church and, bizarrely, a preserved mulberry tree stump in the corner of the local council's parks department depot. However, when updating a village exhibition on the story a few years ago, Making History listener Christine Dean tried to find confirmation in the local records that the John Rolfe of Jamestown, Virginia was the John Rolfe of Heacham, Norfolk.

`White Slavery` in the Western Isles

~Making History listener Barney Kinsler recalled a visit to the Rodel Hotel on South Harris in 1966. He remembers some artefacts on the wall of the bar which were described as slave whips, used in the transportation of local people to the American colonies - so-called `White Slavery`. Other stories exist locally about people being taken against their will to work as indentured labour either in the Americas or Indian sub-continent. Making History consulted local historian Bill Lawson who made the point that in an oral or story-telling culture, like that of the Scottish Highlands and Islands, it is very difficult to separate fact from fiction. He believes that most of these stories and the few artefacts linked with them, originate in the islands' maritime heritage - i.e. brought home from travels around the globe.

Vanessa Collingridge explores whether Pohahontas really did live in Heacham, Norfolk.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A Making History listener with an interest in the Eleanor crosses of the late thirteenth century, noticed that the route taken from the place of her death near Lincoln in 1290 to London did not follow the great arterial routes of either Watling Street or Ermine Street. Could this be because those routes were now largely abandoned?

David explained that roads would have been drawn towards new settlements, furthermore, Roman roads often ignored the constraints imposed by landscape and would therefore have been expensive to maintain. Therefore by the thirteenth century parts of these earlier routes may well have been little used and in a state of disrepair. To confirm the difference between the Roman road network and that of the middle ages, David visited the Bodleian Library in Oxford to view one of our earliest maps - the Gough Map. This dates from around 1360 and was bought by a Richard Gough at a sale in 1774 for half a crown.

Monmouth Rebellion

Were rebel soldiers sold as slaves after the Battle of Sedgemoor in July 1685? Making History consulted the author John Tincey who explained that hundreds were transported to the Caribbean and sold to work on the sugar plantations. However, unlike African slaves, they did not lose their identities and their term was limited to 10 years - not a lifetime.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the Roman road network.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

This is the local legend as told to Making History by listener Iain Wood: The town of Dinant, Belgium, has the honour of being the birthplace of Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone. Of course, not only being an accomplished musician, he also needed his skills as a coppersmith to enable him to make the instrument. Dinant, with more than 800 years of coppersmith related trades has also someone else, perhaps a little less renowned but again just as important, (especially for England) to be embraced as a local hero. This man was Lambin Warrin.

In 1226, Warrin participated like many others in his trade, in the creation of religious artefacts for the local schools, churches and monasteries. (the Dinant monastery is where the famous Leffe trapiste beer is made). Kitchenware objects were also made and these were mostly destined for export to England. On one of his trips and having taken his usual place on Portsmouth harbour with 2 of his shipmates, Warrin prepared his merchandise for another day of sales. Early on in the afternoon, King Henry the 3rd arrived with his entourage to admire the market. During his walk-around, the unfortunate King stumbled and fell into the water. Being unable to swim, Warrin dived from his rowing boat to save the King's life.

In Dinant there are records indicating that the Royal Household sent money to Dinant as a thank-you and this money was used to reconstruct part of the local church after a rockslide from the adjacent cliffs. The King also offered the town 4 coats of arms which can be seen to this day in the same churc

A Making History listener came across some iron crosses marking the graves of former patients of the Wickham Psychiatric Hospital at Knowle near Fareham in Hampshire. The asylum was opened in the 1850's and the graveyard is half a mile away from the hospital in a small copse. There are few stone memorials, just iron crosses with numbers and not names on them. `Were all inmates buried like this?` Making History consulted Dr Susan Burt who wrote her PhD thesis on the Wickham Asylum.

Life in London after the Romans

Francis Grew from the Museum of London revealed new finds which point to greater continuity between Roman and Saxon London. These finds are the subject of a new exhibition which is open until the beginning of August.

The extraordinary finds, from an archaeological dig at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, include a stone sarcophagus containing the skeleton of a middle aged Roman man, and exquisite Saxon grave goods. Ranging from AD410 to 600, the finds offer tantalising clues to a previously hidden period in London's history. London's story usually features a ghostly two hundred year silence between the end of Roman Londinium and the settlement of Saxon Lundenwic, further to the west.

The finds going on display at the Museum are challenging archaeologists' long held belief that the two were unconnected. The stone sarcophagus contains a man who died around AD410. His limestone coffin suggests he was a man of considerable wealth and high standing. A kiln for making tiles found near to his grave points to Roman building work, well outside the walls of the city, at the very time when Londinium was falling into ruin. He appears to be a man out of time and out of place.

Captain Pugwash and the Concertina

Has our understanding of the music played on board ship in the eighteenth and nineteenth century been clouded by the music of Captain Pugwash?

~Making History spoke to traditional musician John Kirkpatrick. He confirmed that most music at sea (indeed most traditional singing) was unaccompanied. The concertina would not have been a good instrument on board ship: they are made of wood that swells when it gets damp, leather that is unpredictable and rots when wet and has brass or steel 'free reeds' that either go out of tune quickly or corrodes respectively. Furthermore, the instrument wasn't invented until the 1820's. It was the folk revivalists of the twentieth century who added musical accompaniments to traditional singing.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the history of Wickham Psychiatric Hospital.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A listener asks why there are graves in the village of Denneville near Cherbourg in France marking the deaths of eight British soldiers on the 17th June 1940 - nearly two weeks after the evacuation of Dunkirk. What were they doing there?

~Making History consulted the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the local Mayor and his Deputy in Denneville. Dunkirk wasn't the end of British action on French soil. Thousands of men (some put the number as high as 200,000) remained fighting in pockets inland in a line stretching from Dunkirk in the east to Cherbourg in the west. Added to these were troops from the 1st Armoured Division under General Evans who had been sent to relieve the pressure on the forces stranded on Dunkirk beach; the 52nd Highland Division and the 51st Canadian Armoured Division. With the French army in disarray, the British sorting out the aftermath of Dunkirk, there was a made scramble to escape France and Rommel's advancing German troops.

~Making History tracked down the one survivor of the incident at Denneville at his home in Sheffield. Geoffrey Goodman was only 19 in 1940 and had one of his legs blown off. He regained consciousness in a Southampton hospital but, in recent years with the help of his family, has returned to the place where he lost his comrades. More information at: Normandy 1944/Dennville.

Panomphaeus Cult

A listener in Sheffield wants to know more about the cult referred to in a letter he found bricked up in a wall of his house. Making History consulted professor Ronald Hutton at the University of Bristol who explained the background to similar cults as part of a move against science and the rational - but he had never heard of the Panomphaeus Cult.

Old Welsh in Scotland

A listener in Wales (with a surname that shares his country's name too) asked when the Old Welsh language died out in Scotland.

~Making History consulted Professor Thomas Clancy at the University of Glasgow who explained that the language used in the fringe areas of Britain throughout the Roman and Saxon period and into the early middle ages was more akin to modern Welsh than the English we speak today.

Vanessa Collingridge discovers when the Old Welsh language died out in Scotland.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

A listener who lives in an old hall-house near Maidstone in Kent discovered from old maps that either the area around his house, or the house itself, was once known as ‘Whore's Harbour'. Why such a name in such a tranquil, rural setting he asks?

~Making History consulted Jane Davidson of House Historians and the Centre for Kentish Studies. They explained that it was highly unlikely that prostitutes would have been working so far from a major road or a major centre of population and that it probably goes back to the early Ordnance Survey maps which, for Kent, was in 1801. It could just be that the mapmaker (a Colonel Mudge) misheard the name ‘hall' for ‘whore'. A guess, but the Tithe maps and other local parish records throw up no further clues.

Following on from the search for ‘Whore's Harbour', Vanessa Collingridge paid a visit to the Map Library at the British Library to find out more about the history of mapping and the Ordnance Survey.

Picture Post

Vanessa Collingridge caught up with Sheila Hardy, the widow of Bert Hardy who was a photographer for the Picture Post which closed 50 years ago. She also spoke to Bert's son Michael and Professor Jeffrey Richards of the University of Lancaster.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the mystery behind the place name 'Whore's Harbour'.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Doggerland is the name given to the former landmass in the southern North Sea which connected what we now think of as East Anglia and Kent with France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Now, a team of scientists based at the University of Birmingham have mapped this area of the sea bed using technology developed by the oil and gas exploration industry. The results include 3D graphics which show clearly the landscape that the sea bed of the North Sea now hides. Making History consulted Professor Vince Gaffney at the University of Birmingham and Professor Chris Stringer at the National History Museum.

Vikings in the Med

We tend to think of the Vikings travelling from east to west - but how far south did they get? Making History consulted Professor David Munro Director of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society

British Assault on Finland

~Making History spoke with Dr James Symonds of Archaeological Consultancy and Research at the University of Sheffield about new evidence for a little-known incident in 1854 when a British fleet of (predominantly) paddle steamers attacked the port of Olou in Finland.

This was during the Crimean War and Finland was under Russian rule, the British were attempting to cause a diversion but the paddles of their ships snapped in heavy ice and the only damage done seems to have been to supplies of tar bound for the Royal Navy.

Vanessa Collingridge explores the 3D graphics of the Doggerland.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

The programme came from the Culloden battle site near Inverness in Scotland where the National Trust for Scotland is building a new visitor centre which will be opened in the autumn of 2007.

History of Smoking

In the lead up to the ban on smoking in public places in England on Sunday 1st July (2207), Making History's Nick Baker went to Eton to hear how, in the seventeenth century, boys were punished for not smoking. The thinking was that the owners of tobacco shops did not appear to be susceptible to the plague. Making History consulted Sir Eric Anderson, Provost of Eton; and James Walton, Editor of the Faber Book of Smoking

Vanessa Collingridge explores the history of smoking.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Helen Castor charts the course of the Prague Spring, that period of liberalisation in Czechoslovakia brought in when Alexander Dubcek became leader in January 1968. She hears from those who were there and those who study that period now and asks whether people had any inkling what an extraordinary year it would be.

Alice Taylor introduces a new project which will celebrate the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath in 2020. She explains how fact and fiction were brought together to create the notion of a Scottish nation and a document that would heavily influence the Constitution of the United States.

French Journalist Agnes Poirier leafs through the pages of Our Island Story, the 1905 children's book that some argue not only re-imagined English history but then shaped the world-view of some of our political leaders.

Fresh from the publication of his book of twentieth century diary extracts, Travis Elborough discusses if the diary is dead in the digital post-truth age.

And Iszi Lawrence enlists the help of the world wide web in her search for the origins of the expression 'hair of the dog'.

Producer: Nick Patrick

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

The Prague Spring, a French take on our island story, and historical hangovers.

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.