Dublin Festival of History Podcast
74 episodes - English - Latest episode: 4 months ago -The Dublin Festival of History is an annual free festival, brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with the Dublin City Council Culture Company. The Festival has gained a reputation for attracting best-selling Irish and international historians to Dublin for a high-profile weekend of history talks and debate.
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Episodes
On Behan, On Dublin - in conversation with Peter Sheridan
February 06, 2024 12:39 - 1 hour - 83.6 MBIn this episode from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Peter Sheridan marks the centenary of the birth of the writer Brendan Behan. Raised in Dublin’s north inner city and with strong connections to Dublin’s tenements, Behan is regarded as one of the greatest Irish writers and poets of all time. Sheridan discusses his engagement with the work of Behan and his career more broadly. Peter Sheridan, is a playwright, screenwriter and director. This episode was recorded at 14 Henrietta Stree...
From 8th Amendment to Repeal the 8th - with Mary Muldowney
January 31, 2024 10:27 - 42 minutes - 58.8 MBIn this episode from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Dublin City Council Historian in Residence, Dr Mary Muldowney, will discuss the 40th anniversary of the 8th Amendment to the Constitution, including a comparison with the successful campaign for Repeal of the 8th. The fifth anniversary of that Referendum was on May 25 and the signing of Repeal into law took place on September 18, 2018. This episode was recorded at Central Library on September 28, 2023. The Dublin Festival of Histo...
Harry Kernoff 1900-1974 - in conversation with Kathryn Milligan
January 29, 2024 13:12 - 42 minutes - 58.6 MBIn this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Kathryn Milligan discusses the work of artist Harry Kernoff. Born in London on the 9th of January 1900, Harry Aaron Kernoff was a prolific figure in twentieth century Irish art. Well regarded for his portraiture and landscape painting, Kernoff often focused on the depiction of Dublin, a city with which he became intimately familiar with, after the Kernoff family moved there in 1914. Kathryn Milligan is the author of ‘Painting Dubl...
The evolution of Navan Road - in conversation with Enda Finnan
January 29, 2024 12:57 - 43 minutes - 59.2 MBIn this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Enda Finnan examines the Navan Road parish area and the transformation of the rural community and landscapes of the townlands of Greater Cabragh, Ashtown and Pelletstown from the 1920s to the 1960s. He connects the dots between migration and change of land ownership and development. Enda Finnan is a local resident and historian. This episode was recorded at Cabra Library, on October 12, 2023. The Dublin Festival of History is brou...
Industrious Poor and Rolling Vagabonds - in conversation with Francis Thackaberry
January 25, 2024 14:04 - 43 minutes - 59.7 MBIn this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Francis Thackaberry explores the attitudes and responses to poverty in eighteenth-century Dublin. The citizens of prosperous Georgian Dublin, associated poverty with idleness, disease and moral decay and sought ways to prevent ‘foreign’ vagrants from ‘infesting’ the city. One response was to found Dublin’s first tax-funded workhouse in James’s Street in 1703. Francis Thackaberry is a former teacher, journalist, and arts administra...
May Tyrants Tremble: The Life of William Drennan - with Fergus Whelan
January 24, 2024 14:33 - 43 minutes - 60.4 MBIn this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Fergus Whelan remembers the revolutionary and poet Dr William Drennan (1754-1820). Dr Drennan, a onetime elder of the Dublin Unitarian Church congregation, was born the son of a unitarian minister and made his life’s work the building of ‘a Brotherhood of Affection to Break Down the Brazen Walls of Separation’ which had been erected between ‘Irishmen by Distinctions of Rank, Property and Religious Persuasion’. Fergus Whelan is the a...
Vindicating Dublin: Dublin Corporation and 1924 - in conversation with Aodh Quinlivan
January 23, 2024 13:17 - 46 minutes - 64.4 MBIn this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Aodh Quinlivan illustrates the strained relationship between the Irish Free State and Dublin Corporation, which was central to his recent study. He examines how after the Civil War, the Corporation continued to irritate the central Government and how the dissolution of Dublin Corporation came to be. Aodh Quinlivan is an author and senior lecturer. This episode was recorded at the Mansion House on September 27, 2023. The Dublin Fest...
From Rake to Radical: An Irish Abolitionist - In conversation with Anne Chambers
January 23, 2024 13:13 - 36 minutes - 49.6 MBIn this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Anne Chambers tells us about Lord Sligo - from a youth of hedonistic self-indulgence in Regency England, to a reforming, responsible legislator and landlord, Sligo became enshrined in the history of Jamaica as ‘Emancipator of the Slaves’ and in Ireland as ‘The Poor Man’s Friend’. Anne Chambers is a biographer, novelist, and screenwriter. This episode was recorded at the Central Library, on October 4, 2023. The Dublin Festival of H...
Animals in 20th Century Dublin: In conversation with Ann Marie Durkan
January 23, 2024 13:11 - 40 minutes - 55.2 MBIn this episode, from the Dublin Festival of History 2023, Ann Marie Durkan will introduce the maps she prepared, which locate animals and animal-related businesses in Dublin City in 1911. It provides an insight into how in 1901, 803 Dubliners worked as cattle dealers, drovers, farriers and vets, yet over the course of the 20th century most of these animals, and most of these jobs, disappeared. Ann Marie Durkan is an Irish Research Council funded PhD candidate in Dublin City University. Thi...
Beyond the Wall: East Germany’s rich political and cultural landscape
June 30, 2023 13:28 - 41 minutes - 57.4 MBIn Beyond the Wall, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country. Beginning with the bitter experience of German Marxists exiled by Hitler, she traces the arc of the state they would go on to create, first under the watchful eye of Stalin, and then in an increasingly distinctive German fashion. From the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, to the relative prosperity of the 1970s, and on to the creaking foundations of socialism in the mid-1980s, H...
Uki Goñi to discuss how Nazi War criminals escaped Europe via Dublin
June 30, 2023 13:21 - 53 minutes - 73.3 MBThe large influx of fugitive Nazis and collaborators in post-WWII Argentina created an environment that normalised the presence of such heinous criminals in society and by doing so facilitated the crimes of Argentina’s own genocidal dictatorship in 1976-83. During the research for his book ‘The Real Odessa’ on the escape of Nazi war criminals, author Uki Goñi was surprised to discover that some escaped first to Ireland from where they made their way to Argentina. The Dublin Festival of Hist...
Peter Taylor: Operation Chiffon; The Secret Story of MI5 and MI6 and the Road to Peace in Ireland
June 30, 2023 13:17 - 56 minutes - 77.5 MBOn the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, Peter Taylor tells for the first time the gripping story of Operation Chiffon, MI5’s top secret intelligence operation that helped bring peace to Ireland. The conversation was hosted by journalist Susan McKay. The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
'Monto: Madams, Murder and Black Coddle' by Terry Fagan
May 04, 2023 16:35 - 56 minutes - 78.3 MBMonto: Madams, Murder and Black Coddle chronicles the history and reminiscences in a part of Dublin rich in the memories of its people. Recently republished, this history of the Monto district from Terry Fagan of the North Inner-City Folklore Project draws on rich oral history collections from the area, explaining how Dublin’s Monto came to be, and why it lasted for so long. Terry Fagan is a historian and tour guide with a particular interest in the north inner-city. The Dublin Festival of...
Mary Wollstonecraft and 15 Henrietta Street: By Fergus Whelan
May 04, 2023 15:24 - 42 minutes - 58.4 MBHistorian Fergus Whelan will discuss the life of writer, philosopher, and advocate of women’s rights Mary Wollstonecraft, her impact on the life of Margaret King of 15 Henrietta Street, and the links that bound the two women, even after Wollstonecraft’s untimely death. This talk is a collaboration between 14 Henrietta Street and Na Píobairí Uilleann. The Dublin Festival of History is brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin C...
Dublin v. Cork: A Tale of Two Eighteenth-Century Cities - A Lecture by David Dickson
April 21, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 118 MBDublin City Library and Archive hosts a lecture with David Dickson, titled ‘Dublin v. Cork: A Tale of Two Eighteenth-Century Cities’ To citizens of Dublin, their city has always been unquestionably the most important urban centre in the country. To citizens of Cork, this has never been entirely accepted. In the eighteenth century both cities far outgrew their medieval shells to become major European ports, each with a vastly expanded population. But they remained very different places, Dubl...
LGBTQ+ and Public History - Richard O’Leary, Maurice J Casey and Kate Drinane in Conversation with Sara Phillips
April 19, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 134 MBWelcome to the Dublin Festival of History Podcast, brought to you by Dublin City Council. In this episode from the 2021 Dublin Festival of History, we hear from practitioners who have worked on LGBTQ+ in public history, from grassroots projects to archives and museums. The speakers are Richard O’Leary, Maurice J Casey and Kate Drinane. The moderator is Sara Phillips. The episode was recorded at The Printworks, Dublin Castle on the 10th of October 2021. The Dublin Festival of History is b...
If Ever You Go To Dublin Town - Kathryn Milligan and Nicola Pierce in Conversation with Donal Fallon
April 14, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 115 MBDonal Fallon speaks to two writers who have written recent books on the history of Dublin. In O’Connell Street: The History and Life of Dublin’s Iconic Street, Nicola Pierce explores the people, the history, the buildings and the stories behind the main street in our capital. Kathryn Milligan’s Painting Dublin, 1886-1949: Visualising a Changing City represents the first detailed study of the depiction of Dublin in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. It demonstrates the important role pl...
George III: The Life and Reign of Britain's Most Misunderstood Monarch - Andrew Roberts in Conversation with Lisa Marie Griffith
April 12, 2022 07:00 - 53 minutes - 97.2 MBGeorge III, Britain’s longest-reigning king, has gone down in history as ‘the cruellest tyrant of this age’. Andrew Roberts’s new biography takes entirely the opposite view. It portrays George as intelligent, benevolent, scrupulously devoted to the constitution of his country and (as head of government as well as head of state) navigating the turbulence of eighteenth-century politics with a strong sense of honour and duty. He was a devoted husband and family man, a great patron of the arts ...
The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge and the Murders that Stunned an Empire - Julie Kavanagh in Conversation with Roy Foster
April 07, 2022 07:00 - 48 minutes - 30.8 MBOn a sunlit evening in 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were carried out by the Invincibles, a militant faction of republicans armed with specially-made surgeon’s blades. The murders ended what should have been a turning point in Anglo-Irish relations. A new spirit of goodwill had been burgeoning between Prime Minister William Gladsto...
Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground - Susan McKay in Conversation with Martin Doyle
April 05, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 133 MBTwenty years on from her critically acclaimed book, ‘Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People’, Susan McKay talks again to the Protestant community in Northern Ireland. The book contains interviews with politicians, former paramilitaries, victims and survivors, business people, religious leaders, community workers, young people, writers and others. It tackles controversial issues, such as Brexit, paramilitary violence, the border, the legacy of the Troubles, same-sex marriage and abortion...
Four Killings: Land, Hunger, Murder & Family in the Irish Revolution
March 31, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 126 MBMyles Dungan in Conversation with Catriona Crowe See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Four Killings: Land, Hunger, Murder & Family in the Irish Revolution - Myles Dungan in Conversation with Catriona Crowe
March 31, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 126 MBMyles Dungan’s family was involved in four violent deaths between 1915 and 1922. Jack Clinton, an immigrant small farmer from County Meath, was murdered in the remote and lawless Arizona territory by a powerful rancher’s hired assassin; three more died in Ireland, and each death is compellingly reconstructed in this extraordinary book. Mark Clinton was murdered by a group of agrarian ‘bandits’ who resented his family’s possession of some disputed acres; his killer was tried and executed by t...
Between Two Hells: The Irish Civil War
March 29, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 128 MBAt the end of the Irish War of Independence, Dublin signed an unsatisfactory treaty with London, that amongst other things, required oaths of allegiance to the British Empire. To many this was a price worth paying, but for others it was impossible. Very quickly, in 1922 the country collapsed into a cruel civil war that split organisations like Sinn Fein and the IRA, local communities, and families. It was less devastating than some other European civil wars but it left a ghastly number of d...
Between Two Hells: The Irish Civil War - Diarmaid Ferriter in Conversation with Ronan McGreevy
March 29, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 128 MBAt the end of the Irish War of Independence, Dublin signed an unsatisfactory treaty with London, that amongst other things, required oaths of allegiance to the British Empire. To many this was a price worth paying, but for others it was impossible. Very quickly, in 1922 the country collapsed into a cruel civil war that split organisations like Sinn Fein and the IRA, local communities, and families. It was less devastating than some other European civil wars but it left a ghastly number of d...
Blood & Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871–1918
March 24, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes - 102 MBBefore 1871, Germany was not a nation but an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser, convincing proud Prussians, Bavarians and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France – all without destroying itself in the process? In a unique study of five decades that changed the course of modern ...
Blood & Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871–1918 - Katja Hoyer in Conversation with Roger Moorhouse
March 24, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes - 102 MBBefore 1871, Germany was not a nation but an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser, convincing proud Prussians, Bavarians and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France – all without destroying itself in the process? In a unique study of five decades that changed the course of modern ...
Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth
March 22, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes - 51 MBIain McGregor’s book is a powerful, fascinating, and groundbreaking history of Checkpoint Charlie, the famous military gate on the border of East and West Berlin. East Germany committed a billion dollars to the creation of the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s, an eleven-foot-high barrier that consisted of seventy-nine miles of fencing, 300 watchtowers, 250 guard dog runs, twenty bunkers, and was operated around the clock by guards who shot to kill. Over the next twenty-eight years, at least ...
Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth - Iain MacGregor in Conversation with Jane Freeland
March 22, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes - 51 MBIain McGregor’s book is a powerful, fascinating, and groundbreaking history of Checkpoint Charlie, the famous military gate on the border of East and West Berlin. East Germany committed a billion dollars to the creation of the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s, an eleven-foot-high barrier that consisted of seventy-nine miles of fencing, 300 watchtowers, 250 guard dog runs, twenty bunkers, and was operated around the clock by guards who shot to kill. Over the next twenty-eight years, at least ...
The Best Catholics in the World
March 17, 2022 08:00 - 48 minutes - 44.6 MBWhen Dubliner Derek Scally goes to Christmas Eve Mass on a visit home from Berlin, he finds more memories than congregants in the church where he was once an altar boy. Not for the first time, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland brings to mind the fall of another powerful ideology – East German communism. While Germans are engaging earnestly with their past, Scally sees nothing comparable going on in his native land. So he embarks on a quest to unravel the tight hold the Church ha...
The Best Catholics in the World - Derek Scally in Conversation with Rachael English
March 17, 2022 08:00 - 48 minutes - 44.6 MBWhen Dubliner Derek Scally goes to Christmas Eve Mass on a visit home from Berlin, he finds more memories than congregants in the church where he was once an altar boy. Not for the first time, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland brings to mind the fall of another powerful ideology – East German communism. While Germans are engaging earnestly with their past, Scally sees nothing comparable going on in his native land. So he embarks on a quest to unravel the tight hold the Church ha...
Fallen Idols: 12 Statues That Made History
March 15, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes - 50.8 MBIn 2020, statues across the world were pulled down in an extraordinary wave of global iconoclasm. From the United States and the United Kingdom to Canada, South Africa, the Caribbean, India, Bangladesh, and New Zealand, Black Lives Matter protests defaced and hauled down statues of slaveholders, Confederates, and imperialists. Edward Colston was hurled into the harbour in Bristol, England. Robert E. Lee was covered in graffiti in Richmond, Virginia. Christopher Columbus was toppled in Minne...
Fallen Idols: 12 Statues That Made History - Alex Von Tunzelmann in Conversation with Hugh Linehan
March 15, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes - 50.8 MBIn 2020, statues across the world were pulled down in an extraordinary wave of global iconoclasm. From the United States and the United Kingdom to Canada, South Africa, the Caribbean, India, Bangladesh, and New Zealand, Black Lives Matter protests defaced and hauled down statues of slaveholders, Confederates, and imperialists. Edward Colston was hurled into the harbour in Bristol, England. Robert E. Lee was covered in graffiti in Richmond, Virginia. Christopher Columbus was toppled in Minne...
The Darkness Echoing: Exploring Ireland's Places of Famine, Death and Rebellion
March 10, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes - 50.7 MBIreland is a nation obsessed with death. We find a thrill in the moribund, a strange enchantment in the drama of our dark past. It’s everywhere we look and in all of our beloved myths, songs and stories that have helped to form our cultural identity. Our wakes and ballads, our plays and famine sites, all of them and more come together to tell ourselves and the world who we are and what we have suffered to get here. Always fascinated by the Irish preoccupation with death and the rituals aro...
The Darkness Echoing: Exploring Ireland's Places of Famine, Death and Rebellion - Gillian O’Brien in Conversation with Michael Staunton
March 10, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes - 50.7 MBIreland is a nation obsessed with death. We find a thrill in the moribund, a strange enchantment in the drama of our dark past. It’s everywhere we look and in all of our beloved myths, songs and stories that have helped to form our cultural identity. Our wakes and ballads, our plays and famine sites, all of them and more come together to tell ourselves and the world who we are and what we have suffered to get here. Always fascinated by the Irish preoccupation with death and the rituals aro...
Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance - Stephan Malinowski in conversation with Robert Gerwarth
March 08, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes - 50.9 MBIn the annals of the Third Reich, little has been said about the role played by the German nobility in the Nazis’ rise to power. Nazis and Nobles now fills this gap, providing the first systematic investigation of the role played by the nobility in German political life between Germany’s defeat in the First World War in 1918 and the consolidation of Nazi power in the 1930s. As Stephan Malinowski shows, the German nobility was too weak to prevent the German Revolution of 1918 but strong enou...
Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance
March 08, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes - 50.9 MBIn the annals of the Third Reich, little has been said about the role played by the German nobility in the Nazis’ rise to power. Nazis and Nobles now fills this gap, providing the first systematic investigation of the role played by the nobility in German political life between Germany’s defeat in the First World War in 1918 and the consolidation of Nazi power in the 1930s. As Stephan Malinowski shows, the German nobility was too weak to prevent the German Revolution of 1918 but strong enou...
1920: Countdown To Partition
March 23, 2021 08:30 - 59 minutes - 54.4 MBThe 1921 partition of Ireland had huge ramifications for almost all aspects of Irish life and was directly responsible for hundreds of deaths and injuries, with thousands displaced from their homes and many more forced from their jobs. Two new justice systems were created; the effects on the major religions were profound, with both jurisdictions adopting wholly different approaches; and major disruptions were caused in crossing the border, with invasive checks and stops becoming the norm. V...
Dead Famous: an unexpected history of celebrity
March 19, 2021 08:30 - 1 hour - 59.1 MBCelebrity, with its neon glow and selfie pout, strikes us as hypermodern. But the famous and infamous have been thrilling, titillating, and outraging us for much longer than we might realise. In this ambitious history, that spans the Bronze Age to the coming of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Greg Jenner assembles a vibrant cast of over 125 actors, singers, dancers, sportspeople, freaks, demigods, ruffians, and more, in search of celebrity’s historical roots. In this episode from the 2020 Dublin Fe...
V2
March 16, 2021 08:30 - 57 minutes - 52.7 MBOn the brink of defeat, Hitler commissioned 10,000 V2s - ballistic rockets that carried a one-ton warhead at three times the speed of sound, which he believed would win the war. Dr Rudi Graf who, along with his friend Werner von Braun, had once dreamt of sending a rocket to the moon, now finds himself in November 1944 in a bleak seaside town in Occupied Holland, launching V2s against London. Kay Caton-Walsh, an officer in the WAAF, has experienced first-hand the horror of a V2 strike. When ...
House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family
March 12, 2021 08:30 - 58 minutes - 53.6 MBAfter her grandmother died, Hadley Freeman travelled to her apartment to try and make sense of a woman she’d never really known. When Hadley found a shoebox filled with her grandmother’s treasured belongings, it started a decade-long quest to find out their haunting significance and to dig deep into the extraordinary lives of Sala Glass and her three brothers. The search takes Hadley from Picasso’s archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island and to Auschwitz....
Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends
March 09, 2021 08:30 - 58 minutes - 53.8 MBIn the years just before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people from across the political spectrum in Europe and America celebrated a great achievement, felt a common purpose and, very often, forged personal friendships. Yet over the following decades the euphoria evaporated, the common purpose and centre ground gradually disappeared, extremism rose once more and eventually - as this book compellingly relates - the relationships soured too. Anne Applebaum traces this history in an un...
The Hitler Years ~ Disaster 1940-1945
March 05, 2021 08:30 - 1 hour - 57.6 MBAt the beginning of 1940 Germany was at the pinnacle of its power. By May 1945 Hitler was dead and Germany had suffered a disastrous defeat. Hitler had failed to achieve his aim of making Germany a super power and had left her people to cope with the endless shame of the Holocaust. In The Hitler Years ~ Disaster 1940-1945, Professor Frank McDonough charts the dramatic change of fortune for the Third Reich, and challenges long-held accounts of the Holocaust and Germany's ultimate defeat. In ...
The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive
March 02, 2021 08:30 - 1 hour - 56.4 MBIn The Ratline, his riveting real-life thriller, Philippe Sands offers a unique account of the daily life of senior Nazi SS Brigadefuhrer Otto Freiherr von Wachter and his wife, Charlotte. Drawing on a remarkable archive of family letters and diaries, he unveils a fascinating insight into life before and during the war, as a fugitive on the run in the Alps and then in Rome, and into the Cold War. In this episode Philippe Sands talks about The Ratline with UCD's Professor Robert Gerwarth. Th...
Bloody Sunday: the day that shook Dublin
November 19, 2020 13:16 - 1 hour - 63.4 MBAt 9am on the morning of 21 November 1920, Michael Collins’ IRA gunmen killed 15 suspected British intelligence officers at various sites across Dublin City. In the afternoon Crown forces opened fire on the crowd at a Dublin v Tipperary Gaelic football match in Croke Park killing 14 people, including 3 children and a Tipperary player. John Borgonovo and Michael Foley discuss the events of a day that changed Ireland forever. Author of The Bloodied Field, which tells the story of what happe...
Writing the History of 20th Century Europe
August 11, 2020 07:30 - 1 hour - 57.1 MBIn 1914 a civilization that had blandly assumed itself to be a model for the rest of the world had collapsed into a savagery beyond any comparison. In 1939 Europeans initiated a second conflict that managed to be even worse, a war in which the killing of civilians was central and which culminated in the Holocaust. We are delighted to welcome one of Britain’s greatest historians to discuss what it meant for the Europeans who initiated and lived through such fearful times. The episode was reco...
Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain
August 07, 2020 07:30 - 1 hour - 57.6 MBThe battered and exhausted Britain of 1945 was desperate for workers – to rebuild, to fill the factories, to make the new NHS work. From all over the world, thousands of individuals – including many Irish emigrants – took the plunge. Most assumed they would spend just three or four years in the UK, sending much of their pay back home, but instead large numbers stayed and transformed the country. Recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 1st October 2017. Clair Wills teaches at Princeton Uni...
The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution
August 04, 2020 07:30 - 1 hour - 64.9 MBThe Last of the Tsars is a masterful study of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All the Russias, a man who was almost entirely out of his depth, perhaps even willfully so. It is also a compelling account of the social, economic and political foment in Russia in the aftermath of Alexander Kerensky’s February Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the beginnings of Lenin’s Soviet republic. The episode was recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 1st October 2017. Robert S...
Dublin Festival of History Question Time
July 31, 2020 07:30 - 59 minutes - 54.2 MBOur expect panel answer questions from the audience on a whole range of historical topics,with Joe Duffy keeping order, recorded at Printworks, Dublin Castle, on 1st October 2017. Catriona Crowe is former head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland. In 2016 she presented the RTE documentary Life Before the Rising . Donal Fallon is a Dublin-based historian, publisher of the Three Castles Burning podcast, and worked as an Historian in Residence with Dublin City Council. Dr ...
The Russian Revolution Debate
July 28, 2020 07:30 - 1 hour - 62.2 MBIn its centenary year the sheer apocalyptic scale of the Russian Revolution seems almost to defy comprehension. What began as a challenge to the decadence and complacency of the Romanov dynasty ended up in the slaughter of millions and the subjugation of an entire people. History has consigned the revolution to the tomb and celebrated its death but what, if anything, remains of the elevated goals and ideals which inspired it? Was the poison of Stalinism in Bolshevism from the beginning? Can ...
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
July 24, 2020 07:30 - 57 minutes - 53 MBThe Darkening Age tells the story of how, between the 2nd and 6th centuries AD, the Christians of the late Roman Empire set out deliberately to destroy all the books, knowledge and temples of the ancient Roman and Greek worlds, killing pagan priests, burning libraries and erasing the wisdom of ages. All the great works that survived and prompted the Renaissance had to be translated back into European languages many centuries later from Arabic libraries. The Darkening Age brilliantly illumina...