Latest Counterfactual Podcast Episodes
AH 12 Opening the iron curtain - the DDR's day of dissent
Almost History - July 12, 2018 04:00 - 19 minutes ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsIt’s the summer of 1953, and, across East Germany, angry people take to the streets. This isn’t a polite street protest. This is a furious, red flag ripping, police beating, office burning rampage. The crowds demand: - better living conditions; - the reunification of Germany; and - f...
AH 11 Operation Unthinkable - Churchill's plan to attack Russia and start a Third World War
Almost History - June 15, 2017 04:00 - 23 minutes ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsAccording to Field Marshal Montgomery, rule number one on the first page of the book of war is ‘do not march on Moscow’. In April 1945, Winston Churchill ordered the British Chiefs of Staff to rip up the rule book and plan for an attack on their wartime ally, Russia. It was audacious, inconceiva...
AH 10 Louis of England - history’s forgotten King of England
Almost History - June 01, 2017 04:00 - 23 minutes ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsIn August of 1216, the King of Scotland rode down the entire length of England to pay homage to a new English king at Dover. The Scottish monarch bent his knee to a warrior prince who was the pride and hope of his dynasty. His name was Louis and he was the eldest son of the King of France. ...
AH 09 Princess Mary Tudor's flight to freedom
Almost History - May 18, 2017 04:00 - 21 minutes ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsIn the summer of 1550, Princess Mary, the eldest daughter of Henry VIII, was packing her belongings and preparing to flee her home. Her Tudor brother was the figurehead for an increasingly Protestant regime. Mary clung to her mother's Catholicism. She feared for her life and, as the pressure o...
AH 08 Cancelling Christmas and the Plum Pudding Riots
Almost History - May 11, 2017 04:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsIn 1647, the new puritan government tried to cancel Christmas. People in Canterbury protested in a peculiarly English way, with a destructive game of football followed by a mass brawl. The city’s Plum Pudding Riots led to a royalist revolt throughout Kent and the second round of the Civil War...
AH 07 The Prince of Poyais - settling in the country that never was
Almost History - May 05, 2017 04:00 - 22 minutes ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsIn 1822, Gregor MacGregor committed what The Economist newspaper has called the ‘biggest fraud in history’ and ‘the greatest confidence trick of all time’. Investors, many of them Scottish, put forward vast sums towards creating a colony in central America. They were told it was a sure bet, a la...
AH 06 A wonderful paradise on the Isthmus of Panama
Almost History - April 27, 2017 04:00 - 18 minutes ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsTowards the end of the seventeenth century, Scotland sank a huge chunk of its national wealth into an audacious scheme to colonise central America. become a more equal partner with England under the Stuart crown. The colony was to straddle the Isthmus of Panama at the Gulf of Darién. It would c...
AH 05 Roosevelt's third term and the voice from the sewers
Almost History - April 21, 2017 04:00 - 17 minutes ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsIn the first half of 1940 only one question mattered in American politics. Would Franklin D. Roosevelt break with tradition and run for a third term as President of the United States? The New York Times proclaimed it as 'the all-absorbing political riddle'. Roosevelt kept the country guessing r...
AH 04 The British Hindenberg disaster and the demise of Imperial Airships
Almost History - April 13, 2017 04:00 - 22 minutes ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsImperial Airships would bring the far flung peoples of the British Empire closer together than ever before. Every day, blimps would slip their masts near London carrying passengers and freight bound for Montreal, Cairo, Karachi, Singapore and Sydney. Journeys that had once been measured in mont...
AH 04 The British Hindenberg disaster and the demise of Imperial Airships
Almost History - April 13, 2017 04:00 - 22 minutes ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsImperial Airships would bring the far flung peoples of the British Empire closer together than ever before. Every day, blimps would slip their masts near London carrying passengers and freight bound for Montreal, Cairo, Karachi, Singapore and Sydney. Journeys that had once been measured in mont...
AH 03 Hitler’s dreams to unify his empire with a monstrous railway
Almost History - April 07, 2017 04:00 - 16 minutes ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsIn 1941, Adolf Hitler issued orders to Nazi Germany’s railway officials. He wanted them to develop a new type of railway. It was to be bigger, far bigger, than anything that had ever been seen. Trains the height and width of a suburban house and the length of the Empire State Building would hu...
AH 01 Achtung! Achtung! Dystopian adventures with Nazi TV
Almost History - April 06, 2017 04:00 - 15 minutes ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsWhat if … ... Nazi Germany had been able to roll out the television equivalent of its inescapable radio network? Everywhere you turn, you see the unmistakable face of Adolf Hitler. His voice echoes in your head, broadcast from a thousand loudspeakers. His wild, gesticulating speech is reachin...
AH 02 Draining the swamp -Garibaldi's plan to diver Rome's river
Almost History - April 06, 2017 04:00 - 13 minutes ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsIn 1875, Rome came close to losing its river.In that year, the liberator of Italy, General Giuseppe Garibaldi, visited and announced plans to clean up the Eternal City. His main target was the River Tiber. Garibaldi would solve problems from pollution to flooding by diverting the river and comp...
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