In a world that is constantly awake, illuminated and exposed, there is much to gain from looking into the darkness of times past. Avner Wishnitzer's As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark (Cambridge University Press, 2021) gives a fascinating and vivid picture of nocturnal life in Middle Eastern cities shows that the night in the eighte ... Show More
Jan 30
Najati Sidqi, "Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist: The Secret Life of Najati Sidqi" (U Texas Press, 2025)
In the public eye, Najati Sidqi was known as a journalist and writer, a translator of Russian classics, and an outspoken opponent of Nazism. However, Sidqi concealed a critical component of his life from the world and his family. He was an underground activist for the Palestinian ... Show More
25m 54s
Jan 29
Yossef Rapoport, "Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Today, much of the Middle East is “Arab”—an identity that now extends across North Africa and up through the Near East to Syria. Yet how did this region become Arab? How did this identity spread? Was it due to migration, or conquest? Historian Yossef Rapoport, in his book Becomi ... Show More
41m 38s
Jan 26
Adam Bursi, "Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
Adam Bursi’s Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam (Edinburg University Press, 2024) uses writings by early Muslims to map a history of material objects, relics, and tombs of prophetic figures as they were conceptualized in the 8th and 9th centuries. The ... Show More
56m 59s
Nov 2023
The Rise of Constantinople with Bettany Hughes
<p>The city of Constantinople, founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine in 324 AD, was a glittering jewel in the eastern Mediterranean for more than a thousand years. Its dazzling cathedrals, ambitious emperors and mixing pot culture were the stuff of legend throughout Christendo ... Show More
39m 35s
Aug 2023
The Assassination of Orléans: The Rise & Fall of a Medieval Detective
On the eve of the worst winter for over a century and with France on the brink of war with the English, the 1400s in Paris were a tumultuous period. With a mentally unstable king and a collection of dukes, lords and nobles all vying for power in the background, catastrophe was on ... Show More
1h 5m
Feb 2020
The Phantom Dark Age Pt. 2
In the late 1980s, historical revisionist, Heribert Illig recognized a massive discrepancy in our calendar. Illig began to construct his Phantom Time Hypothesis in an effort to prove that Otto III fabricated 297 years of history, therefore explaining why the Dark Ages were so dar ... Show More
44m 27s
Apr 2023
281. Expériences de guerres civiles, avec Jérémie Foa et Quentin Deluermoz
Emission enregistrée à la BIS (Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, salle Jacqueline de Romilly) le 29 mars 2023 dans le cadre des “Nocturnes de l’histoire” Les invités : Jérémie Foa, MCF à l’université Aix-Marseille, et Quentin Deluermoz, professeur à l’université Paris-Cité. Le livre : ... Show More
57m 16s
May 2024
A Shot in the Dark: The Hammersmith Ghost of 1804
In the last twenty-five years, ghost hunting has entered something of a golden age, with all sorts of technology playing its part and filling up an investigators kit bag. Cameras, EMF metres, InfraRed thermometers and spirit boxes all help to carve a science out of a difficult pr ... Show More
52m 15s