Listen Now

Dublin 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, Dublin the political centre and a ‘court city’, Cork the commercial centre and a ‘merchant city’. Does this explain why in the tumultuous politics of the 1790s things turned out so very differently in the two cities? 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome 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 brought to you by Dublin City Council, and organised by Dublin City Libraries, in partnership with Dublin City Council Culture Company. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Donal 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 played by the portrayal and experience of urban life, a role shaped by huge historical, political, and social change. 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

George 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 and sciences, keen to advance Britain’s agricultural capacity (‘Farmer George’) and determined that her horizons should be global. He could be stubborn and self-righteous, but he was also brave, brushing aside numerous assassination attempts, galvanising his ministers and generals at moments of crisis and stoical in the face of his descent – five times during his life – into a horrifying loss of mind. Andrew Roberts is a biographer and historian of international renown. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, and the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Lisa Marie Griffith is author of ‘Dublin: Then and Now’ and ‘Stones of Dublin: A History of Dublin in Ten Buildings’ and has published a number of essays on Dublin history. She is co-editor of two edited collections of essays, ‘Leaders of the City: Dublin’s first citizens, 1500–1950’ and ‘Death and Dying in Dublin: 1500 to the Present’. 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On 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 Gladstone and Ireland’s leader Charles Stewart Parnell, with both men forging in secret a pact to achieve peace and independence in Ireland – with the newly appointed Cavendish, Gladstone’s protégé, to play an instrumental role. The impact of the Phoenix Park murders was so cataclysmic that it destroyed the pact, almost brought down the government and set in motion repercussions that would last long into the twentieth century. Julie Kavanagh is a renowned journalist, former New Yorker London editor, former arts editor of Harpers & Queen and Costa Biography Award finalist. Roy Foster is a distinguished Irish historian and academic. He was the Carroll Professor of Irish History from 1991 until 2016 at Hertford College, Oxford. 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Twenty 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, RHI, and the possibility of a United Ireland, and explores social justice issues and campaigns, particularly the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights. Susan McKay is an award-winning writer and commentator and contributes regularly to print and broadcast media, including Guardian/Observer, New York Times, Irish Times and London Review of Books. Martin Doyle is Books Editor of the Irish Times. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Myles 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 the dead man’s relatives and comrades in the Meath IRA. A mentally challenged youth was shot as an informer by another relative of Dungan’s, and buried in secrecy and silence. Myles Dungan’s book, focused on one family, offers an original perspective on this still controversial period: a prism through which the moral and personal costs of violence, and the elemental conflict over land, come alive. Myles Dungan is an Irish broadcaster and author. He has presented many arts programmes on RTÉ Radio, and has also been a sports broadcaster on RTÉ Television. Since October 2010 he has been the presenter of “The History Show” on RTÉ Radio One. Catriona Crowe is one of Ireland’s leading historians and commentators. She was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2012. 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

At 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 dead, injured and immiserated across Ireland, north and south. And it cast a long shadow across Ireland. Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, the two parties that grew out of the rival factions, have ruled Ireland since the end of the civil war. It was only in 2019 – almost a century after the conflict – because of Sinn Fein’s electoral success that the two parties could see their way to officially working together. Drawing on completely new sources, Ireland’s most brilliant historian shows how important this tragic war was for understanding Ireland now. Diarmaid Ferriter has been Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD since 2008. He is a weekly columnist for The Irish Times and in March 2019, was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Ronan McGreevy is a news reporter with The Irish Times.  He is the editor of ‘Centenary, Ireland Remembers 1916’, the official State book recalling the commemorations of 2016. 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Before 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 history, Katja Hoyer tells the story of the German Empire from its violent beginnings to its calamitous defeat in the First World War. It is a dramatic tale of national self-discovery, social upheaval and realpolitik that ended, as it started, in blood and iron. Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian specializing in modern German history. She was born in East Germany and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London . Roger Moorhouse began his writing career working for Professor Norman Davies and has since written several highly successful books on aspects of the Third Reich. 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Iain 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 five thousand people attempted to smash through it, swim across it, tunnel under it, or fly over it. In November 1989, the East German leadership buckled in the face of a civil revolt that culminated in half a million East Berliners demanding an end to the ban on free movement. The world’s media flocked to capture the moment which, perhaps more than any other, signaled the end of the Cold War. Checkpoint Charlie had been the epicenter of global conflict for nearly three decades. Iain McGregor is a successful editor of non fiction for major publishing houses, working with talented and bestselling historians such as Michael Wood, Sir Simon Schama, William Taubman, Alice Roberts and John Nichol – as well as publishing tie-ins with archives and podcasts such as the Imperial War Museum and R4’s ‘In Our Time’ series with Melvyn Bragg. He is also a writer and public speaker on modern history and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Jane Freeland is a historian of feminism and gender in modern Germany at the German Historical Institute London. 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

When 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 had on the Irish. The Best Catholics in the World is the remarkable result of his three-year journey. With wit, wisdom and compassion Scally gives voice and definition to the murky and difficult questions that face a society coming to terms with its troubling past. It is both a lively personal odyssey and a resonant and gripping work of reporting that is a major contribution to the story of Ireland. Derek Scally has written for the Irish Times since 2000. He is based in Berlin. The Best Catholics in the World is his first book. Rachael English is a journalist and writer. She is presenter of Morning Ireland on RTÉ Radio 1. Her latest book, The Paper Bracelet, is published by Hachette UK. 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 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 Minnesota, beheaded in Massachusetts, and thrown into a lake in Virginia. King Leopold II of the Belgians was set on fire in Antwerp and doused in red paint in Ghent. Winston Churchill was daubed with the word ‘racist’ in London. Statues are one of the most visible – and controversial – forms of historical storytelling. The stories we tell about history are vital to how we, as societies, understand our past and create our future. Fallen Idols looks at twelve statues in modern history. It looks at why they were put up; the stories they were supposed to tell; why those stories were challenged; and how they came down. Alex von Tunzelmann is a historian and screenwriter. She is the author of five books on Cold War politics and cultural history, most recently Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History. Hugh Linehan is Culture Editor with the Irish Times. 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Ireland 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 around it, Gillian sets out to explore this intriguing habit of ours, to be compelled to celebrate the macabre and relish the darkness of own mortality. In The Darkness Echoing she tours Ireland to find our most haunted and fascinating historical sites, to discover the stories behind them and reveal what they say about Ireland as a nation. Dr Gillian O’Brien is a Reader in Modern Irish History at Liverpool John Moores University. She is the author of Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago. Michael Staunton is a medieval historian and Associate Professor of History at University College Dublin. 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 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 enough to take an active part in the struggle against the Weimar Republic. In this skilful portrait of an aristocratic world that was soon to disappear, Malinowski gives us for the first time the in-depth story of the German nobility’s social decline and political radicalization in the inter-war years. Stephan Malinowski teaches Modern European History at the University of Edinburgh. Born and raised in Berlin, he is one of Germany’s leading experts on the history of the German nobility in the 20th century. Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at UCD and Director of its Centre for War Studies. This event was organised in collaboration with the Holocaust Education Trust Ireland. 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The 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. Very little has been written on the actual effects of partition, the-day-to-day implications, and the complex ways that society, north and south, was truly and meaningfully affected. Cormac Moore's Birth of the Border: The Impact of Partition in Ireland is the most comprehensive account to date on the far-reaching effects of the partitioning of Ireland. In this episode author and Dublin City Council historian-in-residence Cormac Moore explains how the partition of Ireland in 1920 came about. The questions are asked by Deputy City Librarian Brendan Teeling and episode was recorded via Zoom on the 3rd October 2021. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Celebrity, 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 Festival of History, public historian, broadcaster, and author Greg Jenner talks about his book Dead Famous: an unexpected history of celebrity. The episode is moderated by author and journalist Anna Carey and was recorded via Zoom on the 1st October 2021 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On 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 160 Londoners, mostly women and children, are killed by a single missile, the government decides to send a team of WAAFs to newly-liberated Belgium in the hope of discovering the location of the launch sites. But not all the Germans have left and Kay finds herself in mortal danger. In this episode best-selling author Robert Harris returns to the Festival to talk about his book V2, the story of the deadliest rockets of the Second World War. The episode is moderated by journalist and broadcaster Edel Coffey and was recorded via Zoom on the 27th September 2020 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

After 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. A moving memoir following the Glass siblings throughout the course of the 20th century as they each make their own bid for survival, House of Glass explores assimilation, identity and home – issues that are deeply relevant today. In this episode journalist and author Hadley Freeman discusses her book ‘House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family'. The episode is moderated by journalist Sarah Carey and was recorded via Zoom on the 25th September 2020. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 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 unfamiliar way, looking at the trajectories of individuals caught up in the public events of the last three decades. When politics becomes polarized, which side do you back?  In this episode Anne Applebaum returns to the Festival to talk about her book Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends. Anne is in conversation with Paschal Donohue, TD, Ireland's Minister for Finance and President of the EuroGroup. The questions are asked by Deputy City Librarian Brendan Teeling, and the episode was recorded via Zoom on the 3rd October 2021. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

At 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 this special episode historian Professor Frank McDonough returns to the Festival to talk about his book The Hitler Years: Disaster 1940-1945, the second volume in his history of the Third Reich. Frank is in conversation with actor, and voice of the audiobook, Paul McGann. The episode was recorded via Zoom on 4th December 2021. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.