The Tudor State
In Our Time: History
10/26/00
•42m
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Melvyn Bragg and guests discusses the Tudor State. In 1485 Henry Tudor slew Richard III and routed his army at The Battle of Bosworth Field. It was a decisive victory which founded a bold new dynasty; and this date like 1789 and 1066 has been taken by historians to be one of the great ‘year zeros’ of history: Suddenly the muddled Medieval World with its robber barons, feudal barbarism and bloody Wars of the Roses was banished, and the modern age of centralised government and King’s Justice was ushered in. But were the Tudors as instrumental in reshaping the British state as historians have liked to make out, and did their reign throughout the 16th century really lay the political foundations of our own age? With John Guy, Professor of Modern History, University of St Andrews; Christopher Haigh, Tutor of Modern History at Christ Church College, Cambridge; Christine Carpenter, Fellow in History at New Hall, Cambridge.
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Hitler in History
October 5, 2000
•42m
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how history has struggled to explain the enormity of the crimes committed in Germany under Adolf Hitler: we have had theories of ‘totalitarianism’, and of ‘distorted modernity’, debates between ‘intentionalists’ and their opponents the ‘structuralists’. The great political philosopher Hannah Arendt said, “Under conditions of tyranny, it is far easier to act than to think”. But somehow none of these explanations has seemed quite enough to explain how a democratic country in the heart of modern Europe was mobilised to commit genocide, and to fight a bitter war to the end against the world’s most powerful nations.With Ian Kershaw, historian and biographer of Hitler; Niall Ferguson, fellow and tutor in Modern History at Jesus College Oxford; Mary Fulbrook, Professor of German History at University College London.
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The Enlightenment in Britain
January 18, 2001
•42m
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Enlightenment. In Germany it's called Aufklarung, in France it's the Siecle De Lumieres, and in Britain it's called the Age of Enlightenment. It's the period around the eighteenth century when an intellectual movement committed to science and opposed to superstition, embraced the greatest minds of Europe and America; Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Montesquie, Diderot, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. But where are all the British thinkers? According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'ideas concerning God, reason, nature and man were synthesised into a world view that gained wide assent and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy and politics'. Some historians in the past have claimed that The Enlightenment passed these islands by, but in his new book Enlightenment: Britain and The Creation of The Modern World, Roy Porter says The Enlightenment was British first, and that the modern world started here. With Roy Porter, Professor in the Social History of Medicine, Wellcome Trust Centre of University College London, Linda Colley, Leverhulme Research Professor and School Professor of History, London School of Economics; Jeremy Black, Professor of History at Exeter University.
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