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Making History podcast compressed

Making History

Factual: Life Stories

Factual: History

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Making History: 03/05/2011

03/05/2011

BBC Radio 4 - Making History, 03/05/2011

Helen Castor with your stories that are changing the way we see the past.

Helen Castor presents the programme with a passion for the past. Including the Dutch 'hunger winter', Welsh 'stay-down' strikes, Italian cycling and East Anglian trees.

Helen Castor and the team explore recent historical research and follow up listener's questions and comments. 

It's thought that twenty thousand people died as the Allied push to Berlin stalled in the south of the country.

In Wales a listener has a family story about his grandfather and a sit-in staged by miners in 1935. These 'stay-down' strikes were a tactic used by men of the Mineworker's Federation who were fighting inroads made on their membership by another union that had the support of the pit owners.

This Saturday sees the start of the Giro d'Italia, the cycling race that serves as a tough appetiser to the Tour de France in July. Helen Castor meets up with Professor John Foot from University College London who has just written a book on the history of cycling a sport which he argues did as much to create modern Italy as any politician did.

Finally, in East Anglia's Breckland, Professor Tom Williamson from the University of East Anglia takes Making History's Richard Daniel on a road-trip to discover the origins of a landscape feature that defines the area - pine rows. Tom Williamson argues that these lines of Scots Pine were planted as hedging in the early decades of the nineteenth century and have subsequently grown out into old, individual trees. 


Producer: Nick Patrick
A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

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03/05/2011

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