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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: 13/09/2011

13/09/2011

BBC Radio 4 - Making History, 13/09/2011

Helen Castor with the programme where listeners help re-assess the past.

An African take on the colonial scramble for Africa; intrepid 19th-century women educationalists and the forgotten railway building genius.

Helen Castor takes the chair for another edition of Radio 4's popular history magazine in which listeners can contribute to a better understanding of the past.

Today, Iain Dryden in south-west France recalls his childhood growing up with the Nandi tribe of Kenya in the 1950's and how their version of fighting British colonialists at the turn of the twentieth century is very different to that told in our history books. Helen talks to Professor David Anderson at the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford who explains the importance of this non-colonial oral history.

At Brunel University Archives in Runnymede south west of London, Making History reporter Joanna Pinnock comes across some remarkable women educationalists who travelled the globe in the early decades of the nineteenth century to start schools. One even beating Livingstone to the heart of Africa. We hear from archivist Dr Phaedra Casey and Dr Christina de Bellaigue, Fellow and Tutor at Exeter College Oxford.

Our series on unsung history heroes throws up the railway contractor who in his lifetime built 1 in 20 of each mile of railway laid throughout the world. A man who employed 80,000 workers and had no administrative help. His name was Thomas Brassey and transport writer Christian Wolman tells Helen more about his remarkable life and why we know so little about him.

On the Norfolk/Suffolk border, reporter Richard Daniel follows in the footsteps of the Iceni as the County Archaeologist for Norfolk, Dr David Gurney, shows him remarkable new evidence for an iron-age roadway.


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

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