In Our Time

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His eighth choice is The War of 1812, which was first released in January 2013. Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed the conflict between America and the British Empire sometimes referred to as the second American War of Independence. In June 1812, President James Madison declared war on Britain, angered by the restrictions Britain had imposed on American trade, the Royal Navy's capture of American sailors and British support for Native Americans. After three years of largely inconclusive fighting, the conflict finally came to an end with the Treaty of Ghent which, among other things, helped to hasten the abolition of the global slave trade.

Although the War of 1812 is often overlooked, historians say it had a profound effect on the USA and Canada's sense of national identity, confirming the USA as an independent country. America's national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner began life as a poem written after its author, Francis Scott Key, witnessed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore. The war also led to Native Americans losing hundreds of thousands of acres of land in a programme of forced removal.

With:

Kathleen Burk
Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London

Lawrence Goldman
Fellow in Modern History at St Peter's College, University of Oxford

Frank Cogliano
Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh

Producer: Victoria Brignell
Reading list:
Carl Benn, The War of 1812 (Osprey, 2002)
George Robert Gleig, A Narrative of the Campaigns of the British Army: at Washington, Baltimore, and New Orleans by an officer (John Murray, 1821)
Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (University of Illinois Press, 1989)
Reginald Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812 (Various publishers, 1962)
Reginald Horsman, The Diplomacy of the New Republic, 1776-1815 (Harlan Davidson, 1985)
Lawrence Kaplan, Entangling Alliances with None: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Jefferson (Kent State University Press, 1987)
Andrew Lambert, The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812 (Faber and Faber, 2012)
Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America (Harvard University Press, 2007)
Bradford Perkins, The Creation of a Republican Empire, 1776-1865 (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Leonard Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (University of Virginia Press, 2009)
J. C. A. Stagg, The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels and Indian Allies (Knopf, 2010)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His seventh choice is the pioneering scientist Rosalind Franklin (1920 - 1958), first released in February 2018. During her distinguished career, Franklin carried out ground-breaking research into coal and viruses but she is perhaps best remembered for her investigations in the field of DNA. In 1952 her research generated a famous image that became known as Photograph 51. When the Cambridge scientists Francis Crick and James Watson saw this image, it enabled them the following year to work out that DNA has a double-helix structure, one of the most important discoveries of modern science. Watson, Crick and Franklin's colleague Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel Prize in 1962 for this achievement but Franklin did not and today many people believe that Franklin has not received enough recognition for her work.
With:
Patricia Fara
President of the British Society for the History of Science
Jim Naismith
Interim lead of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, Director of the Research Complex at Harwell and Professor at the University of Oxford
Judith Howard
Professor of Chemistry at Durham University
Producer: Victoria Brignell.
Reading list:
Jenifer Glynn, My Sister Rosalind Franklin (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Kersten T. Hall, The Man in the Monkeynut Coat: William Astbury and the Forgotten Road to the Double-Helix (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (HarperCollins, 2002)
Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA (first published 1975; W. W. Norton, 2000)
James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (first published 1968; W&N, 2010)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His sixth choice is Plato's Republic, an episode first released in June 2017. Is it always better to be just than unjust? That is the central question of Plato's Republic, written in c380BC. Plato applied this question both to the individual and the city-state, considering earlier and current forms of government in Athens and potential forms, in which the ideal city might be ruled by philosophers. The Republic is arguably Plato's best known and greatest work, a dialogue between Socrates and his companions, featuring the allegory of the cave and ideas about immortality of the soul, the value of poetry to society, and democracy's vulnerability to a clever demagogue seeking tyranny.
With
Angie Hobbs
Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield
MM McCabe
Professor of Ancient Philosophy Emerita at King's College London
and
James Warren
Fellow of Corpus Christi College and a Reader in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato's Republic (Oxford University Press, 1998)
Rachel Barney, Tad Brennan and Charles Brittain, Plato and the Divided Self (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
G. R. F. Ferrari (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Angela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Angela Hobbs, Plato's Republic (Ladybird Expert Book, to be published 2018)
Thomas More (trans. Dominic Baker-Smith), Utopia 1516 (Penguin, 2012)
Grethe B. Peterson (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values: 18 (University of Utah Press, 1997), especially ‘Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic’ by Myles Burnyeat
Gerald A. Press (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Plato (Bloomsbury, 2012)
Gerasimos Santas (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Plato's Republic (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006)
Malcolm Schofield, Plato (Oxford University Press, 2006)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

In Our Time returns for a new series with host Misha Glenny.
A world class seminar, every week. In Our Time explores the ideas, people and discoveries that have shaped our world, spanning history, philosophy, religion, science, literature, art and culture.

On Thursdays, hear brand-new episodes with Misha Glenny and leading academics. On Mondays, discover Misha's Archive Picks: classic conversations from the In Our Time archive, originally presented by Melvyn Bragg.

Recent episodes have featured topics as wide-ranging as the Roman Arena, Handel's Messiah, John Keats, On Liberty and the Mariana Trench, bringing expert insight to pivotal events, influential thinkers and remarkable discoveries.

Throughout the archive, you can hear discussions on historical figures such as Marie Antoinette, Nefertiti, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx and Albert Einstein; explore great works of literature such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the poetry of John Donne; uncover the stories behind cultural masterpieces including Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel; or journey from Jupiter and the death of stars, to the theories of Plato and Aristotle.

In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas.
A BBC Studios Production.

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His fifth choice, first released in May 2024, is the Empress Dowager Cixi, the woman who, for almost fifty years, was the most powerful figure in the Chinese court. Cixi (1835-1908) started out at court as one of the Emperor's many concubines, yet was the only one who gave him a son to succeed him and who also possessed great political skill and ambition. When their son became emperor he was still a young child and Cixi ruled first through him and then, following his death, through another child emperor. This was a time of rapid change in China, when western powers and Japan humiliated the forces of the Qing empire time after time, and Cixi had the chance to push forward the modernising reforms the country needed to thrive. However, when she found those reforms conflicted with her own interests or those of the Qing dynasty, she was arguably obstructive or too slow to act and she has been personally blamed for some of those many humiliations even when the fault lay elsewhere.
With
Yangwen Zheng
Professor of Chinese History at the University of Manchester
Rana Mitter
The S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School
And
Ronald Po
Associate Professor in the Department of International History at London School of Economics and Visiting Professor at Leiden University
Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production
Reading list:
Pearl S. Buck, Imperial Woman: The Story of the Last Empress of China (first published 1956; Open Road Media, 2013)
Katharine A. Carl, With the Empress Dowager (first published 1906; General Books LLC, 2009)
Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (Jonathan Cape, 2013)
Princess Der Ling, Old Buddha (first published 1929; Kessinger Publishing, 2007)
Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (University of California Press, 1987)
John K. Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History (Harvard University Press, 2006)
Peter Gue Zarrow and Rebecca Karl (eds.), Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China (Harvard University Press, 2002)
Grant Hayter-Menzies, Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling (Hong Kong University Press, 2008)
Keith Laidler, The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (Wiley, 2003)
Keith McMahon, Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020)
Anchee Min, The Last Empress (Bloomsbury, 2011)
Ying-Chen Peng, Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making (Yale University Press, 2023).
Sarah Pike Conger, Letters from China: with Particular Reference to the Empress Dowager and the Women of China (first published 1910; Forgotten Books, 2024)
Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age (Atlantic Books, 2019)
Liang Qichao (trans. Peter Zarrow), Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker's Studio: Essays on China and the World (Penguin Classics, 2023)
Sterling Seagrave, Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China (Vintage, 1993)
Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (first published 1991; W. W. Norton & Company, 2001)
X. L. Woo, Empress Dowager Cixi: China's Last Dynasty and the Long Reign of a Formidable Concubine (Algora Publishing, 2003)