1 – A History of Britain

y name is Jamie, and this show is a chronological retelling of the story of Britain, from its very earliest days when prehistoric man shared the island with Giant Deer and massive earth grinding glaciers… all the way to the dawn of the Second World War. This show focuses upon the people, the drama, and the real life events that shaped and molded this island into a global super power. The stories that you’re going to hear in this podcast continue to shape us today and many of the lessons learned by our ancestors still apply to us. As a brit growing up in the US, I had a unique perspective on history because much of the history of Britain that I learned when I was younger didn’t come from a classroom, but instead came from my Grandfather who was a gifted storyteller. What I didn’t realize at the time was that my grandfather was continuing our most ancient human tradition. The sharing of Oral Histories, which is just another way to say “telling stories,” and I can’t thank him enough for teaching me in this manner because, while many people have an aversion for History, I absolutely adored it and was always hungering to learn more. After all, it was a rich tapestry of stories, and who doesn’t love stories? Movies, tv, books, even just hanging out at the coffee shop with your hot mess of a friend… all of this is stuff revolves around stories. Unfortunately, not everyone was as lucky as I was. It seems like many people have been exposed to history in a plastic and alienating form that focused upon dates and easily tested facts. And when people /are/ discussed, they tend to portrayed as inhuman and distant, and barely people at all… rather that the incredibly relatable individuals that they were. And that’s criminal! I mean, you probably know Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, and did ground-breaking work on evolution. But did you know that he would occasionally have temper tantrums and write letters to his best friend that were dripping with self-loathing and a complete sense of exasperation with his work? Here’s a direct quote from one of those letters… “I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything. I am going to write a little book for Murray on orchids and today I hate them worse than everything.” Haven’t we all had days like that, and doesn’t that make Charles a little more relatable? And it’s stories like that, that I’ll be working to bring to you. What makes me really excited about this is that with podcasting, we are in a unique moment in time where we can free a great deal of knowledge from the ivory towers and make it available to the public. And that’s why I’m doing this project specifically as a free community supported podcast. This history, these stories, belong to all of us and should be accessible to every single one of us. They shouldn’t be restricted to only those of us who are lucky enough to have the grades and the finances get into the right schools. They’re ours, and I intend to bring them to you. And in doing this project, I’m also going to be working to shed light on the whole story. When we only focus on kings and battles, we miss the vast majority of the history of the time. The kings and the battles are important, sure, but so is everything else. The vast majority of all of our ancestors were the common people… by forgetting to talk about them and the world that they inhabited, we are depriving ourselves of getting to know our own family. And it turns out, our family was awesome. For example, the Anglo Saxons were tremendous lushes with even monks imbibing gallons of ale on a regular basis. In this show we’re also going to be talking about a group of people that many accounts of history largely ignore. And this group is commonly referred to as… I hope I get this right…. “Women.” And it turns out that these “women” comprise 51% of the population of the world. Who knew? Seriously, how crazy is it that talking about women as more t...