History

There’s a problem with ‘history’. And it’s a pretty big one – the problem is the word we use to describe it

History. It’s old. It’s already happened. It’s the past and that’s where it should stay.

But history is not the past. ‘The past’ has happened. It has been and gone and cannot be changed. ‘History’ is so much more than that.

History is how we think about the past. It’s how we speak of it. And the way we speak of it today will be different to the way people spoke of it a century ago and to the way people will speak of it in a hundred years’ time.

History is not about long gone people and ideas – it’s about you and me, all of us, right here, right now. It’s about how we manage the past, how we explain it so as to better understand the present and prepare for
the future.

This is how James Baldwin, the great American writer and thinker, saw it: “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us – we are our history.”

This is what the Trapped History podcast is about – changing what we mean when we use the word ‘history’.

It’s also about changing what we mean when we use the word ‘we’. Who are ‘we’? And why have some of our lives and stories been pushed aside because they don’t fit a particular view of the past?

Trapped History seeks to reboot our sense of history by breaking those stories free.

In Season One, you will hear about the greatest singer you’ve never heard of, the greatest mathematician and the greatest journalist. And that’s before you find out about the Jewish and African Prisoners of War, the women who circled the world and the children who took on the most powerful men in America and won.

Season Two wrestles with Empire, genocide and racism through the stories of the Indian woman who studied law at Oxford, the American soldier who campaigned for world peace and the Caribbean thinker who fought for justice on the streets of London.

And maybe you will also get the chance to meet the greatest songwriter you’ve never heard of, the most important broadcaster you’ve never heard of and the most fearsome hero you’ve never heard of.

Because their histories are our histories.