HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-05T16:09:20.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/period/21st-century/feed/atom Rob Attar <![CDATA[North Korea's religious dictators]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/north-korea-religious-dictators-podcast/ 2026-10-05T16:09:20.000Z 2026-10-05T16:09:20.000Z More than three decades after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the USSR, the North Korean regime remains steadfastly in place, defiantly ploughing its own path some eight decades after its founding. What might explain this remarkable longevity?
In Jonathan Cheng’s new book, Korean Messiah, the Wall Street Journal correspondent argues that it owes much to the enduring cult of personality around its founder, Kim Il-Sung, who took inspiration from his own Christian roots to create a modern religion that endures to this day.
Jonathan’s book is a finalist for the 2026 Cundill History Prize, and in today’s episode he explores these ideas with Rob Attar.
]]> Charlotte Vosper <![CDATA["The Iraq War was a disaster": a historian's view on the modern Middle East]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-iraq-war-was-a-disaster-a-historians-view-on-the-modern-middle-east/ 2026-10-05T13:24:52.000Z 2026-10-05T15:00:09.000Z Charlotte Vosper: You begin your new book with Abdulaziz’s raid on Riyadh in 1902, a major event in the foundation of Saudi Arabia. Why?
Simon Sebag Montefiore: Virtually all histories of the Arab world start with the traditional Levant – Jerusalem, Lebanon, Syria – or Constantinople; anywhere but Saudi Arabia. Yet Saudi is really the centre of the Middle East. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina are in Saudi Arabia, so the Gulf has become the heart of the Arab and Islamic worlds. I began my book with Riyadh to signal that this is very much an Arab-centric history of the modern Middle East. Plus I think that Abdulaziz Ibn Saud’s raid is one of the best stories – like something out of Lawrence of Arabia.
What powers were at play there at the turn of the 20th century?
In 1900, the Middle East was really another world – and that’s the central point of this book: to get across just how recently the Middle East, as we know it today, was created.
At the turn of the century, half of the Middle East was ruled by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The other half was ruled by the British – the Trucial States (essentially, what’s now the United Arab Emirates), plus places such as Aden, along with Egypt. France ruled Algeria and Tunisia. There were virtually no independent Arab states except central Arabia.
What happened in the Middle East when those imperial powers fought the First World War?
First of all, most people forget that a large part of the First World War was fought in the Middle East. Britain suffered some major disasters in the region – defeat at the Dardanelles, surrender at Kut in Iraq – and it’s often forgotten how resilient the Ottoman empire really was.
More importantly, the war was also a major turning point for the Middle East. With the western front in a desperate state, Britain promised swathes of Ottoman territory to other powers and groups including France, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Jews, the Italians, the Armenians, the Kurds and, above all, Russia. So there were many competing claims to Middle Eastern territory.
One of these promises was the Balfour Declaration of 1917. By the early 20th century, the ancient Jewish desire to return to the Holy Land and the longstanding connection to Jerusalem had inspired a political movement, and Jews – like other nations – sought to create a homeland with a shared religion and language in Palestine. Jewish leaders successfully persuaded the British, French and Americans that one of the entities to be carved from the Ottoman empire should encompass this Jewish ‘national home’. Zionists envisaged this as a land of socialist farming communities under British rule or an Arab monarchy, or a single state shared with the Palestinian Arabs.
In the event, the British and the French divvied up the whole Middle East between them. It was decided that the British would get Iraq and Palestine, and the French took Greater Syria (Lebanon and Syria). Constantinople would be ruled by the Allies, while the Greeks and Italians got half of today’s Turkey, with Kurdish and Armenian states in the east. The British and French provinces were called ‘mandates’: Middle Eastern states that would be under British or French control while the peoples prepared for full statehood. As we can see today in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Yemen, Libya and Sudan, the nation-state structure isn’t necessarily suited to the incredibly complex, multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian patchwork that is the Middle East.
- Read more | “The early 2000s was a strange era of fear and terror”: remembering the Iraq War 20 years on
How did Middle Eastern people respond to the imposed mandates?
Not well. They were extremely disappointed – they’d swapped one empire for another. The state of Iraq, for example, followed a British mandate in 1920 – but, though the British initially promised freedom to the Iraqis, they changed their minds and decided to keep Iraq as a client state. The Iraqis certainly didn’t want to be ruled by Britain, so they launched a huge rebellion against their new mandatory power, which the British brutally crushed. Similarly, the Syrians didn’t want to be ruled by the French, and rebelled in 1925. In 1919, the Egyptians launched a revolution that also resulted in defeat by the British.
You describe the Second World War as the start of a new Middle East. Why?
The Second World War brought about the realisation that the west needed to give independence to the Arab world. During the war, the British occupied southern Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon but, with the European powers financially exhausted by 1945, and the increasing waves of nationalist movements, several of the countries that now make up the Middle East were created as independent nation states. Syria became fully independent in 1946 and, with the termination of the British mandate for Palestine, Israel was created in 1948. Turkey had already formed in 1923, and the British mandate over Iraq had ended in 1932.
Following the world wars, a new Middle East was born – with varying degrees of success. Many of these new states proved either ungovernable or dominated by autocrats – and that’s another of the central debates that runs through the book: who or what should we blame for the failure of many of these states? Is it their corrupt oligarchical dictatorial rulers? Or the imperial powers that created the states? Does it come down to Arab culture or Jewish nationalism? Was it the creation of Israel that poisoned the whole Middle East and made it ungovernable? Or was it the Cold War, and the interference of the Americans and the Soviets, that undermined the Middle Eastern state system? These are all vital questions.
Did new ideologies or identities emerge in these newly established nation states?
With the new states came the rise of Arab nationalism, particularly the ideology of pan-Arabism. This is the idea that the Arab world should be ruled by one state, and it’s a natural reaction to the division of the Middle East by borders drawn by the imperial powers. What’s interesting, though, is that the former imperial powers also embraced Arab nationalism. They wanted to create strong Arab states, and it was actually Britain that sponsored the creation of the Arab League, which promoted the idea that the separate states should act together as a community.
For the next 30 years after independence, pan-Arabism became the ruling ideology among Arab leaders including Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and its greatest champion, Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Of them, Nasser was the most successful and popular; at his apogee, he united Egypt with Syria as the United Arab Republic in 1958. (Three years later, Syria seceded.)
If pan-Arabism had such powerful political proponents, why did it decline?
In reality, the Arab world is much less monolithic than sometimes we in the west like to think. The different states and regions all had their own dialects, agendas and circumstances, and it’s questionable whether a single Arab state could ever have held together.
It also failed badly, in both governance and war. In the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt fought Israel in a series of regional conflicts – and each time, Israel won out. The creation of Israel in itself was a huge blow to Arab pride, and its military victories undermined the confidence of the surrounding new nation states. In 1948, the UN partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish sectors, and the State of Israel was declared. Five Arab countries immediately invaded Israel but, with their war aims divided, Israel was able to defeat them all. Then, in 1967, Nasser hubristically threatened war – and was defeated spectacularly by Israel, discrediting Nasserism.
By the 1970s, pan-Arabism was declining and a new ideology, Islamism, was about to explode.
You’ve also described 1979 as a turning point in this history. Why was that year such a decisive moment?
It brought an ideological shift in the Middle East. Islamic anti-western radicalism had always existed in various forms, but in 1979 an Iranian Shia variant mobilised the belief that Islam should govern society as well as the state, in resistance to the west and pro-western versions of Islam. In January of that year, a huge popular revolt overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah, the last Shah of Iran, who had ruled Iran for 37 years.
When the country fell to Ayatollah Khomeini, it shook the whole Middle East. Khomeini was an incredibly brutal and oppressive figure with a vision of Islamic rule that had never really been put into practice before. His idea was that, while Shiite Muslims waited for the Occulted Imam to return as Mahdi (Messiah), a trusted member of the Islamic clergy should rule Iran. With this Islamist ideology, Khomeini created an extraordinary system that was really a sacred monarchy ruled by one man – himself. That is still the system ruling Iran today.
So, first of all, a new system was created in 1979 in Iran – a Shia theocracy, a sacred dictatorship – and, at the same time, the revolution also unleashed a radical Islamism on the rest of the Muslim world. This was a fusion of Sunni Islamist radicalism, Arab nationalism and Arab resistance, making it distinctly anti-western.
If 1979 unleashed the ideological movement, we now see its manifestation in all sorts of ways. Radical Islamism became a resistance movement against a version of moderate Islam that was open to western ideas in pro-American states such as Egypt, Jordan, UAE and, to an extent, Saudi Arabia. Today, we see the influence of Khomeini’s Islamism in Hezbollah in Lebanon and in Hamas in Gaza.
Following the end of the Cold War, did the Middle Eastern states start to become more stable?
No – and where it looked stable, that was due to the stagnant, oppressive rule of long-reigning dictators: Gaddafi, Saddam, Mubarak, Assad. It’s a question that you could ask at any point during the history of the region – or, as I’ve called it, The Cauldron – and you’d get the same answer. This is a story of continued tumultuous bubbling, which is why I gave the book its title.
Having said that, we do see something different after the fall of the Soviet Union: the emergence of the US as a unipolar paramount power in the Middle East. To be fair to the Americans, they did try to use this power in a positive way to create a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Though these attempts are now discredited among many people, they nearly worked. Israel and Palestine needed to recognise the other’s existence, national narratives and possible Palestinian statehood – and, for around two decades (1990–2012), there were people in both nations who were willing to do so. The Madrid Conference took place in 1991 under George HW Bush, and the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 under Bill Clinton, but ultimately peace fell through. Israel-Palestine peace looks incredibly distant now. I still believe that a pathway to two republics, two nations, is the only way – but that means many things.
The rest of the Middle East also didn’t gain stability. It is important to note, though, that by that stage the Middle Eastern states were no longer dominated by imperialist powers, and the end of superpower competition gave them more space to assert themselves. After the end of the Cold War, they were freer than they ever had been. This idea – that the Middle Eastern states were not simply subject to greater powers but had their own agency – is another key theme in the book. The Middle Eastern states really recreated themselves, and they’ve been independent for almost 80 years now.
How much of the recent turbulence in the Middle East do you think stems from the attacks on 9/11?
A lot of it. The story of Osama bin Laden and his ‘Planes Operation’, as he called it, is just extraordinary. It was intended to draw the US into the Middle East – and it worked. When Joe Biden flew to Israel after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, he said of 9/11: “We overreacted”. There are arguments to say that’s true.
There was definitely a case for invading Afghanistan in 2001, but the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was, I think, totally misconceived. It was based on false intelligence, but even if you believe that the invasion was justified, it was utterly misgoverned. The Iraq War was a disaster, its main effect being to empower a rising Middle Eastern state: Iran. The US knocked out the other great power in the Middle East, Iraq, and the country never recovered. To be clear, I’m not nostalgic for Saddam, but I think there’s something to be said for a measured response, particularly in the Middle East.
Why do you think that democracy has made few inroads in the region?
There are all sorts of reasons across the different Middle Eastern countries. I don’t think for a moment you could say that the Arab world is not suited to democracy, but there is a habitual resort to autocracy. I think this comes from the belief that only an autocrat is strong enough to hold together disparate states and resist Islamism, which often resorts to armed revolution. That’s combined with a long Middle Eastern tradition of one-man rule – sultanates, kingdoms. The best-ruled countries in the Middle East are actually the absolute monarchies that weren’t created by the west but grew organically – such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Morocco.
Conflict remains ongoing in the Middle East. Do you think that it is somehow an inherently violent place?
I don’t think that’s really true. If you look at the Middle East across the 20th century, the number of deaths never came close to the bloodletting of the world wars in Europe, or Stalin’s Red Terror, or Hitler’s Holocaust, or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Statistics are sometimes used in a distasteful parlour game of ‘who’s worst’, and I don’t want to play. But, if you look at the pure numbers of people killed in the entire Israel-Arab-Palestine conflict from 1948 to today, it’s a mere iota of those killed just on the western front in the First World War.
That said, every death is a tragedy. The Middle East is a very turbulent place – a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian patchwork with so many interwoven layers of tension piled on top of each other. There’s nothing quite like it.
- Read more | The overlooked history of Muslims in Europe
Why is understanding this history so important?
The truth matters in itself. Its moral lessons matter, and anything based on lies and conspiracies is brittle and will crumble. Our societies are successful because we respect facts, sources, truth – and that encompasses history. In the post-religious, post-Christian world of the west, history has assumed a moral importance that allows it to be a propellant of political power, similar to the power that religion once had.
And for history to matter, it has to be right. That’s why this book aims to show how the present Middle East –19 states in all – came to be, and how to understand the nuances that created it. I don’t just mean Israel and Palestine. You can’t really understand Saudi Arabia unless you realise that it’s the third Saudi Arabian kingdom, not the first. You can’t really understand what’s happening in Iran unless you understand Twelver Shiism and who the last shah was. You can’t understand Turkey without understanding Ataturk.
In a way, I think it’s strange that this book didn’t exist before. There are histories of the Arabs, of the Jews and of the Turks, but no one had put it together. I’ve tried to do it in a nuanced and balanced way that is entirely based on fact – though myths and conspiracies are important, too. But I also want this to be a great read. So you can read it as the history of how the Middle East came to be what it is today – or you can just enjoy this extraordinary story.
Simon Sebag Montefiore is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and historian. His previous books include Jerusalem: The Biography (W&N, 2011, revised in 2024) and The World: A Family History (W&N, 2022)
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Kavita Puri <![CDATA[The Amazon rainforest is hiding an ancient secret – and scientists now know what it is]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-amazon-rainforest-is-hiding-an-ancient-secret-and-scientists-now-know-what-it-is/ 2026-10-02T14:31:04.000Z 2026-10-02T14:30:16.000Z Christopher Nolan’s box-office smash hit adaptation of The Odyssey has sparked much excitement about and interest in ancient Greece. Not only has it grossed hundreds of millions of pounds in the first few weeks of its release, but sales of Homer’s 2,700-year-old epic poem have also soared. There’s been a spike in visits to Greece, too, particularly to filming locations such as Voidokilia Beach and Nestor’s Cave in the Peloponnese.
Thanks to poems, other writings and buildings left by the ancient Greeks, we have a strong sense of that culture and its influence on wider civilisation. But other ancient peoples are only now being discovered or studied in detail through groundbreaking technology that has transformed our understanding of their worlds.
- Read more | Were the Amazons just a “male fantasy”? Here’s the truth behind the ancient world’s warrior women
LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology involves firing millions of laser pulses from an aircraft down at the ground. Some beams bounce up and are detected by a sensor; computer algorithms then effectively ‘erase’ vegetation to create highly detailed topographic maps – almost like X-rays of landscapes. It’s so sensitive and precise that it can pick up small bumps, depressions and artificial structures cloaked by vegetation for centuries and often invisible to the naked eye – the flattened outline of a long-gone fortification, for example. LiDAR can map 50 square miles in one day. A team on the ground would need years to do something similar.
Using this technique, experts have made discoveries in remote and difficult-to-study places such as Cambodia’s jungle. There, LiDAR mapping of hundreds of square miles starting in 2012 revealed previously unknown infrastructure around the famed Angkor temple complex. The results suggest that Angkor wasn’t an isolated religious sanctuary but, at its peak in the 13th century, was the centrepiece of an extensive city, with numerous neighbourhoods and a sophisticated water-control system.
Three years ago, LiDAR revealed hitherto hidden cities in Mexico’s Campeche region. Featuring 15-metre-tall pyramid-like structures as well as residential areas bustling with inhabitants during the Late Classic Period of the Maya civilisation (AD 600–900), they’re forcing historians to revise population estimates for that culture.
The latest breakthroughs using LiDAR have been made in the Amazon. It was long believed that, in the pre-colonial era, the Amazonian forest – which spans parts of modern-day Peru, Brazil, Bolivia and six other countries – was a wilderness inhabited by only a small number of hunter-gatherers. But new findings revealed in a July 2026 issue of the journal Nature suggest that this area may have been occupied by millions of people.
The multicultural society that lived in the Amazon region from around 600 BC to AD 850 has been given the name Aquiry. LiDAR evidence shows that they built vast geometric earthworks, with shapes that may have represented deities; many of them appear to be connected by ancient roads. Authors of the paper also suggest that the Aquiry had a major impact on the rainforest, repeatedly burning bamboo patches to clear land for planting maize, squash and manioc, and felling forests for their earthworks and the roads leading to them.
- Read more | “A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions”: the future of history
LiDAR has been widely available for some three decades, but has recently become more accessible and affordable for use by researchers in places ranging from Stonehenge to Guatemala. The results are transforming how we think about ancient civilisations – how these people lived and organised themselves, and even how these great empires may have risen and fallen. LiDAR has already revealed that those that came before us were more numerous and sophisticated than we had believed. Ours has been called a ‘golden age of archaeological discovery’ – and, as these techniques are further developed and utilised, no doubt more hidden cities will be uncovered around the world.
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Dr David Musgrove, FSA <![CDATA[The Bayeux Tapestry: secrets of the stitchers]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-bayeux-tapestry-secrets-of-the-stitchers/ 2026-09-30T11:28:31.000Z 2026-09-29T11:27:07.000Z Mia Hansson has spent 10 years making an exact replica of the Bayeux Tapestry. In conversation with Dave Musgrove, she explains what her modern remake experience can teach us about the women who made the original artefact in the 11th century, and the secrets she has spotted in her decade of close attention to the embroidery
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Robot wars in the classroom: why AI in education is nothing new]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/robot-wars-in-the-classroom-why-ai-in-education-is-nothing-new/ 2026-09-28T14:56:27.000Z 2026-09-28T14:56:27.000Z In 1929, the British magazine Teachers World identified ‘A Possible Menace to the Free Development of Education’. The putative culprit was BBC Radio, which had begun its schools broadcasting programme five years earlier, provoking fears that teachers would simply become ‘machine minders’. Such concerns pre-dated radios, though. The first ‘teaching machines’ were developed in the US in the 19th century; it was claimed that they could, for example, teach students to spell by getting them to turn a crank to arrange letters in the correct order.
Panic reached fever pitch by the 1960s, when new electronic ‘automatic teachers’ emerged, popularised by the American psychologist BF Skinner. More widely, commentators ranging from Canadian radical feminist Shulamith Firestone (in The Dialectic of Sex, 1970) to US businessman Alvin Toffler (Future Shock, 1970) predicted that humanoid robots would soon be indistinguishable from real people. Such an “inhuman, mechanical monster”, as one TV journalist put it in 1965 on encountering a teaching machine, was the face of the imagined future.
Anxieties about human teachers becoming redundant have so far proved unfounded, though worries have re-emerged periodically with the inception of computers, the internet and, most recently, generative AI in the form of large language models (LLMs). But the introduction of new technologies into the British classroom often sits alongside surprising continuities in the structure of schooling and the role of the teacher. Teachers have lost a significant amount of autonomy over the past 40 years as relationships with the central state have changed. But the power they hold over students in the classroom has been maintained or even intensified.
Mass education
The Elementary Education Act of 1870 introduced compulsory elementary education, originally until the age of 10, in England and Wales; similar legislation followed in Scotland in 1872. Local education authorities (LEAs), established in 1902, had the task of schooling large numbers of children, often in very poor conditions. So new technologies such as ‘readers’ – printed collections of extracts on different topics – or early projection equipment (‘magic lanterns’) could be very helpful.
Teachers continued to struggle with classes of up to 40 or even 50 children into the mid-20th century, especially in poorer rural areas, and school radio and television programmes offered means of engaging interest. On the other hand, the teachers and students who most needed these technologies were often those to whom they weren’t accessible. One secondary school in Ely was not atypical: in 1962, it still lacked wall maps, a projector and science apparatus, and had barely any books.
School inspectors sometimes addressed the impacts of limited funding from LEAs by bringing in needed items themselves – though these were often modest, such as “a large roll of kitchen paper and some tins of powder paint” given to an Oxfordshire junior school in 1959.
New classroom technologies often received a mixed reception among teachers, who might have felt as if their expertise was being undermined by ‘trendy’ ideas. In the 1980s, fears also intensified that technology could break down the distinction between childhood and adulthood. The American cultural critic Neil Postman argued in The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) that television challenged the authority of adults by giving children unfettered access to information. “Without secrets,” he wrote, “of course, there can be no such thing as childhood.”
Children themselves gave these ideas short shrift. “Childhood does not disappear because you watch TV,” 10-year-old Joseph told Postman in 1994. And teachers’ authority in the classroom remained basically unchallenged. Many British students did not feel respected by their teachers in schools, as responses to the Scottish School Leavers’ Survey from the 1980s show. “Some of the teachers were… power mad, big headed,” wrote one boy in 1983. Despite the efforts of child-led school student unions in the 1960s and 1970s to introduce innovations such as school councils and student representation on governing bodies, students still had little say in what they learned or how they learned it.
Learning by doing
Many technological innovations in postwar Britain were related to the rise of ‘child-centred education’ in primary and secondary schools, intended to suit students’ ‘natural interests’, a philosophy epitomised in the Plowden Report of 1967. One pedagogical idea promoted by child-centred educationalists was ‘learning by doing’, suggesting that children learned best when they actively found out things for themselves.
Building on earlier pieces of teaching apparatus, such as the Montessori sense-training materials of interwar kindergartens, educational innovators pushed technologies such as Cuisenaire rods. These were coloured sticks that could be used to teach basic mathematical operations. However, teachers were often sceptical of the value of these materials – and, indeed, of ‘learning by doing’ itself. “Is there nothing to maths but bits of wood?” complained a columnist in Teachers World in 1971.
Other technologies were more empowering for teachers because they built on their existing expertise. Before the 1980s, education in Britain was highly decentralised. This gave teachers significant control over what they taught, encouraged by initiatives such as the Mode 3 CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education), introduced in 1965, which allowed teachers to choose their own topics and set their own exams. Teachers used photocopiers and Bandas (a British brand name for a spirit duplicator) to make classroom resources, and employed overhead projectors to display this material easily to students. “My fingers are still stained purple,” recalled one enthusiast of the Banda machine.
A major constraint on the adoption of new technologies in the British classroom was funding. Central government did not provide dedicated funds for equipment in schools until the early 1980s, leaving them at the mercy of local authority budgets. And when funds were allocated, the focus was on electronic technologies – mainly computers, but also other innovations such as interactive whiteboards. This was not necessarily what teachers or students wanted; most continued to value older, under-funded technologies such as textbooks, though some embraced digital possibilities.
This pattern of spending began with the Conservative governments of Thatcher and Major, then accelerated under New Labour after 1997, with a 2009 Ofsted report estimating that £2bn had been spent on information and communications technology (ICT) over the previous decade. The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency was set up in 1998 to promote ICT, which also became a compulsory part of the curriculum. Today, we see the same thing happening with generative AI – expensive pilot projects being funded to develop new GenAI education tools.
Teachers have expressed mixed opinions on new technologies. The Labour proposal earlier this year to develop ‘AI tutors’ to help disadvantaged students in Years 9 and 10 (13 to 15-year-olds) was strongly criticised by the National Education Union (NEU), with an NEU survey revealing that only 14 per cent of respondents supported the plan. However, teachers’ views on GenAI change when they are the ones using the technology: 76 per cent report using GenAI for day-to-day work.
Students, meanwhile, are not necessarily uniformly enthusiastic. Responding to a 2025 survey by the National Literacy Trust, 66.5 per cent of 13 to 18-year-olds reported using GenAI; however, many were aware of its potential pitfalls. One student did not want to use GenAI in written work because “It wouldn’t be actually what I truly think, it would be a vague interpretation of what I’ve told a robot to expand on, and it might not even make sense”.
Digital natives
Some digital technologies, such as the internet, initially promised students the ability to overtake teachers, with children and teenagers framed in the 1990s as a ‘net generation’ or ‘digital natives’. “For the first time ever, in one domain the students will be the teachers and the teachers will be the students,” argued the Canadian writer Don Tapscott in Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (1997). But the internet, like television, has failed to truly disrupt power hierarchies between adults and children.
Teacher autonomy in the classroom has been less threatened by new technologies than by political decisions that have removed power from local authorities. These included the introduction of the first GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) in 1986, the National Curriculum of 1988, and the introduction of academies in 2000. Teachers have lost much of the control they once had over the curriculum and teaching methods. However, other power relationships within schools have persisted unchallenged. The idea of ‘student voice’ is often promoted but has failed to become a reality. A report on pupil participation in Welsh schools found in 2022 that only 23 per cent of students felt they had a say over school policies.
Though certain technologies, such as GenAI, are promoted in classrooms because they are seen to teach valuable work-related skills, others are framed as harmful. Smartphones have been banned in English schools this year, and the use of most social media platforms by under-16s is to be banned altogether across the UK in spring 2027.
At the same time, the government’s New Media Unit hires for jobs such as ‘Social Content Creator’ – with requirements including: “You are a true social media native who knows exactly how to capture an audience’s attention in the first three seconds across TikTok” – suggesting that these skills should be on employability agendas.
In How Children Fail (1964), the radical American educator and teacher John Holt argued that hierarchical, compulsory, competitive schooling discourages children from learning. That kind of education, Holt suggested, drove children to focus on getting the right answers on tests rather than being intrinsically motivated to seek knowledge for its own sake.
In the context of a school system that has changed little since the Second World War, at least in terms of relationships between teachers and children, misuse of technologies such as LLMs is a symptom of a bigger problem. It is unsurprising that students who feel they have little control over their own education might turn to GenAI to produce work that they did not choose to do in the first place.
In some ways, GenAI presents genuinely new challenges for schools, even when compared with the impact of older technologies such as the calculator, the television, the computer and the internet. In other ways, though, it shows how much schools have remained the same. As in past eras, hopes and fears about the potential of new technologies in the classroom should make us think about who chooses these technologies, who funds them, and who gets to control them.
Laura Tisdall is senior lecturer in modern British history at Newcastle University, and author of We Have Come to Be Destroyed: Growing Up in Cold War Britain (Yale University Press, 2026)
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Danny Bird <![CDATA[Was Napoleon III the world's first populist leader?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/was-napoleon-iii-the-worlds-first-populist-leader/ 2026-09-11T10:20:24.000Z 2026-09-11T10:20:11.000Z Napoleon III's family was, in the words of historian Edward Shawcross, “the most cutthroat mafioso soap opera in the world”. Exiled to Switzerland as a boy and disowned by his own father, he spent years as a laughing stock of French politics, twice arrested trying to seize power.
Here, in conversation with Danny Bird, Edward traces Louis-Napoleon's strange path from mocked pretender in exile to Emperor of the French, and explores whether Napoleon III can really be regarded as an early populist dictator.
]]> Dr David Musgrove, FSA <![CDATA[The Bayeux Tapestry blockbuster at the British Museum]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-bayeux-tapestry-blockbuster-british-museum-podcast/ 2026-09-09T11:50:36.000Z 2026-09-09T11:50:36.000Z The Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum is set to be the biggest historical event in decades.
In conversation with David Musgrove, its curator Michael Lewis gives the lowdown on what the exhibition is all about, and how you should make the most of your trip if you do get a ticket to the show.
]]> Jon Bauckham <![CDATA[The secrets of our DNA]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-secrets-of-our-dna-podcast/ 2026-09-09T11:45:03.000Z 2026-09-08T11:43:31.000Z What can DNA tell us about who we are and where we came from?
Professor Turi King – who previously appeared on the podcast to discuss her research into Adolf Hitler’s DNA – returns to explore modern genetics and its role in solving some of history’s biggest mysteries.
Speaking to Jon Bauckham, Turi discusses the surprising origins of DNA fingerprinting, common misconceptions surrounding testing, and her role in the groundbreaking discovery of King Richard III.
]]> Charlotte Vosper <![CDATA[What's it like to live in a royal palace?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/whats-it-like-to-live-in-a-royal-palace/ 2026-09-07T14:13:20.000Z 2026-09-07T14:13:20.000Z Did Lucy Worsley have 'the best job in history'? And what did she do when she worked in it?
In this episode, Lucy reflects on her career so far, her time as Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces and how the job has changed her perspective on some of our favourite monarchs from royal history...
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Why does Britain keep changing prime ministers? The answer lies in history]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-does-britain-keep-changing-prime-ministers-the-answer-lies-in-history/ 2026-09-28T10:47:01.000Z 2026-09-02T15:30:47.000Z Enoch Powell, in his biography of Victorian politician Joseph Chamberlain, famously declared that “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”
Chamberlain never made it to the very top of what Benjamin Disraeli memorably called “the greasy pole” – unlike his son Neville, who did. But for the seven men and women to have occupied the post of prime minister between 2016 and 2026, only for their time in office to be “cut off in midstream” at anything but “a happy juncture”, Powell’s characteristically pessimistic take must surely resonate.
Quite why the UK has managed to burn through so many prime ministers in the space of a decade is a question well worth exploring. But it’s also worth asking whether that churn is as unprecedented as many assume – and whether it’s something to which we need to become accustomed: the ‘new normal’, as it were.
Familiar story
Actually, we’ve been here before – several times, in fact. Between the years 1916 and 1940, for example, Britain had no fewer than 10 prime ministers, though admittedly a couple of them served more than once – Stanley Baldwin three times, Ramsay MacDonald twice. In the 13 years between 1951 and 1964, six individuals served as PM. And between 1970 and 1979, the late queen ‘kissed hands’ with new leaders on four separate occasions.
Moreover, though recent events have generated all sorts of explanations as to why Downing Street seems to have a pressing need for a revolving door to be installed, the reasons why prime ministers came and went fairly frequently in those earlier periods are actually pretty similar. It’s down to a combination of intraparty and interpersonal bust-ups, policy U-turns and failures – and the hope that a change at the top might stave off electoral defeat.
Obviously, there are one or two differences between the recent and distant pasts. First, owing both to medical advances and to the fact that prime ministers tend to be much younger nowadays, none of the recent run had to step down due to ill health. That’s in marked contrast to some of their 20th-century predecessors: declining health curtailed the premierships of Andrew Bonar Law in 1923, Ramsay MacDonald in 1935 and Winston Churchill in 1955. Second, since 1974 no prime minister defeated at a general election has been permitted by their party to stay on as leader in order to try to win back the keys to number 10. Previously, Baldwin, MacDonald, Churchill and Harold Wilson had done so successfully, Ted Heath markedly less so.
So much for the contrasts. What about the similarities that suggest what we’ve seen since 2016 isn’t quite as novel as we might imagine?
A good place to start might be a century ago. In December 1916, the mercurial Welshman David Lloyd George effectively forced his boss, Herbert Asquith, out of 10 Downing Street by persuading some of his fellow Liberals – as well as Conservative members of the wartime coalition – that the conflict needed a prime minister prepared to secure victory by any means necessary. Shades, surely, of Boris Johnson convincing Tory MPs in 2019 that he – and only he – could “get Brexit done”?
Indeed, the parallels between Johnson and Lloyd George don’t end there. A few years later, in October 1922, while mired in scandal, the prime minister who’d swept all before him in the ‘coupon election’ of 1918 was the victim of what he clearly saw as an outrageous coup against him by a majority of Conservative MPs. Ideologically opposed to many of his policies and convinced that sticking with him could lose them their seats, they replaced him with Bonar Law in the wake of a dramatic meeting at the Carlton Club. That was the very institution where, in June 2022, Tory MP Chris Pincher’s drunken antics triggered the scandal that proved the final straw for those colleagues who wanted rid of Johnson.
- Read more | The downfall of Lloyd George
Our next parallel – this time with Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May – is provided by Stanley Baldwin just a year later, in December 1923. He inherited a workable majority from the dying Bonar Law but, like May, felt that he needed a fresh mandate and, ideally, a bigger majority in order to allow him to push through a controversial departure from the platform on which the Conservatives had fought the previous election.
In May’s case, of course, the issue for which a strong mandate was needed was Brexit – on which her predecessor, David Cameron, had been defeated at the referendum held in June 2016, triggering his resignation. In Baldwin’s case, it was overturning free trade in favour of tariffs and preferential treatment for imports originating in the British empire.
Like May’s gamble, Baldwin’s backfired, resulting in the loss of his majority. But unlike May, he was – despite being a far more skilled politician – unable to cobble together an arrangement with another party that would have allowed him to carry on in Number 10. That failure ushered in the country’s first Labour government in January 1924.
New rival
Ramsay MacDonald’s minority Labour government lasted less than a year before it was defeated in a vote of no confidence, after which Baldwin’s Tories were returned at the October 1924 general election with a landslide majority. But MacDonald’s party performed well enough to ensure that, from then on, the Conservatives’ main rivals would be Labour rather than the Liberals.
Sadly for MacDonald, however, his second term as prime minister, which began in 1929, proved disastrous. Labour MPs and ministers – not for the last time – baulked at their PM and chancellor’s plans to cut public spending and benefits in order to assuage the markets, the media and the opposition. This rebellion prompted MacDonald to jump ship and head up the National Government dominated by Baldwin’s Conservatives.
In 1937, Neville Chamberlain succeeded Baldwin as PM, then himself resigned in May 1940 having lost the support of hundreds of Tory MPs following Nazi Germany’s invasion of Norway in April that year. His downfall demonstrates the difficulty (indeed, the impossibility) of carrying on once a significant section of a prime minister’s own colleagues turn against them in the wake of a major policy failure. That’s what happened to Theresa May after her repeated inability to secure an EU withdrawal agreement; to Liz Truss following her disastrous ‘mini-budget’ in autumn 2022; and, of course, to their iconic predecessor Margaret Thatcher, who was ditched when her flagship poll tax looked set to cost the Tories the next election.
Anthony Eden suffered the same fate in 1956, having been forced by US pressure to end the Anglo-French military operation to snatch back the Suez Canal, after it had been nationalised by Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser. It is, nevertheless, important to note that, notwithstanding the fact that he had won a comfortable election victory for the Conservatives not long after taking over from Churchill in 1955, Eden (like May, Johnson, Truss and, now, Keir Starmer) had been driving many of his cabinet colleagues to distraction for some time. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that many of them were, frankly, glad to see the back of him when illness provided the excuse that allowed him to jump before he was pushed.
Rich pickings
The same could be said of Eden’s successor, Harold Macmillan. In October 1963, as his political luck seemed to be running out, he suddenly quit after being temporarily hospitalised. Much to the chagrin of some of the younger members of his cabinet, he helped to ensure that he was replaced not by their favourite, Rab Butler, but by the Tory peer Alec Douglas-Home.
The parallel in that case is with Rishi Sunak – and not just because Home was in all probability the wealthiest prime minister of the 20th century, just as Sunak was the wealthiest of the 21st. Like many so-called ‘takeover’ prime ministers, both men – having acceded to the role in controversial circumstances and, therefore, needing to keep as many of their MPs onside as possible – felt unable to ditch policies, priorities and cabinet colleagues that were past their sell-by dates. John Major, who managed to signal a sufficiently significant change from Margaret Thatcher to enable him to win the Conservatives their fourth consecutive term in 1992, is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. Sadly for Gordon Brown – like Eden, a number two forced to wait too long before becoming captain of the ship – he didn’t manage to pull off the same trick when he took over from Tony Blair in 2007.
It might, however, be a tad unfair to say the same about Jim Callaghan, who succeeded Harold Wilson in 1976 after a Labour leadership contest widely thought to have included the most impressive group of politicians ever to have fought for the premiership.
The authority of every one of the prime ministers who occupied Downing Street after 2016 was eroded by ministerial departures resulting from policy disagreements, personal ambition or a combination of both. Callaghan, though, managed to push a swingeing IMF-inspired cuts package through his cabinet without a single resignation before his government was defeated by Margaret Thatcher three years later. The same, incidentally, applies to Thatcher’s much-maligned predecessor as Tory leader, Ted Heath. He felt that he had to perform a series of spectacular U-turns to cope with similarly challenging economic circumstances as prime minister between 1970 and 1974, the year when he was defeated in two general elections (one in February, the other in October) by Harold Wilson.
Wilson, having achieved his ambition of regaining the majority he unexpectedly lost in 1970, chose to honour a promise he’d made to his family a few years previously by handing over to Callaghan after 18 months. That made him one of only two prime ministers in the past 100 years to have defied Powell’s aphorism, by leaving Downing Street at a time of their own choosing and with at least a modicum of popularity still remaining. The other was Stanley Baldwin, who had handed over to Neville Chamberlain in 1937.
Impossible job?
In a parliamentary system such as Britain’s, governments are perfectly entitled to swap prime ministers without holding an election. That they have done so five times since 2016 is actually nothing new. In fact, as we have seen, it is by no means uncommon, having happened five times between 1916 and 1940 and six times between 1945 and 2007. The big difference, of course, is the rate at which they have effected such a swap: five times in just 10 years compared with 24 and 62 years, respectively.
One commonly heard explanation for this acceleration is that the job of prime minister has simply become more difficult – perhaps even impossible – over time. Clearly there is some truth in that view: the state has assumed more responsibilities over the past 100 or so years, and running it has become more complex than used to be the case. Meanwhile, the increasing demands on the role imposed by the advent of 24-hour news and social media have also made the spotlight on the PM a whole lot harsher.
As we have seen, though, even in the early part of the 20th century, the geopolitical, financial and internal party pressures under which prime ministers operated were often intense, as was competition among their colleagues to replace them given half the chance. All of which suggests that the explanation for the accelerating rate of churn may actually lie elsewhere.
- Read more | Alleged coups and government traitors: conspiracy theories in 20th-century British politics
A far bigger difference between the recent and more distant pasts is the sheer volatility of the modern British electorate. Voters today will swiftly switch their support if their (arguably unrealistic and inflated) expectations aren’t immediately met. And that’s much harder for governments to do now that rapid economic growth seems to be more and more difficult to generate.
Is it any wonder, then, that MPs, bombarded as they now are by opinion polls that suggest they’re going to lose their seats unless they make a change, act accordingly – and more often, and more ruthlessly, than ever before?
Tim Bale is professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London
This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
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