Roundup

Earliest New World writing discovered [audio 4min]

A heap of debris taken from a quarry in Veracruz, Mexico has yielded a stone block inscribed with what appears to be the oldest writing ever found in the Americas. Numerous symbols are carved across the block in rows. Experts say the block dates back almost 3,000 years, and was created by people from the Olmec civilization. The Olmec were an early central American people who rose to prominence before the heyday of the Maya. It is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, says Stephen Houston, an archeolog

Gaskell's 'Mary Barton' is staged in Manchester building funded by same Victorian mill-owners she criticised [audio 8min]

Set in 1840's Manchester, Mary Barton was the first novel written by Elizabeth Gaskell. It caused a sensation because of its damning indictment of industrialisation in the mill-towns of the north of England, and caused outrage on its publication in 1848. It painted a grim picture of working life; mill-owners growing rich on the back of the suffering of their workers. For the first time it's been adapted for the stage -- and is being performed at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre, a buil

Former Texas Gov. Ann Richards dies at 73 [audio 4min]

Ann Richards, a former Democratic Texas governor and a pioneering woman in Texas politics, died Wednesday after a battle with esophageal cancer. She was 73. Richards is remembered for her saucy, down-to-earth wit and her determination to make government more inclusive. Report by John Burnett.

Why did Suffolk's woollen trade began to fail in the 1620s? [audio 15min]

Richard Foster recounts stories based on old accounting documents. In the 1620s, cloth merchant Roger Cutler just about managed to keep his head above water as competition from the Low Countries cut into his export trade. The records reveal that blue was the colour of the day, and Suffolk was famous for its blue cloths. Richard Foster finds the Baltic connections alive and well as he drops into a Polish deli in Ipswich, but Suffolk ships now export rye to Europe rather than cloth, and in the loc

Stanley Baldwin's reputation deserves a rethink [audio 30min]

"It would have been much better had he never lived", was Churchill's scathing judgement of his fellow Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. But Lord Biffen -- the former Tory Minister, John Biffen -- tells presenter Matthew Parris why he believes Baldwin's reputation deserves a rethink. With the journalist and Labour historian Anne Perkins.

Gibbon's 'Rise and Fall' offers 3rd lesson for our own time [audio 14min]

Ever since the celebrated 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, people have looked to his work for signs of decay in their own age. In the last of a new three-part series, 'The Gibbon Test', Matthew Parris explores what lessons Gibbon may have for a multi-cultural Britain in the 21st Century. A writer for The Times and The Spectator, Parris is also a frequent broadcaster on British television and radio.

Titus Salt's factory town was Industrial Revolution model [audio 29min]

Archaeologist Julian Richards explores the hidden history of British towns through the streets and buildings of today. Over 150 years ago, Titus Salt set up a textile mill in a piece of countryside three miles from the centre of Bradford. It became a model town, its visionary scale unsurpassed during the Industrial Revolution. Salt didn't just provide well-built homes for his workers, but hospitals, shops and schools. Julian Richards takes a look around this fascinating place, finding out more a

18th-century interior-design market compares to today's world [audio 15min]

Richard Foster recounts stories based on old accounting documents. Soon after the famous actor and theatre manager David Garrick bought a London house at 6 Adelphi Terrace in 1771, Dr Johnson observed: 'He now lives rather as a prince than as an actor'. The surviving bills of Chippendale, Haig & Co for the furnishing of Garrick's house prove the good doctor's point -- the total cost was £931 9s 31/2d. Thomas Chippendale had expanded his furniture-making business to offer a complete interior

Raphael Chikukwa recounts history of WWII African veterans of British Army [audio 10min @32:45]

Raphael Chikukwa is the curator of a new exhibition -- Afrikan Heroes: Veterans of the Second World War, at the Imperial War Museum North, near Manchester, England -- which charts the often overlooked experiences and contributions of 2nd World War African veterans of the British Army. It was also a personal journey for Raphael, as his father and grandfather both served in the 1st and 2nd World Wars.

Journalist comments on an Alabama county's bloody past [audio 4min]

Commentator John Fleming tells the story of Lowdnes County, Ala. During the Civil Rights era, it was called"Bloody Lowdnes" because of all the violence there. One of the people who lost their lives working for civil rights was a young Episcopal seminarian named Jonathan Daniels. Fleming is the editor-at-large for the Anniston Star.

David Brion Davis discusses rise and fall of slavery in New World [video 65min]

Inhuman Bondage is David Brion Davis's history of slave revolts during the 19th century. This book details the British and American abolitionist movements and analyzes the social and economic impact of American slavery on the growth of the country. Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and Director Emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, also at Yale. He is the author of The Problem of Slavery in Western Cu

Sept. 11 was a day that changed the world [multiple clips]

Five years ago, on a beautiful September morning, terrorists wreaked havoc in America. NPR covered the story from the time the first plane struck the World Trade Center, and is still covering the story today. We have links to our past reports and essays, and fresh looks at how the world -- and individual lives -- were transformed by Sept. 11.

US remembers 9/11 five years on [multiple clips]

Sombre ceremonies have been held in the US on the fifth anniversary of the devastating 11 September attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people. Survivors of the attack on the Pentagon reflect on what has changed in the last five years -- and what has not. After the attacks, many commentators and political leaders declared that the world had changed for ever. Five years on, what exactly has changed?

What did Henry VIII's wives think of him? [audio 12min]

Nowadays we don't have too many of them, but in Tudor times, there was certainly no shortage of royal weddings. Henry VIII had six wives, and his fourth and fifth are the focus of the latest historical novel by Philippa Gregory, The Boleyn Inheritence (Harper Collins). The story of their relationships is told from the perspectives of Anne of Cleves and Catherine Howard and also from the view of a less familiar character, Jane Boleyn. She was lady-in-waiting to both and would become a Tudo

18th-century art market compares to art world today [audio 15min]

Richard Foster recounts stories based on old accounting documents. The accounts of the 18th-century painter and engraver Arthur Pond provide a detailed picture of the developing Georgian art market. Returning British colonists wanted pictures for their country houses, and Pond was happy to supply them -- either originals or old masters. For a portrait, he required 10 guineas for head and shoulders, 12 guineas if you wanted hands as well. To compare his world with the art world today, Richard Fos

50 years since rising in Hungary [audio 2min & 6min]

1) Listen to then US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge address the UN and a US news report from the time; 2) Dr Tomas Kazdebo, who know lives in Ireland, recalls what life was like in Hungary in the years immediately after WWII up to 1956.

Mao stirs mixed feelings in modern China [audio 4min]

Thirty years after his death, Mao's image is everywhere in China. But a new high school history book refers to him only briefly, in a chapter on etiquette. His communist views are in contrast with the nation's new economic direction. Report by Louisa Lim.

30th anniversary of Mao Tse-tung's death [audio 4min]

Journalist Michael Bristow, in Beijing, reports on the shadow that Mao Tse-tung casts over modern China.

Former prisoners recall Robben Island, Nelson Mandela [audio 45min]

Sue MacGregor goes to Johannesburg to reunite a group of former political prisoners who were incarcerated on Robben Island when Nelson Mandela was there throughout the 1960s and 70s. Robben Island was a world of chains and torture during South Africa's darkest apartheid years. But it also became a place where many of the country's future leaders learnt the skills which would later bring them to power. We hear the extraordinary stories of five former prisoners.

300 years of Liverpool history show themselves on its modern map [audio 29min]

Archaeologist Julian Richards explores the hidden history of British towns through the streets and buildings of today. In Liverpool -- the Gateway to the Empire -- human traffic through the port created a unique test-bed for new ideas about charity, health provision and disease control. But how does the bustling cosmopolitan history of the last 300 years show itself in the architecture of the city and the shape of the modern map?