Trapped History

Ranking history

About the show

Latest episodes

• Hall of Fame: Capitalism and Slavery

  August 16, 2026 · 5 min

  Eric Williams was Trinidad and Tobago's first Prime Minister after independence. Pretty consequential stuff. But for us, and for this week's guest Alex Renton, Eric was so much more. Because in the 1940s, he became the first historian to…

• My Family Owned Slaves

  August 9, 2026 · 45 min

  As we close out Season 7, Trapped History takes a long dark walk down one of the most uncomfortable roads in history, going deep into the story of one British family which owned and traded in slaves. We are joined by the journalist and…

• Hall of Fame: The Man Who Designed Bond

  August 2, 2026 · 6 min

  After pulling the curtain away from James Bond, writer Mark O'Connell chose Bond's book designer for his Hall of Fame nominee. Richard Chopping was Ian Fleming's choice too, and he created the template for Bond which we are all familiar…

• The Name's Bond. Queer Bond.

  July 26, 2026 · 52 min

  He's the man's man, the lady's man, the pinnacle of heterosexual hyper-masculinity. His name is Bond. But you know what? Maybe James Bond is not as straight as you think. Because the origin story of 007 is a very queer one. From Ian…

• Jocelyn Bell: Music, Poetry and That Other Thing

  July 19, 2026 · 4 min

  This week, we've got a special Trapped History short for you. It felt wrong to ask Jocelyn to nominate someone for the Hall of Fame (Vera Rubin, anyone?) and so today we've got some choice gems which didn't make it into the main show…

• The Lost Nobel Women

  July 12, 2026 · 53 min

  In its 120 year history, nearly 1,000 people have won a Nobel Prize. And we're going to ask you a simple question: how many of those Nobel laureates are women? What, half of them maybe? Or perhaps more realistically, one in four? One in…

• Hall of Fame: The Modernist Romantic

  July 5, 2026 · 6 min

  For this week's Hall of Fame, the author Joe Dunthorne presents the writer's writer: Heinrich von Kleist. A contemporary of Goethe, Byron and Shelley he was perhaps even more jaded, world-weary and downright depressed than a whole inkwell…

• My Great-Grandfather Made Chemical Weapons for the Nazis

  June 28, 2026 · 56 min

  Wouldn't it be nice if the stories we're told were all true, were all heroic and inspiring? But that's not always the case. Because more often than not, family histories – all our family histories – are messy, complicated, disappointing…