Explore every episode of the podcast Broad History
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The homesteaders trad wives would rather forget about (Megan Kate Nelson, part 2) | 06 Jun 2026 | 00:36:24 | |
In part 2 of our exploration of the American frontier, Megan Kate Nelson introduces two women who belie the homesteader image conservative "trad wives" like to harken back to. Polly Bemis was a Chinese immigrant who built a life and a community in Idaho, despite intense prejudice and stringent anti-Chinese immigration policies. Ella Watson was a self-made homesteader and small rancher, a so-called cattle queen who got on the wrong side of cattle barons in Wyoming and paid the price. Read more: How Chinese women were barred from the American dream
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| The American Frontier you never hear about (Megan Kate Nelson, part 1) | 24 May 2026 | 00:40:02 | |
The Western frontier is a foundational myth of the United States. Historian Megan Kate Nelson is here to complicate it with the stories of women who do not at all fit the image of the American pioneer you probably imagine. In part 1 of this two-parter conversation, she (re)introduces us to Sacajawea, the Native American woman who led the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific, and Gertrudis Barceló, an infamous gambling entrepreneur who became one of the richest people in the New Mexico territory. Members can listen to both parts of this conversation right away. Sign up at www.broadhistory.com/membership.
What do you think? Jump to:
Get the book 🇺🇸 Buy "The Westerners" in the US bookstore 🇬🇧 Shop in the UK bookshop (Affiliate bookshop.org links support Broad History and indie bookstores. "The Westerners" is not yet available in the UK unless as an import.) | |||
| History's super confused ideas about women's sex lives (Kate Lister) | 09 May 2026 | 00:50:51 | |
The ancient Greeks believed a woman's womb wandered through her body and made her ill. Medieval Europeans believed a woman's orgasm was necessary for conception. And the Victorians believed masturbation would drive you to madness. Sex historian Dr. Kate Lister — host of Betwixt the Sheets and author of Flick: A History of Sexual Pleasure — joins me for a tour through the wildly strange, often infuriating history of women's sexuality. For most of that history, women were believed to be the more sex-crazed gender. What can we say, girls will be girls...
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Get the book 🇬🇧 Buy the book in the UK: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/9178/9780857506436 🇺🇸 Shop in the US bookstore (Flick is not yet published in the US) (Affiliate bookshop.org links support Broad History and indie bookstores.) | |||
| The fire that started a Victorian gender war | 02 May 2026 | 00:21:25 | |
Paris, 1897. The Bazar de la Charité blaze killed 118 women and girls. Where were the men?
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| The gender pension gap of 1539, or how women got screwed by the Dissolution of Monasteries | 21 Apr 2026 | 00:19:16 | |
Don't work but don't get married and don't count on a living pension. This is an audio read of The gender pension gap of 1539, or how women got screwed by the Dissolution of Monasteries.
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| "I refuse to be a footnote" – the women who invented literary journalism (Julia Cooke) | 12 Apr 2026 | 00:44:32 | |
Julia Cooke, author of Starry and Restless, joins me to bring back three women who were household names in their day — Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Mickey Hahn — pioneering journalists who covered wars, crossed borders, and revolutionised literary nonfiction decades before the men usually credited with inventing it. We talk about why these women's fame didn't survive them, the challenges of resurrecting female legacy, and what it meant — then and now — to want both a roaming career and a life with people you love. Sign up for the newsletter.
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Get the book 🇬🇧 Shop in the UK bookshop 🇺🇸 Shop in the US bookstore (Affiliate bookshop.org links support Broad History and indie bookstores.) | |||
| "All work is sh*t" or the anti Girl Boss feminism of the 1970s (Emily Callaci) | 24 Mar 2026 | 00:43:33 | |
In the 1970s, Wages for Housework demanded pay for cooking and cleaning without any illusions about making it in the workplace. What if work was never our liberator?
Listen early and without ads. Become a member at www.broadhistory.com. 🇬🇧 Buy the book in the UK: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/9178/9780241502907 Click here to watch a video of this episode.
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| George Sand outsold Victor Hugo. Then we forgot about her. (Fiona Sampson) | 05 Mar 2026 | 00:46:35 | |
"We raise them like saints, then hand them over like fillies," she said of 19th-century girls. Her best-selling novels were an indictment of arranged marriages and the female condition. At home in France, her contemporaries – Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac – considered her a giant of literature. In England, she outsold Hugo and inspired the Brontë sisters. Today, we don't read her. She's fallen out of the literary canon. If she's known at all, it's for her private life, a scandalous reputation that pop culture has overblown. A new biography of George Sand by British academic and poet Fiona Sampson reveals a thoroughly modern woman, who was centuries ahead in claiming nothing more and nothing less than the freedom to be a complete person. Creators & Guests
★ Support this podcast ★ 🇬🇧 Buy the book in the UK: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/9178/9781529924336 Click here to watch a video of this episode. | |||
| The long history of women in work (Victoria Bateman) | 12 Feb 2026 | 00:50:14 | |
Forget the cliché that women suddenly joined the workforce in the middle of the 20th century. They've been active in the economy as long as there's been an economy and not anecdotally. Guest: Victoria Bateman, economic historian and author of Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power. 🇬🇧 Buy the book in the UK: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/9178/9781035415779 | |||
| Introducing Broad History | 28 Jan 2026 | 00:02:09 | |