‘Dollar princesses’ or influential heiresses?...

This week, join host Amy Matthews and Howard Spencer, English Heritage senior historian for blue plaques, Judith Garfield MBE, executive director of Eastside Community Heritage, and Sumita Mukherjee, historian at the University of Bristol, as they celebrate the unveiling of Londo ...  Show more

What it is about our cliffs, beaches, islands and headlands that makes them so perfect for pilgrimage, prayer and retreat? In the fourth of our special series on Britain’s coastline, join Amy and English Heritage curators Susan Harrison and Jeremy Ashbee for a spiritual seaside j ...  Show more

In the late 1800s, American industrialists were raking in cash and living like princes, but they had no way, other than their mansions, servants and yachts, of making it clear that they were better than everyone else. Meanwhile, across the pond, the British aristocracy had come o ...  Show more

For much of the history we're discussed on this podcast, marriages were the best way to advance one's social position. In the Gilded Age, a special subset of advantageous marriages emerged: in which wealthy American heiresses paid generous dowries to marry into the European no ...

Royals were the worlds first celebrities. Their wealth and power made them stand out from the mud-caked peasantry. People wanted to know them, or at least know all about them. As actors and eventually actresses started treading the boards and becoming famous for their theatrical ...  Show more

In 1621 the Virginia Company of London put out a call for young, handsome and honestly educated women to become wives for the planters in its new colony in Jamestown. Hopeful husbands were supposed to pay for their English brides in best leaf tobacco. But who were the women wh ...