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70 episodes

Smoke and Silk: Re-imagining London’s Very First Chinatown
09/2/2026 | 44 mins.
As we head into spring, Trapped History takes a brisk wintery walk through the streets of London’s Docklands to seek out the Limehouse Chinatown of the 1880s.
Jack the Ripper is striking fear into the heart of the East End, the Bryant & May matchgirls are on strike and the magnificent Ching Hook is knocking them dead at the Sebright Music Hall. And Pearl Fitzgerald, a young woman with a Chinese mother and an Irish father, is trying to secure her inheritance.
But Pearl isn’t real. She is a fiction, the main character in novelist Fiona Keating’s bodice-ripping Smoke & Silk. Everything else, though, is true – and so Fiona is taking us and you on a journey through Pearl’s world to re-discover London’s first Chinatown. Here you will find laundries and opium, poverty and anger – but above all else a small Chinese community, hanging on by its fingernails in the onslaught of the tabloid ‘yellow peril’ scare.
It's bracing, it’s exciting and it might help change your mind about Sherlock Holmes.

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Hall of Fame: Beer, Bailiffs and Balls
02/2/2026 | 3 mins.
Here's a great Hall of Fame nominee from Christina Wade – and it's another oldie. In 1275, Gillian Pykard told the sheriff's bailiffs in Exeter precisely what they could do with their rules. She was a brewer and knew what her customers wanted.
It's a small story but it's a slice of life which shows us so much about a world which seems so foreign to us in the 21st century. But if there's one thing we've learned from history, it's that people and people – and they don't take kindly to being told what to do! Enjoy this medieval rebel's tale.

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Kiss and Tell: The Fabulous Lives of Peg Plunkett, Dublin’s Courtesan Extraordinaire
26/1/2026 | 48 mins.
With a name and a story Dickens would have killed for, Peg Plunkett owned Dublin in the 1780s. Surviving a horrific childhood, she escaped to the big city and swiped right and left to her heart’s content until she blew everything up with her incendiary memoirs.
Award-winning Filthy Queens author, Christina Wade, plunges us into the life of an 18th century courtesan – a world in which Peg is a modern day Samuel Pepys, with views on men, marriage, chastity and responsibility which seem so fresh and yet alien to her times. This is a rip-roaring, rumbustious tale – so buckle in and check your pockets!

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Hall of Fame: Ireland's Pirate Queen
19/1/2026 | 4 mins.
Sathnam Sanghera blows the doors off the Hall of Fame today alongside his nominee, the Pirate Queen of Ireland, Grainne – or Grace – O'Malley.
Born in County Mayo when Henry VIII was on the throne of England, Grainne would command a fleet of ships, raid neighbouring clans, revenge the deaths of her loved ones and take on the English army. She would even meet with Queen Elizabeth to – in the best Jack Sparrow tradition – 'parley' with her opponent.
Grainne was pretty special and is a worthy addition to the Trapped History Hall of Fame – and its new protector too!

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It's Complicated: Sathnam Sanghera on India's Controversial Independence Leader
12/1/2026 | 52 mins.
Mahatma Gandhi is a worldwide hero. Nehru led India through turmoil. But who in the West knows of Subhas Chandra Bose? Well, perhaps we should learn more about him because he is the man of the moment in Modi’s 21st century India.
Empireland’s Sathnam Sanghera joins us today to try to understand someone who lived and died by the maxim ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. We find out what that actually meant in the 1940s and how we can navigate the ethical and moral quagmire which led Bose into the arms of the Nazis. This is an important episode, summed up by Sathnam’s own maxim: ‘it’s complicated’.

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About Trapped History

Trapped History is a history reboot for everyone. It tells the stories of the forgotten – of the hidden heroes ignored by the history we were taught in school. We take our name from something the writer James Baldwin said: “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” We want to break people free from those stories. Whether it is women's history, Black history, military history, cultural history – all of this, hidden or forgotten, is also trapped history. And so we give you a history podcast for the curious, with inspiring tales of unsung heroes, people who broke the mould with their courage and defiance. Co-hosts Oswin and Carla are joined by special guests who help bring those stories to life. People like Mishal Husain, Jeremy Corbyn, Michaela Strachan, Sathnam Sanghera – even Zippo the Clown and Jet from Gladiators! Anyone with a new and different perspective on history. Rebooting history one story at a time. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and subscribe to the award-winning history podcast at our website for bonus episodes and more: www.instagram.com/trappedhistory www.facebook.com/trappedhistory www.trappedhistory.com This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy

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