Enlightenment Podcasts

(Image: An old man consulting a book and holding a flask in a room with many pharmacy jars. Oil painting. Wellcome Collection)

“So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” (Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography)

Our world is to a great extent the produce of an historical movement called the Enlightenment. Centred on the eighteenth-century in Europe and America, the Enlightenment has often been described as an ‘Age of Reason’. It was a time when science, rationalism and enlarged human curiosity replaced the traditions of the past.

During the Enlightenment a new concept of ‘happiness’ came into vogue. This ‘pursuit of happiness’ is now considered to be one of the central preoccupations of the age.

From the Scientific Revolution to the French Revolution (and with many other revolutions in between) here is a selection of Enlightenment podcasts from Travels Through Time, with some of the world’s finest historians.

Radicalism, madness and laughing gas: Mike Jay (1799)

In this episode of Travels Through Time the author and cultural historian Mike Jay takes us back to 1799 – a year of anxiety, action and excitement on the cusp of a new century.
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The Fall of Maximilien Robespierre: Colin Jones (1794)

Colin Jones takes us back to one of the most dramatic days in all political history. Exactly 227 years ago today, on 9 Thermidor in the Revolutionary Calendar, or 27 July in ours, Maximilien Robespierre fell from power in Paris.
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The Warrior, the Voyager and the Artist: Dr Kate Fullagar (1776)

The Australian historian Dr Kate Fullagar travels back to 10 December 1776 to introduce us to a warrior, a voyager and an artist.
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The Relentless Rise of the East India Company: William Dalrymple (1764)

The inimitable William Dalrymple takes us on a tour of 1764 to try and explain how the East India Company became “An empire within an empire.”
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Latitude: Nicholas Crane (1739)

The Enlightenment was an age of problem solving. From the tides to lightning, the movement of the planets to the workings of the human body, generations of natural philosophers sought to subdue the ancient problems of Nature. Join Nicholas Crane to find out more.
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Money for Nothing in the South Sea Bubble: Thomas Levenson (1720)

Thomas Levenson, Professor of Science Writing at MIT, guides us back to the scene of one the first and most devastating of all stock market crashes, an event that traumatised Georgian Britain: the South Sea Bubble.
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The Paper Chase: Joseph Hone (1711)

The historian and literary scholar Dr Joseph Hone takes us back to the early eighteenth century. We follow the twists and turns of a three-hundred year old mystery and we meet the man who many consider Britain’s first prime minister: Robert Harley.
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The Glorious Revolution: Margarette Lincoln (1688)

1688 is an oddly neglected year in English history. Yet it is a compelling and consequential one as the author Margarette Lincoln explains in this episode. The year saw fiery riots, an invasion, a royal getaway and a change of monarchs. Lincoln takes us back to these events, which form part of the event we remember today as the Glorious Revolution.
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The Magical Mathematician: Prof. Simon Schaffer (1684)

On a frozen January day in 1684 three friends – Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley - met at a London coffee house to confront one of the great questions in knowledge: planetary motion.
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Christiaan Huygens and the Dutch Golden Age: Hugh Aldersey-Williams (1655)

Hugh Aldersey-Williams takes us back to 1655 and the vibrant heart of the Dutch Golden Age to meet Christiaan Huygens, a figure oddly forgotten by us today but who was once venerated as the greatest mathematician, astronomer and physicist of his age.
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The Ghost of Galileo: Professor John Heilbron (1643)

In this episode we’re venturing back to a dramatic moment in the seventeenth century, to investigate the secret histories embedded in a forgotten painting with one America’s great historians.
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