In Our Time

The Spanish-American War 1898

Misha Glenny and guests discuss a turning point in world affairs in 1898 that left Spain greatly reduced as an imperial power and the US the owner of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, with a significant influence over the newly independent Cuba where the war broke out. The US had been eyeing Cuba for decades, waiting for the right moment and the right kind of action, and in April 1898 intervened in the long-running fighting on the island for independence from Spain. With a much stronger navy it was a very uneven battle and the US soon triumphed over Spanish forces from Manila to Santiago de Cuba. This brief war confirmed the US as a power on the world stage and made a shocked Spain turn inwards to ask what had gone wrong. Meanwhile, people in the Philippines were about to attempt a new and bloody independence fight with the US. With Frank Cogliano Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh Mary Vincent Professor of Modern European History at the University of Sheffield And Stephen Wilkinson Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Buckingham Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898-1923 (Clarendon Press, 1997) Sebastian Balfour, ‘Riot, Regeneration and Reaction: Spain in the Aftermath of the 1898 Disaster’ (The Historical journal 38.2, 1995) Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021) Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World (Torva, 2025) Richard Kluger, Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea (Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2007) Robert W. Merry, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century (Simon & Schuster, 2017) Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion (Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2008) Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba Between Empires, 1878–1902 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983) John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006) Mary Vincent, Spain, 1833-2002: People and State (Oxford University Press, 2007), especially chapter 3 In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Silicon

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the physics, biology and chemistry of the element silicon which is at the heart of some of the most useful and beautiful objects on the planet. While it is still being created throughout the universe, the silicon we have here was made billions of years ago in dying stars. In its compounds we have long used silicon for glass and, more recently, purified silicon has become the foundation of modern electronics. Perhaps less appreciated is the role silicon compounds play in the biology of life on Earth, on the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the cycling of elements between land, oceans and atmosphere that sustains us. With Kate Hendry Oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey and Bye-Fellow of Queen’s College, University of Cambridge Andrea Sella Professor of Chemistry at University College London And Monica Grady Professor Emerita in Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University Produced by Martha Owen Reading list: Christina De La Rocha and Daniel J. Conley, Silica Stories (Springer, 2017) Bernard Quéguiner, The Biogeochemical Cycle of Silicon in the Ocean (John Wiley & Sons, 2016) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Dadaism

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the provocative artistic phenomenon that first startled audiences in 1916 in Zurich. There, at the Cabaret Voltaire at the Holländische Meierei on the Spiegelgasse, Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball and others gathered on a small stage, sometimes dressed in cardboard, often performing nonsense poems. This was the start of Dada, a spirit more than a movement which spread to other cities in Europe during the war. In part the Dadas (as they called themselves) were protesting against the inevitability of constant wars on the continent and in part this was an artistic experiment around the absurd; they were creating poems, songs, costumes and art that made no obvious sense, just as the war around them made no sense to the artists, designers and poets at the Cabaret Voltaire. With Dawn Ades Emeritus Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex Ruth Hemus Professor of French and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London And Stephen Forcer Professor of French at the University of Glasgow Produced by Martha Owen Reading list: Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (Tate Publishing, 2006) Hugo Ball (trans. Ann Raimes and ed. John Elderfield), Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary (first published 1927; University of California Press, 1996) Stephen Forcer, Dada as Text, Thought and Theory (Legenda, 2015) Ruth Hemus, Dada's Women (Yale University Press, 2009) David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004) Jed Rasula, Destruction was my Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2015) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Archaea

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most remarkable scientific discoveries of the 20th century: the archaea microorganisms. In the 1970s the American microbiologist Carl Woese (1928-2012) realised that the tiny bacteria-sized organisms he was studying were not actually bacteria but from an entirely different branch of the tree of life. It became clear that archaea, as he named them, share aspects of the cells in all plants and animals even if they often live in places where other life struggles including salty lakes, acidic pools, under the sea bed and in the gut. While aspects of what followed from Woese are still under debate, further discoveries suggest that life on Earth has been on a journey of separation and reunion: that the first cells developed into bacteria and archaea billions of years ago and that some of those later combined to form the complex cells from which we are made. With Christa Schleper Professor of Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Vienna Thorsten Allers Professor of Archaeal Genetics at the University of Nottingham And Buzz Baum Group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: John Archibald, One Plus One Equals One: Symbiosis and the evolution of complex life (Oxford University Press, 2014) Buzz Baum, ‘I’: A Biography of the Biological Self (Allen Lane, forthcoming 2027) Franklin M. Harold, In Search of Cell History: The Evolution of Life's Building Blocks (University of Chicago Press, 2014) Nick Lane, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press, 2005) David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (Simon & Schuster, 2018) Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis (Oxford University Press, 1994) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Margaret Beaufort

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the woman who, as a child bride, became mother to the boy who would eventually become the first king in the Tudor dynasty. Lady Margaret Beaufort (c1443-1509) was twelve when she married Edmund Tudor, half his age, and gave birth to their son Henry when she was thirteen and Edmund was already dead from the plague. Margaret Beaufort made it her life's work to protect Henry during the Wars of the Roses, which had begun soon before his birth and, as many more obvious successors to the crown died or were killed in the wars, she pivoted to supporting Henry when he became the strongest contender against Richard III. She was to survive Richard III declaring her a traitor and went on to see Henry become Henry VII, the first Tudor king, and herself become the King's Mother. Outliving her son by a few months, she was then to help her grandson Henry VIII succeed and the Tudor dynasty continue. With Joanna Laynesmith Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading Katherine Lewis Honorary Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lincoln and Research Associate at the University of York And David Grummitt Staff Tutor in History at the Open University Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Nathen Amin, The House of Beaufort (Amberley Publishing, 2017) Rachel Delman, 'The Vowesses, the anchoresses, and the aldermen's wives: Lady Margaret Beaufort and the Devout Society of Late Medieval Stamford' (Urban History 49, 2022) David Grummitt, A Short History of the Wars of the Roses (revised edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) Michael Hicks, The Wars of the Roses (Yale University Press, 2010) Lauren Johnson, Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025) Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King's Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge University Press, 1991) Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women's Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2008), especially the chapter ‘Margaret Beaufort's Literate Practice: Service and Self-Inscription' J.L. Laynesmith, Cecily Duchess of York (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) Susan Powell, The Household Accounts of Lady Margaret Beaufort, 1443-1509 (The British Academy, 2022) Nicola Tallis, Uncrowned Queen: The Fateful Life of Margaret Beaufort, Tudor Matriarch (Michael O'Mara, 2019) Micheline White (ed.), English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500-1625 (Ashgate, 2016), especially ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort’s Translations as Mirrors of Practical Piety’ by Brenda M. Hosington In Our Time is a BBC Studios production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.