International audio

Find podcasts that relate records in The National Archives to places and events around the world, from the first American settlement in Jamestown to the partition of Punjab, India.

Australia in War and Peace, 1914-19

The ‘Australia in War and Peace, 1914-19′ research project is a major collaborative research project between the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies (MCAS), King’s College London and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) in Canberra, Australia. The ultimate ...
The policy agenda of the British Government, 1945-2008

Peter John talks about his research mapping the policies the British government has been concentrating on since 1945. Using the Queen’s Speech, laws and budgets he shows how the attention of government has shifted, taking into account the crisis in ...
Rawdon Brown and the Brown Archive in The National Archives

Rawdon Brown was born in 1806 and, from 1833 until his death in 1883, lived in Venice, virtually without a break. There, he quickly became a self-taught expert on the city and on its records and came to be employed ...
Geography, art and the sinking of the Mary Rose

King Henry VIII watched as the Mary Rose, pride of his Navy, suddenly capsized and sank whilst engaging a French invasion fleet off Portsmouth. This talk brings together Tudor art, geography, history and archaeology to better understand a few desperate ...
Tracing Huguenot ancestors

Between the 16th and 18th centuries, many thousands of refugees fled from religious persecution in the Low Countries and France. These refugees left descendants in Britain and many people have family stories of Huguenot descent. This talk will help you ...
The strange journey of Edward Swarthye, an African in Elizabethan England: from the Spanish Caribbean to rural Gloucestershire

In 1597, an African man named ‘Edward Swarthye, alias negro’ appeared before an English court. He gave evidence that, at the command of his employer Sir Edward Wynter, he had whipped another servant, John Guye, in the hall of his ...
Morbidity and mortality on convict voyages to 19th century Australia

Between 1803 and 1853 some 67,000 convicts were transported from England and Ireland to the British penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, later renamed Tasmania. Using a detailed reconstruction of 278 voyages (82 carrying female convicts and 196 male) this ...
Security Service file release October 2012

Professor Christopher Andrew, author of ‘The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5’, introduces highlights of the 29th release of Security Service records to The National Archives. Among the 77 files released are the ten post-war diaries of ...
Remembering Samuel Coleridge Taylor; African British musician and pan-Africanist

This podcast is an audio-visual presentation on the life of one of Britain’s favourite composers of the early 20th century and the first African to conduct an all-European orchestra. The podcast introduces some of his works, including Hiawatha’s wedding feast, ...
British Malaya

Diplomatic and Colonial Records Specialist Dr Dan Gilfoyle discusses some of the stand-out images from the Colonial Office Library’s photographic collection, recently digitised and put online by The National Archives for its ‘Asia through a Lens’ project. In this podcast, ...
Colonial lives, careers and policies: researching printed papers of the British colonial governments

The printed papers of colonial governments held by the Colonial Office, including government gazettes and sessional papers of colonial assemblies and parliaments, contain a wealth of detail for historians and genealogists. This podcast outlines the content of the printed papers ...
The Golden Stool: cataloguing Colonial Office records from 1900

In 1900, war broke out between the British and the Ashanti in the Gold Coast. The Colonial Office records from this year have recently been catalogued by volunteers at The National Archives. This talk, given by the volunteers themselves, shares ...
The Olympic Record

Sarah Hutton, records specialist at The National Archives, said: ‘These files show the impact the Olympic movement has had on our history in the 116 years since the modern Games were revived. From a brief dispatch in 1896 to the ...
An introduction to the first tranche of colonial administration records released at The National Archives

The National Archives is working with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to transfer and begin releasing colonial administration records, referred to as the ‘migrated archives’ between April 2012 and November 2013, in accordance with the published timeline on the ...
Finding your family in Canada

Researching in Canada is vastly different than researching in the UK. Records are especially different in areas originally settled by the French. This talk gives an overview of record keeping in Canada, how the records are organised, and where to ...