Trapped History Podcast: Understand The Present/Prepare for The Future

 

Today, we have a superb indie podcast that approaches history in a  distinct way, sparkling with freshness, historical profundity, and audio brilliance. 

Trapped History has a distinct take on history, explaining that "
History is how we think about the past. It’s how we speak of it. And the way we speak of it today will be different to the way people spoke of it a century ago and to the way people will speak of it in a hundred years’ time. History is not about long gone people and ideas – it’s about you and me, all of us, right here, right now. It’s about how we manage the past, how we explain it to better understand the present and prepare for the future." 

The podcast is an independent show, professionally produced, and acts as a reminder that history is not simply "what was," but more often the way things are now.

Trapped History has an interesting and unique origin story. 

"Trapped History's starting point – and our very name – comes from something the great writer and activist James Baldwin wrote: 'People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.' We want to break people free from those stories," says co-host Carla O'Shaughnessy.

Carla continues: "That's why Oswin started up the successful @trappedhistory Instagram account during lockdown. It now has an established and dedicated following, and it soon became clear that people really want to hear about these forgotten people. And that's when the Trapped History podcast was born - it launched in December 2022."

The co-hosts are Oswin Baker, the founder of Trapped History and Carla O'Shaughnessy, with engineer MK Lee. The show just began its fifth season with over 50 episodes released.


The show focuses on the interstices of history. The stories you don't know and aren't told. At times, this podcast presents heroes as villains and villains as heroes. Unlike the current whitewashing of history in the United States, this podcast doesn't align history with political ideology. 

Here is the summary of their July 28th episode: It’s October 1940, and you are walking down a dusty lane when someone slips a scrap of paper into your hand. You hold it tightly in your palm, waiting until you’re around a corner and away from prying eyes.  When you manage to find that moment and open the folded paper square, you read: “Milena from Prague requests a meeting.”

You are Margarete Buber-Neumann and you are a prisoner in Ravensbruck concentration camp. The note in your hand is from Milena Jesenska, who has just arrived in the camp. It is a note which heralds the beginnings of hope, of friendship – of love – in the midst of death.

Along with historian Gwen Strauss, the co-hosts tell the life-affirming and heart-breaking tale of Grete and Milena as they try to find a reason to live. The tale depicts the atrocities surrounding these two women, and a spiritual, emotional, and perhaps physical connection between these two women imprisoned in a wartime concentration camp.

On the November 7, 2024, episode, here's the summary: It's October 1961. The Beatles are in Hamburg, JFK in the White House, Yuri Gagarin has just shot into space. And a state-sponsored killing spree is going down on the streets of a capital city. But this isn't Rio, Washington or Johannesburg. This isn't Moscow or Port-au-Prince or Saigon. This is Paris, the City of LIght, and by the month's end, over 200 north Africans will have been murdered by the city police. Rewind a further 60 years and the same thing is playing out in the hills and forests of the Philippines, as the Moro resistance is being wiped out by the American army in the infamous Bud Dajo massacre.

The co-hosts ask a devastatingly simple question that appears to evade the consciousness of entire nations: Does history teach us anything? Looking around the world today, can we say that we have learnt from the past? 

 

The co-hosts are Oswin Baker, who  studied history at the University of Edinburgh, where he researched post-war British politics. He has spent the last 30 years gathering and hearing the stories of people who have been forgotten and ignored by society, firstly at the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence, then at the homelessness charity Crisis before working at the pollsters Ipsos MORI.

Oswin has headed up research departments in the NHS and at Dr Foster, a healthcare data agency, and for the last decade he has run his own social research agency, Rockpool  Research, where he has worked with charities, social enterprises, government departments and local authorities. Throughout, Oswin has sought to understand and bring to the fore the lived experiences of people who are all too easily written out of history.

Carla is an audio producer, voice actor and PR consultant based in Bristol, UK. She formerly worked as a freelance producer on BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show (the most listened-to current affairs radio programme in the UK) and is now part of the team producing John Darvall's morning show at BBC Radio Bristol.

As a voice actor, Carla works across narration, commercials and characters and has voiced projects for brands including Airbus, LEGO, Hasbro, Barclays, PwC, Bupa, Astra Zeneca and Nurofen. Prior to working in audio, Carla worked in PR for brands across financial services, retail, leisure and entertainment. 

Carla has co-presented the Trapped History podcast with Oswin Baker since its inception and loves discovering and telling the stories of amazing unsung heroes, particularly incredible women whose stories deserve to be told.

Along with engineer MK Lee, this team brings the gravitas necessary to narrate these tales of history either forgotten, never known, or neglected. The show also "chapters" its episode interviews, using music to segment the interview, which enables listeners to catch a breath and absorb the tenor of the show. It's almost always a smart strategy for interview podcasts, and isn't used enough as a narrative tool. 

The show also has an innovative and utterly fascinating segment called the Hall Of Fame. The guest of an episode gets to nominate a historical figure for the podcast's Hall of Fame. For example, in the episode described above about the concentration camps, guest historian Gwen Strauss nominated Odette Pilpoul, the Parisian soul of the French Resistance who took it upon herself to document and save evidence of atrocities when she survived a series of concentration camps.

I highly recommend Trapped History. In countries like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and the United States, history is being subverted to serve a political agenda. This podcast searches for truth in history and releases those truths from the trap that has ensnared them. 

I think I can already recognize a nominee for next year's Ear Worthy Award for History.