Podcast Tag: history

The Sword Guy Podcast

Listen in as Guy interviews a wide variety of interesting swordspeople and historians from around the world. Learn more about the practical, the tactical, the theoretical and the just plain awesome from a diverse group of voices.

Podcast Tag: history

Dr. Jamie L.H. Goodall is a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C. She is the author of Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars, National Geographic’s Pirates: Shipwrecks, Conquests, and their Lasting Legacy, Pirates and Privateers from Long Island Sound to Delaware Bay, and The Daring Exploits of Black Sam Bellamy: From Cape Cod to the Caribbean. She has a BA in Archeology, an MA in […]
Ben Miller is the man behind Physical Culture Historians, preserving and reviving historical exercise methods for mind, body and spirit using wands, Indian Clubs, calisthenics, and more. He has a successful and fascinating YouTube channel, and has produced several modern editions of 18th and 19th century fencing and self defence sources, as well as being the author of The Gladiatory Art: The Lives, Writings, & Techniques of the Eighteenth Century Stage Gladiators. In our […]
Sally Pointer is a freelance heritage educator, archaeologist and presenter of traditional skills and historic crafts. She is also an author and an Experimental Archaeology MSC student at Exeter University. Sally lives near Hereford, which is in the west of England on the Welsh border. It’s a rural area and perfect for her hobby of “hedge bothering” – a mix of foraging, looking at all the species that are in the hedge, what the […]
Dr. Przemysław Grabowski-Górniak is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw. His research focuses on the chivalric tradition of the late Middle Ages, be it chivalric romances or medieval manuscripts and treatises on the art of war, with a special focus on the English literary portrayals of Sir Gawain in the period of the 100 Years War and the Wars of the Roses. His admiration for the […]
Dr Rachael Whitbread is a historian and author. Her PhD from York University was on tournaments, jousts and duels. She is the co-author with Graham Callister of Battle: Understanding Conflict from Hastings to Helmand, and is currently working on a book called Duel: Single Combat in Medieval England for Pen and Sword Press, which sounds just up our streets. In our conversation we talk about chivalry, jousting, tournaments and how to become a famous […]
Dr. Mark Geldof specialises in all kinds of historical violence. He has a DPhil in history from the University of Oxford on Change and Continuity in English Elite Conceptions of Violence, 1450-1560 and an M.A. entitled The Heart, the Foot, the Eye to Accord: Procedural Writing and Three Middle English Manuscripts of Martial Instruction. He got into swords through the SCA, and he explains how the knowledge he gained through whacking people with sticks […]
Erin Fitzgerald is a historical martial arts practitioner at the Chicago Swordplay Guild, but her day job takes us much further back in time: to the time of the dinosaurs. Erin is a Fossil Preparator and in our conversation she explains the painstaking process of safely transporting fossils back to the lab and cleaning them up ready for studying. After talking about dinosaurs we skip forward a few tens of millions of years to […]
Dr. Andrew Lawrence-King is a historical musician, harpist, continuo player, baroque opera director, winner of a Grammy in the category of best small ensemble performance. He is also a rapier fencer and Tai Chi practitioner. And I should mention his crowning professional achievement is, of course, providing the harp music for my George Silver Paradoxes of Defence audiobook. In our conversation we talk about the similarities between researching historical music and historical martial arts. […]
My interview today is with Malcolm Fare, who is a collector of historical fencing books, a fencer himself and proprietor of the National Fencing Museum in the UK. The museum houses a library of over 300 books, 250 paintings and prints, 200 weapons, numerous masks, kit, trophies, posters, programmes, medals, stamps, postcards and other ephemera. You can click through on the museum’s website to see photos of the items. In 2017 I spent three […]
Ruth Goodman is a social and domestic historian working with museums, theatre, television and educational establishments. She has presented and consulted on several highly successful television series for the BBC. She has also written several excellent books we’ll be talking about today, including The Domestic Revolution, How to be a Tudor and How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England. In this episode, Ruth and I talk about some of the lesser known, but nonetheless […]