Unholy Histories: The Humanist Heritage Podcast from Humanists UK
Join Andrew Copson and Madeleine Goodall—alongside a host of expert guests—as they uncover the hidden histories and untold stories of the people, places, movements, ideas, and events that helped shape British humanism, secularism and freethought.
From radical reformers to forgotten dissenters, Unholy Histories explores how reason, skepticism, science, and activism helped build modern Britain—and how these values still shape our society today.
Unholy Histories is a Humanists UK Podcast, showcasing the Humanist Heritage Project and produced by Humanise Live.
Find out more: https://heritage.humanists.uk/
Support us at: https://humanists.uk/support-us/
Start your podcast: https://humanise.live/
Episodes
10 episodes
Can they suffer? Humanism beyond humans and the British animal rights tradition
In 1789, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham asked a deceptively simple question: not whether animals can reason or talk, but whether they can suffer. That question opened a long argument about how a secular, humanist ethics should reach bey...
Radical Empathy: Civil Rights and The Humanist Ideas That Changed Two Nations
In February 1965, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. faced each other across a packed Cambridge Union, debating whether "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro." Baldwin won the vote by a landslide. But that famous mom...
The First Atheists: How Ancient Greece Questioned the Gods and Influenced Modern Thought
Long before the Enlightenment, ancient thinkers were already questioning the gods. In the Greek world of the seventh to fifth centuries BCE, medicine, weather and the natural world began to be explained without divine intervention. Philosophers...
Britain's Most Secular Parliament and the Battle That Built It
In 1880 a newly elected MP walked into the House of Commons and refused to swear an oath to God. Parliament refused to let him take his seat. He was re-elected four times. The standoff lasted six years. Charles Bradlaugh's fight ended with the ...
Who Really Wrote Human Rights? The Humanist Roots of the UDHR
In the aftermath of two world wars, a new vision for humanity began to take shape, one grounded in shared dignity, freedom, and cooperation across borders. At the heart of that vision were humanist thinkers, from H.G. Wells, whose Rights of...
Born of Mary: LGBT+ Rights & Humanism Shared Fight for Freedoms
Join Humanists UK: humanists.uk/joinThroughout modern British history, the movements for sexual freedom and freedom of belief have often converged, challenging moral orthodoxy and reli...
.png)
Good Without God: The Fight for Secular Education
Education has always been central to humanist thought, from the founding of the Moral Instruction League in 1897 to Margaret Knight's scandalous 1955 BBC broadcasts on raising children without religion. This episode traces the long humanist tra...
Atheists Before the Enlightenment: Doubters Before the Age of Reason
Many people assume humanism began with the Enlightenment. But sceptical, rational, human-centred ideas have a much longer history. This episode travels back to the centuries before the so-called Age of Reason to meet the freethinkers, doubters,...
Heroines of Freethought: The Women Who Defied God and the Patriarchy
Throughout history, women have been leading voices for reason, equality, and human progress, even if their stories have too often been overlooked. Taking its title from Sara Underwood's 1876 collection, this episode sheds light on some of the w...
