History Festival 2025
Now in its third year, the Caterham History Festival has welcomed world-leading historians to share their knowledge with an audience of all ages. Open to pupils and students across the Southeast, as well as the history curious of all and any age. We’re delighted to announce another stellar line up for 2025!
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This is a community event to share learning and educational opportunities with everyone and essential for young students of history wishing to extend their knowledge. Students of all schools may attend for free – use promotion code STUDENT.
HISTORY FESTIVAL 2025 – Saturday 15 November 2025 11am – 4pm
We’re thrilled that Suzannah Lipscomb will be joining the lineup for our third History Festival. Suzannah is an award-winning historian, author, and broadcaster and will be delivering a keynote lecture on the Tudors. Professor Suzannah Lipscomb is Professor Emerita at the University of Roehampton, Senior Member at St Cross College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries. She has written and edited seven books, presented history series on BBC, ITV, More4 and Channel 5 and hosts the successful Not Just the Tudors podcast from History Hit. READ MORE…
At 8:15 a.m. on August 6th, 1945, the Japanese port city of Hiroshima was struck by the world’s first atomic bomb. Built in the US by the top-secret Manhattan Project and delivered by a B-29 Superfortress, a revolutionary long-range bomber, the weapon destroyed large swaths of the city, instantly killing tens of thousands. The world would never be the same again. Iain will be giving deeper insight into his book, The Hiroshima Men , a vivid account of one of history’s most significant events: the approval, construction, and fateful decision to drop the atomic bomb – based on new research and interviews. MacGregor recounts the decade long journey towards this first atomic attack. It takes the reader from the corridors of the White House to the laboratories and test sites of New Mexico; from the air war above Nazi Germany and the savage reconquest of the Pacific to the deadly firebombing air raids across the Japanese Home Islands. READ MORE…
Jonathan is Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway, University of London. This talk will use the dramatic lives of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem (1131-52) and Sultana Shajar al-Durr of Egypt (1250) to illuminate female royal power in the medieval world and to discuss the history of the Crusader States and the Muslim Near East. Jonathan will discuss Melisende’s razor-sharp political skills in facing down the ambitions of her husband, King Fulk, as well as her role as the sponsor of multiple landmark building projects in the holy city of Jerusalem. While Melisende was born into the ruling class, Shajar al-Durr (which means ‘Tree of Pearls’) was originally a slave girl. Her rise from these lowly origins to the acknowledged ruler of Muslim Egypt is an astonishing tale yet shares some of the same features and means of demonstrating power as Melisende. It is, however, a rather more blood-stained story…READ MORE…
In his talk centred around his bestselling book, The Shortest History of England, James Hawes journeys from Caesar to Brexit via Conquest, Empire and World War. He discovers an England very different from the standard vision. Our stable island fortress, stubbornly independent, the begetter of parliaments and globe-spanning empires, is riven by an ancient fault-line that predates even the Romans; its fate has ever been bound up with that of its neighbours, whether we like it or not; and – for the past 1,000 years – it has harboured a class system like nowhere else on Earth. There has never been a better time to understand why England is the way it is – and there is no better guide. READ MORE…
Copies of the author’s books will be available to purchase and each talk will be followed by a book signing. Thank you to Village Books in Dulwich Village for being the official bookseller of our festival!
Book your tickets here
Students from all schools and colleges can gain a free ticket using the code ‘STUDENT’ in the box below (remember to click ‘apply’ for the code to work.)
