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A History of the World in 100 Objects Podcast Transcripts

BBC Radio 4 · 102 episodes with transcripts

Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, narrates 100 programmes that retell humanity's history through the objects we have made.

Spoken has transcripts of 102 A History of the World in 100 Objects episodes, with the speakers named. The newest listed here is from July 13, 2026.

History

Every A History of the World in 100 Objects transcript in one script

102 episodes of A History of the World in 100 Objects have transcripts. Fetch them all as speaker-labeled Markdown in one script — 1 credit each, and re-fetching one you already have is free:

archive.sh
curl -s -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  https://spoken.md/podcasts/351096296/episodes \
  | jq -r '.episodes[] | "\(.id) \(.title)"' \
  | while IFS=' ' read -r id title; do
      slug=$(echo "$title" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr -cs 'a-z0-9' '-' | sed 's/-*$//')
      [ -f "${id}-${slug}.md" ] && continue
      curl -sf -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
        -o "${id}-${slug}.md" \
        https://spoken.md/transcripts/$id || rm -f "${id}-${slug}.md"
      sleep 0.34
    done

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Latest A History of the World in 100 Objects transcripts

From The World to America: Neil MacGregor meets Roman Mars

July 13, 2026

Roman Mars (0:00)

In 2010, A History of the World in 100 Objects, hosted by Neil MacGregor, premiered on BBC Radio 4 to great acclaim. It was a groundbreaking series that told a complex and interconnected history of the world through 100 objects housed in the British Museum collection. For 2026, BBC Studios decided they wanted to…

If you listened to and enjoyed the original A History of the World in 100 Objects, I hope you'll give A History of the United States in 100 Objects a spin. I'm so proud of what we've made so far and all that is to come. But from the beginning, I knew I needed sage advice to do the job right. And so I sought the…

Neil MacGregor (2:02)

No, absolutely not, absolutely not.

I was intimidated, we were all intimidated by the fact that the BBC had committed to a series of 100 programs. We had no idea how it was going to be received at all. In a strange way, the project began really almost as an internal project in the British Museum. What's interested me having come from the National…

Roman Mars (3:00)

Of all the things in the building, how did you choose the 100?

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