Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. We got Hilda Hugenboom on the podcast

we're talking Catherine the Great, Catherine the Great, a German princess, Maffeli, minor

royal house, who became Zarina of Russia, overseeing a massive expansion of the Russian

Empire, ruling in her own right, a truly extraordinary woman.

Hilda Hugenboom is a literary historian, a translator, she has been through acres, acres of archive

material about Catherine, much of it written by Catherine the Great. She wrote fluently

and thoughtfully about constitutions, about how government should run, most of it to be

fair based on the assumption that she would be in absolute control of everything, but

still interesting. But then that absolute slacker, Charles I. Anyway, she also is really

interesting on busting the myths around Catherine of the misogynistic myths, for example, about

her addiction to sex, when in fact she seemed about a sexually active as any of us normal

human beings are, and particularly in comparison to her male counterparts, the crowned heads of

Europe. It's a fascinating conversation about one of the 18th century's most remarkable

people. If like me, you love 18th century history, there's plenty of it available. You

know what I'm going to say? It's available at historyhits.tv. It's our new history channel,

folks. Someone pointed out to me over the weekend, it's like a history channel, but there's

no aliens on it or neo-nazis on this history channel. So go and check it out if you actually

like history. It's historyhits.tv. Please head over there. It's like Netflix and history

got hundreds of documentaries on there, thousands of episodes of podcasts, this one and many

others. You can love it. That's all I can say. Welcome to the team, welcome to the family.

I'm in some big meetings today about some projects the second half of this year. It's

good news, folks. We're doing some big stuff. You're going to enjoy it. In the meantime,

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