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Rearview Mirror Chronicles
Keith Hockton, FRAS, is a writer, publisher, and award-winning podcaster based in Penang, Malaysia, with a deep passion for uncovering the stories that shaped our world. As the Southeast Asia Editor for International Living magazine, Keith explores the intersections of history, culture, and modern life across the region.
A dynamic lecturer and storyteller, he speaks internationally on Southeast Asian politics, economics, and history—bringing the past to life with clarity, wit, and insight. Keith is also a proud Fellow of The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland and is on a mission to make history not only accessible but genuinely entertaining for everyone.
His published books include:
• Atlas of Australian Dive Sites - Travellers Edition (Harper Collins Australia, 2003).
• Penang - An inside guide to its historic homes, buildings, monuments and parks (MPH Publishing, 2012; 2nd Edition 2014; 3rd Edition 2017).
• Festivals of Malaysia (Trafalgar Publishing, 2015).
• The Habitat Penang Hill: A pocket history (Entrepot Publishing, 2018)
• Alana and the Secret Life of Trees at Night (Entrepot Publishing, 2018)
• Penang Then & Now: A Century of Change in Pictures (Entrepot Publishing, 2019; 2nd Edition 2021
• Bersama Lima - Five Together (Entrepot Publishing, 2022)
www.entrepotpublishing.com
Episodes
166 episodes
History’s Strangest Questions: Where does the name America come from?
Everyone knows America was named after Amerigo Vespucci. The Italian explorer. The New World. The map. Case closed.Except it isn't.Current research points to someone else entirely. Someone hiding in plain sight for five hundred ye...
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The Dutch East India Company — Every Port Has a Price (Part Three)
The VOC was dissolved on the thirty-first of December, 1799. But empires don't simply end. They leave things behind.In the third and final part of this series, we sail into the aftermath. The ports your ship is passing through, Semarang,...
The Dutch East India Company —Nutmeg: The Spice They Traded Manhattan For (Part Two)
What if the most valuable commodity on earth — more precious than gold, more coveted than silk — grew in just one place? Six tiny volcanic islands in the middle of the Indonesian sea, surrounded by reefs, monsoons, and men willing to kill to ke...
The Dutch East India Company — Spies, Spices and the Birth of the Stock Market (Part One)
One man. A stolen map. The birth of modern capitalism.In 1583, a young Dutchman talked his way into the heart of Portugal's Asian empire — and spent six years quietly copying its most jealously guarded secrets. Routes. Charts. The knowle...
The Flying Tigers, CAT, Air America — An Unbroken Thread: The Legacy (Part Three)
They flew wars that officially never happened. They built a nation that might not exist without them. They were civilians on paper and combat veterans in reality — and most of them came home to silence.This is the final chapter of the tr...
From The Hump to Saigon: The Extraordinary Story of CAT, Air America and Air Asia (Part Two)
What happened to the legendary pilots of The Hump after the Second World War ended?The answer is one of the most extraordinary and least known stories in aviation history.From the battlefields of China to the jungles of Laos and V...
The Flying Tigers - The Hump Crews (Part One)
The Flying Tigers became legends. The shark mouths. The dogfights. The mythology of fearless American pilots diving through the skies above China and Burma. But behind the glamour lay another war almost nobody remembers.This is the story...
History’s Strangest Questions: The Most Extreme Psychological Warfare Ever Recorded
What is the most extreme act of psychological warfare in history?In 496 BC, the Chinese ruler King Goujian unveiled a tactic so shocking that it still resonates more than 2,500 years later. In this episode of History’s St...
Bloody Mary - The Real Mary Tudor
For nearly five centuries she has been remembered by a nickname: Bloody Mary. But was Mary Tudor really the monster history made her out to be? In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we look beyond the propaganda and mee...
History’s Strangest Questions: Was The Great Stink of 1858 Real?
In the boiling summer of 1858 London nearly collapsed under the weight of its own filth. The Thames became an open sewer, Parliament could barely function through the stench, and thousands had already died from cholera. Out of this ...
Who Owns The Koh-i-Noor Diamond?
The Koh i Noor is not just a diamond. It is a trail of blood stretching across centuries.Murder, betrayal, empire, conquest, assassinations, collapsing kingdoms, and one tiny stone that still has the power to ignite arguments across half...
History’s Strangest Questions: Who Was the Last Survivor of the Crimean War?
Can a war last more than a century by accident? Why do some of history’s strangest stories sound completely impossible, yet turn out to be true? And how do forgotten laws, bizarre misunderstandings, and tiny historical footnotes sometimes becom...
The Last Letters of Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette still haunts history. Not because of the diamonds, the silk gowns, or the myth of “Let them eat cake”, but because beneath the powdered image was a real woman slowly being destroyed by revolution, propaganda, fear, and public h...
Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? The Lost Christianities
What if the Christianity we know today was only one version among many?In the earliest centuries after Jesus, Christianity was not a single unified faith but a chaotic world of rival gospels, competing prophets, strange miracles, and wil...
The Ninth: A Legion Erased
They marched into the mists of Scotland… and something in those mists did not let them return.The Legio IX Hispana had once been Rome at its most ruthless. Veterans of slaughter in Hispania, men who had learned to kill without hesitation...
Marks That Outlive Us - Tattoos and the Stories We Carry
Tattoos are not really about ink. They are about memory, identity, and the quiet human need to leave a mark.Across thousands of years, people have chosen to carve meaning into their own skin, sometimes as an act of devotion, sometimes of...
Vietnam, The War That Broke America
We step into the shadows of Southeast Asia, where beauty and violence sit side by side, and something begins to break. Vietnam is no longer a distant conflict. It is the place where power is tested, and found wanting.This is not a story ...
The Emergency: Fear, Fire, and the Making of Modern Malaya
It doesn’t begin with a declaration of war. It begins with unease.In the humid aftermath of the Second World War, British Malaya looks stable on the surface, plantations hum, the Union Jack flies once more, and the machinery of empire cr...
Secrets of the Freemasons
They’ve been blamed for everything from world domination to hiding the Ark of the Covenant—yet they still can’t agree on who brings the biscuits to the meeting.The Freemasons: part medieval guild, part secret society, part boys’ club wit...
Masterpieces and Mysteries - The Ambassadors (Part Three)
Step into the quiet grandeur of the National Gallery and come face to face with one of the most unsettling masterpieces ever painted, The Ambassadors. At first, it appears to be a portrait of wealth, power, and Renaissance confidence, two men s...
Masterpieces and Mysteries - The Garden of Earthly Delights (Part Two)
There are paintings you admire… and then there are paintings that quietly take hold of you, refusing to let go. The Garden of Earthly Delights is firmly in the latter camp.Set within the shadowed grandeur of the Museo del Prado, this ext...
Masterpieces and Mysteries - The Arnolfini Portrait: A Marriage or a Mystery (Part One)
What if the world’s most famous paintings are not what they seem?In this series, Masterpieces and Mysteries steps beyond the frame to uncover the hidden stories behind some of history’s greatest works of art. These are not just ...
Harald Hardrada - Viking, Mercenary, King (Part Two)
Exile. Warrior. Something more than a man.In Part Two, Harald Hardrada arrives in Constantinople, the greatest city on earth, and enters the brutal, glittering world of the Varangian Guard.What follows is a life lived at the edge,...
Harald Hardrada - Viking, Mercenary, King (Part One)
Before 1066, before Stamford Bridge, before he became a legend, Harald Hardrada was a boy standing in a collapsing shield wall, watching his world burn.Wounded, hunted, and forced into exile, he vanishes east into a vast and dangerous wo...
The Bible - The Book That Changed the World… and Nearly Tore It Apart
This episode turns to the Bible, not as a relic, but as a living document shaped by centuries of belief, conflict, and interpretation. What begins in the ancient Hebrew texts unfolds into the foundations of Christianity, and then into the conte...