Orlando Figes talks to Dan about social and technological developments and their relationship to cultural changes in the 19th century.

Professor Paul Preston doesn’t pull his punches. His magisterial new history of modern Spain is called 'A People Betrayed'. He is the greatest living authority on Spain and he is not a fan of how that country had been governed. In this podcast he tells me a sorry story of corruption, war and brut...

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe. It killed nearly a quarter of all Germans and transformed the map of the modern world. Professor Peter Wilson of Oxford University took me on a whistle stop tour through these tumultuous years - from defenestrations in Prague, Westphalia...

Antony Robbins, Communications director Museum of London.

Eamonn O'Keeffe is a young Oxford Researcher in the midst of a PhD. He stopped off in Wakefield Library to look at a journal Yorkshire farmer Matthew Tomlinson to see if the author had any opinions on the subject of his research: military music. Tomlinson did not. However what O'Keeffe found in t...

The second ever History Hit live show saw Dan talking about ghosts with Martha McGill, the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick. How do ghosts change throughout history? What ghostly misdemeanour saw one servant forced to wear a sackcloth to church for a year?

The Haitian Revolution caused a seismic shift in global politics. When a mixture of different groups on the French colony of Saint Domingue rose against the colonists, few expected the rebellion to succeed. However, under the leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Haitians became one of the few...

Padraic Scanlan joined me on the podcast to talk about how Britain rose to global power on the backs of enslaved workers. Modern Britain has inherited the legacies and contradictions of a liberal empire built on slavery. Modern capitalism and liberalism emphasise 'freedom' - for individuals and f...

John Darwin joined me on the podcast to discuss how steam power reshaped our cities and our seas, and forged a new world order.

As an armed mob broke into the US Capitol, Dan talked long into the night to his friend and star blogger known only as the Angry Staff Officer. He is a serving officer in the US military and is unable to use his own name for broadcasting. During the course of a long conversation they talked about...

Sidney Blumenthal joined me on the podcast to talk about the political life of Abraham Lincoln and what his legacy means today.

Emily Brand is a writer, historian and genealogist. She specialises in the social history of the eighteenth century and is currently researching the trials and tribulations of romantic (and not-so-romantic) relationships in England, from the seduction guides of Restoration scoundrels to the broth...

Dan talks to Bee Rowlatt about the life and death of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft.

Angus Konstam joined me on the podcast to tell the dramatic story of HMS Hermione. In 1797, the British frigate was the site of the bloodiest mutiny in British naval history.

Dan talks to Adam Zamoyski, a historian who has recently written a new biography of Napoleon.

Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson died at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. Recently there has been considerable interest in Nelson's views on the slave trade and the plantation economy of the West Indies. A letter of Nelson's written months before his death in 1805 to the infamous Jamaican slave owne...

James Rebanks joined me on the podcast to tell the history of his family farm in the Lake District hills. This was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. We talk about how it has transfor...

Paul John Darran joined the army 1980. He was ninth generation of his family to do so. The story begins with his ancestor John Carberry joined the Tyrone militia in Ireland in 1795. He later transferred to the regular army and fought in the Peninsula with Wellington. he was killed during the noto...

In 1819, a huge crowd gathered in St Peter's Fields, Manchester, to hear radical speakers demand democratic reform. Dozens were killed and many more were injured by the army and local militia in what became known as the Peterloo Massacre. Dan talks to Jacqueline Riding - historical adviser on the...

Jamie L.H. Goodall joined me on the pod to discuss pirates of the Chesapeake Bay. The story of Chesapeake pirates and patriots begins with a land dispute and ends with the untimely death of an oyster dredger at the hands of the Maryland Oyster Navy.

Dan talks to Joanne Freeman about the history of polarisation in the USA, giving an extraordinary insight into the tone of American politics' early days.

The protests on the streets of America are a product of 400 years of violence, slavery, coercion and injustice. I took a crash course with Harvard's Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad on the history that has led to this moment. He stripped me of my illusions about America but also explained why he ...

Dan headed out to Texas to discuss the Battle of the Alamo and what its legacy means for modern Texas. He met with W. F. Strong, a famed historian of Texas, to wander around the city and get a deeper understanding of one of America's most famous battles.

The common sailor was a crucial engine of British prosperity and expansion up until the Industrial Revolution. From exploring the South Seas with Cook to establishing the East India Company as a global corporation;from the sea battles that made Britain a superpower to the crisis of the 1797 mutin...