In 1649 Britain was engulfed by revolution. Charles I was executed for treason and within weeks the English monarchy had been abolished and the House of Lords discarded. The people, it was announced, were now the sovereign force in the land. What did this mean for the decade that would follow?

A...

From the 16th to the 19th centuries, European slave traders forcibly uprooted millions of African people and shipped them across the Atlantic in conditions of great cruelty. Today, on the bottom of the world’s oceans lies the lost wrecks of ships that carried enslaved people from Africa to the Am...

Agincourt is a name which conjures an image of plucky English archers taking on and defeating the arrogant and aristocratic knights of the French court. But was it really the David and Goliath struggle often depicted on stage and screen?

In this episode of the podcast, Dan is joined by Mike Loa...

John Donne (1572-1631) lived myriad lives. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral – and pe...

On this day 40 years ago the HMS Conqueror, a British nuclear submarine, propelled silently through the South Atlantic stalking the Argentinian light cruiser the ARA General Belgrano

in the vicinity of the Falkland Islands. At 2.57 pm Conqueror was given the order to torpedo the enemy warship. W...

The Falkland Islands lie 8000 miles from Britain making the Falklands War a particularly tricky one to fight; it required some seriously innovative thinking. No story from the Falklands better tells the story of that innovation than Operation Blackbuck which ran from the 30th of April 1982 to the...

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (October 27, 1858 - January 6, 1919), was an American politician, conservationist and writer. After the assassination of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt unexpectedly became the 26th president of the United States in September 1901 - he won a second term in 1904 and ser...

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon documented British High Society in eye-watering detail. His diaries are gossipy, sometimes vile, rude but always honest. Even after his death, his diaries struck fear into the British upper classes and it is only recently t...

We are told that modern science was invented in Europe, the product of great minds like Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. But science has never been a uniquely European endeavour. Copernicus relied on mathematical techniques borrowed from Arabic and Persian te...

Just before midnight on January 20, 1936, King George V died at Sandringham, in Norfolk, England. The scandal of King George V’s reign would not be revealed publicly until 1986, in the diary of his physician, Lord Bertrand Dawson. Dawson had written about the night of January 20, detailing that h...

Since its foundation in 1824, the volunteers of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution have been braving the most savage of elements at sea to rescue sailors in distress. Their work has saved the lives of an estimated 143,000 people and helped many, many thousands more. Funded entirely by charit...

It’s 1943. The Allies are determined to break Hitler’s grip on occupied Europe and plan an all-out assault on Sicily, but they face an impossible challenge - how to protect a massive invasion force from a potential massacre. It falls to two remarkable intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu and Charl...

On November 30th, 2021, Josephine Baker, the French-American performer, second world war resistance hero, and activist became the first Black woman to enter France’s Panthéon mausoleum of revered historical figures. As one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century, Baker risked her life ...

News of Titanic's fate sent shockwaves around the world; stories and illustrations of that fateful night splashed across newspaper stands on every corner. One town was affected more than most: Southampton. It's said everyone in the Southern English port knew someone who had perished on the Titani...

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Depicted countless times in art, television and film, the night of the 14th April 1912 has haunted and fascinated us for over a century. This is a dramatic moment by moment retelling of the sinking of the Titanic in the freezing North Atlantic after the 'unsinkable' ship struck an icebe...

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On April 10th, 1912, RMS Titanic cast off from Southampton, England, on her maiden voyage. The largest of its kind, full of grandeur and the most sophisticated technology for the time, Titanic was determined “practically unsinkable” in admiring reviews of the ship beforehand. The coloss...

What can art tell us about a country's history? Well, a lot! In today's episode, Dan is joined by Art Historian Temi Odumosu and popular historian James Hawes to discuss the cultural works they think reveal something vital about the history of Britain. J

James enthuses about the Staffordshire Ho...

Across the whole of Nazi-ruled Europe, the experience of occupation was sharply varied. As a result, resistance movements during World War II occurred through a variety of means - from open partisan warfare in the occupied Soviet Union to dangerous acts of insurrection in the Netherlands or Norwa...

In 1888 Louis Le Prince shot the world’s first motion picture in Leeds, England. In 1890, weeks before the public unveiling of his camera and projector – a year before Thomas Edison announced that he had invented a motion picture camera – Le Prince stepped on a train in France – and disappeared w...

The greatest anti-imperial rebellion of the nineteenth century, The Indian Rebellion of 1857, witnessed mass violence against the British. Ninety years later, Indian freedom was founded on a deadly fratricide that singularly spared the outgoing masters. As a result, India’s founding fathers were ...

On April 2nd 1982 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared war against Argentina over the Falkland Islands in the Southern Atlantic. To make sense of the conflict on its 40th anniversary, the podcast is bringing you a special season of episodes marking the key moments of the war with the...

The enclosure of the commons was a centuries-long process. Gradually, through a combination of legal degrees and private acts, the land across Britain moved from a system of open field system to larger, enclosed farms. This was a transformative political, social and agricultural shift – that is s...

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a scientist, inventor, writer and diplomat. As one of the leading figures of early American history, Franklin helped to draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776, worked to negotiate the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, and was a dele...

The Demerara Rebellion of 1823 was an uprising of over ten thousand enslaved people in the Crown colony of Demerara-Essequibo (now part of Guyana) on the coast of South America. Having grown tired of their servitude, the enslaved sought to resist in the most direct way they could. The rebellion t...