The laws now enforced throughout the world are almost all modelled on systems developed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During two hundred years of colonial rule, Europeans exported their laws everywhere they could. But not quite as revolutionary as we may think, they weren'...

2021 was a bumper year for archaeological discoveries across Britain. In this episode, we go on a whistlestop tour of some of the most notable finds — from an immaculately preserved Roman mosaic found on a working farm, to the puzzling ruin of a Norman church discovered by HS2 engineers.

Dan is ...

102 years ago on the 10th of January 1920, the League of Nations was formed out of the Treaty of Versailles. Its aim was to maintain peace after the First World War. With 58 member states by the 1930s, it had successes e against drug traffickers and slave traders, settling border disputes and ret...

U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are two of the world’s most influential leaders, together at the centre of some of the biggest controversies and most impressive advancements of our time. Taking office at the height of the 2008 global recession, Obama was keenly awa...

For the first time, the 1921 Census of England & Wales is now publicly available, only online at the family history website, Findmypast.co.uk. More detailed than any previous British census taken up to that point, it provides us with a remarkable, once-in-a-generation snapshot of a country that h...

The 6th of January marks one year since the United States Capitol attack of 2021, whereby a mob of supporters of Republican President Donald J. Trump stormed the Capitol Building. On today’s anniversary, what can we learn from prehistory to the present, about democratic decay, corruption and cron...

Ramesses the Great, ego in the ancient world and Tutankhamun's sacred underwear. These are all covered in today's episode with Dr Campbell Price about the treasures that will be housed in the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, set to open later this year.

Dr Campbell Price is the Chair of Trust...

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides - the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were both unprecedented and widespread. A global crisis extended from England to Japan, and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa. North and South America, too, suffered turbulence. ...

Please note that this episode contains conversation about sex that you might not want to listen to in the presence of children.

What did medieval people really think about sex, and were those thoughts all that different from ours today?

The medieval humoral system of medicine suggested that i...

A trip to Paris wouldn't be the same without taking a moment to gaze up at the great looming towers of the Gothic Notre Dame Cathedral with its watchful gargoyles on every corner. Today, celebrated journalist Simon Jenkins joins Dan to discuss 'humankind's greatest creation'; the cathedral. Simon...

In a special episode of the podcast, Dan's children join him for a lively retelling of Boudica and the violent uprising that tore Roman Britain apart - a classic bedtime story in the Snow household. Merry Christmas from Dan and his family!

Traditionally sung at Christmas itself or during the surrounding Christmas holiday season, it is thought that carols existed to keep up people’s spirits, along with dances, plays and feasts since before the fourteenth century. Whether religious or not, the singing of Christmas carols is a traditi...

Just as Scrooge wandered London's streets on a cold Christmas night, Dan Snow follows the ghosts of Charles Dickens' past to discover the city that inspired his greatest works. With London-born tour guide David Charnick, they slip down hidden alleyways to find the old debtor's prison that the Dic...

The permanent home of the Parthenon Marbles, also known as the Elgin Marbles, has been the subject of a heated, decades-long debate.

Currently housed in the British Museum, Greece has been proactively campaigning for their return since the 1980s. But, how did this controversy start and why did t...

While many traditions regard God to be incorporeal, some three thousand years ago in the Southwest Asian lands, a group of people worshipped a complex pantheon of deities, led by a father god called El. El had seventy children, who were gods in their own right. One of them was a deity, known as Y...

The Battle of Agincourt looms large in the English historical and cultural imagination, this explainer wades through the mythology to help listeners really understand this infamous battle.

From almost the moment the battle finished the myth of Agincourt was being spun. Henry V milked the victory...

On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. The Wright Brothers took the world's first engine-powered flight. It didn't take long for countries around the world to realise that the Wright flying machine had the potential to revolu...

On February 27 1763, thousands of enslaved people in the Dutch colony of Berbice—in present-day Guyana—launched a huge uprising against their oppressors. Surrounded by jungle and savannah, the revolutionaries—many of them African-born—effectively controlled the colony for a year as they resisted ...

British politician Gavin Barwell served as Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Theresa May from June 2017 to July 2019, one of the most turbulent periods in recent British political history.

As the Prime Minister’s senior political adviser, Barwell was at May's side as she navigated tumultuous Brex...

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941 remains etched in public memory as the turning point of WW2. But in fact, it was Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States – four days later on December 11, 1941 – that changed everything.

In this episode, Professor of International ...

The Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) was the women's branch of the British Army during the Second World War. Formed in 1938 it saw many thousands of women take on a huge range of vital roles in the war effort which had never before been open to them. This included manning anti-aircraft station...

While the allies reeled from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and Hitler's declaration of war on the United States, a ferocious battle was also raging across the icy steppes of Russia in early December 1941. Hitler had launched his invasion of the Soviet Union in June of that year - Operation...

With closed borders, a totalitarian regime, electricity blackouts and widespread poverty, North Korea is a brutal place to survive; even looking at a foreign media outlet can get a North Korean citizen sent to a concentration camp. So why, in 2011 did leader Kim Jong Il allow Jean Lee, a celebrat...

On December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service launched a surprise military strike upon the United States against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii. Just before 8 a.m., the base was attacked by 353 Imperial Japanese aircraft as fighters, level, dive bomb...