In December 2021, marine archaeologists working alongside the Swedish Navy came across the wreck of a 17th-century warship in the Stockholm archipelago. Its identity remained a mystery until earlier this year when she was positively identified as the elusive 'Äpplet', sister ship to the ill-fated...

Often faster than letters sent by ship, WWII soldiers stationed in South East Asia would send heartfelt and humorous video messages to their loved ones who'd gather in cinemas across Britain. Using the revolutionary technology of the time the men spoke directly to the camera, addressing their fam...

For at least 1,500 years, since the mists swirling around the Dark Ages began to clear, the British Isles have had monarchical rulers. For hundreds of years, they were the central figures of the nation: the focus of its politics and society, consecrated by God, endorsed (or not) by the nobility, ...

On November 9th, 1989, 33 years ago to the day, the Berlin Wall that had symbolised the ideological and physical division of Europe came crumbling down. We remember this in the West as a triumph of Democracy and the beginning of a new, post-Cold War world. But was it that clear cut for the people...

American intelligence services like the CIA are commonly thought of as global behemoths of international surveillance and covert operations, responsible for carrying out everything from cyber espionage to assassinations and political coups. But its origins in the Second World War paint a picture ...

4/4. Dan descends the very same stone steps into Tutankhamun's tomb that Carter did, 100 years earlier. From within the chamber, Dan and Egyptologist Alia Ismail give a sense of the awe Carter and Carnarvon would have felt, of the riches and sarcophagi that housed the mummy of Tutankhamun. Meanwh...

3/4. How much do we know about Tutankhamun, his short life and even shorter reign? Dan unravels the complicated legacy of Tutankhamun's predecessor Akhenaten who changed the very fabric of Egyptian society, leaving his son Tutankhamun to change it back. In life, the boy pharaoh was plagued by hea...

2/4. Dan dives into Carter’s obsession with Tutankhamun and the trials and idiosyncrasies that made him the right man for the discovery. Dan visits the house Carter built where he conducted his search. There, architectural historian Nicholas Warner tells Dan about the many frustrating years of fi...

1/4. On the West Bank of the Nile in Luxor lie the burial chambers of some of Ancient Egypt's greatest pharaohs - Rameses II, Seti I and Tutankhamun. From Luxor, Dan delves into the history of the Valley of the Kings with Alia Ismail whose current project is 3D mapping the tombs. He ventures deep...

Stories of shipwrecks, smugglers and ghosts. Built in the mid-18th century, over the years many of the Jamaica Inn's patrons have been less respectable than most. The inn has a long history of being used by smugglers to hide away contraband that was brought ashore concealed in all sorts of things...

From their origins in necromancy to their ritualisation in the religion of Spiritualism, seances have long been a staple in the occultist's toolbelt. Purporting to call forth spirits and allow communication with the dead, they exploded in popularity in the nineteenth century, attracting great sci...

The inspiration behind countless gothic novels, Countess Elizabeth Báthory is said to be one of the most prolific serial killers of all time, accused of the murder of 600 girls during the late 16th century. Dan talks to Professor Kimberly Craft, a legal historian who has spent over a decade resea...

James Arthur Stanley Harley was a scholar, reverend, politician, and perhaps aristocrat. Born in a poor village in the Caribbean island of Antigua, he went on to attend Howard, Harvard, Yale and Oxford universities, was ordained a priest in Canterbury Cathedral and was elected to Leicestershire C...

Fought in the second half of 1942, the Battles of El Alamein were a series of climactic confrontations in Egypt between British Imperial and Commonwealth forces, and a combined German and Italian army. Intended as a last-ditch attempts by the British to halt German gains in North Africa, they res...

Could Liz Truss be Britain's worst Prime Minister? As the political scene in the UK hurtles into further disarray, Dan gets together historians Tim Bale, Catherine Haddon and Robin Eagles to put forward who they think has been Britain's worst Prime Minister over the centuries. Anthony Eden, Edwar...

Born Mary Jane Grant in the colony of Kingston, Jamaica, in November 1805, Mary would later become a businesswoman, traveller and healer. Posthumously, Mary is best known as a Black British nurse who tended the wounded of the Crimean War.

Gretchen Gerzina is an author and academic who has writte...

From a plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE, to another in 540 that wiped out half the population of the Roman empire, down through the Black Death in the Middle Ages and on through the 1918 flu epidemic (which killed between 50 and 100 million people) and this century's deadl...

Russia's current conflict in Ukraine was supposed to be a showcase of military prowess, a quick war that solidified her status as a great power. Instead, it has laid bare issues in leadership, training, supply and morale, all of which have crippled the military's operational capabilities. Althoug...

There remains a tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush. Yet, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isle, there have been A...

After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, thousands of German Jews facing systematic persecution wanted to flee the Third Reich but found few countries willing to accept them. For refugees fleeing the Nazis, America’s immigration quotas, established in the 1920s and sustained by popular and Con...

The Romanov family were the first imperial dynasty to rule Russia, reigning from the early seventeenth century until the Russian Revolution of 1917. Including such illustrious names as Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Alexander I, they oversaw and often instigated, dramatic changes to the...

Josie Bassett Morris' life epitomised the Wild West. She grew up on a homestead in the late 18th century, in Northern Utah, USA. Their home was situated on the Outlaw Trail and gun-slingers like Butch Cassidy and the Sun Dance Kid would stay as they passed through. Her mother was a forbidding cat...

Please note that this episode contains discussion of racist language.

Charles Ignatius Sancho was born on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean, in what was known as the Middle Passage. He was soon orphaned and then brought to England, where he was enslaved in Greenwich, London, by three sist...

A long dark, cold winter looms with soaring energy prices. Some of the advice we've heard recently includes buying a new kettle or taking a flannel bath...echoing previous advice given during the brutal fuel crisis of 1973. The Arab–Israeli War sent oil sky high and Britain saw a wave of crises f...