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Walking with Cavemen
1 season
Professor Robert Winston meets Lucy, the first upright ape, and follows her ancestors on the three-million-year journey to civilisation. Broadcast in 2003, Walking with Cavemen combined special effects with the latest scientific theories, to show us what it really means to be human.
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Lost City of Gaul: Unearthing Bibracte
In the heart of the French region of Burgundy, deep in a forest, lies a hidden city that had been dormant for 2,000 years. It’s called Bibracte, the most important oppidum in all of Gaul. That is where the Aedui, a Gallic tribe allied to the Romans, once built a fortified city on top of a mountai...
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Great Excavations! Digging Charles Dickens' Workhouse with Sir Tony Robinson
Sir Tony Robinson comes to History Hit to present a special film about a remarkable excavation in central London, the workhouse that inspired Charles Dickens to write his famous novel, “Oliver Twist”.
In the middle of the capital, archaeologists are digging deep to find out more about the lives ...
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Church Crawls in Solitude: With Diarmaid MacCulloch
1 season
Enjoy church crawling around a selection of beautiful parish churches with Oxford Professor, Diarmaid MacCulloch, courtesy of the Church Conservation Trust.
The Churches Conservation Trust is the national charity responsible for caring for and protecting England's historic churches on behalf of ...
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Rome’s Disaster: The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest
2 seasons
Tristan Hughes investigates one of Rome’s greatest disasters, the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
The Battle of the Teutoburg forest stopped Roman expansion in its tracks. It’s a story of betrayal, of one man’s vehement desire to liberate his people from Roman rule and the brutal, bloody length...
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The Rollright Stones: Mind, Myre and Magic
The Rollright Stones are some of Britain’s most remarkable and mysterious ancient monuments. They consist of three separate sites - a looming funerary monument built to contain dismembered corpses, a venerated stone circle, and a single monolith with an innominate purpose. Alice Loxton traces six...
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Shackleton: The Story of Endurance
Part 1 of 3.
Explorers called it the 'Great White Silence', an inhospitable continent of rock, ice and snow on which no human has stepped until just over 100 years ago. Girdled by an ocean packed with shifting ice and beyond that, the roughest oceans on the planet with waves as tall as apartment...
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The Pursuit of Endurance: On the Shoulders of Shackleton
In the heart of the Antarctic, nine adventurers are about to live an extraordinary story. They come from very different backgrounds, but one thing brings them together: a passion for adventure and testing the limits.
Their goal: to follow in the footsteps of one of the greatest legends of the go...
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Into the Valley of the Kings
Dan Snow ventures into Egypt's Valley of the Kings to explore its rediscovery.
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Swordfish: World War II's Surprising Aircraft and the Raid that Changed History
Dan Snow flies on a mission to explore one of the most daring and dangerous aerial attacks of World War 2
On 11th November 1940, 21 antiquated Swordfish aircraft took off from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious. They were embarking on one of the most extraordinary raids of the Second World Wa...
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Dover Castle at War
Peter Snow explores the part Dover Castle played in Operation Dynamo in 1940, the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk.
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Mary Anning: The Forgotten Fossil Hunter
Born in Lyme Regis in 1799, Mary Anning was a pioneering palaeontologist and fossil collector who's story continues to inspire so many scientists to this day. In this documentary Dr Anjana Khatwa, Dr Liz Hide, David Tucker and Anya Pearson explore Anning's life and legacy.
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Britain's Wild West: Discovering Hay Castle
The peaceful South Wales town of Hay-on-Wye offers few clues today of its brutal past on a violent frontier. A monument to this history can be found in Hay Castle. Once right on the border between England and Wales, it sits in a region densely packed with castles that saw border skirmishes and bi...
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A Tudor Wonder - Hardwick Hall - with Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb
A History Hit treat for the holidays, this special new film reveals an extraordinary Tudor life-story and an amazing creation. We meet the extraordinary Bess of Hardwick and go inside the incredible home she built, a spectacular construction in glass and stone that defined the elegance and grande...
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Lost and Found: The Search for USS Lagarto
A fierce WWII battle at sea, unreported for more than 60 years is revealed at the bottom of the Gulf of Thailand in HD underwater video. There lay the US submarine Lagarto and the remains of her 86 crewmen, whose families share how their husbands’ and fathers' disappearance shaped their lives. Wr...
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Waterloo: Bones in the Attic
BREAKING NEWS: The bones of up to 10 soldiers killed in the Battle of Waterloo have been discovered - the largest cache of Waterloo casualties ever found.
Uncovered by a team of Belgium and German academics, it's believed these bones belong to a mix of Prussian, French and British Soldiers all ...
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Secrets of Hitler's Island Fortress
Guernsey and its neighbouring islands have a unique distinction which sets them apart from the rest of the British Isles. Together with the rest of the Channel Islands, they were the only part of the British Isles to fall to Nazi Germany in the Second World War. In this documentary Dan Snow disco...
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Debunking the Myths of the Titanic
At noon on 10 April 1912, crowds gathered at Southampton to watch the maiden voyage of the World's largest ship RMS Titanic. A sleek, modern luxurious liner that was offering a safe and fast crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Titanic was said to be invincible. She cruised down Southampton waters on ...
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Life on the Wall
In this episode, Tristan Hughes visits two key sites along Hadrian’s Wall that can tell us more about everyday life on this far flung frontier, with a particular focus on hygiene and worship. First on the list is Chesters Roman Fort. Described as one of the most complete cavalry forts that surviv...
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The Uniform of the British Army
The British Army is one of the world’s most experienced fighting forces. From Blenheim to Waterloo, from Balaclava to the Somme, it has played its part in the history’s most bloody conflicts. But as these troops executed Herculean tasks in the worlds harshest terrains, what were they wearing? How...
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The Vikings in the Vicarage
The Viking dig in the grounds of St Wystan Church in Repton is one of the most important Viking sites of modern times. Recently new research has brought to light new information which further elevates the significance of the site and redefines our knowledge of the Great Heathen Army. The Great He...
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The History of Westminster Abbey
Sir David Cannadine shows Dan around the iconic Westminster Abbey, in the heart of London. With an unrivalled arrange of monuments - ranging from grand royal tombs to the grave of The Unknown Warrior - and spectacular architecture spanning nearly 1,000 years, join the two historians as they explo...