January 1649, Whitehall. A king steps onto the scaffold. Moments later, Charles I is dead... tried and executed by his own subjects. For the first time in its history, England is without a monarch.

What follows is one of the most radical experiments in British history. The House of Lords is abol...

The Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Drum and Bell Towers - all of these architectural wonders stand on a line that runs like a spine through the centre of Beijing.  It is known as the Beijing Central Axis, a World Heritage site containing a spectacular array of ancient buildings that together t...

Join Holocaust expert and historian Dr James Bulgin as he is given unprecedented access to Auschwitz-Birkenau to uncover how this site was transformed, step by step, decision by decision, from a concentration camp for political prisoners into the epicentre of one of the worst crimes in human hist...

The Dead Sea Scrolls regularly rank amongst the most significant archaeological discoveries of recent decades. Over 900 papyrus documents, discovered in caves near the site of Qumran, that date to the century before Jesus and include the oldest surviving manuscripts from the Hebrew Bible.

But am...

The Brontë family created some of the world's most passionate and enduring novels, yet their lives were shadowed by tragedy.

Dr Maddy Pelling and Dr Anthony Delaney challenge the romantic myths surrounding the family, tracing the harsh reality of their lives in 19th-century Haworth—a crowded Yor...

This winter, Dr Eleanor Janega leads us into the darker corners of the medieval imagination - a world where the boundary between the living and the dead was dangerously thin.

Drawing on medieval chronicles, religious monuments, and Icelandic sagas, we learn why people believed the dead could ret...

The fourth film in our series exploring the remarkable collections of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

In this episode, Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb meets curator Matthew Winterbottom to explore the morbid side of life in Early Modern Europe... through Memento Mori.

This was a period awash with obje...

The story of ancient Italy is so much more than just Rome. Tristan Hughes visits the extraordinary site of Paestum in southern Italy, home to some of the greatest ancient Greek temples from anywhere in the world.

From majestic temples to pristine wall paintings more that 2,500 years old, he exp...

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents”. So begins ‘Little Women’ by Louisa May Alcott.

In this special seasonal film, History Hit explores the extraordinary literary heritage of Concord, Massachusetts - a town that nurtured so many great American writers and thinkers, particularly ...

Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn - the first two wives of Henry VIII - are so often portrayed as opposites. Katherine as the loyal, scorned wife - Anne as the bright, bewitching upstart.

But now Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb returns to Hever Castle to explore what Anne and Katherine were really l...

In 1895, the world's first celebrity trial challenged the creaking moral core of the British Empire. Dr Anthony Delaney traces the extraordinary trajectory of Oscar Wilde—from the toast of London’s West End, a shining star on both sides of the Atlantic, to the disgraced accused standing before th...