Our new strand, Access All Areas, will take you behind the scenes at top historical destinations. "Like many people my age - some of my strongest childhood memories are of the exciting new devices called "computers" that started appearing in our homes. I spent hours learning programming on a BBC ...

Seb Falk, a historian of medieval science at Cambridge University and the author of The Light Ages, tackles the big questions about science in the Middle Ages.

The F-35 is the latest plane to join the ranks of the RAF. What is so special about it is that it is a single-seat, single-engine fighter aircraft designed for many missions with advanced, integrated sensors built into every aircraft. Missions that were traditionally performed by small numbers of...

Bletchley Park is now internationally famous as the home of the code-breakers during World War Two. But the endeavours of Alan Turing, Dilly Knox and their colleagues were so top secret that we are only now beginning to learn how they really lived day-to-day in this magnificent house, where – beh...

We haven’t always been preoccupied with ideas of race. But from the 19th c onward, bogus science has been used to legitimise social hierarchies and political policies, with consequences that have resounded across the world. From the father of eugenics Francis Galton to surprising figures such as ...

This story has everything: war, politics, betrayal, scandal, murder and at its heart a cracking forensic science mystery. This is the story of Simon Fraser, the 11th Lord Lovat of the Highland, also known as the Fox. In the late 1660s, Simon Fraser was born in a house on the banks of a burn in th...

Sam Nightingale is an infectious diseases researcher and is currently treating patients with COVID-19. In this episode of Historic Questions he talks about this new form of coronavirus and how it might change our society. He also explains how humans responded to the emergence of AIDS in the late ...

Steve Wyler answers the big questions about how communities have responded to pandemics in the past and whether similar reactions can be seen in the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Something a little different... Total War: Three Kingdoms is the fastest selling real time strategy of all time, and based on the Wei, Shu, and Wu division of China in the 200s AD. This is an interview that talks about fact and fiction within gaming narratives and the historical research undertak...

‘Dictator of British Botany’. ‘Autocrat of the Philosophers’. Sir Joseph Banks has been called many things over the past few centuries. A towering figure in the development of British botany and British natural history during the 18th century, he voyaged across the World with famous navigators su...

Eugenics is a set of ideas that cast a long shadow over the 20th century and beyond. In this film, historian Marius Turda takes us on a tour of a new exhibition about Eugenics, exploring how it spread, who it affected and how to confront it.

In the past few months more than a billion people have faced restrictions unlike any seen before. Shops are closed; the death toll is rising; people across the globe have been forced to rise to an extraordinary challenge. But it is important to remember that humans have experienced pandemics befo...

Regarded by many as the world's first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace was also the first to envision a world where computers could be used for more than just number crunching. She saw in them the potential to not just solve problems, but create new ideas and even produce music and poetry as we ...