At the end of May and the beginning of June 1940, over 370,000 Allied soldiers found themselves at great risk, surrounded by German forces on all sides & with their backs to the Channel. The eyes of the World fixed their gaze on the small Allied perimeter that remained, around the beaches of Dunk...

For centuries the city of Timbuktu was famed as a golden metropolis situated on the southern fringes of the Sahara; tales of its immense wealth and its reputation as a key centre of learning obsessed travellers and adventurers for many hundreds of years. Timbuktu certainly has one of the most ill...

In early 1789, Captain Bligh in the South Pacific suffered a mutiny among his crew on HMS Bounty. Put to sea with a small group of loyal sailors in one of the ship's boats, what followed was one of the epic stories of maritime history. For more than 40 days, Bligh and his men sailed across open P...

The Battle of Brunanburh was one of the bloodiest and biggest battles of early medieval history. Fought 1100 years ago, Athelstan - the king of the English - opposed a coalition of Irish, Scots, Northumbrians and Vikings and won a decisive victory. The enemy shield wall was penetrated. Their troo...

Mark Williams, senior lecturer in Early Modern history at Cardiff University, tackles the big questions about the East India Company.

200 years ago, Britain's Royal Navy was the most technologically advanced and supremely efficient force in the history of naval warfare.

But what was it like to live and work on board these ships? What did the men eat? How did the ships sail? What were the weapons they used?

In this documentar...

Submarine veteran Commodore Eric Thompson gives Dan Snow a tour of HMS Alliance, now preserved at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Portsmouth.

Winston Churchill, wartime Prime Minister of Great Britain and its empire during the Second World War, is one of the most recognisable figures of world history. The man dominated Whitehall and Westminster, but many of his most vital decisions during the war years were taken away from the public e...

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...

Captain James Cook is one of the greatest maritime navigators in history. Born in 1728 to a Scottish father and English mother, Cook grew up in Yorkshire and soon developed a great fascination with the sea and exploration. In 1746 Cook joined the merchant shipping industry when he moved to the ne...

In the late 1850s, Britain and France were involved in an arms race. Both sides were embracing new technologies like armour plating to try and create the ultimate battleship. In 1860 this produced the revolutionary HMS Warrior, a product of Britain's naval mastery in the 19th century and the Indu...

In 1845, a British voyage of Arctic exploration led by Captain Sir John Franklin departed England aboard two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. The expedition was assigned to traverse the last unnavigated sections of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic and to record magnetic data to help ...

For generations, Drake's Island, situated just outside of Plymouth harbour, had been owned by the Ministry of Defence. Recently, however, this island bastion has gone into private ownership. In this documentary Bob King, the gatekeeper of Drake's Island, gives Dan an exclusive tour of this extrem...

Tracy Borman unravels the web of messages and secrets hidden in one of the most spectacular and mysterious Tudor paintings, Holbein’s the Ambassadors.

In 1533 England was in turmoil - Henry VIII had secretly married Anne Boleyn and had his marriage to Katherine of Aragon annulled.

This was the ...

Dan Snow explores Biblical lands, discovering the places where religion and history intersect on the east bank of the River Jordan. It is a region full of evidence of the connections early Christians made here with places and events in the Bible, from Moses to the baptism of Jesus.

The journey b...

All around the UK, in rivers and streams, and in the mud on the side of riverbeds are the remains of our maritime past, which helps us understand who were are today.

In 2013, a survey around the UK identified 199 different assemblages of hulks, remains of craft. These included paddle ships, ferr...

Dan joins author and mudlark expert Lara Maiklem for a spot of mudlarking.

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...

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...

The Battle of Jutland was the decisive naval clash of the First World War, pitting the German High Seas Fleet against the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet in an all or nothing battle for supremacy and survival. At the end of the war, the defeated German fleet was scuttled at Scapa Flow. Or so we thought....