By the late 1950s the superpowers of USA and Soviet had moved beyond attempting to dominate land, sea and air and now set their sights firmly on space. After the USSR succeeded in launching an unmanned satellite and sending a man into orbit first, the USA announced a massive spending programme in...

Between 1919 and 1921, Ireland played host to a long and bloody guerrilla conflict between British state forces and Irish republican guerrillas, in the form of Irish Volunteers or the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The conflict would completely transform the political landscape in Ireland.

In this...

It was one of the last great lost shipwrecks of history - Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance. But now, incredibly, it has been rediscovered - over a century after it sank beneath the ice in freezing Antarctic waters.

Organised by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, the expedition to locate the...

This documentary takes a rare look at Emmeline Pankhurst’s personal story.
Emmeline Pankhurst led an army of women onto the streets of Britain – the likes of which has never been seen before or since. Fearsome, fearless and ready to fight to the death for her political beliefs she is remembered a...

From 1929 to 1939, Edgar Feuchtwanger lived across the street from Adolf Hitler in a bourgeois building in Munich, Germany. From his bedroom, the young Jewish boy had a view of the Führer across the avenue on the second floor. A schoolboy in Munich at the time, Edgar witnessed the rise of Nazism ...

Brilliant Lawer, at only 27 years old, Benjamin Ferencz was the youngest prosecutor in charge of the sentencing nazi criminals in Nuremberg on 1946. Relentless fighter for peace he never stopped trying to make the world a more human place, always governed by the spirit of the law.
After the war a...

From 1945 to 1989, after the capitulation of Nazi Germany, two rival ideologies, communism and capitalism, faced each other in a merciless battle.

On one side of the Iron Curtain and on the other, throughout the Cold War, the USSR and the United States sought to shape children’s imaginations thr...

The Eichmann trial marks a real turning point in the emergence of the memory of the genocide of the Jews, in Israel, Germany and the United States. It is the first major transnational narrative that constructs the genocide of the Jews as a distinct event in the Second World War. It was intended a...

June 6th 1944. Operation Overlord begins. Discover D-Day through the photographic eyes of the British Soldiers. In this film the memories of Peter Norris, Harry Oakes, John Aldred and Peter Handford of their photographic activity during D-Day are recollected and allow us to better understand the ...

In the wake of the Second World War, Britain moved to cement itself as one of the world's main nuclear powers. The erection of a series of nuclear bunkers followed across the UK, tasked with protecting a fortunate few against any devastating nuclear attack. Sarah Agha explores Britain's secret nu...

The Greatest Air Race is the story of how Sir Ross Smith and his three-man crew became the first aviators to cross the planet. It’s a feat that remains largely overlooked in the history of flight.
The Greatest Air Race is presented and narrated by astronaut Andy Thomas as he embarks on a trans-co...

19th century Birmingham was famous for its industrial might, but particular parts of it were also renowned for a more infamous reason: its gangs. Dan headed up to Birmingham to meet bestselling author and celebrity local historian Carl Chinn to learn the true history behind Birmingham's most noto...

This documentary explores the sinking of the Britannic during the First World War, examining how she ultimately came to suffer the same fate as her sister ship, the Titanic.

Titanic had a twin sister, Britannic, which despite being bigger and better built, sank to the bottom three times faster t...

Queen Elizabeth II was born in a totally different world to today. Her life spanned decades of profound change, both in the United Kingdom and around the globe.

In this special programme, Dan Snow and royal historian Prof. Kate Williams reflect on the early years of Elizabeth II’s remarkable l...

At the beginning of America's involvement in World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) called on the country to become "an arsenal of democracy" – to become producers of war materiel to help defeat the Axis powers – Germany, Japan and Italy. This is the story of how Chicago answered...

On the 8th June 1982, at the height of the Falklands War, 53 men lost their lives in the Argentine air attacks on the British ships, Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram.

32 of those men were Welsh Guards - some of them no more than boys.

A further 160 Welsh Guards were injured, many suffering severe b...