Dan Snow's History Hit

In 1649 Britain was engulfed by revolution. Charles I was executed for treason and within weeks the English monarchy had been abolished and the House of Lords discarded. The people, it was announced, ...

9 Touko 202228min

For most of us, VE Day conjures up black and white images of carefree servicemen and women dancing and beaming in Trafalgar Square, of Churchill greeted by jubilant crowds in Whitehall, and of course,...

8 Touko 202222min

From the 16th to the 19th centuries, European slave traders forcibly uprooted millions of African people and shipped them across the Atlantic in conditions of great cruelty. Today, on the bottom of th...

5 Touko 202236min

Agincourt is a name which conjures an image of plucky English archers taking on and defeating the arrogant and aristocratic knights of the French court. But was it really the David and Goliath struggl...

4 Touko 202225min

The Dudleys were the most brilliant, bold and manipulative of power-hungry Tudor families. Every Tudor monarch made their name either with a Dudley at their side - or by crushing one beneath their fee...

3 Touko 202241min

John Donne (1572-1631) lived myriad lives. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He ...

2 Touko 202233min

On this day 40 years ago the HMS Conqueror, a British nuclear submarine, propelled silently through the South Atlantic stalking the Argentinian light cruiser the ARA General Belgrano in the vicinity o...

1 Touko 202244min

The Falkland Islands lie 8000 miles from Britain making the Falklands War a particularly tricky one to fight; it required some seriously innovative thinking. No story from the Falklands better tells t...

30 Huhti 202233min