The road to the American Revolutionary War
The United States often presents its birth as a straightforward struggle for liberty – but reality was far more messy. In this first episode of HistoryExtra's four-part series on the American Revoluti...
20 Jun 43min
The protestant missionaries that didn't change the world
Why did Protestant missionaries travel the globe across the course of centuries, only to convert remarkably few people? Alec Ryrie – author of new book The World’s Reformation – tells Elinor Evans abo...
18 Jun 43min
Strangers and aliens in Tudor England
Many histories of the 16th century tell stories of monarchs and courtiers – but there is, of course, much more to the century than that. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Nandini Das charts the ways in wh...
16 Jun 43min
Alexander the Great: life of the week
Stretching from Greece to India, Alexander the Great’s empire was one of the largest in human history, and he’d conquered it all by the time he was 30 years old. So how did this young king of a small ...
15 Jun 54min
What myths do we tell about royal women?
Have royal women's stories been misconstrued? Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Kate Williams argues that many of them have been, tracing the lives of a whole host of queens – from Hatshepsut to Queen Vic...
14 Jun 50min
Cleopatra’s death – and cultural afterlife
The final chapter of Cleopatra’s life is shrouded in mystery. Did she really take her own life? Was an asp involved? And why don’t we know where her tomb is? In this final episode of our four-part Sun...
13 Jun 38min
Masters of disinformation: how British spies played dirty in the Cold War
They 'haunted' an Indonesian general with a talking ghost and planted fake hippies in a Bulgarian youth festival. But did they change the course of the Cold War? Rory Cormac introduces Spencer Mizen t...
11 Jun 34min
Churchill's toughest decision
In the summer of 1940, the Royal Navy attacked a French fleet moored off the coast of north Africa, killing almost 1,300 sailors. Winston Churchill described his decision to greenlight the operation a...
9 Jun 35min
