History Hit Podcasts

Cold War Origins of Tanks in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine is being fought with tanks designed in the Cold War. The US Abrams. The German Leopard. The British Challenger. All have been...

Drag Queens

RuPaul. Lily Savage. Bianca Del Rio. Dame Edna Everage. These iconic drag queens are household names, but have you ever heard about Princess...

Battle of Towton

What do skeletal remains from the fifteenth century tell us about one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the Wars of the Roses?...

Women Rebels: The Spanish Civil War

From aristocratic rebels to Civil Rights activists, tens of thousands of people travelled to Spain during the Civil War - and not all of them were...

Fighter Pilots of the Korean War

The Korean War was a vital moment in world history - changing geopolitics on the Korean Peninsula and beyond forever. With nearly 5 million dead,...

Samuel Adams

One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, Samuel Adams was a political force of nature. Stacy Schiff tells Don how Adams, fuelled by...

First Ladies of the United States

Don talks to former White House reporter Kate Andersen Brower about how the role of First Lady has changed - and stayed the same - since the...

Septimius Severus

Given his incredible career, you'd perhaps expect the name of Roman Emperor Septimius Severus to be better known. Born in North Africa in 145AD,...

The Myth of 'Western Civilisation'

'Western Civilisation' is often thought of as a continuous thread through the centuries - from classical antiquity to the countries of the modern...

The Psychiatric Hospital that Fought the Nazis

There are descriptions of suffering early in this episode that some listeners may find distressing.

As hospitals and institutions across...

The First Computer Program

This is the story of the first modern computer program and the extraordinary woman who wrote it, Klara von Neumann.

The program Klara wrote...

The Women Who Organised the Battle of Britain

In a suburb of North-West London, among housing estates and residential streets lies a secret bunker, you may never have heard of it but it's one...

From Eve to Austen: Women in Literature

Why might a woman have willingly confined herself to a cell for the rest of her life? Why have so many female authors in history published under...

Medieval Women with Eleanor Janega

What made for the ideal woman in the Middle Ages? In her new book The Once and Future Sex, Dr. Eleanor Janega looks at what beauty,...

Uniting Europe After WWII

Count Coudenhove-Kalergi was one of the most influential 20th Century European thinkers that you've never heard of. He was a pioneer of European...

New Amsterdam

Before New York was New York, it was New Amsterdam. Dutch colonists arrived on the East Coast in the early 17th century, creating the New...

Katherine of Aragon: England's First Renaissance Queen

In preparation for International Women's Day this Wednesday, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb takes a look at a Queen whose reputation has largely been...

Tony Blair & The Iraq War

March 2023 marks the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war, seeing US and British troops enter the country - the legalities of which are still debated...

The Making of 'All Quiet on the Western Front'

All Quiet on the Western Front is the 2022 film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's famous anti-war novel. Told from the German perspective, it...

Keyboards

The keyboard on the first ever commercially successful typewriter and the keyboard on your smartphone are separated by a gulf of time and...

Dinosaurs: The Last Days

Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid the size of Mount Everest slammed into our planet, triggering the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and...