History Hit Podcasts

The Tudors and Food

What food - and how much of it - did people eat in the Tudor period? Where did they get it? When did they eat it? What arrangements for cookery...

Yorkshire's Roman Mystery: The Ryedale Hoard

In May 2020, four unique Roman artefacts were unearthed near Ampleforth, North Yorkshire by two amateur metal detectorists. A bronze bust that is...

Anne of Cleves

Anne of Cleves was the ‘last woman standing’ of Henry VIII’s wives and the only one buried in Westminster Abbey. How did she manage it? Was...

Contactless Payment

*tap* *tap* *tap*

That’s the sound of physical cash being consigned to the dustbin of history by us tapping cards/phones/watches...

A Short History of the Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire was gigantic; at one point it reached the walls of Vienna to the Persian Gulf and beyond. It was established at the end of the...

The Norse Walrus Ivory Trade Crash

The first of Greenland’s Viking settlements were established in the tenth century. But by the fifteenth century, they had all but vanished,...

America's Serial Killer Family

When the Bender family disappeared from Labette county, Kansas, in 1873, they left a dozen bodies buried in the garden of their home.

But...

The Biggest Prison Breakout of WW2

During World War II, in the town of Cowra in central New South Wales, thousands of Japanese prisoners of war were held in a POW camp. On the icy...

Benjamin Franklin

As the only person to have signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Treaty of Alliance with France in 1778, Treaty of Paris in 1783, and...

The Kosovo War

The war in Ukraine has left many of us aghast that open armed conflict could again erupt on the European continent... except the idea of a...

The Cultural Impact of Colonisation

Ruffs, Pipes and Pearls

When Francis Drake returned home from the Spanish West Indies, he carried with him pearls to present as gifts to...

Putin, Power and Personality

Vladimir Putin has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm. He invades his neighbours, most recently...

Air Conditioning

No summer blockbuster. No Las Vegas and no skyscrapers in Dubai. No chocolate bars when the weather gets hot. Air conditioning is one of those...

Hannibal vs Rome: Terror at Trasimene

Towards the beginning of the Second Punic War on 21 June 217 BC, a Carthaginian force under Hannibal launched a vicious ambush on a Roman army...

Going to Church in Medieval England

Parish churches were at the heart of English social life in the Middle Ages. But how did they come into existence? Who staffed them? And how were...

The Korean War: The Korean Experience

In July 1945 when Korea was divided by the 38th parallel into North and South, families were suddenly torn apart by a border that would change the...

Sex & Shopping

From facilitating affairs to public facilities, how has shopping changed our lives?

And where did the one-stop shop, the palace of splendour...

Waterloo Uncovered: Bones from the Battlefield

In a special episode from our sister podcast Warfare, Dan is joined by host James Rogers fresh off the Waterloo battlefield in Belgium where last...

The Origins of Rome

Known as the Eternal City, ancient Rome was one of the greatest civilisations in human history, but how did it come about?

With a turbulent...

The Venetian Inquisition

From the sixteenth century through to the end of the eighteenth century, the Venetian government and the Roman Catholic Church jointly established...

The Apollo Programme with Kevin Fong

Getting to the moon was no easy feat, no matter how confident President Kennedy may have sounded in his famous 1961 speech. NASA built a team from...