History Hit Podcasts

Jan Stangreciuk: Veteran. Hero. Guinea Pig.

Of all the clubs in the world, perhaps the most extraordinary is the Guinea Pig Club, a group of Second World War veterans that suffered terrible...

Division. Corruption. Incompetence: A History of Spain

Professor Paul Preston doesn’t pull his punches. His magisterial new history of modern Spain is called 'A People Betrayed'. He is the greatest...

The Human Tide

I was thrilled to chat to Paul Morland, a historian who uses population to explain almost all the major global shifts and events of the last two...

Coronavirus - Lessons from History

Professor John Oxford is a virologist. He is one of the world's leading experts on influenza.

He is a leader in the study of the great...

Britain in the 1980s

Dominic Sandbrook is one of Britain’s most prolific historians, working his way through a series on Britain since the Second World War. His most...

Coronavirus is NOT the plague

It came from Asia via the Middle East and Italy. But, says 17th Century historian, Rebecca Rideal, the parallels with the Black Death, The Plague,...

Champagne Riots

Rebecca Gibb is a Master of Wine. A ninja who can sniff out a Merlot from a Margaux at 50 paces. I know ABSOLUTELY nothing about wine other than I...

The Discovery of the Universe

The universe has always been there, kind of, but it took intelligent life on earth billions of years to start to grapple with its nature. Carolyn...

The First President

George. Where did it all go wrong?

George Washington could have had a comfortable career as a loyal member of HIs Majesty's Virginia militia...

The Bombing War

75 years ago this Spring, the aerial assault on Germany was reaching a crescendo as city after city was devastated by British and American bomber...

The Irish War of Independence

Dan made a stupid comment on twitter. Irish history twitter melted down. So we did a pod on why. 

100 years ago the Irish War of...

Guernsey: Voices of the Occupation

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Channel Islands. Dan went to meet four people who remember the war years on the islands...

‘One of Our Greatest Living Historians’

Natalie Zemon Davis is a legend. One of the most influential and versatile contemporary historians. A pathbreaking scholar of early modern...

Churchill's Cook

Annie Gray is a wonderful historian and broadcaster. Her latest project is a biography of the woman who cooked for Churchill. Georgina Landemare...

Georgian Musings on Homosexuality

Eamonn O'Keeffe is a young Oxford Researcher in the midst of a PhD. He stopped off in Wakefield Library to look at a journal Yorkshire farmer...

The Boundless Sea

We are a land animal. But millions of us have taken to the sea to live, fight, travel, eat, escape and seek fame and fortune. I am obsessed with...

The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz

This is the most remarkable father and son story I have ever come across.

We are still marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of...

West Africa before the Europeans

Toby Green has been fascinated by the history of West Africa for decades after he visited as a student and heard whispers of history that didn’t...

Suicide at the Fall of Nazi Germany

There is almost no end to the dark secrets that emerge from the smashed ruins of 1945 Europe. Dr Florian Huber has spent years researching the...

The Adventuress

In the 1930s Lady Lucy Houston was one of the richest women in England and a household name, notorious for her virulent criticisms of the government,...

A Very Stable Genius

Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig are both Pulitzer Prize winning journalists at the Washington Post.

They've written a new book with yet more...