Dan Snow's History Hit
Episodes
Mudlarking
04 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Lara Maiklem has scoured banks of the Thames for over 15 years in pursuit of the objects that the fast moving river water unearths. The Thames is one ...
One Family: 200 Years of Continuous Military Service
03 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Paul John Darran joined the army 1980. He was ninth generation of his family to do so. The story begins with his ancestor John Carberry joined the Tyr...
Moscow's Communist Dorm
29 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1931, an enormous apartment building was completed in Moscow. Challenging the Kremlin for architectural supremacy on the Moskva River, it was ...
Globalisation in 1000 AD
27 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Globalisation. It's a word we often associate with the politics, society and economics of our own lifetimes. But Valerie Hansen, an esteemed professor...
Florence Nightingale
26 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For soldiers of the Crimean War, perhaps the greatest adversary they faced was the Selimiye Barracks in Scutari, a makeshift hospital for wounded men....
Australia, Anzac and History
25 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I was thrilled to have Mat McLachlan on the pod, one of Australia's foremost history presenters and writers. Using his encyclopaedic knowledge of Aust...
The Death of Hitler
24 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Did Hitler shoot himself in the Führerbunker, or did he slip past the Soviets and escape to South America? There have been innumerable documentaries,...
The Black Death
22 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast, Dan Snow is joined by Professor Mark Bailey, High Master of St Paul's School, London and Professor of Later Medieval History at the U...
A Curious History of Sex
21 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Sex. There's a lot of it about. We talk about war, chaos and atrocities on this podcast a lot although, thankfully, few of us have first hand experien...
Criminal Subculture in the Gulag
19 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I was thrilled to be joined by Mark Vincent, an expert in criminal subculture and prisoner society in Stalinist Labour camps. Mark has looked at thous...
Working Motherhood
16 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Helen McCarthy, lecturer in modern British history at the University of Cambridge, joins Dan to discuss the complicated past of working motherhood....
The Aftermath of WW1
15 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast I was joined by Margaret MacMillan, professor at St Antony's College, Oxford University and author of 'Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Co...
British Ship Building
14 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Dan chats to British naval historian and maritime artist, Richard Endsor, about seventeenth century ship building. It was the develop...
Apollo 13
13 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I was joined by Kevin Fong, who took me through one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of exploration. Apollo 13 was the seventh crewed ...
The House of Byron
12 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Emily Brand has written a brilliant book about the Byrons. Not just the great romantic, poet and adventurer, George Gordon Byron, but his parents and ...
The Prime Minister Hospitalised: Lloyd George's Influenza
10 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In September 1918 David Lloyd George, the charismatic wartime Prime Minister, visited the city of Manchester, attended a vast public gathering and the...
How Pandemics Made the Modern World
09 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Frank Snowden is currently on lockdown in Rome, experiencing at first hand life in a pandemic. For years he has written about the great wave...
Loot? Spoils? Artefacts? What to Do with Our Museums
08 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Our museums are full of stuff taken, bought, stolen and gifted from foreign countries. It feels like we face a reckoning. What shall we do with it?I t...
Death by Shakespeare
06 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Poison, swordplay and bloodshed. Shakespeare’s characters met their ends in a plethora of gruesome ways. But how realistic were they? And did they e...
The Battle of Okinawa
03 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The last great battle of the Second World War was fought on the island of Okinawa. After 83 blood-soaked days, almost a quarter of a million people lo...
Origins of the Spanish Flu
02 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This episode features military historian Douglas Gill who has extensively researched the origins of the Spanish Influenza as it emerged in 1915 and 19...
Valkyrie: The Warrior Women of the Viking World
01 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I was thrilled to have Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir on the pod. We talked about Viking women, old Norse-Icelandic sagas, mythology and poetry. Wh...
Battle of Britain 'What Ifs'
30 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Jamie Wood and Professor Niall Mackay at the University of York are mathematicians who love history. Sensible dudes. They released a paper which s...
A Strange Bit of History
29 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We were delighted to have comedy royalty on the podcast. Omid Djalili talked to me about one of his earliest stage creations, first performed at the E...
How AI is Safeguarding Maritime Heritage
26 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There are more historic artefacts on our ocean floor than there are in every museum in the world put together. Over thousands of years ships carrying ...
The Real Thomas Cromwell
25 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Everyone is Thomas Cromwell obsessed at the moment. The man who rose to be the most powerful member of Henry VIII's court, his Lord Privy Seal, Princi...
Britain's Fightback
23 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Todman is a Professor of Modern History at Queen Mary. He has just published his epic study of how during the Second World War Britain fought b...
How the Earth Shaped Human History
22 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Great leaders? Industrial change? Revolutions? If you thought these were the things that shaped history, think again. Back by popular demand, I was th...
Mystery of the Alexander the Great Coin Hoard
19 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Off the coast of the Gaza Strip fishermen have been discovering coins of extreme rarity and importance. They date from the brief reign of Alexander th...
Small Men on the Wrong Side of History
17 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Dan chats with journalist and author Ed West about Ed's conservative views, which make him an anomaly among his peers. They explore why conservatives ...
How to Fight anti-Semitism
16 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Dan meets New York Times journalist and writer Bari Weiss, who grew up near and attended the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsberg, Pen...
Jan Stangreciuk: Veteran. Hero. Guinea Pig.
15 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 inju...
Division. Corruption. Incompetence: A History of Spain
13 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Paul Preston doesn’t pull his punches. His magisterial new history of modern Spain is called 'A People Betrayed'. He is the greatest livin...
The Human Tide
10 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 centu...
Coronavirus - Lessons from History
09 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 Influenza outbre...
Britain in the 1980s
08 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 rec...
Coronavirus is NOT the plague
05 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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, are...
Champagne Riots
04 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 lik...
The Discovery of the Universe
03 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 Coll...
The First President
02 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 and coloni...
The Bombing War
01 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 flee...
The Irish War of Independence
27 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 Independence was ...
Guernsey: Voices of the Occupation
26 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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’
24 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Natalie Zemon Davis is a legend. One of the most influential and versatile contemporary historians. A pathbreaking scholar of early modern European so...
Churchill's Cook
23 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Annie Gray is a wonderful historian and broadcaster. Her latest project is a biography of the woman who cooked for Churchill. Georgina Landemare was o...
Georgian Musings on Homosexuality
20 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 Matthew ...
The Boundless Sea
19 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 s...
The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz
17 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 Auschwitz here...
West Africa before the Europeans
16 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 app...
Suicide at the Fall of Nazi Germany
13 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 fascina...
The Adventuress
12 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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
10 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig are both Pulitzer Prize winning journalists at the Washington Post.They've written a new book with yet more revelation...
Dresden. 75 years on.
09 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
75 years ago this week Dresden, in Saxony, known as the ‘jewel box’ because of its stunning architecture was obliterated by British and Ameri...
The British Republic
06 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Lay, editor of History Today, has written a great book about the rise and fall of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate (1653–1659), England's sole ex...
Flu pandemics. Then and Now.
05 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
'We are very very vulnerable' says the brilliant science author and journalist Laura Spinney. Her fantastic book 'Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 ...
Confronting a Nazi past
04 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Derek Niemman and Noemie Lopian work together. Two people from very different backgrounds, they tour the world telling people about their family stori...
Night of the Bayonets
29 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
75 years ago this spring a fascinating but forgotten battle was fought in the dying days of the Second World War. A group of Georgians rose up against...
Max Eisen: Surviving Auschwitz
27 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Max Eisen was only 15 when he and his family were taken from their Hungarian home to the infamous Auschwitz Concentration Camp during the Second World...
UnRoman Britain
26 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How far did Roman culture and politics penetrate into Britain during the Roman occupation of Britannia?Miles Russell, archaeologist and writer, argues...
The Anglo-Zulu War
22 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Saul David - historian, broadcaster and author of several critically-acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction - comes on the show to discuss the mos...
Hunting the Bismarck
20 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In May 1941, the Royal Navy pursued Nazi Germany's largest battleship, the Bismarck, in the greatest chase story in the history of naval warfare. Bism...
The Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz
19 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1940 the Polish resistance decided it needed to send an agent to Auschwitz concentration camp. They were desperate to find out what was going on in...
'Seducing and Killing Nazis'
15 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
During the Second World War the Netherlands fell to advancing German forces in just a few hours. The Dutch found themselves under Nazi occupation. Man...
How History Inspires Environmental Activism
14 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The world faces a unique environmental challenge. The scale of response to this looming catastrophe can be overwhelming. But economist and activist An...
The Commando Raid that Changed the Course of WW2
12 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In October 1942 the British launched a small raid on the Channel Island of Sark. A cast of characters who gave their colleague Ian Fleming ideas for a...
Sam Mendes on 1917
09 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast Dan talks to Golden Globe winning film maker Sam Mendes about his new World War One film 1917.Based in part on an account told to Mend...
The Persian War
08 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the 5th century BC the world's first super power, the Persian Empire, went to war against a ragtag collection of cities and statelets on its wester...
Interwar Germany’s Secret Ally: The USSR
06 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
After the First World War the German Army was in crisis. Limited in the size and its equipment by the Versailles Treaty which ended the war, it was a ...
Ink: A History of Tattooing
05 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Matt Lodder is the world's leading expert on the history of tattoos. He has found evidence of people using ink or charcoal on their bodies stretching ...
Geordies: A History
03 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
'Northumbrian patriot' Dan Jackson, who has just written a book on the history of Northeast England and its people, comes on the podcast to talk about...
The Crusaders' Last Battle for the Holy Land
01 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Roger Crowley is the author of the new book, Accursed Tower: The Crusaders' Last Battle for the Holy Land.The city of Acre, powerfully fortified and r...