Dan Snow's History Hit

Dame Hilary Mantel died on 22 September 2022 at the age of 70. Her acclaimed Wolf Hall trilogy - which brought the life of Thomas Cromwell so vividly to life - has sold more than five million copies worldwide. She won the Booker Prize twice - for Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies . In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb and History Hit's Dan Snow pay...

A long dark, cold winter looms with soaring energy prices. Some of the advice we've heard recently includes buying a new kettle or taking a flannel bath...echoing previous advice given during the brutal fuel crisis of 1973. The Arab–Israeli War sent oil sky high and Britain saw a wave of crises from rolling strikes to energy shortages but the 1970s saw a fuel shortage and what we're facing now is...

From the stone age to current day, from sticks and rocks to drones and artillery - the nature of warfare has changed drastically throughout history. Over the years, technology and societal organisation have transformed the battlefield. Dan talks to Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, a professor of war studies at King's College London about the evolution of warfare. Professor Freedman takes the tempe...

In 1939 Franklin D Roosevelt received a letter from Albert Einstein, warning him that the Nazis might be developing nuclear weapons. America has to act fast. What follows is the creation of a secret city in the rural area of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Around 75,000 people moved to the secret city during World War Two, and the first atomic bomb was developed in just 28 months. Don Wildman...

In the week of the Labour Party when polls indicate that the party is likely to form the next government, it seems an opportune moment to examine what lessons they might be able to draw from their own history. But why Harold Wilson? Harold Wilson won four general elections. More than Clement Atlee or Tony Blair. Wilson was a wily, strategic political operator who made some radical changes to the U...

As the UK's bond market has suffered its biggest fall in decades and the pound has reached its lowest ever price against the US dollar, Dan talks to Dr Nuno Palma, a senior lecturer and associate professor in economics at the University of Manchester about the Bank of England. Dr Palma explains its historical role in Britain's imperial expansion and the industrial revolution and now how it's fight...

Agatha Christie is the best-selling fiction writer of all time and her many detective novels, short stories and plays have gripped and entertained millions around the world. Her real life was just as fascinating as any of her crime novels. It was full of love and loss, travel and adventure and an enduring passion for archaeology. In this episode, Dan is joined by historian and Chief Curator at His...

From an age in which women’s lives were obscured and poorly recorded, one shines brightly from the darkness. Eleanor of Aquitaine - born 900 years ago - has been the subject of scandal and legend for almost a millennium. Nevertheless, she played a central role in the pivotal events that defined nations and set relationships across Europe for centuries to come.  In this special explainer...

The Lion House is a riveting new book from journalist and historian Christopher De Bellaigue, written like a novel that tells the dramatic story of Suleyman the Magnificent and his power and influence over 16th Century Europe. In this episode recorded at the Chalke Valley History festival earlier this summer, Christopher talks Dan through what was happening at the opposite end of Europe to Henry V...

In September 1952 Mahmood Hussein Mattan became the last to be executed at Cardiff Prison, but Mahmood had in fact been framed by the police and 70 years later South Wales Police formally apologised to his family for his wrongful conviction. Mahmood originally hailed from Somalia and had been a merchant seaman who had ended up settling in Cardiff and marrying a Welsh woman called Laura Williams. T...

It is believed clans started to emerge in Scotland around 1100AD and were originally the descendants of kings – if not of demigods from Irish mythology. As well as kinship and a sense of identity and belonging, being part of a clan was an important part of survival throughout the centuries that would follow. Scotland’s leading cultural historian, Professor Murray Pittock, joins Dan on the podcast...

On the 16th of September 1620, The Mayflower set sail from Southampton to the New World. Aboard were 102 passengers determined to reach a new land, escape the religious persecution they faced and establish a colony. They endured a long and arduous crossing and a brutal first winter which they only survived due to the help of the native Wampanoag people. It was from this first, successful, colony t...

The Queen's body has been taken to Westminster Hall in London, where she will lie in state for the public to visit and pay their respects. Over the past week since her death, we've seen a number of ceremonies and protocols enacted across the country to mark the end of her reign and life. These arrangements and the funeral we can expect to see on Monday follows a precedent set by Queen Victoria upo...

Ray Victor is a lifelong New Yorker and tour guide from Queens. He remembers 11th of September 2001 vividly, when hijacked planes were flown into the World Trade Centre towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Virginia, and a site in Pennsylvania. Thousands were killed and injured. Ray remembers the missing posters, the hole that was left in the heart of the city, the destruction but also the huma...

Malta is located in the Mediterranean sea just beyond Sicily, between Europe and Africa; its warm climate and beautiful islands make it a perfect holiday destination. But in World War Two, the Islands’ strategic location made it centre stage in the theatre of war in the Mediterranean: a key stronghold from which the Allies could sustain their North African campaign and from which they could launch...

As a mark of respect and remembrance to the late Queen Elizabeth II, we've chosen to focus on Her Majesty's personal history as a veteran of the Second World War. For this episode, James is joined by Tessa Dunlop to learn more about how the inspirational, dedicated, and devoted monarch that was Elizabeth II went from a young girl living through the blitz, to serving as a second subaltern in the al...

Queen Elizabeth II has died after 70 years on the British throne. Born in April 1926, Elizabeth Windsor became heir apparent, aged 10, when her uncle Edward VIII abdicated and her father George VI became king. In 1947 – She married navy lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, a Greek Prince, at London’s Westminster Abbey before being crowned there in 1953 in the world’s first televised coronation. In this...

What do you get when you bring together five top historians in a room with bottles of Prosecco to debate Elizabeth I on screen? History with the gloves off - our first Not Just the Tudors Lates!  Taking as her starting point the new series Becoming Elizabeth - now streaming on STARZ - Professor Suzannah Lipscomb is joined by Dr Joanne Paul, Jessie Childs, Alex von Tunzelmann and Professor Sar...

Why are humans the only species to have escaped – only very recently – the subsistence trap, allowing us to enjoy a standard of living that vastly exceeds all others? And why have we progressed so unequally around the world? Professor Oded Galor is an economist and the founding thinker behind Unified Growth Theory, which seeks to uncover the fundamental causes of development, prosperity and i...

For millennia, people have obsessed over questions about the nature of matter in our universe. Then, by the turn of the twentieth century, we believed we had answered everything. Our understanding of matter was finally complete. But an unprecedented outburst of scientific discovery was about to change the course of history... Dr Suzie Sheehy is an accelerator physicist, academic and science commun...

The mechanised warfare of the First World War brought unprecedented new levels of firepower and destruction to the battlefield and with it horrific new injuries. Advances in medicine also meant that soldiers were surviving injuries that previously would have been fatal. Many of these men were left with horrific, disfiguring facial injuries which carried with them not just a physical trauma but a s...

Located just 100 miles off the coast of mainland China, the nation of Taiwan sits in the so-called 'first island chain' - a group of US-friendly territories deemed crucial to American foreign policy. Yet China's president Xi Jinping maintains that Chinese reunification with Taiwan must be fulfilled. He's not ruled out the possible use of military force - and neither has US president Joe Biden. Ten...

Robin Hood is one of the most famous legends of British history, but did he exist and if so who was he? Gareth Morgan, Learning Development Officer at Nottingham Castle, is just the man to help separate fact from fiction when it comes to this archetypal hero who robbed the rich to give to the poor. Gareth helps Dan discover some of the real-life figures which might have inspired Robin, what the st...

On August 28, 1963, some 200,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to protest the continuing inequalities faced by African Americans. The final speaker of the day was Dr Martin Luther King who would deliver one of the most famous orations of the civil rights movement—and of human history. Dr Clayborne Carson is a historian, founder of the Martin Luther King, Jr.,...

1066 is one of the most critical and dramatic years in British history. In the space of one year, the country had three kings, three major battles and a year that decided the fate of British history. To tell the thrilling story of this infamous year Dan is joined by three very special guests his children Zia, Wolf and Orla. They test Dan's historical knowledge to its limits and ask the questions w...