History from a New Perspective

Send us Fan Mail The ancient Polynesians stand among history’s greatest seafarers. By around 1100 BC, they had already crossed vast expanses of the Pacific, settling remote islands such as Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. In the centuries that followed, they pushed even farther, reaching places like Easter Island, Vanuatu, New Zealand and off the coast of Africa in Madagascar. This was known as the Austron...

Send us Fan Mail EXPLAINER: Recent tensions involving the United States, Israel, and Iran have once again drawn global attention to a region with a long and complex past. But today’s events are only the latest chapter in a much deeper story. To understand Iran’s place in the world, we need to look back thousands of years—through the rise of ancient Persian empires, periods of conquest and the foun...

Send us Fan Mail In the long stretch of prehistory, humans weren’t alone. One of the groups they shared the world and sometimes their lives with were the Neanderthals. Now, a new DNA study suggests those encounters followed a pattern and most often, it was Neanderthal men and human women who got together and interbred. This left a genetic signature that is still found in then DNA of many of us tod...

Send us Fan Mail In October 2025, the city of El Fasher in North Darfur fell to the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary organisation which has been engaged in a vicious civil war against the Sudanese armed forces. The United Nations says thousands have fled El Fasher since the RSF takeover. Over the course of the war the BBC says more than 150,000 people have died and about 12 million have fled t...

Send us Fan Mail As part of UK Black History Month, History from a New Perspective has been exploring London's historic relationship with the Transatlantic slave trade. This is a short episode which explains how the city's wealth grew as a result of slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas. The episode also explores how Britain later abolished the slave trade and slavery. Joseph Keen vi...

Send us Fan Mail Buried deep beneath coconut groves in South India’s Tamil Nadu state lies Keeladi, an ancient settlement whose 2,500-year-old remains are igniting a fierce debate over India’s history. Archaeologists, politicians and linguists have clashed over what Keeladi means — for identity, heritage and the story we tell about the past.  India’s first major civilisation, the Indus Valley, thr...

Send us Fan Mail The US FBI recently returned a 500-year-old stolen document to Mexico. The manuscript was penned by Hernán Cortés, a man who helped pave the way for Spanish colonisation of the Americas and bring about the end of the Aztec Empire. The Aztec empire lasted until the 16th century in what is now Mexico with Spain’s conquest leading to its collapse in 1521. The civilisation has often b...

Send us Fan Mail Archaeologists have used high-resolution scans to produce images of tattoos found on an ancient woman in an ice cave. This woman was part of the Pazyryk people, a nomadic Scythian culture (documented by the Ancient Greek historian, Herodotus) which existed between the 6th and 3rd centuries BC in the area of modern day Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and North Western China. The “Ice...

Send us Fan Mail In 1830, French forces invaded Algeria leading to over a century of colonial rule. The North African nation was even treated as an integral part of France known as “Algerie Francaise.” By 1 November 1954, Algeria’s National Liberation Front or FLN began a major war of decolonization from France, which eventually led to the deaths of somewhere between 400,000 to 1.5 million people....

Send us Fan Mail Want to learn more about the history of the African continent? From the ancient Nubian kingdoms of Sudan and Egypt to Mansa Musa's medieval Mali, to modern-day Ghana, we'll explore the rise and fall of civilizations and the lasting legacies they left behind. Joseph Keen spoke to Luke Pepera is a writer, broadcast, anthropologist, historian and author of "Motherland:...

Send us Fan Mail History from a New Perspective is a world history channel and podcast exploring history from the ancient period to the modern, covering every continent. Also available on YouTube:  https://youtube.com/@historynewperspective Support the show