Venerable Lives | History's Defining Moments

He woke up the most famous man in England, and died a revolutionary at thirty-six. This is the story of Lord Byron: Romantic poet, scandalous exile, and the man who accidentally gave birth to both the modern vampire and the world's first celebrity. In this episode of Venerable Lives, we trace the full arc of George Gordon Byron's extraordinary life, from his defiant years at Trinity Colleg...

In 333 BC, a twenty-two-year-old Macedonian king stood on a narrow coastal plain in southern Turkey and did something no one had done before: he made the Great King of Persia run. The Battle of Issus is one of the most consequential military engagements in ancient history, and one of the most misunderstood. This wasn't just a military victory. It was the moment Alexander the Great stopped fini...

What does it take to become the first human being to walk on another world, and then spend the rest of your life insisting it wasn't really about you? In this episode of Venerable Lives, we tell the full story of Neil Armstrong: the boy from Wapakoneta, Ohio who built a wind tunnel in his basement at age six, earned his pilot's licence before his driver's licence, flew combat missions...

This episode of Venerable Lives traces the full life of Brutus, from his birth into one of the Roman Republic's most legendary families to his death on a battlefield in Greece. His ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus had overthrown Rome's last king and founded the Republic in 509 BC, then executed his own sons when they conspired to bring the monarchy back. For five centuries, the Brutus name ca...

This episode of Venerable Lives traces the full arc of Einstein's extraordinary life, from his birth in Ulm, Germany, in 1879 to his death in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1955. We follow the boy who was slow to talk and clashed with the rigid discipline of the German school system. We meet the teenager who ran away to Italy, renounced his citizenship, and failed his first university entrance exam...

Christmas morning, 800 AD. A man six feet four inches tall kneels at the altar of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Pope Leo III steps forward and places a crown on his head. In that single moment, the Western Roman Empire, dead for over three hundred years, is declared alive again. In this episode of Venerable Lives, we tell the full story of Charlemagne: the Frankish king who unified medieval Eu...

She entered the imperial palace at fourteen as a minor concubine. She was sent to a Buddhist convent at twenty-five with her head shaved and her future closed. Then, over the next forty years, she dismantled the most complex power structure in the ancient world and made it hers. In this episode of Venerable Lives, we tell the full story of Wu Zetian — the only woman in three thousand years of Chin...

He was a sickly child who could barely climb a flight of stairs. He became a president who charged into enemy gunfire on horseback, alone, wearing spectacles held on with a piece of string. In the debut episode of Venerable Lives, we tell the full story of Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most extraordinary, contradictory, and compelling figures in American history. This is the definitive narrative...