Dan Snow's History Hit

110 years ago today, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was struck down by an assassin's bullet. His death triggered one of the most destructive wars in human history, a conflict that set the st…

The Silk Road was a pivotal ancient exchange network that connected the grassy steppes of Asia and the Middle East with the Western world. The passage of goods, ideas and technologies along this bust…

Adam Worth was the quintessential criminal mastermind. He faked his own death, robbed banks in the US, stole diamonds in South Africa and amassed a fortune that helped him evade capture for decades. …

In 1798, the young French General Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt. After successfully taking Alexandria, he ordered the reconstruction of a fort at the nearby city of Rosetta. As his soldiers did th…

Not long after the turn of the first millennium, a Jewish prophet emerged from a period of desert solitude in the Jordan River valley. He wore simple camel hair garments and ate nothing but locusts a…

Historian, broadcaster and author Jonathan Dimbleby joins Dan to explain how Hitler's plans in the East went disastrously wrong.

2 weeks after the D-Day landings, a gigantic Soviet offensive tore thro…

Please note that this episode contains some explicit language.

This is the story of Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, Britain's most extraordinary soldier. The one-handed, one-eyed, walking stick-wielding w…

This is the story of Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, Britain's most extraordinary soldier. The one-handed, one-eyed, walking stick-wielding war hero fought in the Second Boer War, The First World War and…

With a sinister hierarchy of "grand wizards" and "dragons," hooded Klansmen concealed their identities as they unleashed a reign of terror on Black Americans and other minorities across America for a…

100 years ago, in the spring of 1864, the Overland Campaign ignited a ferocious clash between two titans of US military history: Ulysses S. Grant, the rugged and relentless Union general, versus the …

The British weren't always imperial global players with an empire of viceroys, redcoats and industrialised trade systems. The early years of the British Empire were actually pretty chaotic; for the E…

On January 28, 1986, the nation watched in horror as the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after liftoff, killing all seven crew members aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, the first…

Dan unravels the mystery surrounding George Mallory and Andrew Irvine's daring attempt to conquer Mount Everest in 1924 - a feat that could have made them the first to stand atop the world's highest …

With closed borders, a totalitarian regime, electricity blackouts and widespread poverty, North Korea is a brutal place to survive; even looking at a foreign media outlet can get a North Korean citiz…

Just after midnight on the 6th of June, 1944, 181 British glider-borne infantry crashed to earth in the Normandy countryside. They clambered out of their gliders and rushed towards their objectives; …

Please note that this episode contains explicit language.

On the 29th of May, 1944, less than a week before D-Day, General George S. Patton gave a rip-roaring speech to the First US Army Group. He spo…

Dan and military historian Stephen Fischer record a moment by moment play of the dramatic and bloody first crucial hour and a half of D-day, as it happened. They breakdown the assaults across the Nor…

In the second episode of our D-Day series, we look to the skies. In the build-up to Operation Overlord, thousands of Allied pilots in heavy bombers and fighter planes ground down the Luftwaffe and de…

This is the often forgotten chapter of the D-Day story.

To begin our series for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, we turn to the massive naval operations that made it all happen. On D-Day it…

In the 1950s, the US government conducted a series of nuclear bomb tests in the Mojave desert, right next door to Las Vegas. Tourists flocked to the luxurious hotels of America's gambling capital to …