Dan Snow's History Hit

Pontius Pilate was the Roman Prefect of Judea during the reign of Emperor Tiberius and is most famous for condemning Jesus of Nazareth to death by crucifixion in the Four Gospels. But who really was …

The English won a decisive battlefield victory over the French in the first decade of the Hundred Years' War. At the Battle of Crécy, an outnumbered English army went up against thousands of French m…

On the 1st of April, 2024, a presumed Israeli airstrike destroyed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing 13 people. Amongst them was a Brigadier General of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard…

As a foreign correspondent for ITN in the 70s, Peter Snow remembers handing tins of film to strangers on airport runways, hoping they would take it back to Britain to hand over to his colleagues on t…

Fought in the second half of 1942, the Battles of El Alamein were a series of climactic confrontations in Egypt between British Imperial and Commonwealth forces and a combined German and Italian army…

In the mid-17th century, King Charles I of England was put on trial for treason against the sovereign state. Such a process involved a singular determination by Parliament to find a way, through due …

Dan delves into the complex history of Zionism, exploring its multifaceted origins and the various ideological strands that have shaped it over the years. From its early beginnings in the 19th centur…

From a plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE, to another in 540 that wiped out half the population of the Roman empire, down through the Black Death in the Middle Ages and on throu…

Frederick Rutland was one of Britain's finest naval pilots and a celebrated hero of the First World War. And yet in the interwar period, he would become a turncoat, feeding information to Japanese in…

Join Dan as he narrates the harrowing story of the HMS Wager and its crew's descent into mutiny and survival against all odds. Set against the backdrop of the War of Jenkins' Ear, the Wager, a Britis…

This is the untold story of how Nazi experiments with psychedelics influenced CIA research and the War on Drugs. From covert mind control programs to experiments with 'truth serums', we trace the con…

In 1872 the ghost ship Mary Celeste is found sailing across the Atlantic without a single crew member left onboard. Theories over what happened on the Mary Celeste range from insurance fraud to a vio…

Kensington Palace was the centre of court life in 18th-century Britain. It was the principal London residence for the Royals, as well as a lavish venue for hosting monarchs and world leaders. But beh…

As Commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, George Washington was a central feature of the American Revolutionary War. He was also the first President of the nascent United States, and his ethics …

What happened to the pioneering pilot, Amelia Earhart? In 1937, while attempting to circumnavigate the globe by aircraft, Earhart and her navigator went missing. Some 87 years later, new evidence has…

This is the story of the British Empire in India. Over two episodes, we'll chart India's history from the birth of the Mughal Empire until the Partition of India. Joining us is Shrabani Basu, a journ…

This is the story of the British Empire in India. Over two episodes, we'll chart India's history from the birth of the Mughal Empire until the Partition of India. Joining us is Shrabani Basu, a journ…

On 23 June 1972, a man boarded American Airlines Flight 119 in St Louis. He sat most of the way to Tulsa before donning a wig and a pair of gloves in the restroom, taking out a gun and handing a memb…

In the year 1600, a bedraggled English sailor and his sick and dying crewmates anchored off the coast of Kyushu, Japan. His name was William Adams, and over the next two decades, he would rise throug…

The fictional island of Atlantis has intrigued and eluded us for millennia. First mentioned in the works of Plato, it's a story that captures our collective imagination - and yet it's almost certainl…