Dan Snow's History Hit

The only British territory ever occupied by the Nazis was the Channel Islands. From 1940 to the end of the war, the Germans turned Jersey, and some of the islands around it, into an impenetrable fortr...

Synonymous for somewhere far away, Timbuktu has been mythologised by the stories of old European explorers. But in fact, for centuries it was in fact a key trading post on the edge of the Sahara and t...

In this episode we hear all about the Glorious Revolution, a pivotal moment in British history that saw the overthrow of King James II and the accession to the throne of William III and Mary II. For t...

In the summer of 1683, Vienna was under siege. A vast Ottoman army surrounded the city, poised to breach the walls and clear the way for Ottoman expansion into Central Europe. Inside the city, famine ...

Home to the likes of Al Capone and George 'Machine Gun' Kelly, Alcatraz was once the jewel in the American prison system. The wind-swept island fortress was the final stop for the nation's most danger...

When the Second World War finally ended 80 years ago, there was a mixed reaction in Britain. Today, we hear about these varying responses, from elation and celebration to reticence and restraint. For ...

A hero to some, and a villain to others, the seventh president of the United States was a populist firebrand who reshaped America and left a legacy that still echoes today. In this episode, Dan dives ...

80 years ago, as the war in Europe drew to a close, the world began to come to terms with the horrors of the Third Reich. This is the story of the Nuremberg Trials, the first of their kind, that would...

Warning: this episode contains discussion of suicide. Berlin, April 1945: After nearly 12 years, the "Thousand-Year Reich" is crumbling. Isolated in a bunker beneath the city, as Soviet forces close i...

It started with an inconsequential piece of military intelligence, scrawled on a piece of paper and left in a waste paper basket. But over the next decade, the infamous Dreyfus affair would mutate int...