Dan Snow's History Hit

Sex. There's a lot of it about. We talk about war, chaos and atrocities on this podcast a lot although, thankfully, few of us have first hand experience of them. Yet we rarely talk sex. Which is odd. Sex is what got us here in the first place and nearly all of us will experience it in some form through our lives. I talked to Dr Kate Lister about the ways in which society dictates how sex is culturally understood and performed have varied significantly through the ages. Dr Lister runs the brilliant digital project Whores of Yore and has just written the brilliant Curious History of Sex. We chatted about why humans are the only creatures that stigmatise particular sexual practices, and sex remains a deeply divisive issue around the world. This was a fascinating chat.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to&n

I was thrilled to be joined by Mark Vincent, an expert in criminal subculture and prisoner society in Stalinist Labour camps. Mark has looked at thousands of journals, song collections, tattoo drawings and slang dictionaries to reveal a hidden side of Gulag daily life. In this podcast, he also explained how these criminal habits laid the foundations for the Russian mafia.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Helen McCarthy, lecturer in modern British history at the University of Cambridge, joins Dan to discuss the complicated past of working motherhood. They consider how women have been excluded from the world of work as well as attempts to break into it, and how these developments have informed our views on gender, work and equality in Britain today.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this podcast I was joined by Margaret MacMillan, professor at St Antony's College, Oxford University and author of 'Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War'. We discussed the effects WWI had on the world, and how Europe began to rebuild in the years that followed.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Dan chats to British naval historian and maritime artist, Richard Endsor, about seventeenth century ship building. It was the developments of this period that would enable Britain to extend it's maritime reach across the oceans, eventually encompassing territory on every continent.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I was joined by Kevin Fong, who took me through one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of exploration. Apollo 13 was the seventh crewed mission on the Apollo space programme, and their third attempt to land on the moon. But after an oxygen tank in the command module ignited early on in the mission, the three astronauts got much more than they bargained for. As each of the systems in the space craft began to shut down one after another over a course of four excruciating days, it seemed impossible they would come out alive.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Emily Brand has written a brilliant book about the Byrons. Not just the great romantic, poet and adventurer, George Gordon Byron, but his parents and grandparents who are equally as deserving of our attention. I loved this opportunity to delve into 18th Century British life. There are admirals, villains, heroines and lovers all over the place. One family give us an entree into a world different to ours yet tantalisingly similar. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In September 1918 David Lloyd George, the charismatic wartime Prime Minister, visited the city of Manchester, attended a vast public gathering and then collapsed. He spent the next week and a half confined to the Manchester Town Hall in a hastily assembled private hospital ward. He needed assistance breathing. His valet said it was touch and go as to whether he would survive. He did pull through but a vast number of his fellow Brits did not. The country was in the grip of an influenza pandemic, known as Spanish Influenza. It is interesting that Lloyd George was in Manchester because it was under the care of one of the most remarkable public health officials in British history, James Niven. His rapid response the pandemic, his insistence on a public information campaign and closing of mass gatherings meant that Manchester suffered fewer deaths than other big cities like London. In this podcast I talk to Mark Honigsbaum who has written extensively about the Influenza and Niven. We talked about sick Prime M

Professor Frank Snowden is currently on lockdown in Rome, experiencing at first hand life in a pandemic. For years he has written about the great waves of disease that swept across the world in the past. Now he is experiencing one. I talked to him about what pandemics have done to us. How they have changed our societies, nudged us towards the present and whether this outbreak might refocus us to give previous pandemics the attention they deserve. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our museums are full of stuff taken, bought, stolen and gifted from foreign countries. It feels like we face a reckoning. What shall we do with it?I talked to two authors of new books that wrestle with this. Christopher Joll is a former soldier who deals specifically with the spoils of war, while Alice Proctor thinks more generally about all objects and where they are best placed and how best to interpret them. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Poison, swordplay and bloodshed. Shakespeare’s characters met their ends in a plethora of gruesome ways. But how realistic were they? And did they even shock audiences who lived in a time of plague, pestilence and public executions, a time when seeing a dead or dying body on the way home from the theatre were high. I was joined by the wonderful Dr Kathryn Harkup, a chemist and author, on a tumultuous journey through the most dramatic and memorable parts of Shakespeare’s work. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The last great battle of the Second World War was fought on the island of Okinawa. After 83 blood-soaked days, almost a quarter of a million people lost their lives. The death toll included thousands of civilians lost to mass suicide - convinced to do so by Japanese propaganda. I invited Saul David on the podcast to tell me about this shocking - often overlooked - chapter of the Second World War. A chapter which was central to Truman’s decision to use the atomic bombs in August 1945. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode features military historian Douglas Gill who has extensively researched the origins of the Spanish Influenza as it emerged in 1915 and 1916 in northern France. Douglas has worked alongside leading virologist, and previous guest on Dan's podcast, John Oxford, to track the initial cases of this particularly violent strain of influenza which would go on to kill millions of people across the globe. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I was thrilled to have Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir on the pod. We talked about Viking women, old Norse-Icelandic sagas, mythology and poetry. Who were these Viking women who were champions on the battlefield, did they really exist, and is there much historic evidence? Jóhanna answered all these questions drawing upon the latest archaeological evidence. It seems the lives of Viking women were far more dynamic than we might imagine. Enjoy!For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Jamie Wood and Professor Niall Mackay at the University of York are mathematicians who love history. Sensible dudes. They released a paper which sent the rest of the history world into a meltdown when they tried to use the statistics of airframe losses from the Battle of Britain to test just how close Germany might have come to victory in the battle. Essentially (I think but then again I am totally innumerate) they tested what would happen if the loss ration on certain days had been replicated consistently. Anyway I wouldn't read my take on it, give it a listen and see if it makes sense to you. I loved these guys and I hope we get to work together again. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month f

We were delighted to have comedy royalty on the podcast. Omid Djalili talked to me about one of his earliest stage creations, first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1993. Over the next four years it was performed 109 times in 10 different countries. The backdrop of this epic storytelling piece was the tumultuous expectation for a Promised One in Persia in 1844. The claims made by a young merchant of Shiraz - who became known as the Bab - caused a revolution, and laid the foundations for the Baha'i Faith - which numbers some seven million followers around the world today. Omid, who grew up in an Iranian Baha'i family, gave a fascinating insight into his relationship with history, comedy and family. Enjoy. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' for

There are more historic artefacts on our ocean floor than there are in every museum in the world put together. Over thousands of years ships carrying every conceivable cargo have sunk in the rivers and oceans of the world. Protecting them is an enormous challenge. Thankfully there are heroes out there who are taking on that challenge. In this episode I was lucky enough to talk to maritime archaeologist Jessica Berry, CEO of MAST (Maritime Archaeological Sea Trust) and her colleague Nick Wise. Nick is CEO of OceanMind. OceanMind is a not for profit which specialises in using the latest technology, unleashing the full potential of the latest AI from Microsoft. Together their two organisations have now set up the Maritime Observatory. This will protect underwater heritage from illegal looting - people going down, and ripping off bits of wrecks. So what Microsoft AI, and OceanMind's technology, allows MAST to keep an eye on ships behaving suspiciously on the surface in areas of important maritime wreck

Everyone is Thomas Cromwell obsessed at the moment. The man who rose to be the most powerful member of Henry VIII's court, his Lord Privy Seal, Principal Secretary and Chancellor. He was a driving force behind the English Reformation and constitutional changes that emphasised the centrality of Parliament, but his current mighty reputation depends on the fictional trilogy of the genius novelist Hilary Mantel. On this podcast I talk to another genius, Tracy Borman, historian and curator of Historic Royal Palaces, a biographer of Cromwell about the reality behind the literary legend. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV We have got a special offer on at the moment - use code 'pod1' for a month free and the next month for just £/€/$1.For information regarding your data privacy

Daniel Todman is a Professor of Modern History at Queen Mary. He has just published his epic study of how during the Second World War Britain fought back from near disaster to triumph. It opens with the fall fall of Singapore Feb 1942 and ends with Britain’s post war experiment in social democracy well underway. Speaking to him amidst the Covid crisis was particularly fascinating. I was able to ask just why states are able to do and pay for in moments of extreme drama. Dan always encourages me to think differently about the past. This episode was certainly no exception. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV We have got a special offer on at the moment- use code 'pod1' for a month free and the first month for just £/€/$1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more

Great leaders? Industrial change? Revolutions? If you thought these were the things that shaped history, think again. Back by popular demand, I was thrilled to be joined by bestselling author Lewis Dartnell. He explained how modern political and economic patterns correlate with events which happened not decades or centuries ago, but hundreds of millions of years before human civilisations existed. Pretty mind-blowing stuff. Perhaps more relevant than ever in these uncertain and weird times, it’s never been more compelling to understand Earth’s impact on the shape of human civilisations. Enjoy. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV We have got a special offer on at the moment- use code 'pod3' for a month free and the first THREE months for just £/€/$1 per month. Ho