Michael Buerk looks at the transformation of the nation during the Victorian era, telling the surprising stories behind famous landmarks and the hidden heroes behind epic constructions. He begins by revealing how the Victorians created public transport and sewerage systems. Michael Buerk looks at how the Victorians created what is now known as the modern home, exploring the huge rise in house-building during the period. He travels to Fakenham, Norfolk, to visit the last remaining gasworks in England, and discovers how the Victorians mastered the art of producing `town gas" from coal. He also investigates how the kitchen was transformed with the advent of gas cookers, as more complex meals including the Sunday roast steadily became the norm across the nation.
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Chapter 1: Rapid Dominance From Julius Caesar to Napoleon Bonaparte, ancient generals took advantage of a military tactic still used in modern warfare, employing overwhelming power to paralyse the enemy. A tactic known as Rapid Dominance. This episode explores the lives and feats of four men who used it to achieve victory: Moshe Dayan, Erwin Rommel, Colin Powell and Isoroku Yamomoto. Chapter 2: Combat Power Combined arms operations use the force of different military corps to increase the combat power deployed against an enemy. Combining these forces needs incredible planning, decisiveness and authority. This episode explores the lives and feats of four military leaders who used the tactic to achieve victory: Bernard Montgomery, William Westmoreland, Georgy Zhukov and Norman Schwarzkopf. Chapter 3: Deception Disinformation, decoys, and traps. Strategy and tactics can be creative. But behind every deception and masquerade are the Military Masterminds creating, planning and executing each strategy to defeat an enemy. This episode explores how leaders Winston Churchill, Nikita Khrushchev, George Patton and Muhammad Anwar Sadat, used the tactic to achieve victory. Chapter 4: Guerrilla Warfare To surprise the enemy, attacking and disappearing without a trace. To harass, sabotage, ambush. Throughout the 20th Century the majority of guerrilla warfare centred around the confrontation between right and left ideologies. This episode looks at how Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Josip Broz Tito and V? Nguy?n Gi?p used Guerrilla Warfare to overcome a militarily superior enemy.
2022 • History
August 5, 1962, South Africa. After several months on the run, the Black leader Nelson Mandela is arrested by the South African police and incarcerated in Robben Island, a fortress-like jail off Cape Town. He doesn’t know it at that time, but it is only the beginning of his penitential ordeal.
S3E8 • Butterfly Effect • 2018 • History
Jago explores the forgotten people of ancient Costa Rica, who built a series of spectacular settlements amongst the rivers and volcanoes of central America and whose enigmatic legacy - including hundreds of mysterious, giant stone spheres - is only now being unravelled by archaeologists.
S1E3 • Lost Kingdoms of Central America • 2014 • History
Exit strategies are put into action by the members of the inner circle when the Allies surround the capitol and Hitler perishes by his own hand.
10/10 • Hitler's Circle of Evil • 2017 • History
In April 1944, two Jewish prisoners miraculously escaped from Auschwitz. When they recounted what they had left behind, their harrowing testimony revealed the true horror of the Holocaust to the outside world for the first time. They described in forensic detail the gas chambers and the full extent of the extermination programme. The news they brought presented the Allies with one of the greatest moral questions of the 20th century: Should we bomb Auschwitz? While the Allies deliberated in London and Washington, the killing machine ground on in southern Poland. One month after the men’s escape, almost 800,000 Hungarian Jews had been rounded up awaiting transport to Auschwitz. By early July 1944, the majority had been transported. Most of them were murdered on arrival. As the killing at Auschwitz reached its frenzied climax, the outcome of the Second World War hung in the balance. Millions of troops were fighting on both fronts and battling for supremacy in the air. Should the Allies use their resources to push on and win the war or to stop the industrial slaughter at Auschwitz? The request to bomb the camp, with 30,000 captive prisoners, was remarkable and came from a place of utter desperation. But it was a direct response to the destruction of an entire people. There were operational challenges - was it possible to reach the camp to bomb it? How many heavy bombers would it take? What would the Nazi propaganda machine say about such an attack? - as well as complex moral ones. How many prisoners would likely die in such a raid? Can you kill friendly civilians in order to save the lives of those being transported towards the death camp? These were the hard questions faced by Churchill, Allied Air Command and the Jewish Agency.
2019 • History
Historian Bettany Hughes investigates the ideas of ancient philosophers, starting with the Indian nobleman Siddhartha Gautama, more popularly known as Buddha. Thought to have been lived and tought between the sixth and fourth centuries BC, the sage and holy man inspired a diverse belief system that influences the lives of millions of people to this day. She travels to India, where Buddha experienced the challenging ideas and extreme methods of wandering `truth seekers', after he had abandoned his family and homeland in the Himalayas to embark on his philosophical quest to find a solution to human suffering.
Part 1 • Genius of the Ancient World • 2015 • History