Origins / The Cross and the Crescent • 2017 • episode "Part 1 and 2" • Africa's Great Civilizations

52:00

All seems lost for the Allies. The Italians are defeated at Caporette, and a Bolshevik Russia pulls out of the war. But the American reinforcements are decisive, and the Allies emerge victorious. The Allies are unable to negotiate an honorable peace agreement, and the Treaty of Versailles, 20 years later, will have disastrous consequences.

S1E5 • Apocalypse: World War 1 • 2014 • History

43:45

Our third and final episode looks at the Ottoman Empire’s slow decline in the face of Russian expansion and explores the complex alliances it would forge with European powers in an effort to survive. The map of Europe would be radically redrawn and the Ottoman Empire would come to a humiliating end, giving birth to the modern Turkish Republic.

S1E3 • Ottomans Versus Christians: Battle for Europe • 2016 • History

59:16

In the first programme, he asks how such a small country got such a big head, and how a tiny island in the North Atlantic came to rule over a quarter of the world's population. He travels to India, where local soldiers and local maharajahs helped a handful of British traders to take over vast areas of land. Spectacular displays of imperial power dazzled subject peoples and developed a cult of Queen Victoria as Empress, mother and virtual God. In Egypt, Jeremy explores the bit of Empire that never was, as Britain's temporary peace-keeping visit turned into a seventy year occupation. He travels to the desert where Lawrence of Arabia brought a touch of romance to the grim struggle of the First World War. As Britain came to believe it could solve the world's problems, he tells the story of the triumphant conquest of Palestine by Imperial troops - and Britain's role in a conflict that haunts the Middle East to this day.

S1E1 • Empire • 2012 • History

46:59

The story of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, of Rommel's war against the British in North Africa and of the horrors of the murder of Russian Jews - sometimes known as the Holocaust by Bullets.

S1E3 • Apocalypse: The Second World War • 2009 • History

135:09

Sian Phillips narrates the history of the Roman Empire through the eyes of Livia Drusilla, examining the reigns of the empress's husband Augustus, as well as Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. Chapter 1: The story begins with the assassination of the Roman republic's most powerful general Julius Caesar, with the chaos and bloody power grabs that follow even taking down Egypt's legendary queen Cleopatra. Augustus and Livia seize their moment and through a ruthless combination of gladiatorial violence, sexual alliances and cold-blooded murder, they hoodwink the world's most powerful democracy into nominating Augustus as a single autocratic leader - the first emperor of Rome. Chapter 2: Tiberius and his notorious successor Caligula dragged the Roman empire into an age of tyranny, incest, and shocking depravity. Tiberius became Rome's second emperor with understandable paranoia and trashed what was left of democracy by making it punishable by death to speak out against him. With no son to name as heir, Tiberius invited his teenage nephew Caligula to join his court, but when the emperor fell ill, Caligula seized his chance to gain power and had him smothered on his sickbed. Chapter 3: Examines the reigns of Claudius and Nero. Claudius surprised everyone by taking Rome to its greatest heights yet, only to be brought down by his third wife Messalina and the seemingly unkillable Agrippina the Younger, the mother of his successor, the psychopathic Nero.

2024 • History

15:11

Why, as a teenager in New Jersey in the 1980s, was Peter Sagal taught the Southern myth of the Civil War? How did Gone with the Wind became a national parable? Why is Robert E. Lee an American hero? Slaves = money = power.

S1E2 • Hi$tory • 2019 • History