The Teotihuacan Enigma • 2014

58:56

Jeremy Paxman continues his personal account of Britain's empire, looking at how the empire began as a pirates' treasure hunt, grew into an informal empire based on trade and developed into a global financial network. He travels from Jamaica, where sugar made plantation owners rich on the backs of African slaves, to Calcutta, where British traders became the new princes of India. Jeremy then heads to Hong Kong, where British-supplied opium threatened to turn the Chinese into a nation of drug addicts - leading to the brutal opium wars, in which Britain triumphed and took the island of Hong Kong as booty. Unfair trading helped spark the independence movement in India, led by Mahatma Gandhi; in a former cotton spinning town in Lancashire, Jeremy meets two women who remember Gandhi's extraordinary visit in 1931.

S1E4 • Empire • 2012 • History

26:00

July 31, 1784, Paris. Denis Diderot has just passed away and with him, the memory of the biggest editorial epic of the Age of Enlightenment: Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts.

S3E12 • Butterfly Effect • 2018 • History

206:54

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

82:18

After nearly a century of French colonial rule, Vietnam emerges independent, but divided.

S1E1 • The Vietnam War • 2017 • History

51:59

Which ten events will stay in our minds and hearts as those that marked history Martin Luther king’s i have a dream speech influenced civil rights laws, apartheid ended in south Africa, a bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and man landed on the moon.

S1E8 • 101 Events that Made the 20th Century • 2018 • History

59:08

The Romans were brilliant engineers and soldiers, but what isn't as well known is that they also gave us wonderful artistic treasures. In this three-part series, Alastair Sooke argues that the old-fashioned view that the Romans didn't do art is nonsense. He traces how the Romans during the Republic went from being art thieves and copycats to pioneering a new artistic style - warts 'n' all realism. Roman portraits reveal what the great names from history, men like Julius Caesar and Cicero, actually looked like. Modern-day artists demonstrate the ingenious techniques used to create these true to life masterpieces in marble, bronze and paint. We can step back into the Roman world thanks to their invention of the documentary-style marble relief and to a volcano called Vesuvius. Sooke explores the remarkable artistic legacy of Pompeii before showing how Rome's first emperor, Augustus, used the power of art to help forge an empire.

S1E1 • The Treasures of Ancient Rome • 2012 • History