The public archive
Explore history podcasts about ancient civilizations, wars, rulers, science and culture. Listen to a narrated story, read its complete transcript, and inspect the sources behind the episode.
Recently published
5 min documentary
The common idiom promises the easiest heist in human history, but Victorian archives and developmental biology reveal a very different story. Behind a century of slang lies a vicious infant grip reflex, a moral scandal, and an evolutionary alarm.
15 min documentary
She conquered Hollywood on her own terms, demanding unprecedented contractual control and walking away with an Oscar for a film she despised. From runaway heiress to the highest-paid woman in America, this is the story of how an immigrant girl outsmarted the studio system.
10 min documentary
The greatest amphibious assault in history hinged not on invincible firepower, but on a Scottish meteorologist tracking a pressure wave across the Atlantic and a German command structure paralysed by its own dictator. When the landing craft dropped their ramps in the surf of Normandy, survival came down to forty-eight hours of ruthless bluffing and front-line desperation.
10 min documentary
Suspended inside a perspex turret at twenty-five thousand feet, a young Maine airman watched the air war unfold backwards over the Alps. From the burning wreck of Pearl Harbor to flak-filled skies over the Reich, his war was measured in freezing isolation and thirty-three terrifying combat runs.
10 min documentary
Barely sixty miles south of Sicily lies a waterless limestone outcrop that became the most besieged patch of land in world history. How did a tiny island survive annihilation by sultans and air armadas, preserve an Arabic dialect in a Catholic stronghold, and transform into an indestructible Mediterranean crossroads?
15 min documentary
A cautious general rose almost by accident, then spent thirty-six years building a regime engineered to survive his own death. The trick worked - until the country he modernized quietly buried everything he stood for.
15 min documentary
For fourteen years Nokia owned the mobile phone, then vanished from it in barely six. What kills a giant that had touchscreens before the iPhone and still froze?
10 min documentary
A railway cutting through the South Gippsland scrub split open a seam of black coal, and a forest clearing became one of Victoria's busiest mining towns almost overnight. So why did the boom collapse - and why does a make-believe pioneer village now stand where the miners once dug?
10 min documentary
Everyone remembers the charging cavalry and the undefeated general, but the thing that actually beat Persia was a wooden pike, a supply calculation, and a causeway built into the sea. Here's the engineering and logistics behind the legend.
10 min documentary
For three months in nineteen seventeen, British and Commonwealth armies bled for a ruined Belgian village on higher ground. What if the campaign that became a byword for pointless slaughter came within a few dry weeks of actually working?
15 min documentary
A tiny Czech studio thought its glowing block-slashing game might be just another small side project. Instead it became the first virtual reality game to sell a million copies - and the app that finally made VR worth owning.
10 min documentary
Everyone knows the sword-swinging hero of the novels, but the true lord of Bamburgh lived a century later and met a far darker end. His murder lit a blood feud that burned through three generations.
Stories by date are in Today in History. New to history? Start with the listening guide or compare history podcasts. Not here yet? Make your own episode - episodes are generated, so check important claims against their sources.
