Plagues of our past

Napoleon III's family was, in the words of historian Edward Shawcross, “the most cutthroat mafioso soap opera in the world”. Exiled to Switzerland as a boy and disowned by his own father, he spent years as a laughing stock of French politics, twice arrested trying to seize power. ...  Show more

The Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum is set to be the biggest historical event in decades. In conversation with David Musgrove, its curator Michael Lewis gives the lowdown on what the exhibition is all about, and how you should make the most of your trip if you do ...  Show more

The way we die has been utterly transformed. There have been around 10,000 generations of human beings, but only in the last 3 or 4 have infectious diseases not been an expected and accepted cause of death. What drove the most deadly infectious diseases? Was technological progr ...  Show more

From a plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE, to another in 540 that wiped out half the population of the Roman empire, down through the Black Death in the Middle Ages and on through the 1918 flu epidemic (which killed between 50 and 100 million people) and ...

Three years into a global pandemic, the fact that infectious disease is capable of reshaping humanity is obvious. But seen in the context of sixty thousand years of human and scientific history, COVID-19 is simply the latest in a series of world-changing pathogens. In fact, the r ...  Show more

How devastating were European arrivals to the Americas in terms of deaths and the introduction of new infectious diseases? Tom and Dominic are joined by Professor Kyle Harper from the University of Oklahoma to discuss the relationship between disease and colonial expansion, the ...  Show more