How our hunger for land shaped history

How did a tiny band of guerrillas come to rule a quarter of humanity? And was the outcome of the Chinese Civil War really the ‘heroic’ popular uprising that the People’s Republic portrays? In this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Danny Bird speaks to Frank Dikötter about the ...  Show more

From thrall to king; from pagan to Christian: Olaf Tryggvason was one of the titanic figures of the Viking Age, whose story straddles the line between fantasy and fiction. Speaking to James Osborne about his life for this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Don Hollway steps bac ...  Show more

The enclosure of the commons was a centuries-long process. Gradually, through a combination of legal degrees and private acts, the land across Britain moved from a system of open field system to larger, enclosed farms. This was a transformative political, social and agricultur ...

A whole genre of movies is based on a relatively short period of nineteenth-century American history. But what is the real story behind battles between Native Americans and white settlers during westward expansion? In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, settlers flooded to ...  Show more

At its height the Iroquois Confederacy (or Haudenosaunee) - a union of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations - controlled lands from Quebec to Ohio.

Its origin story goes back to the legend of the warrior Hiawatha and the Peacemaker. In the end its ...

The Cold War, Prohibition, the Gold Rush, the Space Race. Every part of your life - the words you speak, the ideas you share - can be traced to our history, but how well do you really know the stories that made America? We'll take you to the events, the times and the pe ...  Show more