Rethinking the crusades

Mount Rushmore is one of the most iconic images in US history – but its story is far more complex and controversial than that of a simple sculpture. In this episode, historian Matthew Davis joins Elinor Evans to discuss his latest book, A Biography of a Mountain, which delves int ...  Show more

She led “a life that really, in many ways, shouldn't have been possible”. So says historian Paul Gillingham of Juana Inés de la Cruz. This 17th-century polymath and nun challenged a host of social conventions – earning, through her extraordinary books and poems, a place in the pa ...  Show more

Historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook are interrogating the past, attempting to de-tangle the present for their new podcast "The Rest Is History" They question the nature of Greatness, why the West no longer has civil wars and whether Richard Nixon was more like Caligula ...  Show more

Of all the Crusades, the Fourth Crusade was the least successful: It created a permanent divide between Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. But what exactly went wrong? Tune in and learn more in this podcast.

Much has been written about the Crusades, the religiously-inspired wars that pockmarked the later centuries of the Middle Ages. Yet for all of the many books on the subject there has been surprisingly little focus on the men and the women who were entangled in these conflicts. In ...  Show more

The first Crusade began in 1095, and launched a struggle for control of Jerusalem in a series of arduous battles spanning more than two centuries. Learn more about the origin, escalation and consequences of the Crusades in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.