Opening the iron curtain - the East Germany's day of dissent
Send us Fan Mail It’s the summer of 1953, and, across East Germany, angry people take to the streets. This isn’t a polite street protest. Th...
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Almost History
What if ... ? It is one of history's most gripping and dangerous questions. Sometimes the most interesting history is the one that didn't actually happen. Every other Thursday, Almost Histor...
Episodes
12 episodes
Operation Unthinkable - Churchill's plan to attack Russia and start a Third World War
Send us Fan Mail According to Field Marshal Montgomery, rule number one on the first page of the book of war is ‘do not march on Moscow’. In...
Louis of England - history’s forgotten King of England
Send us Fan Mail In August of 1216, the King of Scotland rode down the entire length of England to pay homage to a new English king at Dover...
Princess Mary Tudor's flight to freedom
Send us Fan Mail In the summer of 1550, Princess Mary, the eldest daughter of Henry VIII, was packing her belongings and preparing to flee h...
Cancelling Christmas and the Plum Pudding Riots
Send us Fan Mail In 1647, the new puritan government tried to cancel Christmas. People in Canterbury protested in a peculiarly English way,...
The Prince of Poyais - settling in the country that never was
Send us Fan Mail In 1822, Gregor MacGregor committed what The Economist newspaper has called the ‘biggest fraud in history’ and ‘the greates...
A wonderful paradise on the Isthmus of Panama
Send us Fan Mail Towards the end of the seventeenth century, Scotland sank a huge chunk of its national wealth into an audacious scheme to c...
Roosevelt's third term and the voice from the sewers
Send us Fan Mail In the first half of 1940 only one question mattered in American politics. Would Franklin D. Roosevelt break with tradition...
The British Hindenberg disaster and the demise of Imperial Airships
Send us Fan Mail Imperial Airships would bring the far flung peoples of the British Empire closer together than ever before. Every day, blim...
Hitler’s dreams to unify his empire with a monstrous railway
Send us Fan Mail In 1941, Adolf Hitler issued orders to Nazi Germany’s railway officials. He wanted them to develop a new type of railway. I...
Achtung! Achtung! Dystopian adventures with Nazi TV
Send us Fan Mail What if … ... Nazi Germany had been able to roll out the television equivalent of its inescapable radio network? Everywhere...
Draining the swamp - Garibaldi's plan to diver Rome's river
Send us Fan Mail In 1875, Rome came close to losing its river.In that year, the liberator of Italy, General Giuseppe Garibaldi, visited and...