Volume One of David Reynolds’s major BBC Radio 4 series explores the origins of contemporary USA from its beginnings to the 1860s.This epic narrative tells America’s story through the...

Edgar Award nominee! In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in...

Susanna desperately wants to join the circle of girls who meet every week at the parsonage. What she doesn't realize is that the leader of the group, the malicious Ann Putnam, is about to set off...

In 1940, while the Germans occupied Holland, fourteen-year-old Edith van Hessen was filling her diary with the intimate, carefree details of a typical teenager's life - thoughts about boys,...

The culture wars have distorted the dramatic story of how Americans came to worship freely. Many activists on the right maintain that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation." Many on...

On 25 May 1982, at a critical juncture in the Falklands War, the destroyer HMS Coventry was attacked by Argentinean aircraft. In a devastating strike, she was hit by three bombs, two of which...

It's time for us to re-examine the past. Our lives are infinitely richer if we take the time to look at what the Greeks and Romans have given us in politics and law, religion and philosophy and...

At thirty-nine, Nancy Kissel had it all: the royal lifestyle of the expatriate wife, three young children and what a friend described as "the best marriage in the universe." But it didn't last...

James Naughtie, in this major Radio 4 series, uncovers the roots of our music, revealing how composers and performers, princes, patrons and chance happenings built a classical tradition that has...

When the BBC conducted their Greatest Briton poll, Alfred the Great was the only king to make it into the top twenty. One can be sure that the story of the cakes left to burn by a disguised...

Professor Amanda Vickery is one of the most charismatic historians in Britain today. In 'A History of Private Life' she reveals the intimate secrets of life at home, from the Tudor mansion to the...

The name Borgia is synonymous with the corruption, nepotism, and greed that were rife in Renaissance Italy. The powerful, voracious Rodrigo Borgia, better known to history as Pope Alexander VI,...

Presented by award-winning children's writer Michael Morpurgo, this genuinely ground-breaking history of British childhood from the year 1000 to the present explores, through a wide and colourful...

Ever since the guns fell silent in July 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg has emerged as the defining conflict in our nation's history. American memory has established Gettysburg as the most...

This is perhaps one of the best-loved of all journals. William Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, began it in May 1800 and resolved to keep it for a short time. She continued it for nearly three...