Eras and collections
Every era of history, five minutes at a time.
From Rome to World War II and beyond. Each era is a run of short, narrated stories where you take the seat of the people who lived it, make their calls, then see what really happened.
How Rome's Republic talked, rioted and marched itself into a dictatorship.
How raiders from the sea became conquerors, settlers and kings, from the first raid on a holy island to the last great Viking invasion of England.
Four hundred years of English kings finding out, one hard lesson at a time, that a crown does not come with obedience.
From Morgan, the licensed raider England knighted, through the pirate hunter it hanged, to the pirate republic of Nassau, the King's pardon that broke it, and the navy that ended the age at Cape Lopez.
Ninety years in which Athens goes from a single city with no friends on a beach to the master of the Aegean, and then throws it all away.
Fourteen hundred years of Egypt's rulers finding out what a god-king can and cannot get away with.
Fifty years in which Italy produced its greatest art and its most famous book about power, while popes, bankers and hired captains stabbed, burned and robbed each other.
Three centuries of people deciding, in a hurry and in the dark, who to protect when a disaster nobody understands arrives.
Four years in which the war turns on people at desks and tables as much as on battlefields.
One family conquers most of the known world in two generations.
Three men finish a century of civil war.
One hundred years in which the western Roman Empire is not so much conquered as talked, bribed and murdered out of existence.
Two orders of believers who would die on command, founded a generation apart, one in the mountains of Iran and one in the palace by the Temple in Jerusalem.
A quarrel over two churches in Bohemia turns into a thirty-year war for all of Europe.
A beaten kingdom on the northern edge of Greece becomes, in one man's lifetime and then his son's, the master of everything from Greece to India.
Sixty years in which one family's marriage problems turn into a national religion, a string of rebellions and, in the end, a war with the greatest power in Europe.
The strangest things people really did. A pope's corpse put on trial by his successor, Vlad the Impaler's night attack on a sultan's camp, a witch-finder paid by the town, a woman who convinced doctors she had given birth to rabbits, the killers who sold bodies to Edinburgh's anatomy school, and a New England family that dug up their daughter to stop a vampire.