The History Network

In the nurseries of northern England, mothers would hush their crying children with a simple rhyme: "Hush ye, hush ye, little pet ye, the Black Douglas will not get ye." But this was no fairy tale monster - this was a real man, a Scottish knight whose name became a legend of terror across the known world. Dur: 14mins File: .mp3

The Persian King who invaded Greece in 480 BC is remembered for his defeat at the Battle of Salamis, but he was much more than that.
Xerxes was the king of the Persian Empire from 486 until 465 BC. He is remembered in Western scholarship for his defeat by combined Greek forces during his invasion of Greece in 480 and 479 BC. A quick look at his twenty-year reign, however, tells us that his rule must have amounted to more than that. Unfortunately, the best surviving source for him remains Herodotus, the Greek historian from Halicarnassus, who wrote the history of the Persian Wars (from the Greek perspective). Xerxes is, therefore, the villain of the story, full of hubris (because of his eventual defeat) and reduced almost to a caricature of a bad ruler.
This episode was written by Murray Dahm.
Murray is an ancient and medieval military historian from New Zealand, living in Australia. He has written more than 100 articles on various aspects of ancient and medieval military history and other historical topics from all periods. He is the author of Macedonian Phalangite vs Persian Warrior, Athenian Hoplite vs Spartan Hoplite and Leuctra 371 BC, all from Osprey Publishing. He is a regular on the Ancient Warfare Podcast.

One of the first things to note about our surviving sources for the battle of Agincourt (or Azincourt), fought on October 25th, 1415, is just how many of them there are. In a way, this is unsurprising since it was (and is) one of the most celebrated (and unexpected) victories in English history. And yet, does this plethora of sources actually allow us to get any close to what actually happened at the battle? As historians, we are blessed with a multitude of accounts from differing perspectives on the battle – from eyewitnesses on both sides, writers who were close to the participants of the battle, all the way through to later chroniclers and analysts. Dur: 26mins File: .mp3

In the Second World War, the Rock of Gibraltar stood like a sentinel at the gateway to the Mediterranean. Whoever held it could open or close the sea lanes to North Africa and beyond. To Britain it was a vital stronghold, but by 1940 it looked vulnerable. Spain was under Franco's rule, sympathetic to Berlin, and German planners drew up schemes to seize the fortress in one swift move. It was in this climate that a plan was conceived that bordered on the unimaginable. A small group of men would vanish from the surface of the Rock and take up residence in a chamber hollowed out within its limestone core. They would not leave again until the war ended. Dur: 29mins File: .mp3

The Peloponnesian War pitted the two most powerful Ancient Greek states, Athens and Sparta and their respective allies, against each other in an epic struggle for the control of all of Greece. Dur: 22mins File: .mp3