Video documentaries about history of the world
The voyage of the Mayflower in 1620 has come to define the founding moment of America, celebrated each year at Thanksgiving. A lavish new drama documentary by Ric Burns, based on governor William Bradford’s extraordinary eye-witness account, the Mayflower Pilgrims reveals the grim truth behind their voyage across the Atlantic. The Pilgrims story has come to define the […]
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Documentary examining Stalin’s Gulag. Between the October Revolution and Stalin’s death in 1953, millions of people died in the camps. The film explores the Gulag legacy, hearing from victims and perpetrators of the system. The Gulag part 1 The Gulag was the government agency in charge of the Soviet forced labor camp system that was created under Vladimir
With performances from Peter Capaldi, this documentary marks the 500th anniversary of Machiavelli’s notorious book The Prince. Famous for lines like ‘It is better to be feared than loved’, The Prince has been a manual for tyrants from Napoleon to Stalin. But how relevant is The Prince today, and who are the 21st century Machiavellians? Alan Yentob talks
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A Scottish Soldier: A Lost Diary of WWI: thousands of black soldiers fought in the First World War. Poet Jackie Kay tells the story of one of them – Arthur Roberts. Arthur grew up in Glasgow and joined the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in 1917. He fought at Ypres and kept a detailed diary, which gives us a unique account
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Last Emperor of Mexico: In Austria, he was known as an art collector and idealist. In Mexico, he was a colonialist aggressor responsible for thousands of deaths. And in France, he lost an empire. But who was the real Archduke Maximilian? Join us as we examine the brief and contentious reign of the last emperor of Mexico, a
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On April 26,1986 at 1:24am, a rainbow-colored flame shot 1,000 meters high into the Ukrainian sky. The fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant had just exploded. The battle of Chernobyl had begun. For eight months, 800,000 young soldiers, miners and even civilians from all corners of the Soviet Union worked to try and “liquidate” the radioactivity, build a
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Horror in the East: two-part documentary on Japan at war, examining the Japanese treatment of Allied prisoners of war. Horror in the East – Turning Against the West Using Japanese archive footage and interviews with both prisoners and their guards, this film investigates why, having treated their POW’s comparatively well during World War I, their attitudes had altered
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Docudrama about events at Dunkirk in 1940. The Allies are in retreat, but the Navy can only pick up a few soldiers and Churchill is advised to make peace to save the rest. Dunkirk used archive film footage, eyewitness accounts and original dramatised sequences to describe the events of the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation. Dunkirk Part 1 – Retreat
In 1834 Britain abolished slavery, a defining and celebrated moment in our national history. What has been largely forgotten is that abolition came at a price. The government of the day took the extraordinary step of compensating the slave owners for loss of their ‘property’, as Britain’s slave owners were paid 17bn GBP in today’s money, whilst the slaves received
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Great War Horses: the horses that provided the backbone of the Australian Light Horse regiments in World War I were popularly known as Walers. Bred for Australia’s tough Outback conditions, Walers were well-equipped for the harsh climate and terrain of the Middle East, where the ANZAC forces faced the armies of the Ottoman Empire. Great War Horses is
The Vietnam War episode 10 – The Weight of Memory In The Vietnam War episode 10: while the Watergate scandal rivets Americans’ attention and forces President Nixon to resign, the Vietnamese continue to savage one another in a brutal civil war. When hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese troops pour into the south, Saigon descends rapidly into chaos and collapses. For
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The Vietnam War episode 9 –Â A Disrespectful Loyalty In The Vietnam War episode 9, South Vietnamese forces fighting on their own in Laos suffer a terrible defeat. Massive U.S. airpower makes the difference in halting an unprecedented North Vietnamese offensive. After being re-elected in a landslide, Nixon announces Hanoi has agreed to a peace deal. American prisoners of war will
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