The Rest Is History

Mar 12 2025 569 ep. 54 mins 48.3k
The Rest Is History Podcast artwork

The world’s most popular history podcast, with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.

Join The Rest Is History Club (www.therestishistory.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community.

Here are some of our favourite episodes to get you started:

• WATERGATE/NIXON apple.co/3JrVl5h
• ALEXANDER THE GREAT apple.co/3Q4FaNk
• HARDCORE HISTORY'S DAN CARLIN apple.co/3vqkGa3
• PUTIN & RUSSIA apple.co/3zMtLfX

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The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)

Mar 12 2025 63 mins  
The second revolution that engulfed France over the course of 1792 reached its climax in December, with an astonishing, world-changing spectacle, which held all the eyes of Europe spellbound: Louis Capet, formerly King Louis XVI of France, was on trial for his very life. A guilty verdict would undermine millennia of thought and tradition, ripping apart the longheld inviolability of

546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)

Mar 09 2025 62 mins  
“From this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world’s history, and you can all say you were present at its birth!” By September 1792, the Prussians, under the leadership of the formidable Duke of Brunswick, were closing in on revolutionary Paris. There, the streets roiled with the clanging of church bells, thousands of volunteers, patriotic songs and sl

545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)

Mar 05 2025 61 mins  
In the summer and Autumn of 1792 - with the Prussians bearing down on Paris, the streets thronged with the stirring swell of the Marseillaise, but also the rotting bodies of those brutally killed during the September Massacres - the French Revolution bore a new symbol of optimism and hope: Liberty. Embodied by a female figure, later known as Marianne, and famously enshrined in Eug�

544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)

Mar 02 2025 62 mins  
‘Still more traitors, still more treason…" It is 1792 and France has been at war since April; it is not going well. In Paris, the Tuileries Palace has been stormed, and the royal family imprisoned. Meanwhile, tensions are rising between the main political factions of the Revolution, the Girondins and the Montagnard, led by the icy Maximilien Robespierre. The streets of Paris t

543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Feb 26 2025 69 mins  
“Anyone who even thinks of abandoning this mission will be cut up into a thousand pieces…I am the wrath of God!” At the height of the age of exploration, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one story in particular gripped the imagination of European colonialists: El Dorado, a legendary city of gold, hidden in the very heart of the South American Rainforests. But no

542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe

Feb 23 2025 65 mins  
In Tudor England, during the reign of Elizabeth I, there lived in the very heart of her court a magician, alchemist and polymath, bent upon conversing with the angels of heaven and other supernatural beings. His name was John Dee, and he would prove to.be one of the most remarkable men of his age, living long enough to witness both the dying days of the reign of Henry VIII, and the

541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo

Feb 19 2025 76 mins  
“The horror! The horror!” Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ - the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's ‘Apocalypse Now’ - is one of the most celebrated literary works of all time, though now increasingly contentious. Based on Conrad’s own terrible journey into the Congo in 1890, and the horrors he beheld there while it was under the sway of King Leopold of Belg

540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)

Feb 16 2025 66 mins  
Exposing the dark pit of human suffering, cruelty and corruption that had long been secretly festering in King Leopold’s Congo, would reveal one of the greatest abuses of human rights in all history, and instigate a human rights campaign that would change the world. Having established it as what was essentially his own private colonial fiefdom in 1885, Leopold had grown rich off

539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)

Feb 12 2025 60 mins  
“A secret society of murderers with a king for a ringleader”. In 1885 King Leopold of Belgium; an awkward, ruthless, selfish man, was recognised as the sovereign of the Congo. Long determined to carve out his very own private colonial domain, he had alighted upon the Congo - Africa’s vast and unplundered interior. With the help of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who had f

538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)

Feb 09 2025 65 mins  
The story of King Leopold of Belgium’s brutal regime in the Congo Free State, during the late 19th century, is one of the darkest and most important in global history. It is a story of horror - the murky depths of the human soul pushed to its primal limits, European colonialism and the first Scramble for Africa, royalty and politics, celebrity, and modernity. From that pit of dep