Why things happened, explained clearly
In-depth stories about the past, with maps, infographics, songs and the sources behind every claim. We start in 499 BC, with the wars between Greece and Persia.
Explore 11,000 years of history
Pick a moment to see what it is about. Gold dots are ready to read; the others are coming soon.
Göbekli Tepe
Huge circular enclosures of carved T-shaped stone pillars, built by hunter-gatherers in Anatolia as farming was just beginning, thousands of years before writing.
The Great Pyramid of Giza
How Egypt’s kings organised the labour and the stone for the largest pyramid ever built as a tomb.
The laws of Hammurabi
A Babylonian king carves nearly 300 laws in stone, and what they tell us about everyday life.
The Persian Wars
The Ionian Revolt, Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea: why the Persian Empire could not conquer Greece.
Alexander the Great
In thirteen years a Macedonian king takes the Persian Empire and reaches India.
The Punic Wars
Rome against Carthage: three wars for the western Mediterranean.
The fall of the Western Roman Empire
The last emperor in the West is deposed. Why the Roman West fell and the East did not.
The rise of Islam
Muhammad’s preaching in Mecca and Medina, and how a new faith united Arabia.
Charlemagne crowned emperor
A Frankish king is crowned in Rome on Christmas Day, and Europe gets an emperor again.
The Viking Age
Raiders, traders and settlers from Scandinavia, from Lindisfarne to Normandy and beyond.
The Crusades
Why Christians from Europe marched to Jerusalem, and how the Muslim world saw them.
The Black Death
A plague kills between a third and half of Europe, and changes work, wages and faith.
The fall of Constantinople
The Ottomans take the last capital of the Roman Empire.
Columbus reaches the Americas
A voyage west to reach Asia, and what followed for the peoples of the Americas.
The Reformation
Luther’s theses and the split of Western Christianity.
The Thirty Years’ War
Religion, power and the ruin of central Europe.
The Industrial Revolution
Steam, coal and factories: why it started in Britain.
The French Revolution
From the fall of the Bastille to Napoleon: how a kingdom became a republic.
The Napoleonic Wars
Napoleon’s empire, from Austerlitz to Waterloo.
The American Civil War
Slavery, secession and the war that kept the United States together.
The First World War
How a murder in Sarajevo turned into a world war.
The Second World War
The deadliest war in history, and why it began.
The Cold War
Two superpowers, nuclear weapons and a divided world.
The fall of the Berlin Wall
The night the border opened, and the end of communist rule in Eastern Europe.
The Persian Wars
Not one war but a series of them: a revolt in Ionia, two Persian invasions of Greece, and thirty years of Greek counterattacks. Thermopylae, Marathon and Salamis all belong to this story, but to different chapters of it.
Find your way in
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Clear, sourced, from more than one perspective
Every page says where its facts come from and how close those sources were to the events: written at the time, a lifetime later, or centuries after.
Every story gets a song
Some things stick better when you can sing them. Each song tells one part of a story in about three minutes, and its facts are checked against Herodotus and the other sources, just like the chapters.
- 01Listen to the song
- 02Read the chapter it belongs to
- 03Check every line against the sources
Coming soon♪ SongHot Gates (Thermo-Pylae)
Coming soon♪ SongSeventy out of seven hundred
Coming soon♪ SongLeonidas avenged