History in Short

Told in eight moments

Cinematic stories from the deep past to the present, each in eight scenes and a single sitting.

Featured Story

Everest 1953 · 1921 - 1953

The roof of the world

Two men, one rope, and the last blank space on the map. How Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay walked into the thinnest air on Earth -- and came back.

Read the story →·8 scenes · 4 min read

War & Conflict

BALTIC FLEET 1905

The Men Who Sailed Halfway Round the World

Conscripts and reservists were ordered on an eighteen-thousand-kilometre voyage to a port that had already fallen. Most never came home.

8 scenes · 4 min read

NEUTRAL MORESNET

The Land Nobody Wanted

Two states could not agree who owned a zinc mine. So for 104 years, the land belonged to neither.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Last Samurai Did Not Die in a Movie

Saigo Takamori helped build Japan new army. Nine years later he led a rebellion against it, and lost.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Bird That Saved the Lost Battalion

One pigeon. Twenty-five miles. Twenty-five minutes. And a message that said: stop shooting at us.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Bomb That Missed Napoleon

On Christmas Eve 1800 a barrel of gunpowder and nails exploded in a Paris street seconds after Napoleon's carriage passed. A fourteen-year-old girl died holding the horse. Napoleon went to the opera.

8 scenes · 4 min read

One winter, in one square mile, five men walked the same streets, drank in the same coffee-houses, and rode the same trams. None of them had any idea what the others would become.

8 scenes · 4 min read

A young Black woman walked into Jefferson Davis's dining room every day for two years and memorised the papers on his desk. Then she vanished from history so completely that we are not certain of her real name.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The miracle of deliverance

An army of 400,000 men is trapped on a beach. There are nine days to save them. The rescue fleet includes fishing boats, pleasure yachts and river ferries. How Britain lost the battle and saved the war.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Hunt for Bismarck

The largest warship in the world. Nine days at sea. The Royal Navy's most famous manhunt -- and a single radio message that decided it.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Manhattan Project

A secret city in the New Mexico desert. Two years, two billion dollars, and a weapon that would change every war that came after.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Standing with Giants

The People's Tribute

What started as two missed silhouettes became Britain's largest civilian act of remembrance -- 1,475 giants on the meadow above Gold Beach.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Operation Chariot

The Greatest Raid of All

Britain's most audacious commando raid: a destroyer packed with explosives, rammed into the only Atlantic dry dock big enough for the Tirpitz.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Exploration & Science

Christiaan Huygens

The Man Who Tamed Time

On Christmas Day 1656, a Dutch astronomer hung a swinging weight inside a clock. The world's best timekeepers went from losing fifteen minutes a day to losing seconds. For almost three centuries, nothing beat it.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Shackleton and the Endurance

The Greatest Survival Story Ever Told

Twenty-eight men. One ship crushed by ice. A thousand miles from anywhere. And a leader who refused to lose a single one.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Wright Brothers

Twelve Seconds Over Kitty Hawk

Two bicycle mechanics in Ohio outbuilt every academy in Europe. Then the patent wars nearly undid them.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Discovery of Penicillin

Fleming, Florey, Chain

A contaminated petri dish in a London turret. Seventeen years, dozens of hands, and roughly 500 million lives saved.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Race to the Pole

Amundsen vs Scott

Two ships, two philosophies, two very different men. Only one team came home.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Successful Failure

An oxygen tank ruptures 320,000 km from Earth. A lunar lander built for two men on the Moon becomes a lifeboat for three, all the way home.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Engineering & Craft

The Actress Who Invented Wi-Fi

A Vienna-born film star with an arms-dealer husband sketched a way to steer torpedoes that could not be jammed. The Navy shelved it.

8 scenes · 4 min read

CHAPPE TELEGRAPH

The Internet Before Electricity

A former priest builds towers with moving arms. Paris talks to Lille in under an hour. No wire involved.

8 scenes · 4 min read

CURSUS PUBLICUS

How Rome Sent Messages Faster Than You Think

300 kilometers in a day and a night. Fresh horses every 15 kilometers. And a permit you could not fake.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Architect Who Wanted to Demolish Paris

In 1925 a Swiss architect in round black glasses looked at the heart of Paris and decided it had to go. Eighteen glass towers, one motorway, and a scandal that made him the most famous architect alive.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Eiffel Tower 1889

Three hundred metres of iron

The most famous artists in France sign a letter calling it a monstrous eyesore. The engineer builds it anyway. Two years, 300 metres, 2.5 million rivets -- and one man's bet that iron can be beautiful.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Impossible Lighthouse

Eleven miles off the Scottish coast, a reef that hid five metres below the waves. Robert Stevenson built a stone tower on it that still stands.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Great Pyramid

How a Wonder Was Built

Two decades, 2.3 million blocks, and a foreman named Merer who kept a diary. How Khufu's pyramid actually got built.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Sport & Entertainment

The grandson of a slave ran into Hitler's Olympic stadium and won four gold medals in eight days. Then he went home to a country that still made him use the service entrance.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Four men in their twenties expected fifty thousand. Half a million showed up. It rained for three days. Nothing worked. Somehow it became the defining weekend of a generation.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Shot Heard 'Round the World

Giants vs Dodgers

Down 13 and a half games in August. Tied on the last day of the season. One swing at 3:58 PM decides the pennant -- and hides a secret for fifty years.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Art & Culture

The Girl Who Painted the Subway

In a scene run by boys, a schoolgirl from Queens painted whole subway cars at night. The city then spent a decade scrubbing them away.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Rousseau Banquet

The Banquet for Rousseau

A retired toll collector who painted jungles he never saw. Critics laughed for twenty years. Then, one November night in 1908, Picasso sat him on a throne.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Katsushika Hokusai

He painted The Great Wave at seventy-one. On his deathbed at eighty-eight, he asked for five more years -- then he might become a real painter.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Vincent van Gogh

He became a painter at twenty-seven. Ten years later he was dead. In between, he made western art new.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Leonardo and Michelangelo

Two of the greatest artists who ever lived, in one city, at the same moment. Florence gave them the same hall and told them to outdo each other. Neither finished. Both left behind a legend.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The rejected artist

Rejected three times by the most prestigious art school in France. Twenty years carving ornaments under other men's names. Then, at forty, a scandal that finally made him a sculptor.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Vermeer 1675 - 1866

The forgotten painter

He died broke, leaving a widow and eleven children. His paintings were sold to pay the baker. For two hundred years the world forgot him. Then a political exile in Brussels went looking, and found the Sphinx of Delft.

8 scenes · 4 min read

Nature & Extinction

The largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. Its ash veiled the sun, and a year later, snow fell on New England in June.

8 scenes · 4 min read

The Last Mammoth

The Last Mammoth

c. 10,000 BCE - 1650 BCE

While Khufu built the Great Pyramid, mammoths still grazed on a Siberian island. Nobody knew until 1993.

8 scenes · 4 min read