BBC Documentary - Genghis Khan - Rise Of Mongol Empire
He was a man who combined the savagery of a real-life Conan the Barbarian with the sheer tactical genius of Napoleon, a man from the outermost reaches of Asia whose armies ultimately stood poised to conquer Europe. His name was Genghis Khan.
Today the name of Genghis Khan is synonymous with dark evil yet in his lifetime he was a heroic figure, a supreme strategist capable of eliciting total devotion from his warriors.
He grew up in poverty on the harsh unforgiving steppe of Mongolia. From the murder of his father, the kidnap of his wife and the execution of his closest friend, he learned the lessons of life the hard way.
So how did this outcast come to conquer an empire larger than the Roman Empire? And was Genghis Khan the brutal monster who ruthlessly slaughtered millions in his quest for power, or was he a brilliant visionary who transformed a rabble of warring tribes into a nation capable of world domination?
Filmed entirely on location in Mongolia, the film tells the truth behind the legend that is Genghis Khan.
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Author and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore presents a three-part series illuminating the history of the sacred and peerlessly beautiful city of Jerusalem:
Ep1 -Wellspring of Holiness
Ep2 - Invasion, Invasion, Invasion
Ep3 - Judgement Day
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BBC - Caligula with Mary Beard - Worksheet to support the Documentary
Professor Mary Beard explores the life of Caligula. Many extraordinary stories surround the Roman emperor, but are they true? Mary attempts to peel away some of the myths.
Two thousand years ago one of history’s most notorious individuals was born. Professor Mary Beard embarks on an investigative journey to explore the life and times of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus - better known to us as Caligula.
Caligula has now become known as Rome’s most capricious tyrant, and the stories told about him are some of the most extraordinary told about any Roman emperor. He was said to have made his horse a consul, proclaimed himself a living God, and indulged in scandalous orgies - even with his own three sisters - and that’s before you mention building vast bridges across land and sea, prostituting senators’ wives and killing half the Roman elite seemingly on a whim. All that in just four short years in power before a violent and speedy assassination in a back alley of his own palace at just 29 years old.
But how much of his story is true? Travelling across the Roman world - from Germany and Capri in the bay of Naples to the astonishing luxury of his life in imperial Rome - Mary attempts to peel away the myths. Some stories are difficult to get to the bottom of as they were written by hacks long after his death, but there is plenty of surviving evidence where the ‘real’ Caligula can be glimpsed. Such as in the extraordinary luxury of his private yachts outside Rome; in the designs he chose for his coins when he became emperor; in an eye-witness account of Caligula’s withering humour written in 41AD; in the trial documents covering the mysterious death of his father when he was just seven; and even in a record of his imperial slaves - from the palace spy to his personal trainer.
Piecing together the evidence, Mary puts Caligula back into the context of his times to reveal an astonishing story of murder, intrigue and dynastic family power. Above all, she explains why Caligula has ended up with such a seemingly unredeemable reputation. In the process, she reveals a more intriguing portrait of not just the monster, but the man.
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BBC Jerusalem: The Making of a Holy City—Ep3—Judgement Day
Jerusalem is one of the oldest cities in the world. For the Jewish faith, it is the site of the western wall, the last remnant of the second Jewish temple. For Christians, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the site of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For Muslims, the Al-Aqsa mosque is the third holiest sanctuary of Islam.
In episode three, Simon explores how this unique city rose from a crumbling ruin after the crusades to be rebuilt as a world centre of Islamic pilgrimage. He explains how Jerusalem became the object of rivalry between the Christian nations of Europe, the focus of the longing of Jews from all over the world and, ultimately, the site of one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.
Starting in the Middle Ages, Simon goes on a chronological journey to trace the revival of the city under the Mamluks and its conquest by the biggest of all the Islamic empires - the Ottomans. He examines how the distinctive national identity of the Arab population evolved under centuries of Turkish Ottoman rule and how the city came to be prized by the great powers of 19th-century Europe. The programme explores the emergence of Zionism and the growing Jewish population of the city and traces the origins of today’s nationalist struggle.
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BBC - Planet Oil - Ep1 - The Treasure that Conquered the World - Worksheet to support the BBC Doc
From the moment we first drilled for oil, we opened a Pandora’s box that changed the world forever. It transformed the way we lived our lives, spawned foreign wars and turned a simple natural resource into the most powerful political weapon the world has ever known. But when exactly did geology turn into such a high-stakes game?
In this series, Professor Iain Stewart visits the places that gave birth to the earth’s oil riches, discovers the people who fought over its control and supply, and explores how our insatiable thirst for oil is changing the very planet on which we depend.
It’s a journey that will help us answer a fundamental question - how did we become so addicted to oil in little more than one human lifetime?
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ABC - The Century Americas Time 1929 1936 - Ep4 - Stormy Weather
America – a nation that claimed ever-increasing wealth as a birthright – was rudely awakened by the Great Depression, which caused 25 percent unemployment, the closing of 9,000 banks, and the loss of $2.5 billion in deposits. This program captures a people’s struggle as they faced the collapse of prosperity and diminished hope of being able to experience the American Dream.
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BBC -British History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley - The Glorious Revolution
In this episode, Lucy debunks another of the biggest fibs in British history - the ‘Glorious Revolution’.In 1688, the British Isles were invaded by a huge army led by Dutch prince, William of Orange. With his English wife Mary he stole the throne from Mary’s father, the Catholic King James II. This was the death knell for absolute royal power and laid the foundations of our constitutional monarchy. It was spun as a ‘glorious and bloodless revolution’. But how ‘glorious’ was it really? It led to huge slaughter in Ireland and Scotland. Lucy reveals how the facts and fictions surrounding 1688 have shaped our national story ever since.
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By the early 1950s, a holy trinity of oil, plastics and fertilisers had transformed the planet. But as Professor Iain Stewart reveals, when the oil-producing countries demanded a greater share in profits from the western energy companies, the oil and gas fields of the Middle East became a focus for coup d’etats and military conflict.
In the North Sea, Prof Stewart recalls the race against time to find alternative supplies in the shallow, but turbulent waters both here and in America’s Gulf coast.
The offshore discoveries in the 1970s proved to be a game changer. It marked an engineering revolution, the moment when ‘difficult’ oil and gas (previously unviable sources) could be commercially produced from the ocean depths. It was the moment when Western Europe and the US finally unshackled themselves from their 20th-century energy security nightmare.
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As we entered the 21st century, the world was guzzling oil, coal and gas like never before. Despite fears of ‘peak oil’, Professor Iain Stewart discovers that while huge technological advances are helping extend the life of existing oilfields, new unconventional oil and gas supplies like shale gas and tar sands are extending the hydrocarbon age well into the 21st century.
Given there’s plenty of fossil fuels still in the ground, the spectre of climate change has forced many to ask can we really afford to burn what’s left? In this concluding episode, Iain Stewart argues we face a stark choice.
Do we continue feed our addiction - suck Planet Oil dry - and risk catastrophic climate change, or do we go hell for leather for alternative energy sources, such as nuclear and renewables, to make the transition from our fossil fuel past to a low-carbon future. In which case, how do we make that shift?
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Ep1 -Iain Stewart visits places that gave birth to the earth’s oil riches, discovers the people who fought over its control and explores how the need for oil is changing the planet.
Ep2 -By the early 1950s, a holy trinity of oil, plastics and fertilisers had transformed the planet. But as Professor Iain Stewart reveals, when the oil-producing countries demanded a greater share in profits from the western energy companies, the oil and gas fields of the Middle East became a focus for coup d’etats and military conflict.
Ep3 - Professor Iain Stewart examines the situation in the 21st century, at which point the global consumption of oil, coal and gas is at an all-time high.
Professor Iain Stewart uncovers clues hidden within the New York skyline, the anatomy of American alligators and inside Bolivian silver mines, to reconstruct how North and South America were created. We call these two continents the New World, and in a geological sense they are indeed new worlds, torn from the heart of an ancient supercontinent - the Old World of Pangaea.
Iain starts in New York, where the layout of the city’s skyscrapers provide a link to a long-lost world. Deep within their foundations is evidence that 300 million years ago New York was at the heart of a huge mountain range - part of the vast supercontinent called Pangaea.
Trekking into the Grand Canyon, Iain uncovers a layer of sandstone from Pangaean times that shows there was a vast desert either side of the mountains. Footprints in the rocks of the Grand Canyon reveal that there was only one type of animal that could thrive here - a newly evolved group called the reptiles. Iain meets the closest living relative of those early reptiles - the alligator.
Two hundred million years ago, Pangea underwent a transformation. North and South America were carved from Pangaea, and pushed westwards as separate island continents. To see how this westward movement shaped South America’s often bloody human history, Iain travels to Potosi in Bolivia. Cerro Rico is one of the most dangerous mines in human history. Iain goes to the heart of this extinct volcano to reveal the process that has shaped South America - subduction.
Subduction has also created the longest continual mountain range in the world - the Andes. At its heart lies the stunning ethereal landscape of the Salar de Uyuni, a vast salt flat where a lake has been uplifted thousands of metres above sea level. The lithium found here may be a new source of mineral wealth for Bolivia, for use in mobile phones.
The last chapter in the story of the Americas is told through that most typically Andean animal, the llama. But like much of South America’s wildlife it originated in North America, and only came south when the two island continents of North and South America joined three million years ago.
Since that momentous joining the story of the Americas has been a shared one. Together they continue their westward drift away from the Old World. However, on a cultural and economic level you could argue that the opposite is the case. In our new global economy the Americas are at the very heart of our connected world.
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Dr Suzannah Lipscomb journeys back to Tudor times, when the newly emergent middle classes had money for luxuries and early consumer goods, many of which contained hidden dangers.
Dr Lipscomb takes us back to Tudor times in search of the household killers of the era.
It was a great age of exploration and science where adventurers returned from the New World with exotic goods previously unknown in Europe. An era in which the newly emergent middle classes had, for the first time, money for luxuries and early consumer goods, many of which contained hidden dangers.
The period also saw a radical evolution in the very idea of ‘home’. For the likes of Tudor merchants, their houses became multi-room structures instead of the single-room habitations that had been the norm (aristocracy excepted). This forced the homebuilders of the day to engineer radical new design solutions and technologies, some of which were lethal.
Suzannah discovers that in Tudor houses the threat of a grisly, unpleasant death was never far away in a world (and a home) still mired in the grime and filth of the medieval period - and she shows how we still live with the legacy of some of these killers today
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The Civil War rages. The minie ball is the great equalizer on the battlefield. The formidable Confederate army cannot match the Union’s mastery of technology; railroads, supply lines and the telegram become new weapons in a modern war.
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On its hundredth anniversary, Horrible Histories takes a look at the Russian Revolution. Tsar Nicholas II gives us tips for survival in Russia’s extreme climate (clue: a massive amount of wealth helps), and we reveal that Lenin’s European Communism lecture tour took in a trip to London Zoo. Lenin also gives us beauty advice on how to look good even after death! Meanwhile, Dave TDS finds out just how hard it is to invade Russia, and we listen to Uncle Joe Stalin’s Nursery Rhymes and find out that, at one point, he also decided that the key to world domination might, in fact, lie in poo.
‘The Russian Revolution, a roller-coaster ride of an event that changed the world forever, featuring unpopular emperors, mad monks and wild revolutionaries, and it all happened in a huge country that had been ruled by the same Royal Family, the Romanovs, for 300 years’
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Julius Caesar is the most famous Roman of them all: brutal conqueror, dictator and victim of a gruesome assassination on the Ides of March 44 BC. 2,000 years on, he still shapes the world. He has given us some political slogans we still use today (Crossing the Rubicon), his name lives on in the month of July, and there is nothing new about Vladmir Putin’s carefully cultivated military image, and no real novelty in Donald Trump’s tweets and slogans.
Mary Beard is on a mission to uncover the real Caesar, and to challenge public perception. She seeks the answers to some big questions. How did he become a one-man ruler of Rome? How did he use spin and PR on his way to the top? Why was he killed? And she asks some equally intriguing little questions. How did he conceal his bald patch? Did he really die, as William Shakespeare put it, with the words Et tu, Brute on his lips? Above all, Mary explores his surprising legacy right up to the present day. Like it or not, Caesar is still present in our everyday lives, our language, and our politics. Many dictators since, not to mention some other less autocratic leaders, have learned the tricks of their trade from Julius Caesar.
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Two hundred million years ago the continent we know as Eurasia - the vast swathe of land that extends from Europe in the west to Asia in the east - didn’t exist.
To reveal Eurasia’s origins, Professor Iain Stewart climbs up to the ‘eternal flames’ of Mount Chimera in southern Turkey, blazing natural gas that seeps out of the rock. Formed on the seafloor, it shows that where the south of Eurasia is today, there was once a 90-million-square-kilometre ocean known as the Tethys. It is the destruction of the Tethys Ocean that holds the key to Eurasia’s formation.
In the backwaters of Kerala in southern India, he finds evidence of how that happened, in the most unlikely of places: the bones of the local fishermen’s catch. The freshwater fish called karimeen shares anatomical features with another group of fish that live in Madagascar, evidence that India and Madagascar were joined. India was once 4,000 kilometres south of its current position on the other side of the Tethys.
As it moved north, the ocean in front of it closed. And as it collided with the rest of Eurasia the impact built the Himalayas, the greatest mountain range on Earth. Professor Stewart reveals how the mountains aren’t simply pieces of the land pushed upwards. In fact the rock that forms them was once the floor of the Tethys Ocean.
As Eurasia assembled, Arabia, Greece and Italy too moved north, completing the continent we know today and creating a mountain chain that spans the continent. And it was in the shadow of these mountains that the continent’s first civilisations rose.
But the formation of Eurasia is just the beginning, because the process that formed it is still active today. On the island of Stromboli, Italy’s most continually active volcano, the spectacular eruptions show that the ocean floor is being pulled beneath Eurasia. It is this process that closed the Tethys, and today is closing the Mediterranean, revealing Eurasia’s future. 250 million years in the future all of the continents will collide together once more, forming a new Pangea, with Eurasia at its heart.
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BBC Lucy Worsley Episode 1 The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain
Dr Lucy Worsley’s series begins in 1714 when, to prevent the crown falling into the hands of a Catholic, Britain shipped in a ready-made royal family from Hanover.
In 1714, to prevent the crown falling into the hands of a Catholic, Britain shipped in a ready-made royal family from the small German state of Hanover. To understand this risky experiment, presenter Dr Lucy Worsley has been given access to treasures from the Royal Collection as they are prepared for a new exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace - providing a rare and personal insight into George I and his feuding dynasty.
The Hanoverians arrived at a moment when Britain was changing fast. Satirists were free to mock the powerful, including the new royals. The Hanoverians themselves were busy early adopters of Neo-Palladian architecture, defining the whole look of the Georgian era. When the French philosopher Voltaire visited, he found a ‘land of liberty’ unlike anything in Europe - Britain was embracing freedom of speech and modern cabinet government.
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BBC Lucy Worsley Episode 3 The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain
Dr Lucy Worsley’s story of the first Georgian kings reaches the final years of George II’s reign. With extensive access to artworks in the Royal Collection, she shows how Britain’s new ruling family fought the French, the Jacobites and each other, all at the same time. But while George very publicly bickered with his troublesome son Frederick, Prince of Wales, he also led from the front on the battlefield - the last British king to do so - and helped turn his adopted nation into a global superpower.
What would have seemed an unlikely outcome when the Georges first arrived from Hanover was achieved on the back of a strong navy, a dubious slave trade and a powerful new entrepreneurial spirit that owed much to the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment.
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BBC - Kolkata with Sue Perkins - Worksheet to support the BBC Documentary
Sue Perkins immerses herself in the complex life of Kolkata. She sees first-hand how it has evolved from a place notorious for its fabled ‘Black Hole’ dungeon and the dreadful poverty of its street people to a place reinventing itself as a vibrant new megacity, with a booming property sector and a reputation for eccentricity, culture and tolerance.
In this intricate human habitat, Sue explores the lives of its people, from the 250,000 homeless street kids hustling for a living to the wealthy young entrepreneurs who race their Ferraris and Lamborghinis down the streets of the New Town.
She joins the rickshaw wallahs navigating the chaotic city streets and narrow lanes, thronged with people, and descends into Kolkata’s Victorian sewers as part of an epic clean-up. She limbers up with the ladies of the Laughing Club and makes an offering to the goddess in the sacred Kalighat Temple.
No other city tells the remarkable story of India more clearly than the beautiful, crazy, colourful city of Kolkata. Through encounters with people from every strata of society, from the richest to the poorest, Sue paints a picture of contemporary India emerging from a brutal colonial past to take its place among the most powerful nations on earth.
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