Hourly History

Explore the life of one of the medieval world’s most memorable figures. Eleanor of Aquitaine became the queen of both France and England, the wife of two kings, and later the mother of two kings.

The Sumerians settled in the area known as Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, around 5,000 years ago. They produced many fundamental changes to the way in which human societies developed - these were the first city-builders and the first people to use wheeled vehicles....

Isaac Newton seemed to be a most unwanted child of the world. Ignored by his mother, scorned by contemporaries, seemingly at war with the world in which he lived, Newton turned his energies to things unseen. His laws of motion and law of universal gravitation would set the stage for a most extraordinary life....

In August 1856, mine workers were excavating the Feldhofer Grotto in the western part of Germany. The cave was one of many in a narrow gorge cut by the Düssel River through limestone outcrops. Here, workers discovered what they believed were human bones.

Violent confrontation between armed groups over the supply of illegal narcotics is something we commonly associate with criminal gangs in modern cities, but in the mid-nineteenth century Great Britain went to war with Imperial China....

Discover the remarkable history of the Navajo...

Founded at the dawn of the 17th century as European nations were establishing global empires, the English East India Company would become a vital part of burgeoning British supremacy....

Discover the remarkable history of the Falklands War...The Falklands War, which erupted in 1982, was a conflict between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Argentina over sovereignty of the Falklands, a group of largely uninhabited islands in the South Atlantic....

King George VI was the spare - the second son of King George V and Mary, and never expected to sit on the throne....

Creativity is in our bones. It is found in our very DNA, something not known to Leonardo da Vinci or anyone else who lived in his day and time. All he did was to uncover the hidden genius which lay within himself....

Discover the remarkable history of the Inca Empire...In the space of less than one hundred years, the Inca people expanded from being a small kingdom in the highlands of Peru to becoming one of the largest and most powerful empires in the Americas....

The period from 1870 to 1900 in the US has become known as the Gilded Age, during which America was transformed almost beyond recognition....

Discover the remarkable life of John Belushi... John Belushi lived his life on his own terms. He didn't answer to anyone, and he didn't hold back for an instant.

Franklin Pierce was president of the United States during one of the most pivotal periods in American history. He was the 14th president, and during his tenure leading the nation, he had to deal with multiple points of upheaval.

During the bitter winter of 1692/93, a group of young Puritan women in the colonial town of Salem, Massachusetts, accused more than 200 of their neighbors and fellow townspeople of using witchcraft to injure and torment them....

Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad became famous for his popularization of an Afrocentric branch of Islam. In later years, however, the movement came under fire after critics pointed out that its ideology had very little to do with the mainstream faith....

Over a period of more than 10 years, following the overthrow of the government in 1910, Mexico experienced a period of intense and bloody warfare as a bewildering array of factions in ever-changing alliances took power and then lost it....

Abraham Lincoln's determination to hold the North and South together would ultimately lead to the bloodiest war in American history, the abolition of slavery, and his own untimely death from an assassin’s bullet....

The Akkadian Empire was one of the first empires in human history and certainly the first to involve the central government of a large, multi-ethnic populace. It also introduced things like the very first postal system and facilitated advances in science, art, and medicine....

Wernher von Braun was a rare and complex figure. He went on to become one of the most prominent figures not just in one country but in two.