Hourly History

From his humble beginnings as a farmhand working on tribal Iraqi land to becoming the president of Iraq for more than two decades, Saddam Hussein’s life story is nothing short of extraordinary. Hussein is one of the key figures of the late 20th and early 21st century....

For many, she was simply the last of King Henry VIII’s many wives, but Catherine Parr was much more than that. She had a unique and incredible history all of her own.

The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 in the French colony of Saint Domingue, when a group of slaves rebelled in order to secure their freedom and the end of slavery....

Buddy Holly, born in Lubbock, Texas, was the unassuming yet powerful voice of a generation, singing songs that would become standards of the emerging rock and roll genre in America. From his teenage years, Holly rode high on both his love for music and the pure enthusiasm of his fans....

Explore the triumph and terror that existed in France during the French Revolution. Review the causes and the lasting effects brought about during this tumultuous time period when the common people of France struggled to remake their world upon the cornerstone of liberty....

The American Revolution not only changed the continent of North America, but the ideas it represented would go on to change the world.

Peaky Blinders is a popular BBC television series about an organized crime family in post-World War I Birmingham, England, but does this series depict the factual history of Birmingham? As it turns out, there were Peaky Blinders in Birmingham....

Discover the remarkable life of Virginia Woolf.... Virginia Woolf ranks among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Embracing the Post-Impressionist times in which she lived, her novels reflect the artistic shift from romanticism to abstract....

Kosovo is a tiny land-locked nation located in the heart of the Balkan Peninsula in Eastern Europe. Before the 1990s, few people outside the immediate area had ever even heard of Kosovo. Then, in 1998, war began, and Kosovo moved to the center of the international stage.

When the establishment of the State of Israel was announced on May 14, 1948, it seemed to many people that the new nation could not survive for long.

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 politics and recent history of the Middle East can seem baffling to outsiders. Nowhere was that more evident than during the Lebanon War that raged in 1982. Even contemporary reporting often made fundamental mistakes, and there was little general understanding of what was happening and why.

The Wars of Scottish Independence were a series of conflicts between Scotland and England that spanned more than 60 years during the 13th and 14th centuries. These wars led directly to the establishment of Scotland as an independent, sovereign country....

From his days as a carefree medical student roving the South American countryside to his tenure as the most preeminent revolutionary in the world, the true story of Che Guevara is finally uncovered....

The Russian Revolution in 1917 was a moment in time when the will of the people put an end to a system of government that had been in place for centuries....

In 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led a US Army expedition into the Black Hills of South Dakota, which was at that time under the control of the Lakota people. To the expedition members, this was unknown territory on the leading edge of the American frontier.

If any of the great composers have a staying power that defies genre and time period, Frédéric Chopin was most certainly one of them....

Sean Connery is still well remembered for his role in the epic James Bond series. Although we often picture him as a smooth, daring, and debonair agent, surviving all manner of incredible stunts, Sean Connery was more than just James Bond....

From its beginnings as a loosely definable group of philosophical ideas to the culmination of its revolutionary effect on public life in Europe, the Age of Enlightenment is the defining intellectual and cultural movement of the modern world....

The deciding battle of the War of 1812, the Battle of New Orleans, was won by the Americans on January 8, 1815, a few scant weeks after the British and American negotiators signed the Treaty of Ghent that ended the war, at least on paper....