Welcome to Great Battles in History. This podcast explores some of the most famous and most important battles in world history from ancient times to the Second ...
Send us a textThe Battle of Nagashino is one of the most famous battles in Japanese history. It was the climax of the Sengoku Jidai, the Age of Warring States, a century-long period of civil wars and social upheaval. It represented the culmination of a revolution that had transformed Japanese warfare. And it punctures many myths of the samurai, the warrior-heroes of Japan.This episode also ends a long hiatus for Great Battles in History. For the past couple of years, I've been working on a book. Researching and writing it took up all the time I would have devoted to this podcast. With the book now done, I'm planning to return to a more regular release schedule.If you enjoy this podcast and would like to support it, please consider buying my book. It's called 1709: The Twilight of the Sun King. In 1709, France faced the coldest winter of the past five centuries, famine, financial collapse, and foreign invasion. The Twilight of the Sun King is an expertly researched, engagingly written narrative history of how France survived one of its greatest crises. It explains how Louis XIV, the aging Sun King, and his state passed their greatest test. It presents a total history of an early modern campaign, one that integrates finances, logistics, and diplomacy with military operations. It culminates with an account of Malplaquet, the largest and bloodiest battle of the eighteenth century in Europe. 1709 offers new insights on the development of the French absolute monarchy and the nature of early modern European warfare.Here's a link to my publisher, Rowman and Littlefield and a link to everyone's favourite online bookseller.You can also order it from your local bookstore.Â
-------- Â
4:24:02
Trailer-The Battle of Nagashino
Send us a textTrailer for Episode Six, the Battle of Nagashio, coming soon.
-------- Â
1:57
Lepanto-The Complete Episode
Send us a textOn October 7, 1571, the fleets of the Christian Holy League and the Ottoman Empire clashed near Lepanto off the west coast of Greece. Lepanto was the largest battle on land or sea in Europe in the sixteenth century. During it, over 130,000 combatants had crewed some 500 oared warships. At the battle’s end, at least 35,000 Ottomans and 8,000 Christians had lost their lives. Lepanto was also the climax of a ferocious fifty-year-long struggle waged by the greatest naval powers of the day for domination of the Mediterranean Sea. On one side were Spain, the first global empire in history, and Venice, a fabulously wealthy merchant republic. On the other side was the Sublime State of the House of Osman—the Ottoman Empire—a dynamic Muslim polity that ruled a domain stretching from Algeria to Mesopotamia. Last but not least, Lepanto was the swan song of the naval technology that had dominated the Mediterranean Sea for over two thousand years: the war galley.  In the coming weeks, I will also be posting this episode in shorter parts.
-------- Â
4:33:30
Trailer: the Battle of Lepanto
Send us a textTrailer for Episode Five, the Battle of Lepanto, coming in January 2022. The music is Havada Bulut Yok by Turku, Nomads of the Silk Road , licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
-------- Â
2:19
Agincourt-The Complete Episode
Send us a textThe complete episode of Agincourt, including parts one to ten.
Welcome to Great Battles in History. This podcast explores some of the most famous and most important battles in world history from ancient times to the Second World War. Each episode dives deeply into a single battle, investigating its origins, the course of combat, and the outcomes. We will examine the contending forces, including some of history’s most celebrated armies, navies, and air forces. We will meet great captains like Hannibal Barca, Saladin, Napoleon, and Chester Nimitz. We will also delve into the experiences of the soldier at the sharp end: the Spartan hoplite at Thermopylae, the English longbowman at Agincourt, the mounted samurai at Nagashino, the Soviet tanker at Kursk. Battles are regarded as events that change the course of history; the most important have been described as decisive. We will come to question this idea, for, as we’ll see, while a handful of battles do qualify as momentous, epochal turning points, most others—including not a few widely considered decisive—changed very little if anything at all. Finally, battles are more than just exercises of pure strategy and tactics; they are artifacts— creations of the political, social, economic and cultural forces of their times. To investigate great battles is to open up history in its widest sense.
South Africa