Episodes

Hear how Siân Rees researched her book The Floating Brothel and lent her knowledge of the women aboard the Lady Junilana to Secrets of the Dead.

Learn about the revolutionaries are arrested in 1866, to Fremantle Prison, the most remote and notorious jail in the British Empire, to the United States, where their ultimate taste of liberty is bittersweet.

As early as 1939, the Japanese had drawn up plans to build the railway, which was to provide a supply line capable of transporting 3,000 tons of supplies per day to support their frontline troops in Burma.

"Gangland Graveyard" takes viewers into the world of the Mafia through expert insight provided by Joseph D. Pistone, the real life Donnie Brasco. In 1981, Three Mafia captains were murdered by Massino in a power play for control of the Bananno family. Over the next 20 years the FBI would use undercover testimony and accounting forensics to eventually topple Massino's Mafia career.

Barrett Tillman, an author and historian who appears in the film "Dogfight Over Guadalcanal," discusses the art of the dogfight and the Guadalcanal campaign.

On September 11, 1978, Bulgarian emigre, writer and broadcast journalist Georgi Markov died. Three days before, while waiting for a bus, Markov felt a sudden sting in the back of his thigh. Markov was soon hospitalized. After his death, an investigation ruled Markov had been poisoned: a pellet containing ricin had been covertly shot into his leg. How had this political murder been executed?

Read about the final voyage of the Andrea Doria and it's final descent into the bottom of the Atlantic.

After unearthing evidence of a culture of ancient warrior women in the Russian steppes, Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball follows a trail of artifacts to a remote village in Western Mongolia, where her quest for a living link to a long-imagined tribe ends with a startling discovery.

While working to aid Britain's military efforts Wallis toyed with a problem the British military had largely considered unsolvable -- how to destroy the Nazis' most important hydroelectric dams.

In 64 AD, Rome was the most magnificent city in the world. Then, in the early hours of July 19, fire broke out in the cook shops and cafés lining the Circus Maximus. Centuries later, questions linger. Was the fire an accident, or was it arson? Is Tacitus a reliable witness? Nero blamed the catastrophe on the Christians -- is there any truth to his accusation?

In the aftermath of the Titanic, Canadian rescue ships recovered 328 bodies and buried dozens in unmarked graves. Today, scientific breakthroughs may help 3 families of missing passengers learn the true fate of their relatives.

In 1665, a British tailor opened a flea-infested shipment of fabric from London. In a matter of days, the tailor and much of the village were suffering the telltale signs of bubonic plague, the disease that wiped out a third of the European population. 350 years later, an American geneticist is delving into the reasons why some managed to survive the Black Death while others were not so lucky.

Three years after setting foot on American shores, 440 of the original 500 Jamestown settlers had died. Why did deadly outbreaks strike just after the ships headed home? And is it a coincidence that the only map of the colony today belongs to Spain? Take a 21st-century look at the eerie the plight of these fated settlers.

The trouble in Salem began during the cold, dark Massachusetts winter, in January of 1692. Eight young girls began to take ill, beginning with 9-year-old Elizabeth Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams. But theirs was a strange sickness.