Hourly History

Discover the remarkable life of Pablo Picasso. Free bonus inside. Pablo Picasso, born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain, was one of the 20th century’s most prolific and successful artists. A natural-born prodigy, he began painting at the age of two and never stopped until his death at the...

Audie Murphy was a movie star, writer, and one of the most decorated soldiers who ever lived. He was barely 18 years old when he was shipped off to fight Fascists in Italy during World War II. As he himself would later liken it, he went “to hell and back” and lived to tell the tale. In...

Genghis Khan: a man who managed to unify the warring nomadic Mongol clans, who orchestrated military victories from China all the way to Russia, who founded an empire that continued to expand across Asia and into Europe during the generations that followed his reign. Riding across the steppes...

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....

Beginning with the birth of the nation, slavery divided and caused conflict for the United States of America, worsening during the country's early decades....

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....

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, and he used that inner genius to the very best of his abilities. Leonardo da Vinci...

How did one insignificant patent clerk change the world? Step into the world of Albert Einstein in this book and find out what was so extraordinary about him. Why did it take so long for him to win the Nobel Prize? What kind of a father was Einstein to his boys? How did his marriages affect his...

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

During the late years of the 18th century, the spirit of Enlightenment thinking and revolution were in the air. The world was changing, moving away from ingrained beliefs about religion, reason, society, and the rights of the individual and turning more toward the laws of nature as interpreted...

Discover the surprising history of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War... 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. The haste with which it was created meant that Israel lacked the infrastructure of...

The Cold War between the United States of America and the Soviet Union lasted for more than 40 years. In general, this was a war of spies and subterfuge, of covert action and espionage. There was always a danger, however, that an error of judgment on either side could suddenly cause the Cold War...

Discover the remarkable life of Alan Rickman... Alan Rickman was one of Britain’s most beloved actors. His portrayal of the cunning Hans Gruber in the 1988 blockbuster Die Hard set a new standard for movie villains with his perfect blend of charm and menace. Rickman then became a household...

The archetypal starving artist, Vincent van Gogh died at 37 by his own hand, poor, isolated, and, in his eyes, a failure. Yet, in Vincent’s life story we can see the evolution of a boy becoming a man becoming a great artist, whether his contemporaries could see it at the time or not....

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....

Once valued at close to seven trillion dollars by today’s standards, the Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, became the world’s first multinational corporation....

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. The story of Russia’s transition from Imperial reign to eventual Communist dictatorship is a tale rooted in the ranks of the common people...

Michael Faraday is regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern physics. His work in the field of electromagnetism revolutionized society, leading to new avenues of study....

Prior to December 1941, Great Britain commanded an empire that stretched across the globe....

Cyrus II of Persia was one of the greatest leaders that the world had ever known, he was the one in whose footsteps other empire builders would follow. From Alexander the Great to countless Roman emperors and Ottoman sultans - it was the mighty shoes of Cyrus that they all attempted to fill. ...