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For hundreds of years, the glorious history of Ancient Egypt remained a mystery to the world, its secrets locked away in the baffling language of the hieroglyphs. But in 1799, French troops near the Egyptian town of Rosetta discovered an ancient basalt slab that would prove to be the key to unlocking Egypt's mysteries. Carved in 196 BC, the Rosetta stone bore a decree praising the Egyptian king Ptolemy V etched in hieroglyphs, demotic Egyptian and Greek. From the discovery and the long struggle to uncover the secrets of the ancient language to the birth of modern Egyptology, this is the fascinating saga of the Rosetta Stone. Trace the many failed attempts and dead-ends that stumped scholars. Leading experts tell the story of the brilliant, obsessed Jean Francois Champollion, who finally broke the code. And see how, within a few years, the secrets revealed because of the Rosetta Stone had transformed our understanding of the ancient world.
The Molly Maguires was an Irish 19th-century secret society active in Ireland, Liverpool and parts of the eastern United States, best known for their activism among Irish-American and Irish immigrant coal miners in Pennsylvania. After a series of often violent conflicts, twenty suspected members of the Molly Maguires were convicted of murder and other crimes and were executed by hanging in 1877 and 1878. This history remains part of local Pennsylvania lore.
In the late 1600s, more than 150 men and women were accused of being witches. After the infamous Salem Witch Trials, 19 people were hanged for their alleged crimes, and one person was pressed to death under heavy stones. This History Channel documentary travels back to one of America's darkest times and reveals startling facts about who the real accusers were and what the community did to make restitution to the loved ones of the dead.
Navajo Marines devise an unbroken code.
The rituals and history of Japan's Samurai.
North African pirates imperiled early American sea trade, inspiring Congress to re-establish a Navy to protect merchant ships.
Alexander Selkirk was the real name of the sailor immortalized in Daniel Defoe's classic tale. In "The Real Robinson Crusoe", we learn that Selkirk was marooned on a Souith American island for five years, then accrued a fortune in Spanish loot after being rescued. But did wealth and marriage bring happiness?
This installment of "in Search of History" is about the discovery of the last living member of a Native American tribe, the Yahis, in 1911.
London, 1483. The War of the Roses rages, threatening the throne. Newly orphaned Edward V and his younger brother, placed in the care of their uncle, are declared illegitimate. They then disappear, the bodies never found. Did Richard III have them murdered? Or was he the victim of a Tudor plot to claim the throne and discredit him?
Master thief Bruce Reynolds and a rag-tag crew of career criminals rob a British mail train carrying $2.6 million in 1963.
This documentary takes a look at new evidence that indicates anthropologists and archaeologists may have been wrong in their theories about the first inhabitants of North and South America.
Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb were two wealthy students at the University of Chicago who in May 1924 kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Robert Franks in Chicago. They committed the murder—characterized at the time as "the crime of the century"—as a demonstration of their perceived intellectual superiority, which, they thought, rendered them capable of carrying out a "perfect crime", and absolved them of responsibility for their actions.
Just in time for the Olympics, we'll travel back to 776 B.C. to the world's first sports complex, Olympia, where every four years ancient Greek city-states set aside differences and laid down arms to compete in these peaceful games established to honor Zeus.
For the vulnerable European settlers making their way west on the uncertain plains of the American frontier, the threat of death lurked around every twist of the trail.
In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, America's western lands were a place of both isolation and primitive conditions. At each step in the march westward, new settlers fought cunning and ubiquitous enemies in the form of deadly diseases and rampant epidemics. Where battle wounds, poor sanitation, and deadly animals were common, appropriate medical care was not. To survive in these harrowing conditions, the settlers had to find a doctor - or someone calling him or herself one.
In this captivating program, The History Channel® journeys deep into the American frontier to discover the stories behind the pioneering men and women whose courage and heroism both helped to save lives and make medical history.
MERCURY 13: THE SECRET ASTRONAUTS tells the surprising story of these would-be pioneers who had the right stuff but the wrong sex. Three of the surviving members of the 13 tell their personal stories of how they came to the program, the tests they endured, and their feelings about never getting into orbit. Hear from one of the physicians who was responsible for selecting the "astronaut candidates," and discover how they paved the way for present-day astronauts like Bonnie Dunbar. Overlooked and ignored for decades, the first women in the space program finally get their due.
A look at the various things commonly associated with Ramses and his political motivations.
Recognized as one of the oldest named cities in the world and the leading city of ancient Greece, the cultural achievements of Athens laid the foundation for Western civilization. This episode of In Search of History examines the remarkable monuments dedicated to the patron goddess, Athena. But was the real purpose of these ancient marbled treasures to house a new brand of politics called “democracy”, or to serve as a platform for a brutally intense cult of worship?
This episode describes the Shuar people of the Amazon rain forest. The Ecuadorean government recently outlawed their practice of headhunting so as to encourage commercial development in their territory.
Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg leads the World War II German atomic-bomb project.
This episode describes an inventive, forceful and, some scholars say, wicked culture that predated and greatly influenced nearby ancient Rome.
This episode discusses some details of American military history that have withstood many efforts to sweep them under the rug of time.
This episode explores the controversial story of Ted Hall, a brilliant 19-year-old physics whiz kid who helped ignite the Cold War by leaking America's nuclear secrets to the Soviets after being recruited in 1944 to work at a Los Alamos A-Bomb laboratory.
This program promises to delve into the age-old question of whether astrology really does hold answers.
The Allies launch an elaborate deception to cover D-Day plans.
A look at 200 years of "dirty laundry" coming out of that house on Pennsylvania Avenue.
This documentary describes several ancient Native American cultures in North America that built impressive, mysterious structures, such as giant, snake-shaped mounds.
Described as the "world''s most notorious penal colony" the tropical outpost established by the French government in 1852 (and used until 1945) was so inhospitable that half of the prisoners have died or gone insane.
The Borgia family of Renaissance Italy.
Impressive ruins of ancient cultures, including the structures at Stonehenge, Easter Island, Machu Picchu and Chaco Canyon and in Egypt and Jerusalem.
In the years following his violent death, Abraham Lincoln became the most revered president in US history. But as time passed, what happened to the real story behind the myth? Lincoln's friend, William Herndon, wanted to leave an accurate and personal record. He spent 30 years documenting the most confidential memories of Lincoln's closest friends and family. But for more than a century, these recollections were buried in a disorganized and near illegible collection of papers in the Library of Congress. Now, William Herndon's documents are surfacing for the time, and what they reveal is a portrait of Lincoln as an Earthy, fallible, and often troubled man.
