Dan Snow Profile picture
Creative Director of the world's best History Channel https://t.co/R6CMLAObl3 | I host the Dan Snow’s @HistoryHit podcast
Dame Chris🌟🇺🇦😷 #RejoinEU #FBPE #GTTO🔶️ Profile picture Kerry Hennigan Profile picture European Always 🏳️‍🌈🇪🇺😷💚 Profile picture Mukk Profile picture 4 subscribed
Jan 1 8 tweets 2 min read
Stefan Zweig's description of Europe after WW1 is familiar:

"An era of frenzied ecstasy & chaotic deception, a unique mixture of impatience & fanaticism. Everything that promised an extreme... experience, every form of narcotic-morphine, cocaine, heroin sold like hot cakes

🧵👇 Schools councils....were set up, with young people keeping a sharp eye on the teachers & making their own changes to the curriculum, because children wanted to learn only what they liked.
Nov 29, 2023 18 tweets 4 min read
The Battle of Austerlitz did not take place on a frozen lake.

But some fascinating military episodes DID occur on ice.

Here's a thread. 🧊🥶 Image Aeschylus wrote The Persians a few years after the failed 480BC Persian invasion. He suggests that Xerxes' retreating army marched across the frozen river Strymon. It cracked & many were dragged to the depths. Just topping off a shocking campaigning season for the King of Kings
Nov 20, 2023 10 tweets 4 min read
All this talk of Napoleon. Spare a thought for his siblings. All rose to high office. Such a gifted family.

Here’s list:

Joseph. The big brother. King of Naples, in 1806 and became King of Spain in 1808; not bad going!

He opted for a comfortable retirement in New Jersey. Image Napoleon’s younger brother Lucien. Minister of the Interior and a Prince of France but he disagreed with Napoleon crowning himself Emperor and went into exile. He was cheered when he landed in Britain. Went to live in Worcestershire. Image
Nov 15, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
Some actual antiwoke Tsars

A thread. 👇 Image Ivan the Terrible. The 1st tsar. Literally the original antiwoke tsar.
Disliked:
Muslims
Disrespectful young people
Querulous bourgeois folk
Foreigners
Jews

Liked:
Unfettered power
Empire Image
Oct 29, 2023 14 tweets 4 min read
Today's wind neatly demonstrates why the French under Team Louis & Napoleon never really had a hope of invading Britain.

Their ports were the wrong shape and size, and in the wrong place.

Thread 🔽 Image At first glance it's perfect invasion weather. The wind is blowing from France to Britain. Royal Navy square rigged battleships can't maintain their blockade and are blown north under reefed topsails to torment the good people of Torbay and Plymouth.

The coast is, well, clear.
Oct 21, 2023 10 tweets 2 min read
In the long & mostly glorious history of the Royal Navy there are many astonishing acts of heroism, but one in particular is without a doubt, hands down, the greatest.

Here's what a particularly handsome Irishman got up to on this day in 1805, at the Battle of Trafalgar:

🧵 Dublin born James Spratt was one of the best looking men in the navy. He was also commander of The Squad who made up the boarding party of HMS Defiance.

Trafalgar was like a wooden, floating Mad Max apocalypse: fire, explosions, smoke.
Oct 2, 2023 12 tweets 3 min read
This is intolerable.

You know which country owes its existence to aid? The USA

Who was one of the biggest aid hounds in recent history? That darling of the American right, Winston Churchill.

Aid has always been a vital and often efficient tool of statecraft. Image When the US Republic was on death’s door, when it was needy, they signed a treaty
They needed money and guns and half a chance
Who provided those funds?
France

Here is an official State Department historian describing the French aid as ‘crucial’ to securing victory. Image
Sep 20, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
A very personal new pod:
My great grandpa was a WW1 general. One of those responsible for the first day of the Somme. The bloodiest day in British military history. Thousands of his troops were killed or wounded

Brilliant @sommecourt talks me through it:
podfollow.com/dan-snows-hist…
Image Snow’s sector was one of the most catastrophic. His men fought with astonishing bravery into German trenches despite inadequate artillery support. They fought until their ammunition ran out & they were wiped out by counter attacks.

Then. Astonishingly. My grandfather….
Jun 10, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Maybe the generation who matured after the monstrous destruction of WW2 do not appreciate the fragility of democracy. Or its importance.
Taking a wrecking ball to the institutions that guard our rights as citizens to advance your own cause is dangerous & historically illiterate. There's a distinctly 1990s assumption that liberal democracy is inevitable & immutable. But it's not. It's vulnerable, contingent. You've got to nurture it. Prof Conway's 'W Europe's Democratic Age 1945-68' is so good on this. They chose to be democrats, worked at it.
Jun 8, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
Quite the turnout for the book launch of @JohnNicholRAF's great 'Eject! Eject!' last night.

George Dunn. 100

Jack Dark. 99

Jan Stangryciuk. 101

All RAF Bomber Command veterans. 300 years of experience between them. Jack told me simply that survival was a matter of pure luck Image Wonderful atmosphere in the room. So many were ejectees.

In 1991 Kate Saunders & Ashley Stevenson strucks birds in a Harrier at 250ft. They ejected but she landed too close to the crashed aircraft & was terribly burnt. Although badly injured, he dragged her away, saving her life Image
Jun 7, 2023 11 tweets 3 min read
The Chinese government deliberately flooded a vast area of its own territory in 1938, successfully halting a Japanese advance, but the price was massive causalities and damage to its own resources and reputation.

Flood as a weapon of war. Thread. 👇 Image I was on the Normandy beaches this week where before D-day in 1944 the Germans deliberately flooded fields behind the beaches to create obstacles to aircraft landing. The ground behind Utah beach was flooded so that troops could only advance inland using a few narrow causeways. Image
Apr 22, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
Camden. The reburial parade begins.

En route to the church for the funeral service. Image Men of the Royal Regiment of Scotland carry one of their forebears on his final journey.
Apr 22, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Another pre-dawn start at Camden, South Carolina.

We are preparing for the reburials of 14 American Revolutionary War soldiers whose remains were found on the 1780 battlefield.

They include one Scottish soldier, a Fraser Highlander.

The @Royal_Scots are acting as pall bearers. 20% of them were teenagers.

One young man had a shattered spine with a musket ball in it.

The Scotsman was around 5'6, very thickly built and had a blunt force injury to the back of the head. Possibly a musket but blow

His body where the hand to hand fighting was most intense Image
Apr 20, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
We were mad to let this tradition lapse.

The Champion is a hereditary office currently held by a chartered accountant in his 60s from Lincolnshire.

I want to see him fight Charles' challenger. "The claimant of the House of Wessex have announced that they have signed Tyson Fury as their Champion"
Mar 31, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Apart from when Charles' grandson invaded & fought his uncle for the crown or when Charles' other grandson invaded & deposed that same uncle ushering in the, um, Glorious Revolution, or when Charles' great grandson invaded, triggering several battles & a savage counter insurgency And if you're eliding 'Britain' and the 'UK' then I feel like the Irish may have notes.
Mar 29, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
110 years ago today Captain Scott died in the Antarctic. Within three weeks Captain Smith of the Titanic died in the Atlantic.

@Timmaltin has calculated that they may have perished as a result of the same weather phenomenon.

Podcast here:

podfollow.com/dan-snows-hist… ImageImage 111 years ago obviously! I have forgotten what year it is because I drank too many delicious IPAs last night.
Mar 28, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
HMS Victory is rotting.

But fear not. The world's greatest ship is being meticulously restored.

Here's everything you need to know with curator Andrew Baines



podfollow.com/dan-snows-hist… I grabbed a handful

Mar 5, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
Happy Birthday, Spitfire.
First flight today in 1936. Best piston engined fighter ever. At the controls was Vickers test pilot Joseph "Mutt" Summers who said on landing, simply, "Don't touch anything." It was named by Sir Robert McLean, the chairman of Vickers, after his young daughter, Anna, who was apparently a 'right little spitfire.' According to legend Reginald Mitchell, the lead engineer, said, "It's the sort of bloody silly name they would give it."
Mar 1, 2023 25 tweets 6 min read
There are never enough shells. Demand always exceeds pre-war expectations.

During the First World War a shortage of shells caused a scandal which helped bring down the British government.

🧵👇 Artillery had always been important. Napoleon, a gunner by training, said "it is with artillery that war is made."
He blasted his opponents with concentrated cannon fire, then launched massive infantry assaults with little regard for his own casualties.

Which may sound familiar
Jan 15, 2023 15 tweets 6 min read
Here are some of my favourite eccentric geographical quirks.
Please add your own. I have my atlas at the ready.

👇🧵 Members of my family live in Monaghan, Ireland, where you can drive in and out of the UK and Ireland several times on one journey. A cousin once boasted that he "moved north, into the South."
Dec 8, 2022 12 tweets 4 min read
Prince Henrys.

A thread.

⬇️ The OG Henri. Probs named after his gr uncle King Henry I of France. He became Henry I of England when his big brother, William, 👀, was accidentally yet conveniently killed out hunting. Henry left his bro's body in the dirt, dashed to Winchester and got himself crowned Henry I.