Michael Scott launches his new series which takes familiar historical dates and finds out what was happening away from the geographical centre that makes them so familiar to us. It's an attempt to see the globe as an historic whole and so break out of the modular way in which historic dates are traditionally drummed into children. At the same time he connects previously diverse events in cultural, political and economic history all over the globe.

In programme one, with the ashes of Bonfire Night scarcely cold, he looks at 1605. The gunpowder plot and its impact on the status of Catholics within Britain is kept alive to this day, but it was also in that year that the world's first Newspaper was published, in Strasbourg.

Headline news might well have been that Tsar Boris Godunov died, the catalyst for events known to this day in Russia as 'The Time of Troubles'. Godunov is more familiar now as the subject of Mussorgsky's 19th century Opera but Professors Robert Frost and Krzysztof Lazarski outline the background and importance of Godunov's reign in the story and development of Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile in Persia Shah Abbas I was presiding over a period of supreme regional stability and self-confidence, crowned by the defeat of Turkey in battle.

Spin the Globe to the West and we find reports of the capture of an American Indian who was later to be a vital figure in the protection of the Pilgrim Fathers during their first winter in the New World. But as Michael finds out the story of Squanto is shrouded in historical half-truth. However, the impact of the Gunpowder plot did have a direct baring on the development of British Colonies in America.

And this was also the year that Don Quixote was first published.

It's a programme full of surprises, connections and a sense that events across the world move at different rates and through different phases only occasionally brushing against each other.

Producer: Tom Alban. Show less