About A Name in History

A Name in History makes documentary films about famous lives. Everyone has heard the names: Cleopatra, Napoleon, Genghis Khan. Almost nobody knows the lives. Each film takes one person and tells their life as one story, from the beginning to the ending most people never hear.

Every film comes with a written dispatch on this site: the same story to read, with its sources listed in full.

Who makes it

A Name in History is an independent documentary channel. The films and the dispatches are made by the same small team, to the same rules.

How each story is researched

1. Books first. Every episode starts from four to six real sources: biographies by historians, translated primary sources and specialist articles. The chapter list is built from them before any script is written.
2. The script is fact-checked. Before narration, the script is checked against those sources and read aloud. This step is never skipped.
3. The dispatch follows the film. The article on this site is written from the fact-checked script, and the film and the article cite the same sources.
4. Disputes are flagged. Where historians disagree, about a date, a number or a motive, we say so and say what the disagreement is. We don’t smooth it over.

Where AI is used

We would rather tell you than have you guess.

• The narration uses AI voice synthesis.
• Some scenes in the films are AI-generated illustrations. We use them sparingly, only to fill genuine gaps where no real image exists, and we disclose them. Real paintings, manuscripts and photographs in the films are marked “Not an AI reconstruction”.
• The dispatches on this site use real images only: paintings, manuscripts, maps and photographs, each credited with its source and licence.
• The maps are our own, drawn from Natural Earth’s public-domain map data.

Who we cover

Famous people from every part of the world: conquerors and commanders, rulers, scientists and inventors, thinkers and philosophers, explorers and admirals. Some of them did terrible harm. We tell those lives to explain how it happened, never to celebrate it.

The first season has fifteen lives, released every Sunday from 15 November 2026. The Roll of Names has all fifteen, and the figures index lists them A to Z.

Corrections and contact

If we get something wrong, we fix it in public. The corrections page has our policy and a log of every fix.

The best way to reach us is to leave a comment on any of the films. Comments are off on this site so that the conversation happens in one place.