History Bucket List

Walk among the 5,000-year-old pyramids of Caral, the oldest known city in the Americas

Experience Egypt's ancient capital ruins

Visit the site of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus

Columbus crosses, then governs badly; the Vangelis theme outlived the film by decades.

Five episodes of the 1986 disaster and the lies around it; the highest-rated series on IMDb.

A novice nun in 1962 Poland learns she is Jewish and goes to find the graves.

A pianist and his bouncer-driver tour the 1962 Deep South with the Negro Motorist Green Book.

Salieri's jealous confession of Mozart, from Peter Shaffer's play.

Jack, Rose, the door, and eleven Oscars; the film that was everything in 1997.

The CIA fakes a sci-fi movie to smuggle six diplomats out of Tehran in 1980.

George VI, a stammer and an Australian speech therapist with no credentials.

William Wallace, blue face paint and the Battle of Stirling without the bridge.

The Boston Globe team that broke the Catholic Church abuse story, told as process.

Solomon Northup, a free man in New York, is kidnapped and sold into Louisiana.

Scarlett O'Hara, the burning of Atlanta and the biggest box office in inflation-adjusted history.

One month of political horse-trading to pass the Thirteenth Amendment.

Five Points, 1863, and the nativist butcher who runs it.

Three timelines converge on the beach evacuation of 1940, almost without dialogue.

A boy in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, drawn by a survivor; the manga on the bomb.

The two-player rebuild of 7 Wonders, tighter than the original.

Eighteen storeys cut into volcanic rock, deep enough to hide twenty thousand people and their cattle.

Rainbow Row, Fort Sumter where the Civil War began and Lowcountry cooking.

Dealey Plaza and the Sixth Floor Museum, the Arts District and Texas barbecue.

The Hahoe folk village, its mask dance and the Confucian academies of the Joseon aristocracy.

The Peace Park and the hypocentre, plus Dejima, the island where Japan traded with the world for 200 years.

Kenroku-en, one of the three great gardens, a samurai district and geisha teahouses that escaped the war intact.

The carillon capital, St Rumbold's unfinished tower and the Kazerne Dossin Holocaust museum.

Giant water lilies and centuries-old palms in one of the oldest botanic gardens in the southern hemisphere.

Town beneath an active volcano.

Historic fortress town in the highlands.