Timewatch

Why have successive presidents celebrated the cowboy as all-American hero? The Age of Chivalry is Dead But did it ever flourish? How true is the picture painted of the knights in shining armour, enchanted castles and fabulous tournaments in medieval romance.

In 1900 the railway workers of Taff Vale embarked on a strike which has political implications to this day. Timewatch examines the first great clash between the Trades Unions and the law.

'Let not poor Nellie starve.' With those words Charles II, the 'Merry Monarch', died 300 years ago. Of all British sovereigns, this womanising, yachting, horse-racing king has a fond place in popular myth. During his 25-year reign England returned from the horrors of civil war to peace and plenty.

Churchill and Roosevelt exchanged 2,000 letters during the Second World War. Collected for the first time, they reveal the tensions behind the friendship and Britain's collapse as a great superpower.

By 1945 the Allies and the Nazis had stockpiled five times more chemical weapons than had been used throughout the First World War. They were never used. Why?

In April 1945. British and American troops were sweeping across Western Germany. Charles Wheeler was among them. They stopped 50 miles short of the German capital and Berlin became the prize of the Russian army. Forty years on. Charles Wheeler tells how the Soviet Union fought its bloodiest final battle and how the manner of its victory determined the future of Berlin, and Europe, in the postwar world.

Treason under Elizabeth I became a matter not of actions but of belief. William Shawcross examines the growth of Elizabethan conspiracy theory.

Under Marechal Petain , one of France's most popular leaders, some of the French collaborated with the Nazis and enthusiastically participated in Hitler's 'Final solution'.

Robert Owen is widely regarded as a leader of the labour movement. David Drew finds that it might be more accurate to view him as the precursor of scientific management.

From one of England's High Courts Peter France introduces three stories from our legal past.

Peter France interviews Aubrey Burl, authority on stone circles, about the history of the Stonehenge site before construction of the existing circle. Peter France looks back to ealier this year when the hill fort at Maiden Castle was at the centre of English Heritage's controversial plans to preserve our past which still rages and which have split the world of archaeology .