Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week an audacious attack by Marxist rebels on an army base in El Salvador at the

height of the Cold War in Central America. The fighting continued with great

intensity throughout the whole barracks. It was like a Rambo movie, but this was for real.

Also, the Chalchescu's monstrous homage to their own power in Romania. We meet an architect behind the huge

vanity project ironically referred to as the People's Palace and the

extraordinary British author of hugely successful romantic fiction, Barbara Cartland.

I've always had Virgin Heroins, and they've never gone to bed without the ring on the finger.

And a little while ago, people kept Barbara, he was rarely moved up to date.

And I said no, because it doesn't attract me I don't think

it's romantic popping in our bed. We'll be meeting Dame Barbara later in the

podcast but we begin with the story of a discovery which shook up the way we've understood the human capacity for travel and adventure.

For a long time, a very long time, Christopher Columbus and his crew were credited with having been the first Europeans to set foot in the continent of North America.

In fact, his first landfill in 1492 was on islands we now refer to as the West Indies,

because he thought he'd sailed all the way round from Europe to Asia.

But that's all a bit irrelevant because as Alex Last now reports, there was a more recent discovery

which proved that the Vikings were actually the first Europeans to make it to North America some 1,000 years ago. In the

summer of 1960, a Norwegian couple,

the adventure Helge,

Inksdad and his wife, the archaeologist Anastina, sailed up to a remote tiny fishing

village called Lancer Meadows on the rugged northern tip of Newfoundland on Canada's Atlantic coast.

...