The magazine was launched as
BBC History in May 2000 by
BBC Magazines, with Greg Neale, an experienced journalist and history graduate, as editor. In February 2004 its parent company BBC Worldwide acquired Origin Publishing, which had published the rival
Living History Magazine since April 2003.
Living History Magazine was then incorporated into
BBC History and its former editor Dave Musgrove, a journalist with a doctorate in medieval archaeology, became editor of
BBC History. Following the merger the magazine increased its sales and subscriptions. In March 2010
BBC Historia was launched through a partnership with the Spanish publishers
Ediciones Nobel. In March 2011 the Hungarian edition, retaining the English title, was launched by the Hungarian publisher
Kossuth Kiadó; it features articles by Hungarian historians in addition to items translated from English. In August 2022, after a four-month hiatus, a different publisher,
Kocsis Kiadó Zrt., managed by
András Sándor Kocsis, formerly at Kossuth Kiadó, started to publish the magazine. A Greek edition was launched in December 2020. From 2001 through 2012, the main BBC website also included tie-materials, in the form of historical articles and topic summaries, at BBC.co.uk/history (which was later redirected to an index of BBC's historically themed television offerings). The magazine was renamed
HistoryExtra in January 2026, ending its official relationship with the BBC. ==In the news==