Postwar state support for agriculture in the UK has been hailed a great success, but it had unexpected consequences. P rewar ...

As the medieval book trade declined, Oxford scribes had to turn their hands to other crafts to get by. A t its height ...

Rome welcomed and tended to the vast numbers of pilgrims who arrived in the 16th century, but its attitude to its own poor ...

The ancestor of the London Gazette was launched on 16 November 1665, surviving its bitter rival to become the oldest newspaper in the English-speaking world still in print.

The Heretic of Cacheu by Toby Green and Worlds of Unfreedom by Roquinaldo Ferreira, painstakingly recreate the worlds at the ...

On 14 November 1848 the Fox sisters conjured up a movement when they made contact with the dead – or so they claimed.

Chernobyl Children: A Transnational History of Nuclear Disaster by Melanie Arndt discovers how civil society flourished – and then faltered – in the fallout.

In 1955 the rule on the buses in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, was that ‘coloured’ passengers must sit at the back and leave the front seats to white passengers. In December a Black woman in her ...

Early in 1221 the army of the Fifth Crusade was encamped in the city of Damietta in northern Egypt. As it planned its next move, messengers began to arrive bearing wondrous news. An army was ...

The past is full of unfamiliar ideas and beliefs, but – as Evelyn Underhill has proven – some things are timeless. I n popular history, there are few more challenging subjects than the supernatural ...

The organisers of the Indian displays at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 had a problem: they urgently required a taxidermy elephant. They needed the elephant as a frame on which to display a lavish ...