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

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

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.

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 ...

On 20 June 1940, with the threat of large-scale enemy bombing looming ever closer and the Battle of Britain imminent, a letter from the Ministry of Home Security was sent to selected town clerks ...

On a bleak morning in January 1918 one of the oddest military formations ever put into the field by imperial Britain set out from Khanaqin, in what is now Iraq, to cross the border into Persia.

What makes a state? Is it its people, its borders, its government, or does it rest on recognition from international powers? Across the 19th and 20th centuries, the process by which states have been ...

A literate slave was a must-have in wealthy ancient Roman households. Keen to capitalise on this taste for learning, masters and slaves alike turned education into profit.

The path leading from Edmond Halley’s writings on magnetism to UFOs under Brazil is as convoluted as you might expect. Nonetheless, it was Halley – best known for using Newtonian mechanics to predict ...

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

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

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